maybe something a little more tactful... possibly romance% ?

With bmac's suggestion, I decided to do some testing on the load time differences between the GCN and the Wii. I ran a test with a total of 8 runs of Ison Corridor Ambush, 4 runs on the Wii, 4 runs on GCN by Ninjafalcon_2. I chose this level because it contains the most common amount of cutscenes and level changes (4 cutscenes, and a change level half-way through), plus it's fairly short. We both mashed through the cutscenes as fast as possible, so there should be at least a few frames of variance between them because of this.

This game runs (I'm pretty sure) at 60fps, but I could be wrong. Regardless that is what the fps was set to both of the recordings I have. I counted the amount of frames between all the possible loading variances between all of the runs, and averaged them out. you can see the data in the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1axNlwgm8OnR1H294PfSEoGzFbloBZDgOWBhRVufrYFs/edit?usp=sharing

My results are suggesting that it might actually be slower to run on the Wii by on average about 1/2 a second per level if they have the same amount of cutscenes and loads as Ison Corridor Ambush. Not an significant amount of time for ILs (might be worth playing GC for WRs though), but possibly 3-5 seconds on an any% run.

BIG HOWEVER though, with such limited testing, the results are inconclusive. The runs are not the same, and performed by 2 separate runners, so button mashing speed could be causing this too. But we do know that load times are inconsistent, aside from button mashing.

More testing is obviously needed, but it's pretty time consuming, and I'm not sure where my GCN composite cables are... so as of right now I don't have a way to capture and record runs on there.

If anyone is interested in helping me gather more information, please let me know. Please also feel free to suggest any other ways we could time this consistently.

Well, I'm 99% sure it's the rebel troops reaching to a certain point that causes the level to end. Messed around a whole bunch off-stream and found a few curious tid-bits:

1. Destroying enemies doesn't have any effects to timing that I could tell, I did about 10 runs today and I couldn't get one to crack bellow 8 minutes using the flying car with cheats and homing cluster missiles.
2. If you pick the Y-Wing as your starter ship, you can actually just go straight to the cargo hold before the transport lands and blow it up! It doesn't seem to effect timing though, since cut scenes do not add to the in-game timer.
3. Rebel troops will shoot at nothing, and claim they're being shot even when no one is shooting at them
4. Lag might play a small role in timing, but when I tried to play a few runs with as little lag as possible when bombing the AT-PTs, and then flying around, looking at the sky as much as possible to reduce lag, I actually got my 2 worst time of 8:39 and 8:30
5. You can't bomb AT-ATs to smithereens :(
6. Destroying the guns to the star destroyer does not seem to effect the speed that the rebel troops reach their checkpoint.
7. I was consistently getting AT-ATs down at relatively the same time (within 3 seconds most of the time), but my final time still varied significantly.

I believe the key to cracking the code to this level is figuring out what causes the troops to go reach the final checkpoint the fastest.

I'm going to be spending time on VoK with the intent to figure out wtf is going on with the mission end timer.

I'm beginning to speculate that the end level trigger may also have something to do with the amount of enemies you have destroyed after the troops have made their way to the Star Destroyer.

I plan on testing this out with a profile w/ the homing cluster missiles upgrade and the cluster bomb upgrades to make quick work of the star destroyer defenses and ties. I will also try to be keeping a closer eye on the rebel troops to figure out if and where there is a trigger spot for the troops to end the mission.

Feel free to offer theorycrafts on what could be done to make this more consistent.

On the first 2 missions, Sending wingmen on ties can help, but from my experience it makes the tie segments less consistent. \If you send them off, a lot of times they can split up groups of ties by killing or shooting for a leader, which makes them break off their pattern and more difficult to kill. I find that it's easier and more efficient if you keep your wingmen off ties and just have them stay with you most of the time. If they stick with you, they occasionally land a hit on a tie that you're trying to get, which is better than nothing or causing ties to go off in some random direction.

Having them fight ties in Vengeance on Kothlis is more often than not what I do in my runs, it's basically an escort objective if you do it quick enough.

Battle of Endor is good too, I personally keep them on the bombers because iirc they prioritize objective targets.

I was messing around with raid on bespin after I saw bmac somehow get a quicker than normal first objective after taking out the cannons. It turns out that you only need to clear out the last platform in order to trigger the next part of the mission, you don't need to do the first 2 platforms.