Madagascar is a Country Madagascar the movie is a movie Madagascar the movie the game is a game Madagascar the movie the game the TAS is a TAS

Some of these may not be very important but here's the general settings you need for this movie

Check "Vertex Rounding" under Hacks in graphics settings if using upscalers, otherwise you will get a thin black crosshair in the middle of the screen. This doesn't need to be on if using native res.

Madagascar the game is a game I played a ton of as a kid, yet revisiting it as an adult it doesn't hold up as well in my memory. It's still a decent game imo, just not anything super special.

The speedgame however is pretty cool and definitively underrated. I've wanted to TAS this game for the longest time but was not willing to work with Dolphin's tools. However, CasualPokePlayer was able to make a fork of dolphin into Bizhawk, with the ability to work with TAStudio. I finally decided to pick this game up.

Some of the first areas of this game might look sloppy, that's just me getting used to the controls when TASing, but I get better as I go along.

So first off we need to get the powercards to unlock Marty's kick, the power cards are only to unlock the powers in the stages that they are first introduced and are not required to pick up for later stages, some levels we don't need to use the power given by the cards at all, but sometimes we need to collect them to progress in the stage.

So next we are supposed to see Alex the lion to play his section and get the double jump ability, but we can clip out of bounds using Marty's treadmill and escape the zoo, only to go back into the zoo and use the kick powerup to get past the gate.

We then skip Gloria's section by avoiding the cutscene trigger and jumping near the lightpost. I also have to avoid touching the balloons otherwise we'll get a short cutscene.

We then skip the penguin section by clipping into a hay bale and performing what's known as a proxy. The simplest way to explain it is if you jump on the right frame, you can transfer horizontal speed into your vertical speed to get a super high jump. It seems to only work in certain spots but unsure as to why it does this.

Melman's section we have to play to end the stage, and it is crap. I tried the best I could to speed it up but it's just not kind to me, it doesn't help that I was still learning how to TAS with this awkward movement, waiting for animals to fully turn around before using attacks.

Since the powercards aren't something we need for this stage, we can easily skip them by using a clip in the last pen in the first area, then we use another clip with a hay bale to enter zone monkey earlier than we're supposed to. There's a few skips I could have done to avoid having to get rid of the police guards, but it's incredibly difficult to do and I wasn't willing to spend all my time doing it, so I just did the RTA route. Once we see Skipper go through the brick wall through the pipe, we avoid talking to the monkeys by doing another Proxy jump by hitting the pipe at a weird angle. We then just kick trash cans at the people and the janitor cart.

Perhaps one of the more boring levels. Alex's section is nothing but walking forward and getting to a police section, where we can use a clip to skip the area. You'll notice after this point there's no traffic, which gets disabled when the police section is skipped, this is carried over to the Gloria section as well, which explains why the level looks so empty. This also means the two overhead areas have zero cars to avoid where we can just walk forward. (Also we have to collect the powercards for Gloria here otherwise the game won't let us continue).

It's worth mentioning that there's an insane glitch you can do if you exit the stage after getting powercards, this is known as hippo hop which involves going out of bounds and spawning inside a cop car that for some reason gives you a ton of speed. Unfortunately it requires having a memory card and I didn't TAS this game with one in, and due to the loading times it likely only really saves time on the PC version.

Melman's stage starts out with a simmilar glitch but not as fast, if we grab a ledge as the bus approaches us, jumping here causes us to get a ton of speed and lets us get to the end of this section. You automatically get the powercards once you get past the sign so it doesn't matter if you collect them.

I can do a trick where I press jump and attack on the same frame which gives us air speed for a brief period, useful for getting speed off ledges.

The only penguin section in the game, which is a shame because the penguins are the best part of Madagascar

Skipper can slide and attack. We can use an attack to clip into a wall while standing near a lock. We then open the crate of bowling balls and throw one through boxes to hit a guy on the other side. normally you're supposed to put the ball into the pipe so it hits him that way, but that cut scene is long so doing this skips it.

Quick side note, there's a 50/50 chance if you play this game on the PC version where the bowling balls can be movable without picking them up. The community refers to it as "Gassy Balls" due to the fact that they're not solid balls, and because calling it Gassy Balls is really funny. (Update: as it turns out this bug happens if the game is not running in Windows 98 compatibility mode)

We then do the same thing with the ball to get it on the gate, then do a precise slide to skip a crane section. Since we can't even play it due to the other penguins not being near the area, as you normally call them using the trumpet.

Next we need to keep carrying the bowling ball with us to the poop deck. Normally we would use the ball to get into the door, but if you put the ball and jump in a specific way, you can perform a very difficult clip through the ceiling that gets you to the last area of the level, and the fact that I got this to work at all is an absolute miracle.

finally we just shoot the soldiers as they enter.

Now we’re finally on Madagascar, Alex is honestly a really boring character to play as, since he doesn’t have any fun movement tech as the other characters.

So we jump up to the fallen tree, and we use a branch to let us jump to a cave we normally shouldn’t be able to reach, this skips a side quest. We can’t really make it up there without activating the mango cutscene as we don’t have any room to hit the branch that we need to get the height.

I then climb up the waterfall and get hit by some birds which for some reason gives us an extra double jump. Saves a bit of time from walking around.

We then do the bee section which we can carry two sets of bees at a time, then bring them to flowers.

If alex is jumping down from a great height, he can get a bit of a speed boost.

Garding the mushrooms is slow, in RTA you can actually stand in one place and roar at the roaches without losing, since you only need to save 4 of them. For this final area I just have to take as many shortcuts as possible.

So now we have a fast movement for Marty, the slide. For some reason the game doesn’t tell you that you can slide with the same button you use to crawl, but it’s there now. We can press jump and slide on the same frame to do an air slide, which is much faster than a normal slide. You can’t do an attack and jump on the same frame unless you’re standing on flat ground.

For the evil wind section I try to get Marty on the very edge of the ledges where he won’t get blown away before continuing.

Alex is just an autoscroller waiting for the lemurs to get to the end while stopping the Foosa from getting to the Lemurs.

So since this isnt the PC version and the load times are slower, there’s no reason for me to exit the stage to save time on switching characters.

I grab Gloria’s first power card since I am set up at a good angle to grab it. I need to get the other power cards to play a later game in this stage

For watermelons it’s faster to roll into them than to use the pepper, as I can more easily control my movement and hit melons in close range.

After getting the powercards, I can play the game with the moles, which you’re expected to use the hippo hip attack, but you can also just roll over them.

I then switch to alex to play his specific minigames. The mushroom patterns, getting the fruit in the tree, the bee flowers, and the cave onions.

Then we switch to Marty and get his power cards that lets us play the frog game, after we get the fruit dish from the beach. After the frog game we get up to a slide that has a dish hidden up there, then we use Melman to play his only minigame in the stage.

Melman

We jump to the coconut platform while avoiding a cutscene, we can throw one coconut to destroy two nests at once. Later we can skip the rest of the coconut walls with very precise jumps, one were we need to take damage on the side of the wall, then one were we also have to take damage then hover for a bit, and the final one just walk through without taking damage.

Next is durian throw, which is an annoying stage to do since you can’t control the spawning of the worms, I did what I could to get them all in one throw for each one. You can easily skip the middle two durian piles by jumping over the ground. If you don’t kill the remaining worms with the Durian throws, you have to run up to them and kill them yourself, which is very slow, but luckily I threw one just right to avoid this.

Normally after this you would have to play a Mole hunting game with Gloria, but you can completely skip it by jumping and getting over the invisible wall to reach the exit.

You don’t want to fall on the ground in the following Alex stage. And that’s the last we will see of Melman

Hip thrusting is faster for longer distances.

Crab section we stomp on them using butt bounce, I position Gloria in a way so I can flip the next crab over, saving time.

It’s faster to use hip thrust on the crates as you go faster than the peppers, the only downside is if an enemy is nearby, Gloria will lock onto that enemy and not the crate.

After that we switch to Marty for the rest of the stage and don’t see gloria again.

With some tricky platforming, Marty is able to grab all the other beacon pieces, and using a clip through a bolder, we don’t need to use Gloria to break it open.

I managed to do 3 hits in one kick on the Turtles, which saved a bit of time.

Marty has to kill spiders to get rid of the spider webs, and slide under vines

The fruit collection stage ends if you get caught by the spider, which if you reach a score of 30 before that happens you will win. The spider appears at random and requires some RNG manip to get a favorable spawn time.

Sliding down the waterfall using the small dashes on the side, it’s normal to almost run out of time near the end.

For the spider cave I can easily jump dash around a wall of web to make it to the end.

The Croc race has some rubber banding, and can be pretty annoying to deal with at times.

Foosa can sometimes die on their own, although it’s hard to tell if that’s faster than just killing them. Once you kill 11 Foosa, the super roar plant appears and we can use it to kill off the remaining ones.

The next phase is tricky, if we hit him more than 4 times with the mango he will spawn in Vultures, which takes 3 hits to get rid of. Also important to note that Mango throws lock on to nearby enemies, so I can’t always throw mangos at the boss otherwise it will miss. The mango drops are also RNG, but I was able to manipulate them to always spawn where I am, it was very tricky to get it right.

For the final phase, if we get hit by a durian, he will stop being on fire and we can attack, we don’t want to do too many attacks at once otherwise he will go back to being on fire, we finish him using an air attack which does more damage. Then we jump off the edge to reset the attack cycle. We do this two times then at the end a super roar plant appears which lets us do two extra attack cycles on him to finish the battle.

Would like to give a shoutout to CasualPokePlayer who made the Dolphin fork into bizhawk that made this submimssion possible in the first place.

I'd also like to give a shoutout to the Madagascar speedrunning community who have been very supportive and helpful throughout the creation of this TAS, many of the tricks you see were an accumulation of years of research into tricks, they are really passionate about this game.

Samsara: File replaced with an identical version with a corrected rerecord count, and judging.

Samsara: I could have made a sick Flash game reference if you submitted this like two years earlier, but it's too outdated now. In the meantime, I just have to accept this very well done movie of what appears to be every fever dream I've ever had coalescing into a video game based a movie about Hell Animals.

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