Submission #5575: Avanor_'s GBA Donkey Kong Country "101%" in 1:25:57.64

(Link to video)
Game Boy Advance
101%
BizHawk 1.12.2
308053
59.7275005696058
6374
Unknown
1055 - Donkey Kong Country (U) (Evasion).gba
Submitted by Avanor_ on 7/1/2017 9:43:24 PM
Submission Comments
The emulator I used for this is BizHawk, version 1.12.2. No settings were modified except for hotkeys.
I am aiming for 101% completion of the game. Basically it just is 100%, but the Donkey Kong Country-series defined their completion with 101%, 102% and 103% in the respective games. In order to achieve 101%, you need to play and beat every stage, find all bonus-rooms (only finding them is required, beating is not) and find all 52 cameras to fill the scrapbook. One camera requires you to collect the KONG-letters in every stage. This run makes use of some build-in warps in order to beat a stage, which allows the player to instantly leave the stage upon collecting the last goodie in the respective stage. At the start of the run I finish every stage in the first world with Donkey Kong, because I need to get a camera that is only obtainable when a world-map has every stage beaten by a single Kong. That's why I re-enter World 1 and World 2. World 2 does the same, just with Diddy Kong.
Donkey Kong Country is a 2D platformer originally released on the SNES, with ports for the Gameboy Advance being released in the early 2000's. With the level design being fairly similar, a lot of changes have been applied. Especially the physics are different, in my opinion it makes the ports feel like own games instead of remakes. With the SNES originals partially using glitches, this game and run is the only one we haven't been able to find any glitches for, which makes the run purely movement-optimization. There is RNG involved, and it can have a pretty bad influence on the run. I would estimate really bad RNG to cost about a minute, worst case.
I started working on this movie with high motivation, so I made good progress. Some things were very tedious to work on: water movement, especially with Enguarde the swordfish, and flying with Expresso the strich. Seeing the movement in a TAS makes the gameplay look very smooth tho. Said movement partially is humanly not possible, as an example: flying with Expresso the ostrich and not losing any height (actually gaining height slowly) requires to press the A-button every second frame for one frame, over the course of the entire flight.
There already was a TAS on YouTube a while ago, but it has been deleted. This TAS beats the RTA time of the former one by about 1 minute and 20 seconds. The RTA timing for this run is 1:18:54.97 with the current WR being 1:27:56 which is kinda old and uses an far less optimized route.

Fog: Judging.
Fog: Fixing game name, as platform is already identified.
Fog: The run seems generally well optimized, but the run suffers from the relative lack of glitches and skips. Audience reception is also seemingly negative from an entertainment point of view.
Accepting to Vault.
feos: Pub.
Last Edited by adelikat on 10/23/2023 2:24 AM
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