Crescent Island "Gameplay Sequence" from Diddy Kong Racing on Mario Paint Composer (BETTER VERSION)

I finally stopped being lazy and fixed one of my older (yet one of my favorite) works. As I have noted in my channel description, several of my older videos have stars placed incorrectly on the staff. This is due to the stars naturally making two pitches, and me hearing one of them and everyone else hearing the other one. This bothered me and I made it a goal of mine to go back and fix this issue in these videos, releasing updated versions.

I guess the star mistakes in this song aren't as noticeable as in the other ones, but it's still nice to fix them. This remake not only includes fixed stars, but other small edits such as fixing other wrong notes, adding more stars to cymbal crashes, sound cut-offs, etc. I guess I could have remade the piece with more dickspeed for better accuracy...but I think the way it is still sounds quite good. I am very happy the way this whole piece has turned out. This is one of my works I am most proud of :-)

Nothing much else to say I guess. I had to set this to Private for a couple days to remake those bazillion annotations X-P Enjoy! Here is the description on the original video:

Whew. I dont know what compelled me to do this. Lol. I had wanted to do Crescent Island from Diddy Kong Racing on MPC (as it is one of my favorite levels and songs from the game) and so I started it, and then I figured it would be cool to include the 1st Place Finish theme at the end, and then...well, you see what it led to. This took an unknown amount of hours over the last two weeks. It shouldn't have taken me that long, but here it is nonetheless haha. I'm very pleased the way it turned out, especially considering it was all done on the original soundfont, and by ear! gasp!


I dont know if anything like this has ever been done before on Mario Paint Composer. Normally I would think composing a large gameplay sequence from a video game on MPC would be not the best idea, as all the pieces of music shoved in to one composition could be distracting. But I feel it is different with Diddy Kong Racing, at least with the sequence I arranged here. Anyone who was a fan of the game has heard this general sequence of music a bazillion times as it occurs before and after most races (if you win them), so it should be familiar with many people and it isn't just some random gameplay sequence. What music is included is the following:


Sherbet Island (the beach area in the overworld outside the lobby with the entrances to Crescent Island, Whale Bay, Pirate Lagoon, and Treasure Caves)
The abovementioned Lobby with the abovementioned race level entrances
T.T.s theme
The Lobby again
Race Start Fanfare
Crescent Island
Crescent Island final lap
1st Place Finish
Victory theme

Despite some transition issues between song files, I think it all played through quite smoothly together. I tried as best I could to include all parts of all songs, but had some trouble with a few. In Sherbet Island, I couldn't fit in the proper door opening sound at the end since it was at a slower tempo, so its just a large gap. Pardon that lol.

For T.Ts theme, I was going to use double the tempo I ended up using, but it was part of a tempo gap and so the tempo was going to be way off. So I kept the tempo you see in the video at the cost of some parts not fitting in all their notes at times. Still I think it turned out pretty well.

The Victory theme gave me some issues in the stars, as I couldnt include a few strings of them as cymbal crashes due to the use of other stars in the piece (they would interfere with each other). Also, I couldn't find the right notes for the star runs that go up and down, so I improvised. The Game Boys helped designate the top notes of each run since I couldnt hear them, in case you were wondering.

I left out most sound effects but included the following which I think turned out well: the Crescent Island door opening in the lobby, the revving of the engines before the race (my personal favorite here :-D), the whoosh sound during the Race Start Fanfare that brings up the heads up display on your screen, the headstart blastoff sound of the racecar as the race just begins, the whoosh sound of Taj the elephant making a gold balloon magically appear during the Victory theme, the ding sound as the balloon is added to your tally, and a sparkly noise that ends the Victory theme after that.

A lot of work, a lot of files, but I'm really proud of this. And yes, I looked at Crescent Island footage to get all the timing right for everything lol.

Sorry for the massive description lol.

Enjoy! :-)