Submission #5909: ThunderAxe31's GBA Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure in 32:51.57

Objectives

• Emulator used: BizHawk 2.2.1
• Beating the game as fast as possible
• Takes damage to save time
• Genre: Platform

Abilities

Basic Abilities

• Jump: Press A.
• High Jump: Keep A while Jumping to rise higher. You can also do this by Spinning during the begin of the Jump.
• Spin: Press B.
• Slide: Press R while walking. You can keep R in order to stay down or Crawl.
• Slide and Jump: Press A while Sliding. You will right even higher than a High Jump.
• Getting crouched: Press R while standing still. Very slow.
• Keeping crouched: Keep R after a Slide or after Getting crouched.
• Crawling: Keep R or Down and Right or Left. Very slow.
• Rebounce Jumping: Keep A while landing on a box or enemy to rebounce higher.
• Body Slam: Press R during a jump to hit the ground. It will be replaced by Super Body Slam after defeating Dingodile.

Underwater Abilities

• Swim: Press A. This is preferred for moving vertically.
• Spin: Press B. This is the only way to fight enemies underwater.

Unlockable Abilities

• Super Body Slam: Unlocked after defeating Dingodile. Press R during a jump to hit the ground. This is allows to break reinforced boxes, which can also be done by abusing the invicibility time after losing an Aku Mask or during a level 3 Aku Mask bonus.
• Double Jump: Unlocked after defeating N. Gin. Press A during any kind of jump, except when you are falling. This will make you lose horizontal speed, which can be overworked by pressing B right after.
• Tornado Spin: Unlocked after defeating Tiny. Press B repeadetly to keep spinning. This can slow down falling.
• Dash: Unlocked after defeating Neo Cortex. Press L and Right or Left to run.

Tricks

Spin Tricks

• Landing at the end of a Spin: When Crash lands from a Jump, his horizontal speed will stop for a frame, except if he is Spinning. If the Spin ends the moment you land, you can also do a new Slide 1 frame earlier.
• Landing and continuing a Spin: Crash takes 3 frames to accelerate walking and get to the target horizontal speed of 512, but doing a Spin before landing allows to avoid that and keep the full horizontal speed. Useful when you have to do a Slide later than the landing moment.
• Stepping down while Spinning: If you Spin before you begin falling, Crash will get 320 falling speed instantly, instead of the slow vertical acceleration.
• Delaying Glitched Slide: If a Slide continues over an edge, you can't Spin, except if it's a Glitched Slide. That way, you can keep the 512 horizontal speed, ragardless if you're in air or on ground.
• Instant falling acceleration: If you Spin before you begin falling and you push aganist a wall, you will instantly get 1280 vertical speed.

Slide Tricks

• Slide and Spin: Spin during a Slide in order to end it earlier and get a higher overall speed.
• Glitched Slide: You need to Slide and press B before the 12th frame after the prior Spin is ended. This will make Crash to get instantly 512 horizontal speed and end earlier the Slide, which results in an even higher overall speed than doing Slide and Spin.
• Slide, Spin and Jumping: Allows to avoid Slide and Jump, in order to land earlier. However, this results in a bit slower overall speed compared to do a Slide, Jump, and Spin on landing.
• Stepping down with Slide: Allows to quickly descend a step while allowing to Slide and Jump right after landing.
• Slide on ice: Press B right after R in order to get higher speed, with or without Glitched Slide.

Box Pushforward Tricks

• Box Pushforward: It's possble to benefit box pushforward by jumping or landing on the edge of a box. Can be used on nitro boxes without making them explode, but needs much more precision.
• Landing on a box without breaking: If you break a box with Spin while landing, and at the same time you land on a box, that box won't be broken and Crash won't rejump on it. This allows to Slide right after you're landing, saving a lot of time. Also, TNT boxes won't be activated.
• Landing on a box without breaking and getting pushforward: Like the prior trick, plus the fact that if you land on the middle of two adiacent boxes, you get pushforward bonus.

Terrain Tricks

• Ascending slope pushforward: When moving on an ascending slope, you get some 256 subpixel pushforward bonuses, with regular cadency. You may intentionally slow down your speed in order to not skip the last one before the end of the slope.
• Start crawling 1 frame earlier: If you press R when starting crawling under a level obsctacle, you will start crawling 1 frame earlier.
• Kick Up: When you end crawling or sliding under a level obsctacle, pressing A allows to skip the standing up animation; in the next frame, press the opposite direction in order to also get pushforward bonus aganist the wall.
• Faster Slide and Jump: When you get in a place that has a low ceiling, Jump in order to quickly cancel a Slide halfway.
• Clipping through walls: There are multiple different known places where it's possible to enter a wall or a floor, however only one turned out useful for this run, that is in Level 13.

Underwater Tricks

• Spin turning: You can change horizontal direction instantly by Spinning right after pressing Right or Left.
• Fast immersion: When you have to go from horizontal to vertical moving, turn to the other horizontal side right after the first Swim. This will allow to do the second Swim 2 frames earlier.
• Machinegun Swimming: Press B without any directional keys 2 frames before the moment Crash's sprite inclination will return perfetly horizontal. In most cases, you can achieve this by pressing Up or Down for a minimum of 1 frame to a maximum of 3, then press B exactly 3 frames after the frame you started pressing the direction. This allows to get horizontal speed of 900 every 4 frames.
• Reverse diagonal swimming: While swimming vertically, turn to the opposite horizontal way you want to go, and press A to swim up to 3 more times. You will instantly get 507 horizontal velocity every time you will press A, while keeping vertical momentum. If you press B after this, you will do a Spin towards the opposite direction.
• Underwater box pushforward: You need to touch the upper edge of a box while swimming. Needs to touch the box in the right moment: in order to achieve and optimize this while Machinegun Swimming, you need to plan when and where you start swimming. Bad timing can make you lose speed instead.

Level by level comments

Warp Room 1

• Level 1: Nothing much to say, just basic optimization. I didn't get the Aku Aku mask because it's not worth the time waste.
• Level 2: I abused box pushforward many times, which saved few frames there and there.
• Level 3: Due to the fact that the three last moving platforms force you to wait anyway, I focused all my efforts on minimizing lag through the level by slowing down movements, which may result in an apparently sloppy play. This was the best way to save time that I could find for this level.
• Level 4: I made use of Aku Aku invicibility was slightly faster than ignoring the Aku Aku box.
• Level 5: Sewer levels may look simple, but are instead very hard to optimize, due to the amount of possible routes. At least enemies did not hinder me too much.
• Dingodile: I sacrificed the two Aku Aku masks in order to save 4 frames.

Warp Room 2

• Level 6: No, I couldn't skip that trunk. By the way, I apologize for the absence of playarounds during the Polar zone, but I discovered too late that changing anything there would result in a different RNG seed for the sky levels...
• Level 7: Nothing much to say.
• Level 8: The glitch with the monkey bars saved a total of 5 frames.
• Level 9: Nothing much to say.
• Level 10: The last two platforms... Don't have a fixed timer! They start moving just before you make them appear on screen, so walking in with the right timing was necessary in order to avoiding to be forced to wait.
• N. Gin: I couldn't avoid wasting bullets on the planes, except the last two ones.

Warp Room 3

• Level 11: Another unavoidable trunk blocking my way, and right after that I had to slow down a bit in order to avoid to hit the following one.
• Level 12: Nothing much to say.
• Level 13: The out of bounds is performed by exploiting an oversight in a specific place of the level. There is a corner where trying to move upwards will result in pushing Crash downwards, like if you were trying to push aganist a ceiling. However, since there is a floor right below, Crash will get pushed inside that floor, and trying to move towards the left from there will result in getting zoomed towards the right, due to the wall pushback. In the meantime, it will be necessary to slightly keep moving upwards, otherwise Crash will get ejected upwards. There is just enough time to use a spin to clear our path, then we resume zooming right until we enter inside a long vertical wall. From there, trying to go upwards will zoom Crash downwards until he gets ejected below. I found another possible out of bounds in this level, however I couldn't find any way to get again in-bounds.
• Level 14: Nothing much to say.
• Level 15: Nothing much to say.
• Tiny: Tiny's jump elapse for a fixed amount of frames, despite the difference in height.

Warp Room 4

• Level 16: Nothing much to say.
• Level 17: There is known OoB available there, but it would save time only for the time trial, since that would make it impossible to pick the Crystal.
• Level 18: I wished I could have gone completely pacifist for sky level, but in this one the planes that appear right before the airship hinder you from hitting it right away.
• Level 19: There are two OoBs available in this level, however only the first one allows to save time.
• Level 20: Since this is the last level before the last boss, we sacrifice all available masks .
• Neo Cortex: All Cortex's actions follow a fixed timer, just like for Tiny.