Turok: Evolution is a sidescrolling shooter for the GBA with 5 stages each divided into 4 levels. One of the selectable characters has a grappling hook that can be used to move really quickly through the game since many stages have grabable ceilings.
This run beats the previous one by hejops by ~30 seconds. The majority of that time is from re-routing in stage 4. Some levels have different exits allowing some limited routing options. It turns out the route used in this run is ~15 seconds faster than the one hejops used. Strangely, the first publication of this game used the faster route, while for some reason the second publication used the much slower one (hejops didn't check according to the submission notes, nor was this caught in judging.)
Aside from that some optimized movement and boss fights make up the rest of the improvement. In my test run I accidentally managed to despawn one of the drills in stage 4 saving ~40 frames, but I was unable to reproduce this in the final version after improving earlier parts, probably related to RNG spawns.
This run is console verified as in the temp encode.
nymx: Claiming for judging.