This is an unlicensed demake of Donkey Kong Country (1994) ported to the NES by Hummer Team called "Donkey Kong Country 4". The game is mainly based off of the base game, with visuals being hand drawn to lower quality and music reproduced by ear. Amusingly, it bears a copyright symbol in the opening credits, irony notwithstanding. Extra details about the game can be found at the bootleg wiki and The Cutting Room Floor.
The movie consists of optimizing platforming, keeping in mind that all enemies with the exception of bosses, are all on local cycles from when they are spawned.
Game objectives
- Emulator used: FCEUX 2.2.3
- From wikipedia: The game follows the gorilla Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong as they set out to recover their stolen banana hoard from King K. Rool and the Kremlings
Comments
Some emulators set the dipswitches of this game to "either", on FCEUX 2.2.3 it defaults to DKC4, so make sure that you set the dip switch correctly if using a different ROM or emulator (True True). Otherwise the file will instantly desync.
Running is the fastest method of movement, and all optimization is to ensure that the Kongs are running most of the time. Jumps are cut to the shortest amount they can be without missing, jumping on enemies is put to a minimum (except where it aids platforming) and barrels are thrown away immediately.
Slopes misbehave in the game, sending the kong a pixel forward or back when jumping, and can easily be a source of wasted frames. Hopefully in this submission that is reduced to nil.
Barrels shoot you out according to where you entered. If you entered slightly to the left, the barrel will shoot you out slightly to the left, this is used in some of the barrel sections.
Diddy appears to have faster base speed on land and Donkey has a better vertical speed in water. Different Kong water speeds is used to optimize pathing in water levels. This is used to optimize the first water level, however in the second water level a clip out of bounds combined with a zip technique is used which nullifies this speed discrepancy.
There is some preventable lag in the game, such as the lag from snakes in industry levels has been attempted to be minimized by killing snakes as fast as possible and picking up bananas to reduce the sprite count. For underground levels, the lag is particularly unavoidable due to the spike wheels.
The only glitch known about but not featured in this run is the flying Donkey/Diddy glitch where in 4-1 due to some of the lovely game physics, one may put DK into a zero gravity state and fly across the screen. I was unable to generate a good setup for this. It is not known whether such a trick might exist in other levels, but it is likely related to the platforms, as it is in the Hummer team demake of Aladdin.
Other comments
This run is probably going to be obsoleted by loliillya pretty quickly so I wanted to get it up here before I'm bopped. Thanks to loliillya for their instruction as to how Diddy's speed frames work (3,3,3,3,5) which was useful in shaving some frames off this run.
Previously this run featured inputs made by Samsara, but have now since been replaced. I do thank Samsara in particular for her help concerning the timing of 1 on, 3 off, which when implemented across both water levels has saved some 20 odd seconds to this submission from previous versions.
Routing in the first water level was improved by loliillya but inputs are my own. Inputs to second water level are still similar to Samsara's as there are only so many ways to skin a cat, and the main differences in inputs come down to changing delays between inputs to handle lag and get a few extra boosts here and there.
At the end of the movie I spell out crazyjesse using morse code in my downtime.
The best comment I received about this game was when I was running it during a speedrun event. Someone in the chat said something along the lines of "Why does Jesse know how to speedrun this game and not the regular game? Does he hate 16 bit colours?".
On one occasion I was able to ask Hummer Cheng himself some details about the game. When asked about whether the elements of the bootleg that resemble the GBA version of DKC were intentional, Hummer Cheng responded "I have no idea what you're talking about".
Personally I am very happy with the movie as it stands now.
Cheers,
crazyjesse
Samsara: Cancelling, in favor of #6974: illayaya & crazyjesse's NES Donkey Kong Country 4 in 12:56.27.