Or in this case, some games.

As I'm sure you all want to go out celebrating New Year's Eve, I will not keep you here for long. I have three highly broken games that you can quickly watch so you won't have to stay for long, and go out celebrating instead.

I can't think of how many Pokémon there are to catch, if it didn't hit the thousand yet then I'm surprised. Either way, there are much less than that in Pokémon Green, but runner Paul 'Fishaman P' Fisher can't be bothered catching them all, so instead he skips the entire game to finish in 0:03 using the Dokokashira Door Glitch, an improvement of 0:01 in-game. According to 'Fishaman P' the glitch's name roughly translates to "Where am I?", which is what I'll be saying tomorrow morning.

We host some seriously fast speedruns, some using extreme luck, but we now have a contender for fastest glitched run that isn't Pokémon or Maxim. Ys: The Vanished Omens has a "Pum's Pawn Shop Mirror Glitch" which skips to the credits of the game. Reading Rasmus 'KrazyRasmus' Olsen comments is helpful to understand how he used it to beat the game in an insane 0:00:16, Single Segment.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Cosmo Wright. 0:15:22 (0:18:10 ZSR timing). 1:01:37 improvement. 'nuff said.

Have a happy new year everyone, and here's to plenty more speedruns and to a super successful Awesome Games Done Quick 2015!
*pops open a champagne*
*cork hits his head*
*falls on the floor unconscious*

I can't find a link between them. If you find one please let me know and you will be awarded a cool cookie*.

The Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo page gets an update today with a run on the HD Remix version, which cuts out on a number of features the original has had. 'bluebomber285' didn't mind that and played on the X' Mode with Chun-Li on Expert difficulty, clocking at 0:04:21.

Do you know that internet game that some people still play where one says "The Game" and everyone loses instantly? My brain gets into some sort of convulsion trying to figure out the results of You Have To Win The Game. 'noclip''s brain certainly doesn't get confused as he wins(?) The Game in 0:05:07, a 10 seconds improvement over the previous run. The run is also on a more recent version of The Game which makes it much more CRT-like.

The highly recommended Cutscenes Saga continues with Half Life: Blue Shift as a 'sadf' takes Calhoun through more lengthy cutscenes, among some bunnyhopping and shortcuts on the way, to escape Black Mesa in 0:28:33 on Easy difficulty, Single Segment with Cutscenes.

Going with more action we have the ever successful Diablo 3, where much like the previous games you choose a character and set off to defeat Diablo and co. See, no need for cutscenes to get to the point. 'Freezard' grinds the game for the best items, and this resulted in the following runs: Act I in 0:18:20, Act II in 0:16:24, Act III in 0:13:29 and Act IV in 0:05:28. All runs are on New Game Plus, using the Demon Hunter class, which is absolutely broken in terms of speed. Total time is 0:53:41.

* Terms and Conditions may apply. See your local cookie monster for more details and cookie crumbs.

I'm trying so hard not to make a Doctor Who joke right now.

Don't let the title of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter mislead you since you aren't actually hunting dinosaurs but instead searching for pieces of a relic in different parts of time and stop an ultimate evil (who isn't a dinosaur, boo!). Forrest 'Natas Joplin' Hinton doesn't let this disappointment get on top of him as he beats the game on Easy in 0:55:08, Single Segment with deaths.

One of the best games for its time is TimeSplitters 2. Aliens are at war with humanity and The Doctor, I mean, two space marines, are trying to fend off the alien race known as TimeSplitters, whose way of destruction is by undoing history using Time Crystals. Stefan 'Anemptybox' Persson tackles the messy problem in a quick 0:27:20, Single Segment on Easy difficulty.

Travelling through time and space, or portraits in this case, are the star characters of Super Mario 64. 'Paradox Karl' managed to figure out a route for 1-star on the DS version and produce a run timed at 0:12:52, Single Segment. Some of the tricks used are literally frame-perfect but most of them are stupidly hard.

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness is not a game that you'd imagine having time travel, but it does. After rescuing princesses, killing monsters and blowing up spaceships, a time machine pops up and you only use it once. You read me right: once. But it fits today's theme so who cares! Space Ace Paul 'Lag.Com' Davies gets extra lucky with RNG today with this 0:36:19 run, Single Segment.

I'd actually watch that, but then again I can't find any ninjas.

International Track and Field 2, or IT&F 2000, ESPN IT&F, IT&F: Summer Games, or any other name Konami released it under continues the Track & Field series of having players compete in different Olympic events, and set some impossible records while at it. 'Chris-X' plays on the PS1 European version on Hard difficulty and takes the championship in a mere 0:17:59. More watchable than the Olympics too.

Ninja Gaiden 3 wraps up the trilogy with an odd plot and gameplay that leaves slightly of a bitter taste. It is still better than the one that came out recently. 'InfestedRiche' takes Ryu through the last part of the journey (again, ignoring recent releases) and beats the game in 0:13:13, 19 seconds faster than the previous run.

Skating is pretty popular and there are some seriously awesome tricks out there, but personally I prefer watching people get wrecked and hit certain body parts that can make you squirm just from watching it. Luckily(?) we don't get to see those in Tony Hawk Underground 2 when 'mx.lenny94' plays, instead only the sweet moves as he tears apart every level extremely quickly, and finishes the game in its European version on Easy difficulty in 0:14:34, Single Segment, a 3:47 minutes improvement over the previous run.

We're going to clean up some prehistoric dust today!

'feasel' not only gets speedrun requests from his viewers, but also gets challenged to beat records. Today he gives us a run of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where he improves the previous run from almost 10.5 years ago by 24 seconds, down to 0:04:49. All I can say is "YOU WIN BIG MAN".

It's been a long while since we have had a Metroid run on the front page, but Andrew 'spidey-widey' Brockmann returns to his roots with Metroid Zero Mission. Improving the previous 100% Single Segment run from almost 9.5 years ago, 'spidey-widey' completes the game in 0:50:58, which is a 5:13 minutes improvement.

If my update a couple posts ago didn't have enough rabbits for you, then Jazz Jackrabbit 2 should finish off those cravings. After 9 years we are given a huge improvement of 7:55 minutes, as 'Vortale' tackles Spaz and rushes to an epic fast 0:22:05, Single Segment.

I'm sorry. I'll ask LLCoolDave for the next update's title.

I'll start things off with Heretic 2. Corvus makes a comeback from the first game as he has to find the cure to a plague that makes people go insane if they are not killed by it. 'Ruben Kusters' completes the game on Easy difficulty in 0:44:34, Single Segment.

Freakin' Funky Fuzzballs has a deceiving title; I have yet to find the 'Freakin' Funky' part of it. The game's level maps are statics but all item placements are pure RNG. Coupled with the fact that levels can have tiles that disappear for good, having 'Bouchart' finish the game on Expert difficulty in 0:13:30 is pretty freakin' impressive.

After not playing Gauntlet as the Elf for a long time, 'feasel's stream viewers had requested an updated speedrun for it. Thanks to better random-exit luck the time on the run dropped to 0:15:55, 54 seconds faster than the previous run from three years ago.

I is for I have no good titles.

Aero the Acro-Bat is not an easy game, both in gameplay and the plot. Nonetheless 'Shadow Jacky' is providing us with a display of impressive acrobatics as he completes the game in 0:36:35, Single Segment.

Gravity Duck is self-explanatory just from the title. Nonetheless you should know your task is to find golden eggs for God, who wants to cook an omelette. Tomas 'Guunnz' Gonzalez finishes all 40 levels in 0:04:43. Please note this speedrun does contain traces of egg products and should not be consumed by those who have an allergy for eggs. Or Ducks.

Rabbits have had a bad name since a certain cocky rabbit lost to a turtle. With '__sdfg' in control of Whizz however, they get their good graces back. Improving the previous run on Hard difficulty by 19 seconds, '__sdfg' abuses a few bugs on the way to the giant carrot at the end in a quick 0:15:51.

To finish off the update is the sad news that LLCoolDave will no longer be doing regular front page updates. He has given us a lot over the time he was here and his creative flair made for some excellent news posts, possibly the best SDA had seen yet. As such I have taken over the regular front page updates and so it looks like you and I will be seeing each other a lot more, and hopefully with better titles than the one today.

Probably some rejected ideas for enemies for Silent Hill 2 as they didn't qualify past the gore round. Andrew 'Bigmanjapan' Bondarenko improves the previous Maria Hard mode run by 19 seconds, clocking in at 0:06:04, Single Segment.

It's definitely monkeying around with Jeffrey 'I have no name' Bardon who made a Time Attack individual levels table for Ape Escape. 19 levels done at 0:01:52.40.

If individual levels tables are your thing, then you'd be happy to hear that Tad 'RabidJellyfish' Cordle and 'p-p-j' improved the LittleBigPlanet runs. 14 levels were improved and brought the time down to 0:52:04, a 4:56 minutes improvement.

Unfortunately I missed quite a fair bit of the recent GDQs due to time constraints, but 'SCXCR' lets me catch up ever so slightly by improving Ninjabread Man to 0:03:16, a huge 3:41 improvement over his previous run on the site.

One of my favourite runs on the site is of Drakan: Order of the Flame. Patrik 'Pafi' Varjotie returns to the game and breaks it even further. Using item duplicated rusty chain mails to zip across levels and Arokh to go Out of Bounds (lots of invisible dragon flying!), 'Pafi' produced a 27 segments 0:13:06 Large Skips run. I have a new run to add to my favourite list now.

• Adventure Island 2 in 0:24:26 by 'Whitman_Price_'.
• Alien 3 Single-segment on Hard difficulty in 0:31:40 by Martin 'J.Y' Söderhäll.
• Art of Fighting, level 1 difficulty, in 0:04:41 by 'Jeremy 'DK28' Doll.
• Bionic Commando in 0:15:29 (a 2:08 improvement), as well as 100% in 0:22:09 (a 4:48 improvement) by Patrick 'PJ' DiCesare.
• Bonk's Adventure in 0:29:45 by 'Jeremy 'DK28' Doll.
• Final Fantasy Adventure in 2:10:48 by 'Crow!'.
• Splatterhouse 2 in 0:15:56 by Zack 'Zallard1' Allard.
• Splatterhouse 3 on Game Master difficulty in 0:22:19 by 'Slaughterhouserock'.
• Tiny Toon Adventures in 0:13:16 by Jonathan 'Joka' Karlsson.
• Tomba! 2: The Evil Swine Return Single-segment in 1:14:35 by Dylan 'CavemanDCJ' Jock, an improvement of 11:38 over the run from 2011.
• Wario World Single-segment in 0:46:08 by 'Dangerless'.
• Young Merlin Single-segment in 0:45:04 by 'DumDumDugan'.

Enjoy.

In other news, Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 is a month away. If you're interested, check out gamesdonequick.com.

Time to have another big update. I've stacked up some great runs over the week and now just have to carry them to the frontpage for your viewing pleasure.
*sound of toe being stubbed on an inconveniently placed piece of furniture*
*mildly intelligible German cuss words*
*sound of digital objects inexplicably shattering on the floor*
Well looks like I've got myself a little mess here. But don't worry, I'm sure I'll be able to puzzle things back together just fine.

Our first entry of the day is Mole Sky, Soon, the epic tale of a young mole sorcerer being stuck in an evil labyrinthine molehill, trying to climb to the top to get to the sky before the sun sets. Unfortunately, the NES is too limited to properly display the detailed mole sprites this game clearly deserved. - 'ktwo', 0:29:02, best ending - 0:12:57, any%

Next up we have Artist Corps, a game in which aspiring painter Mike is on a massive inspirational hallucinogenic trip involving talking animals, aliens, and a combat yo-yo. Unfortunately, the drug abuse has a lasting psychological impact on Mike, preventing him from selling his artwork and ending up living out of a dumpster. Fortunately, the runner managed to skip this depressing cutscene. - 'Darkwing Duck', 1:06:50

The Final Fantasy series certainly has come a long way in terms of storytelling since the NES days. One of the latest releases is A Microelectronic Chef's Slyest Ho, featuring a part time robot restaurant owner/part time pimp getting caught up in wacky adventures with one of his prostitutes. Would strongly recommend picking the Italian voice acting if you decide to play this for yourself. - 'someonewhodied', 1:48:52

Shamefaced Hag: Ethic Zero manages to one up the previous RPG story, despite being decades older. After an excessive night of partying (seriously, watch the opening cutscene!), Scheherazade is taken in by the Arabian moral police and the player is tasked with taking the role of a time travelling magician to rescue her so she can go one doing whatever she did to those swans the previous night. - 'Darkwing Duck', 1:07:40

Anal Ants Iffy 6 is a sequel that really didn't need to be made. In my humble opinion, the series really took a downturn after Anal Ants Iffy 4. Though I have to admit, the graphics in the latest release are very lifelike. - 'LCC', 4:50:31

Earn Ten Vases is a rather niche title. Looking for the perfect Christmas gift for his grandma, Earnest Evans does menial tasks in the neighbourhood to earn enough of an allowance to purchase a set of 10 Chinese vases. Once again, the low detail NES graphics do a poor job of properly reflecting the storyline in the gameplay. - Phillip 'ZELLLOOO' Shanklin, 0:08:33

The next thing I've been able to piece back together is The Seaward Shower: Mass Profit, a strange extra-terrestrial real estate management game. The quickest speedrunning route appears to be to violate building regulations and getting into a direct conflict with the imperial homeowner's association. - Nathaniel 'EverAlert' Coughran, 0:46:17

Baccarat Bezel - Hone Teamwork is a massive multiplayer online casino furniture construction simulator. Just take my money already, I'm sold. - 'Thehealbus', 0:57:06

The next entry today is on Belch Molesters Out, a simple flash browser game funded by the 'Alcoholics against Sexual Abuse' foundation. You have to carefully manage your beverage consumption, toilet breaks and stomach air levels to keep the increasing hordes of perverts away from the girls at the bar, all the while the controls get less and less responsive with every beer you drink. Even getting past level 4 is a real challenge. - 'cortez', 0:25:41 (IL table)

Oh sweet Jesus, apparently there's even an Anal Ants Iffy X2. They really don't know when to stop. - Emma 'Augora' Rice, 2:48:47

Next up is the interactive documentary Madden Kimono OP, the story of an American sports commentator taking the east Asian fashion scene by storm. - Lawrence 'playe' Palmiter, 1:04, Large-Skips

Major With REM is the tale of a narcoleptic Marine being caught up in increasingly frightening day dreams, involving such ludicrous concepts as cows dropping from the sky. Who in their right mind would be frightened of that? - Jordan 'Athens_' Kloster, 0:31:26

How about we get in some simulator action in the meantime? I Wheel Goo Stuff is THE leading wheelbarrow simulator on the market. Live your dream of pushing around dangerous and unhealthy liquids all over the world, from a meat factory in northern Wales to manual waste disposal in the slums of Bangladesh. The USB wheelbarrow add-on is strongly recommended for realistic haptic feedback. - 'Senzura', 0:29:07

Archaic Plunderer's Genes is an educational game, teaching children about evolution following the story of British occupants looting religious sites in 19th century India. The title is highly controversial, to say the least, but it does makes for a good speed game so that's good enough for us. - 'philosoraptor42', 0:13:31, 100%

Tabled Toast is an interesting physics based game. Players take turns toasting up bread and stacking it up in a Jenga-like game. Received several awards for the excellent bread physics. - 'jc583', 0:12:57, with warps

And finally, the last entry of the day is Senate Farcically Goads Knaves. It's a post apocalyptic setting in which laws have been passed that require low income citizens to commit petty crimes for the amusement of the rich in order to receive their welfare payments. It's a bit silly, but the controls are rock solid. - Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag, 1:14:10, Cornell

Hmm, it looks like I've got a 'Demoralization Café' left over at the end. Eh, who cares, I doubt it was something of importance.

Spoilers - here's the actual game names:

• Solomon's Key
• Startropics
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time
• Magic of Scheherazade
• Final Fantasy 6
• Earnest Evans
• Star Wars: shadows of the Empire
• Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
• Bulletstorm
• Final Fantasy X-2
• Pokémon Diamon
• Earthworm Jim
• Guise of the Wolfe
• Rescue Rangers
• Battletoads
• Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness

Let's play a little game. It's called 'guess how many runs I can post in 5 hours'. Get your bets in, the answer will be posted at the end of this update.

Alright let's go. Ready to punch some dudes in the jaw? No? That's a tad awkward then. How about you turn around then and just ignore the comedic sound effects and blood splatters for a moment? I promise it will be over soon. In position? Great, let's have a little Punch-Out then. It's just 3 quick bouts today. First of all, we have Adam 'KHANanaphone' Ferguson vs Don Flamenco 2. Bang, knockdown in 0:01:23.82, next. 'sinister1' vs Bald Bull 2, and we've got a KO in just 0:01:20.82. And there goes our final matchup, Zack 'Zallard1' Allard vs Bald Bull 1 (Why this order? POWER UPDATING!), and we got a winner in 0:00:57.00. There, that wasn't so bad now, was it?

What, traumatic experience? Okay, how about something relaxing instead? Here, have some zombies to shoot. Well, technically they are not ACTUALLY zombies, but just parasite infected villagers, but their heads are just as squishy. Here, I'll even give you some special weapons and let Austin 'Auddy07' Davenport guide you. There, wasn't that an enjoyable 1:42:31 spent on the Gamecube release of Resident Evil 4? You don't appear to be cheered up by that, how about we try that again, but even quicker? Robert 'Sunblade' Brandl has chopped the XBox 360 HD experience into 16 neat little chunks, totalling 1:26:23. Man, can you see those brains explode? Joy.

You're terrified and believe you can see ghosts now? Well, then who ya gonna call? No, not child protective services, you silly. Ghostbusters! Let's just hope they won't take too long, you seem to be shivering in fear right now. Ah there they are finally, with 'BeeBee' at the helm. It only took them 0:33:47 to arrive. But what is that, that doesn't look like a ghost trap at all. In fact... is that a giant keg? Oh my, I must have misdialed, looks like I called the BoozeGustlers.

Okay, how about we try some running to distract you from that ghost. I've invited a couple of friends over, so how about taking a stroll in Sonic R? Man, that 'Pkqcpat' guy sure is pulling ahead. Looks like he finished all the tracks in a mere 0:14:51 but hey, it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it?

Oh, a hedgehog phobia, my bad. Yeah, I can see it being an unpleasant experience then, hmm. Okay, let's go for an adventure then, get this all out of our heads, why don't we. Here, how about we collect some notes and Jiggies, rescue some Jinjos and everything is colourful and joyous. Surely not much could go wrong here. Let's join 'Hyperresonance' on our friendly journey through the world of Banjo-Tooie. See, that was quite the 2:52:57 we had, wasn't it? I surely can't fit any more golden notes in my stomach.

My god, what did you just say? Your grandma was mauled by a bear? How could I have forgotten about that, I did film that footage after all. Okay, well, have some medication then, these pills will surely calm you down some. See, you're much more quiet already. Vivid hallucinations? Something about an undercover mission? Degaussing pigeons? That sounds like some Jazzpunk nonsense right there. Oh, those convulsions don't look normal. I better call Dr. Etienne 'EthanWolfcat' Taschereau. Alright, can you hear me again? Great, good to hear that. Your heart stopped beating for 0:17:46, some kind of allergic reaction to the pills, but don't worry, everything is mostly under control now.

Yeah, your head spinning is perfectly normal in this situation. (Is this normal? No? More morphine? Sure.) You can see in 3D? But we live in a 3D world. Yes of course we do, what did you think? It's not like we live in the world of FEZ. No, you're not flat. Maybe we should get a second opinion on your state then. Dr. Gaétan 'Gyoo' Young, what do you think of this? Administer this injection? Okay, this might hurt a bit, but there we go. This should start kicking in in 0:30:55. Why such a precise time? That's the wonder of modern medicine!

Guess you just need some rest now. Here, how about I read you a story while you relax. How about The Legend of Zelda? Classic hero tale, written by 'Darkwing Duck', I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Valiant, lowborn guy sets out on epic quest to save the princess. And he's even quick about it. 0:31:25 to defeat the big bad evil. You still look upset, how about I read you the Second Quest sequel as well. That one's a bit longer, it lasts 0:36:45, but ends with the same sweet justice.

You still look upset. What's the matter? The princess didn't deserve to be rescued as the monarchy in Hyrule is suppressing the common people? Fine, how about you try your hands at politics yourself then. How about you take control of Germany and try to build an Empire Earth? Okay, I'll be back in a bit to see how you did. Alright, you've had 1:26:58 now, what do we stand at? Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is dead and we're at the brink of war? Good fucking job. Guess we'll have to leave it up to Maik 'Onin' Biekart to fix this mess. Maybe politics really isn't your forte after all.

What, aliens? Sure, I'm not falling for that distraction from your failure. You insist? Okay, let's have a loOOK OH MY GOD SPACE MUTANTS. Our only hope is to send Bart vs the Space Mutants. Oh, he's not available? Something about being drawn in Korea or so. Well, I guess Piotr 'TheMexicanRunner' Delgado Kusielczuk will have to do. He seems to be quick about it, too. Instead of the usual 21 minutes (plus commercials) he manages to clean up the first wave in a mere 0:16:59.

But that's still not enough, there's more ground forces. Time to call in Duke Alex 'pogokeen' Dawson Nukem for the cleaning. And here he goes. Incubator in 0:27.11, Overlord in 0:07.44, Raw Meat in 0:18.06. And here comes the celebration! Uh, you might want to turn to look the other way, this is not something you should see. Oh god, can you really stick that there? And then, wow, how does that even fit?

You know what, that was quite the eventful day. Maybe it really is time to wind down. How about we join 'Darkwing Duck' on the streets of River City, clobbering some bad dudes. Some high quality 0:07:46 fisticuffs, a rewarding kick in the groin, an elevating piledriver. That's exactly how I love to end my days, don't you? Oh, I totally forgot about that not wanting to punch some dudes in the jaw part, whoops. Maybe I should listen from time to time.

If you guessed 18 then congratulations, you counted them up before getting to this line so you could look smart, didn't you?

Less typos in this update, I hope.

The last update started off with my mention of Halloween and I do hope you had all enjoyed it. If you already miss the sugar rush and diabetes after a night full of face-stuffing in candy, then I'm sure you'll be happy to hear Halloween is here to stay for a little longer! The Halloween-themed game Costume Quest sees a monster kidnapping your character's sibling followed by you having to hunt it and of course, stop evil on the way. In this game your character and allies, when in battle, will transform into the very creatures or monsters that they are dressed up as; these costumes include the Statue of Liberty, a vampire, a robot and more. I wonder if there's an Air Pirate as well. 'fullmetalgambit' puts on his speedrunner costume as he beats the game in 1:17:17, Single Segment, in one big night of trick-or-treating and lots of fighting.

Super Mario Bros. 3 introduced a few new things to the Mario series, except for Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach. The game itself usually takes quite a while to beat it and you have to go through many worlds and obstacles. 'Davetrap' agrees that going through the whole thing is too bothersome, which is why he uses Large-Skips to wrap to Peach in a brisk, yet very carefully planned out, 0:03:18.

One of my favourite series to watch speedruns of is Metal Slug, which makes me very happy to see three runs of it today. Jeremy 'DK28' Doll presents us with two runs of Metal Slug 2. The first one is by himself as he slices and dices his way through the X Army and the aliens in 0:18:25. The second one sees 'DK28' and Christian 'Koopa Kid' Welsh join forces in a Co-op run in 0:19:45. The time is slower because of the lag issues the game suffers, which becomes more prominent with two players being on screen. For those who prefer the version that slightly lags less, Metal Slug X gets an improvement from Jeremy 'DK28' Doll who beats the game in 0:18:56. All three runs are on Easy difficulty.

The last game for today is pretty Serious, and has a lot of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA in it. I actually wanted to make the whole update just with AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA in it but that would be doing almost the same joke twice. Back in business we have a run of Serious Sam: The First Encounter in Co-op from Anders 'DenLillePige' Hansen and 'momfy' who dealt with a lot of screaming from both the game's enemies and probably from themselves as they beat the game in 0:41:23 in Tourist difficulty. You can watch it from either 'DenLillePige' 's point of view or from 'Momfy' 's.

Next update should come very soon, and if not, then AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Hlaloewen is aprpoacihng and mnay kdis are aobut to cmoe to yuor hosue exepcitng cnady. Smoe of tehm may be drsesed up as piartes, but I tihnk tehy shuold be derssed up as Air Pirtaes, scuh as tohse form Skies of Arcadia. Charlie 'Junglechief' Reichmeier is giivng us a traet by tkaing us thruogh the vsat wolrd of Aracdia, a wrold wihtuut apaprnet sufrace. If you dno't wnat to awnser any dooriblls duinrg the ngiht, tehn pehraps you sohlud get smoe, or ltos, of pocporn as you jorueny tohurgh the gmae in 10:44:17 in 134 sements.

King of the Monsters 2 is an intreestnig baet 'em up gmae taht fetaures trhee mosntirs as tehy tkae on an ailen therat. The montsers feautred are rahter intreesteng to say the laest. Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag taeks cotnrol of Cyber Woo due to his Woocopter ableity that is ovrepoewred on the SNES vesrion, and betas the gmae in 0:20:01, Signle Segmnet. Woo!

I am not excatly srue waht to wrtie abuot You Are Empty. Tehre is a fnie Wikipedia pgae aobut it but I cna't say anihting petraining to the polt beacuze waht the hlel. Nikita 'Tezur0' Buriak deos wlel in explianing the ongiongs of tihs run in his comemnts, and he has spaerd us patrs of the gmae by skpeping qutie a few aeras. Baeting the gmae in 0:50:11 on Esay in 8 segemnts was not esay for him as to add to eveyrthing taht can klil you, it lieks crsahyng a lot.

The polt of Eye of the Beholder shraes cmomon gruond wtih ohter gaems of the smae tpye. The loevly twon of Waterdeep was fonuded on top of eivl, becuase taht's wehre you pay the laest lnad txaes, but it seams taht eivl has gotetn out of cnotrol. Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag alraedy daelt wtih tihs ocne, but tihs tmie tkaes on an eevn qiucker juorney to deafat the eivl Xanathar in 0:08:47, Snigle Segemant in the PC vesrion of tihs gmae. If you flet the run was too qiuck tehn yuo'd be hpapy to konw the gmae's seuqel, Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, taeks mcuh lnoger to baet. A tmeple semeed to hvae been taekn by eivl (poor loaction cohices yet agian) and our heores form the frist gmae tarvel to it and bttale hoardes of enmeies. Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag laeds yet aagin as be maeks his way throogh to the eivl Dran Draggore and baets his Fianl From in 1:45:36, Snigle Semgent.

The Resident Evil series is a mainstay in the action horror genre, but to me it raises quite a few questions. Is it the residents that are evil, or does evil simply reside in the places depicted? If so, what's the big issue, everybody needs a home. Why are there typewriters scattered all over the place? I'm 26 and I have never even seen one in person in all those years. And most importantly, why are all the bad guys so incredibly stupid once they encounter the protagonists. Good job, you turned yourself into a giant zombie plant, what's your contingency plan in case you actually win this fight? Sit around the top of a broken castle tower and photosynthesise all day? 'TheLevelBest' decided to avoid these deep questions by running a title before the story got incredibly silly, if such a time even existed once, and submitted this 1:07:36 run as Jill on the Director's Cut release of the original entry.

If you're more into existential horror instead of the rawr brains type of scare the Resident Evil series provides, Silent Hill 2 surely must be one of your favourite titles. The PC release added a couple of features to the game, among which is a quicksave and quickload option. Ordinarily, one would expect these to be used for segmentation, but Andrew 'Bigmanjapan' Bondarenko has found some rather clever ways to abuse them in a single segment setting instead, fighting his way through the third scariest town in the continental US in a mere 0:45:46 in the Normal Action/Normal Riddle category.

As an aside at this point, we would like to officially renounce any responsibility SDA takes for pants being soiled from watching spooky speedruns. inFamous: Festival of Blood does feature the classical horror creature type vampire (not the sparkly variation), but I'd be hard pressed to call it a horror title. As a digital only spinoff to the superhuman city wreckage simulator inFamous, Festival of Blood somehow turns the main protagonist into an aforementioned vampire and then, in true comic book fashion, simply expects the player to accept that that is indeed now a thing in this story. Not that 'sk84uhlivin' has had much time to ponder this turn of events, as the entire Transylvanian subplot is resolved in a mere 0:29:30.

Our spiral into mysticism has now finally left behind any remnants of horror and put us deep into Japanese folklore, somehow. ÅŒkami weaves plenty of traditional characters, stunning visuals and a lupine protagonist into an astonishingly well produced mesh. In short, I'd describe the game as 'Zelda with a wolf', but there was an actual Zelda title where Link is also a wolf, so I'll have to settle for 'Zelda with a wolf - the good one' instead. Nicolas 'PillsOfDeath' Ziane steers sun goddess Amaterasu through her beautiful adventure on the crisp HD release in 1:25:56 on New Game+ in our final run of the day, and if you'll excuse me, I think I have just found a good reason to plug in my Wii again.

Hey. It's me again. How have you been? I've been great. So, how about them speedruns, huh? I know, they're pretty cool. In fact, I have some for you right now! No need to thank me.

Legend of Mana is one of those jRPGs that everyone seems to be incredibly fond of, but it's one that I know very little about. The run here is by prolific runner Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe, and completes the Dragon storyline in a single segment in 1:49, an improvement of 9 minutes over his run from 2008. Good stuff!

Speaking of jRPGs that everyone seems to be fond of, I have a childhood-destroying run of EarthBound (aka Mother 2) here. It's in the 'uber large skips' category, which I guess means that it's in the category of runs that have large skips and are sufficiently German. 'nemi' has clearly had enough of Porky's shenanigans and decided to skip the preamble normally required to stop a formless malevolent alien force by glitching to the debug menu, beating the game in 0:09:58. I guess Giygas couldn't comprehend the form of nemi's strats, huh?

While not a jRPG in the traditional sense, Rygar still has some RPG elements so I'm going to use that as a segue. This run is a 2 second improvement by 'Darkwing Duck' over his previous run, with a final time of 0:22:53. Not much else to say about this one.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy! QuackShot. Not an RPG. Oh well. 2D platformers are cool too, especially with Donald Duck. 'Windalgo' crushed the previous run of this game, cutting 2 minutes and 24 seconds off of the previous time on the site with his 0:25:10 submission.

Finally, some updates to our Challenge Map IL table for TMNT, submitted by Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe:

• Level 2 in 0:00:08.88 - 0.25 second improvement.
• Level 3 in 0:00:16.82 - 0.12 second improvement.
• Level 4 in 0:00:14.62 - 0.05 second improvement.
• Level 5 in 0:00:13.57 - 0.04 second improvement.
• Level 6 in 0:00:13.52 - 0.02 second improvement.
• Level 7 in 0:00:10.73 - 0.13 second improvement.
• Level 12 in 0:00:08.32 - 1.14 second improvement.
• Level 14 in 0:00:42.65 - 0.28 second improvement.
• Level 15 in 0:00:19.18 - 0.05 second improvement.
• Level 16 in 0:00:13.72 - 0.3 second improvement.

This brings the total time down to 0:04:38.96, a total improvement of 2.38 seconds.

That's all for now. See you soon.

Piotr 'TheMexicanRunner' Delgado Kusielczuk graces us with the third game in as many updates now, and he hasn't shied away from the difficult titles to achieve this hat-trick. Today's entry is The Lion King, a game on the short list of movie tie-ins that are not utterly shit (as long as you avoid the NES port). The game is rather challenging both to play and run, but if you can handle Battletoads then no game can stop you as the duo of a 0:14:38 run on easy and 0:15:01 time on difficult will surely attest to.

While we're on the topic of classic platforming titles let's take a look at Faxanadu, a game that's been gone from the front page for far too long. Combining sidescrolling action with RPG elements, this little known gem never quite managed to escape the shadow of the similar Zelda II despite being a superior design in many aspects. 'ShinerCCC' improves on the previously published run by precisely 100 seconds, a curious but arbitrary fact that allows me to make this paragraph appear to have more content than it actually does. In any case, the new time to beat is a numerically less remarkable 0:29:04.

In a time before video game stories tried to take themselves seriously and failed at it, protagonist Milon lived in the land of Hudson (now take a guess at what studio developed this game) and gets involved in a strange plot involving stolen musical instruments in Milon's Secret Castle. Despite the strange setting, the game is mostly famous for its unforgiving and arbitrary design, relying on players finding secret passages that are in no way indicated to exist before you stumble upon them, among other rather glaringly poor gameplay decisions. A lot of these issues obviously disappear when speedrunning as 'HavocProdigy' knows the game inside out and discovered a very efficient route through it, beating this bane of many a childhood in a mere 0:09:03.

Following on the coattails of Dave's machine gun updates, a slightly bigger one - more of a shotgun blast, really. Let's start off with the one game that breaks away from the theme of this update given away in the uninspired title. Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner HD is one of the lesser known Hideo Kojima games, but that didn't stop 'AllTheHighwinds' from engaging in some wild mecha fun. The single-segment time of 1:06:39 is a pretty impressive result, especially considering the fast pace and general attitude the game takes to all attempts at wringing out extra seconds from the timer - namely, 'screw the runner'.

Speaking of Hideo Kojima, we also have a brand new run of the possibly most demented of his games: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake - which is quite a distinction in a lineup including gems such as SD Snatcher or Metal Gear Solid 4: Grandpa Fighting Simulator. 'Jaguar King' decided to go the extra mile and get the coveted Big Boss rating in his single-segment run, and accomplished this quite challenging feat in 0:51:29 on the in-game timer. This is from the European version of Subsistence, by the way.

Battletoads is up there on the shortlist of the most annoying games of all time. That didn't stop Piotr 'TheMexicanRunner' Delgado Kusielczuk from improving two of the runs on that there page. First, he tackled the standard category (with deaths) and got 0:13:16, 4 seconds faster than the pretty optimized run from January. Then, he obsoleted an old record for the 100% (all stages), getting 0:24:19, over 9 minutes faster. Not bad for runs finished two days apart.

We've also got a small improvement on the IL page for Kirby Super Star. 'BBQSauz' improved the Gourmet Race - Race 1 record to 0:00:21.55. It's a small improvement - less than a second - but enough to knock the total time down by another second. By the skin of the teeth...

For a more modern take on platformers, let's turn to Risk of Rain. Maik 'Onin' Biekart decided to add a run with another character to the lineup on the page. This time, it was using the Mercenary on Downpour difficulty, and it's 0:11:50. All of this is single-segment and using artifacts - which are modifiers of the original difficulty that are supposed to make stuff harder. Spoiler: they don't, not for a speedrunner.

Finally, we have Duke Nukem Forever. Now, I can already hear you typing that angry email: "but dex, you said this update wouldn't have another 3D game!" Well, I contend that describing this game and the characters in it as two dimensional is, if anything, giving the designers too much credit. Anyway, that didn't stop 'DumDumDugan' from wringing out at least some semblance of quality from this game and getting a single-segment time of 2:06:38 on the Piece Of Cake difficulty. Watching this might be the only possible way of getting entertained by Duke Nukem Forever - it's pretty good, I think mainly because it skips a lot of the game with sick tricks, which is most welcome.

Today's update marks the official end of the August Augstravaganza, which however should not have a big influence on the update schedule so it's kind of a moot point. (I mostly mention it for completeness sake, like closing some previously opened brackets for aesthetic balance.

But today is not only an arbitrary SDA update joke reference date but also the 25th anniversary of the beloved Duck Tales game on the NES. What better way to celebrate that than by breaking apart the modern remake Duck Tales: Remastered, which Robbin 'Timber' Tapper was kind enough to do for us today. Despite some immense popularity in the speedrunning scene on its release it still took a few months before a run was submitted to us, but this 0:31:11 on Extreme difficulty was surely worth the wait. Now we're just waiting on Shovel Knight.

It's just been a couple of weeks since the LittleBigPlanet franchise was last mentioned in this very place. (Well, not quite this exact spot, the update only had 2 paragraphs. The same basic idea of bringing create mode items into the story mode levels also works in the original game, so Tad 'RabidJellyfish' Cordle completes his domination of the Large Skips categories with this 0:29:39 showing.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the other hand has not been on the front page in quite a while but is highly anticipated. Today, however, is not that day, as you could have likely deduced by the lack of a hyperlink in the previous sentence. Instead, we have a good ending run collecting all the chaos emeralds on Sonic 3D Blast by Matthew 'voideddarkness' Millwood. Released in the relatively short time span between people yearning for 3D gameplay but the technology not being quite capable of it yet and people realising that isometric platforming is generally quite terrible, Sonic 3D Blast hit the sweet spot of, well, erm, bird collecting or something. This genre still haunts my nightmares, but this 0:41:23 run shows that at least this particular game is one of the best of its kind.

While we're on the subject of challenging platformers, Darkwing Duck on the NES springs to mind. My mind isn't that reliable on the subject though as it somehow associates the title with Sunsoft when it was actually developed by Capcom, so for our favourite Mexican runner Piotr 'TheMexicanRunner' Delgado Kusielczuk's sake I hope I'm also wrong on the difficulty. In case this first childhood videogaming experience had left him with some deep grounded trauma these submissions should have freed him from his curse. Not only does he beat the any% time by over 20 seconds to achieve a 0:12:36, he also included a 0:13:41 run without any pickups. Now he's truly the fajita that flaps in the night.

Contra Hard Corps: Uprising is an XBLA "Contra" game that made the absolutely critical mistake of including a health bar so it is completely and utterly dead to me. DEAD, YOU HEAR ME! SHOT STRAIGHT IN THE HEAD, SO IT SHOULD BE AS DEAD AS CAN BE BUT IT ISN'T BECAUSE HEALTH BAR! 0:43:33 Arcade mode Krystal by Steve 'sutiibu' Laemont blah blah. What an abomination of a game.

Okay, I kind of lied earlier, there is a Zelda game this update. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D is the 3D 3DS rerelease of the N64 classic with a confusing title, as the original was already in 3D but it wasn't IN 3D if you know what I mean. (And I don't, because that 3DS feature doesn't actually work for me. Just like the TV based version this release is still very broken, so it's no big surprise that 'gnik' finished it in a mere 0:36:13, but if you want to know exactly how he accomplishes that you'll have to watch for yourself.

) ) There, I hope you're happy now.

Pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew no seriously this joke has run its course, although there are indeed quite a few lasers in Star Fox 64. You'd expect a mostly on rail shooter not to be a particularly competitive speed game, but the Lylat Wars have a surprisingly large history beyond killing as many things as possible. A fairly recent discovery has allowed for a much faster Katina fight and the consequent route change allowed Jonathan 'dsx' Hotinski to shave off 2 minutes from the any% time to achieve a run in 0:23:09.

If the vast emptiness and hostility of space is not your thing, maybe you'd prefer some atmospheric dogfighting instead. Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan Wars still involves a lot of aircraft being shot down, but at least this time the eject button seems like a preferable option to blowing up in a giant fireball (or rather, mediocre explosion due to lack of oxygen). 'Thehealbus' found the previous war efforts to be a bit inefficient and thus managed to set the future of an entire geopolitical region in a mere 1:01:31 this time around.

And now for something completely different. Nox has appeared on the front page twice in the past and today's entry rounds out the class table for this isometric action RPG. Maik 'Onin' Biekart picks up the Conjurer class this time for some highly glitched spellslinging and crossbowerizing and incorporates some new tricks in his 27 segments. Although not sounding safe for work, the imp bump certainly played a role in achieving a final time of 0:34:24, but the nutritiously favourable apple bump also makes a comeback.

Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew pew Mega Man X5. Pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew. Pew pew pew pew single segment pew pew pew pew, pew 'Luiz Miguel' pew pew pew pew pew pew. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew 5 minutes pew pew pew pew pew 0:10:21.

Pew pew pew pew pew, Mega Man X2 pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew pew Tyler 'Trogdor' Sykes. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew. Pew! Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew. Pew, pew pew pew pew pew pew 100 seconds pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew pew 0:33:50.

Metroid II: Return of Samus pew pew pew pew pew Mega Man, pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew. Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski pew pew pew pew pew 100% pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew. Pew pew pew pew pew pew, pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew 6 minutes, pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew 1:03:24. Pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew.

Mankind having to hide out in the remnants of a subway system after the surface has become inhabitable from nuclear fallout and mutants roaming the place makes for a great post-apocalyptic setting, so it is not a big surprise that the Metro 2033 series by Dmitry Glukhovsky was adapted to the video game format. The second entry Metro: Last Light follows protagonist Artyom through an original storyline and again heavily focuses on the atmosphere and storytelling. The game therefore makes for a slightly odd choice as a speed run title just because there's a lot of downtime waiting for the story to pan out, but that didn't discourage runner 'Froz3n_AV'. He elects to make up for the time lost in dialogue with some clever out of bounds tricks, finishing in 2:39:43 in 30 segments on Ranger Hardcore mode, which among other things removes most of the HUD. Combined with the Russian voice acting and lack of subtitles, watching this run is quite the enticing and immersive experience.

For an entirely different outlook on our future we can turn to the Metal Gear series, although the world painted there doesn't look much more friendly to stay in either. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is part of the canon but plays very unlike other titles in the series. With a heavy emphasize on sword fighting, the hack and slash element takes first billing over the usual stealth focus, but most people agree that the whole package works out just fine this way. 'General_Beatrix' guides protagonist Raiden through a New Game+ playthrough on Hard difficulty with resets in an action packed 0:50:44.99.

If you're still eager for more slashy slashy we can turn to a game that quite likely had a lot of influence on Metal Gear Rising's design in Devil May Cry. The game is notorious for both its crisp gameplay and controls but also the very high difficulty and learning curve, and 'ahuynh' does not go easy on the category choice. Just finishing the game with 100% item collection on Dante Must Die! difficulty is quite impressive on its own, but he does so in a single segment run in just 1:29:37 on the PS3 HD rerelease using the Legendary Dark Knight costume.

I hope that a month is enough time to recover from that explosion of Castlevania runs I dished out, because I did mention that there were two more runs in the queue. Haunted Castle is not a well known game in the Castlevania series, especially since it was released only in Japan. When you normally play this game on PS2 you get one credit, or 16 points of health. Through a little known feature 'Jaguar King' is able to use all four credits in a single life, giving him 64 points of health. As such the two runs he presents today are a one credit 0:11:15 run and a faster four credits run at 0:11:08.

One of the harder NES games out there, and there are a lot of them, but this one has to stand out, is Ghosts 'n Goblins. Watching runs done in previous 'GDQs as well as the ones on SDA you can't help but be impressed as the runners handle the RNG and lag, especially when Round 2 of this game happens. Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown is synonymous with this game and for good reason, as he crushed his previous run down to 0:20:52.

A lot of books, movies and TV shows that get a game remake are not that good, and some are outright disasterous. One of the few games that pleased its fans is Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights, as it stays true to the Scooby-Doo! universe, even featuring villains and music from the original episodes. The Mastermind has kidnapped the gang and it is up to Scooby to free them and piss on The Mastermind's leg. James 'cooopercrisp' Mernin takes control of the brave/scared Scooby as he makes his way through the Mystic Manor and its surroundings in 1:32:33, with deaths.

I don't know what is the previous record of runs in one update, but if every level counts as a run in an Individual Levels table, then I have CLX of them ready for you to watch. This will probably stay the record until Super Meat Boy comes along.

FLaiL is a pretty neat indie game that has nothing to do with me flailing in the swimming pool trying not to drown, or with others having a grand entrance. Based on a character that is capable of changing its movement mid-air, you need to manoeuvre around certain hazards (i.e. spikes) that are in your way, and collect different powerups as you try and get to the finish. Charles 'Arcanod' Nannan improves the time--I'm sorry, score, of the previous run by re-doing the entire table, landing at a high score of 247540.

While the title of Stealth Bastard Deluxe: Tactical Espionage Arsehole can be somewhat misleading, the game really is about stealth. You take control of a goggle wearing clone which is a bit smarter than your average clone, and your task is to get to the end of every room in a testing facility while staying in the shadows. If you leave the shadows you will meet hordes of robots, lasers, robots with lasers, rocket shooting robots and much more (spoilers: robots). There is also this robot you sometimes move that makes the saddest eyes when you run away from it, being the arsehole that you really are. 'Niet the Dark Absol' is being a good clone test subject and wraps up the game in 1:05:05.06.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is one of those games that keeps popping around on the front page, not that I'm complaining, mind you. Today Konstantin 'kuso' Oleynikov properly deals with Max's nightmares in a non-psychological way, with the individual levels table down to 0:17:27.35. Improvements are:

• Max's 1st Nightmare in 0:00:38.89
• Max's 2nd Nightmare in 0:00:50.76
• Max's 3rd Nightmare in 0:00:52.33

I've had enough of bullet points for now. Thankfully the next game doesn't need bullet points as the entire table was improved, but since there are guns in it, there are bullets as well. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light sees Lara Croft team up with Totec, a Mayan warrior, in their adventures to stop the evil spirit Xolotl. Firstly we have 'Fatalis' do a one player run in New Game Plus in 0:22:08. I guarantee it has quite a few interesting skips, and if you want to see the game broken even further, then 'Fatalis' and 'dawhos' teamed up to bring down the New Game Plus co-op table down to 0:14:54, 3:33 minutes faster than the previous table.

Running is an excellent exercise that can be done individually or in a group and many would highly recommend it. However running on tall buildings and very unstable scaffolding is something I don't think anyone would actually recommend, but the creators of Free Running 2 think quite the opposite. Carsten 'djcj' Janssen shows no signs of acrophobia as he gives speedrunning a literal meaning, making his way through skyscrapers and empty offices in a quick 0:10:39. In addition to that he also did an Individual Levels table in 0:09:36, which includes a few handy tricks, such as deaths and a super-jump glitch to give you lots of speed.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! is a game many of you would be familiar with. Taking control of Little Mac you need to punch your way (and avoid getting knocked out) to the top as you take on some odd opponents, and eventually going fist to fist with Mike Tyson. Zack 'Zallard1' Allard and 'sinister1' have teamed up to improve the individual levels table by 13.34 seconds and bring it down to 0:14:36.78. Improvements are:

• Von Kaiser in 0:00:35.97
• Piston Honda 1 in 0:00:42.25
• Great Tiger in 0:00:47.48
• Piston Honda 2 in 0:00:46.61
• Mr. Sandman in 0:02:17.25
• Mike Tyson in 0:02:17.00

'sinister1' also brings us an improvement to his old Single Segment run, improving it by slightly more than half a minute to 0:16:33.22.

In Super Punch-Out!! Little Mac is present again and this time knocking his way through to become the World Video Boxing Association champion. Zack 'Zallard1' Allard and D.J. 'Akiteru' Rideout have improved four levels by 0.85 seconds to bring the time down to 0:02:17.05. Gives you an idea how optimized the individual-levels table is.

• Masked Muscle in 0:00:06.30
• Heike Kagero in 0:00:09.94
• Narcis Prince in 0:00:08.52
• Rick Bruiser in 0:00:10.65

If you prefer to watch all the fights then you'd be happy to hear that Zallard1 also improved his previous Single Segment run by almost 5 seconds, bringing the time down to 0:02:49.19.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron's recent obsession with the Godzilla franchise had him submit this 0:43:31 run on the SNES Super Godzilla to us. Instead of trying to sell you on this game in my own words I'll quote my favourite parts from the Wikizilla entry:
Yet aliens and monsters aren't Godzilla's only worries, as he will face smaller obstacles such as tanks, electricity towers, mines, and UFOs as well.
Godzilla can smash through mountains, buildings and Towers, but this causes damage for no reason.
After King Ghidorah was resurrected as Mecha-King Ghidorah [...] only then would the reptilian creature transform into the godly stature of Super Godzilla.
Super Godzilla's physical appearance is the direct inspiration for SpaceGodzilla, [...]
If this doesn't pique your interest then there's surely nothing I could say that would.

The Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2 has me speechless for an entirely different reason: I've simply already fired my whole load the first time 'Newtmanking' submitted a run on the title. The game solely stands out by just being a slight bit more sophisticated than the other Flash games in its time and thus not being immediately forgotten. This new run in 07:21.77 improves on his previous efforts by adding a new skip in Level 5 and slightly tighter execution but not on the abysmal choice of wardrobe. Those pants are still no good, sir.

Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 is a game that has earned quite an impressive reputation. Being the first major multiplayer online RPG released on consoles it gathered a dedicated fan base immediately and is well regarded to this day, an unusual feat for a game that pioneers its genre and may very well have come a console generation too early. Most people don't even seem to remember that the gamecube had online capabilities, among which we can find 'Ckarl Bobadine' who seems to use the lack of party members durdling behind his Ranger to full effect, improving the category to a time of 0:53:47 with some heavy glitch abuse that could likely get you banned from the servers if they were still running.

My first encounter with Eric 'Omnigamer' Koziel taught me two impressive facts about him: He's a beast that seems to need no sleep, but is socially aware enough to pretend to nap under a table from time to time as not to make everybody else feel bad, and his collection of SNES games is rather outstanding. It is therefore no surprise if you have never even heard of the cartridge he dug out for today, the rather obscure Kendo Rage. The game features a girl sent out to fight monsters by, depending on the localization, a spirit detective (yay) or her personal kendo trainer (boo). That's essentially all I could find out about this game, this 0:11:21 run may very well be the most comprehensive information source on this game out there. I wonder what you will unleash on us next, Omnigamer, but I certainly can't wait for it.

As a friendly reminder, game submission for Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 is nearing an end, so if you've got something you'd like to offer make sure to read up on the guidelines before it's too late.

Espionage and secret agents seem to be a recurring theme this week as it just lends itself so well to video gaming. The romanticized cold war type of espionage from movies, that is, not the modern equivalent of tons of paperwork and staring at a screen for 8 hours a day. I.G.I.-2: Covert Strike is a title that just seems to get lost in the mould, seemingly lacking outstanding positive features. It sold fairly poorly but a copy still managed to make its way to Mihail 'horned' Petrov who deemed it worth running not just once, but twice. This 0:53:48 run is an improvement to his previous submission, abusing more of the numerous bugs the game has to offer and again being cut into segments by mission to efficiently take care of the surprisingly rare rogue Chinese antagonist.

Donald Duck is a lot of things to me, but I just can't imagine him as a competent detective with an alter ego of a Hawaiian ninja (then again, there is Paperinik so good job at keeping your character traits straight, Disney). Luckily, Maui Mallard is exactly the guy to fill that role, except that Maui Mallard is actually just Donald Duck and what the hell is wrong with this setup? Once you get beyond the confusion of just figuring out who the hell the protagonist actually is, Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow is one of my favourite childhood games. As a fairly well designed, varied and difficult platformer the SNES version gave me countless hours of enjoyment. If you've made the grave mistake of already clicking the game link before finishing this paragraph you'll however have noticed that the run submitted today is on the GB port, which is worse in just about any way imaginable. Luckily, Martin 'J.Y' Söderhäll managed to figure out how to contain the suffering to a mere 0:12:42 so some of my good memories made it out unscathed.

Xenomorphs, Predators and Humankind have been at war for quite a while now, and the franchise has thus spawned numerous games as well. The Aliens versus Predator shooter released just at the end of the last millennium had been a huge success and is still well remembered, so there's no big surprise they tried to recapture that in 2010 with Aliens vs. Predator (notice the subtly different spelling). Despite apparently having a lot of the original team working on it, most people seem to agree that it somehow fell short of what it could have been. 'WingedKitsune' still thinks there's enough of a game to speedrun to be found in it, and slashes up a storm in the Xenomorph career in a quick 0:15:40 of fairly unique gameplay for the genre.

Speaking of things you don't want to encounter in the dark (and I don't get why everybody assumes that evil monsters would be your best friends during daytime), Resident Evil 4 surely features some Evil stuff going on with some Residents of the area. The game has proven to be a popular speedrunning title, so today Leon's ill designed one man rescue party for the president's daughter takes him through the gamecube release with special weapons in 1:46:59 at the hands of Austin 'Auddy07' Davenport, a considerable improvement over the previous run in this category.

In an incredibly ballsy move the terroristic The Mafat Conspiracy has stolen a weapons satellite and is now extorting BOTH the US an Soviet governments at the same time. Special agent Golgo 13 is sent to deal with the threat through 5 different styles of gameplay including sniping and driving a Ferrari, because if you're going to save the world, you might as well do it with style. Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski shoots, punches and dies his way through the rather unusual NES game in 0:24:58, just quick enough to be home for his pizza delivery to be picked up. Mmh, Ferraris and pizzas. A world worth saving.

Finally, sometimes you just do evil things solely for your personal amusement. Mr. X has lured unexpecting victims to a luxury cruise just to have them participate in a murder party. Everybody is assigned a target in secret they have to assassinate while dodging any attempts on their own life. Although primarily designed for multiplayer action, The Ship: Murder Party also features a singleplayer campaign in which you have to (spoilers) unsuccessfully try to escape the grasps of Mr. X. Having already successfully murdered all of his friends, Christian 'ShadowDraft' Moll picks up this campaign and manoeuvres through it in 0:19:07 on easy difficulty.

Espionage has been a hot topic for a while, but the more we learn about it the less it looks like the awesome adventure TV has lead us to believe in our youth. Fortunately, video games exist to fill that gap and the James Bond series has done a great job of fulfilling most of our MI6 fantasies and James Bond 007: Nightfire is no different. Once again featuring a wonderful arsenal of non-licensed weaponry such as the Deutsche M9K, the Raptor Magnum or my favourite, the Korsakov K5 Tranquilizer Dart, the game follows Britain's famous womanizer disguised as a mass murderer disguised as a secret agent. The evil plan of the day somehow weaves trying to detonate the Eiffel Tower and escaping on a Space Shuttle into a coherent plot, through which 'Ricecooker' hurries in 0:50:17 on Operative difficulty to get back to this week's Bond-girl under her conveniently L-shaped blanket.

Somehow, Metal Gear Solid 3 HD manages to subpass the previous title in realism still. Whereas the first Metal Gear Solid plot at least had a reasonable level of plausibility to it, by the third game in the subseries we've already thoroughly passed into (possibly literal) voodoo magic. Centenary snipers that die of old age, a guy carrying a hornet's nest on his back, the disembodied spirit of a dead medium and a guy being supercharged with high voltage are just some of the foes you have to face in this game. The stealth action gameplay in the series is absolutely superb though, as demonstrated by japanese runner 川元 'Hikari' 英則 here, adding a single segment EU-Extreme Foxhound run in 1:20:11 to his previous segmented outing.

As some of you may have noticed, the planned server maintenance and upgrade on Monday took a bit longer than expected and there's still a couple of unresolved loose ends to be tied up. As a result, our Augstravaganza has run into a slight delay that we'll surely make up for at some point during the second week. For our first game for yesterday today we're kind of back to punching goons in the face, except this game is the exact opposite of that: kicking goons in the face! Kick Master has a very single minded title and it is indeed all about landing those sweet karate kicks. Besides the industry standard forgettable rescue quest, it also features a crude leveling mechanic for unlocking more moves to your arsenal. 'Zyre' has thoroughly practiced his wax on, wax off routine to channel his inner Daniel-san, shaving 5 second off the old time to achieve a run in 0:12:58.

Stairs play a major role in our lives and those of video game characters, yet they are seldomly paid much attention. Being a convenient way of making use of a vertical component in our buildings, in older games they also served as a useful point for room transitions to keep the memory use in line. It is precisely this careful use of memory space that makes stairs such a prominent feature in this Final Fantasy IV run. The game naturally only stores a limited stack of back references when using a staircase, so cycling through some rooms in a loop until this stack is filled and then backtracking leads to the game just throwing you in an arbitrary spot it didn't intend you to go. Naturally, 'nocashnocash' abuses the potential to easily travel anywhere in the game to its fullest, beating the large skips category in a mere 2:03:58, shaving almost a quarter hour off the previous time and saving an hour on the lazy elevator using couch potatoes.

In a world where running over two pedestrians on your way to a hot dog stand is a minor inconvenience, Tommy Vercetti is driven on his quest from wanna-be small-town psychopatic mass murderer to head of the pack professional exterminator par excellence by a never ending one hour loop of 80's synth pop music and a general disregard for learning the basic skill of swimming when living in a coastal city. Or something like that, I never really pay attention to the story in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. After earning a fortune by dodging traffic cones on a rooftop, 'Eidgod' sets out to complete the linear story line and necessary amount of asset missions to set everything that's wrong in Vice City slightly differently wrong, in the more personally beneficial kind of way. Given the latest findings in the game, this 1:28:33 run may well be the last time you get to see such fan favorites as Cherry Poppers and Sunshine Autos, so be sure not to miss it.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is a strong contender for longest SDA ID at 32 characters. Being the fourth game in the Crystal Chronicles subseries it also might just hold the record for longest story arc in the Final Fantasy series. It however takes place long after the previous titles, so once again you don't run any risk of being familiar with any of the inexplicably clad protagonists. Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe found some improvements to his old route and shaved off just over 11 minutes to achieve a run in 4:01:50 over 20 segments, including over 90 minutes of unskipable cutscenes. Why would you ever want to skip a cutscene in a JRPG anyway?

LittleBigPlanet is one of the few titles I thoroughly regret not owning a PS3 for. It combines a well designed 2D physics engine with an in-depth level editor for countless hours of fun. Want to build the ultimate platforming challenge? The tools are at your disposal. Want to build some ridiculous contraption to accomplish minuscule goals? Go ahead. Treadmill powered cars, a giant mechanical octopus to open your front door, rocket powered ski lift, rocket powered alarm clock, rocket powered mining rig, rocket powered spoon, rocket powered frying pan, rocket powered coat hanger, Rocket Powered ATM, ROCKET POWERED ROCKETS! Ahem, I might have gotten carried away a bit there. Besides the vast customization abilities the game also features a full prebuilt campaign for you to play through, which is exactly what 'p-p-j' did. In order to get back to building rocket fueled nightmare fodder he had to hurry along and accomplish the task in a mere 1:09:03.

LittleBigPlanet 2 features even more of what made the first one great. Figuring that just playing through the predesigned levels isn't doing the game full justice, Tad 'RabidJellyfish' Cordle decided to use and abuse the game's editor to thoroughly break the singleplayer experience. The result is a run in 0:29:40 skipping most of the levels in the progress.

Gex: Enter the Gecko is one of those games that, at least to me, has been heavily nostalgia-goggled in my memory. Being an N64/PS1 platformer, it not only suffers the usual effects of 'did it really look THAT bad?', but by design it's a game that feels dated rather quickly. Titular gecko superhero Gex travels the vast worlds of multimedia entertainment, encountering loads of generic tropes and genre clichés but also rather specific jabs at particular movies and TV series that have left the public's mind in the 15 years since it was first released. What remains fresh is the platforming action, of which Dominic 'exe' Lenze delivers a full 0:57:26.

In their neverending quest of environmental friendliness by producing heavily recycled content, Nintendo has brought the nearly forgotten franchise of Kid Icarus to the forefront again. Not only did the main character Pit get a coveted spot in their popular mascot clobbering series, he even got a well received full fledged 3DS game out of the revival. However, Dylan 'Jorf' Beauchamp is a man of tradition. His speedrunning efforts were concentrated on the original title, guiding the flickery 8-bit sprite of Pit through 4 worlds of traditional jumping and running in a quick 0:25:23, beating the old time by over 8 minutes.

Avid front page readers will likely have no issue in predicting the runner of today's double feature, the first of which is a hard mode run on Two Crude Dudes in 0:19:52. Following the Data East business model of placing some absolutely ordinary dudes in a struggle against some evil oppressive corporation that can only be resolved by an extensive amount of street brawling an ever increasing, but always fairly limited, amount of goons with a repetitive moveset, this title sets itself apart by ending on the two titular (and otherwise unnamed) crude dudes exclaiming 'We're heroes...We'll be rich!'. Wiser words have rarely been spoken.

Double Dragon Advance at least aspires to having a real storyline, although calling it original would be rather far stretched; not only is it utterly generic, it also exactly follows that of the original Double Dragon. The Advance release however is more than a pure port as it not only incorporates 4 new levels but also moves from later titles in the series. This 0:18:54 run doesn't do the best of jobs in showcasing the variety in your attacks though, as some combos are just more efficient at taking down most enemies quickly. To me the most notable oversight in this release however is the fact that Bimmy Lee seems nowhere to be found.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, today's runner is of course the one true crude dude, professional goon puncher and suplex master extraordinaire Sean 'MURPHAGATOR!' Murphy.

If you've ever wondered what a surreal cold-war-esque humorous espionage game on psychotropic drugs is like, Jazzpunk might be just the right game for you. If you haven't it still might be the right game for you. Having seen quite a bit of the game I can still not properly describe what is actually going on in it, and if I could I would probably be missing the point anyway. In case you need a short demonstration of the title, Chris 'Divine Rapture' Williams has prepared one lasting 0:18:05 for you, and trust me, there's plenty more to explore on your own.

Anodyne is a rather less surreal game than Jazzpunk, but it still takes place in a dream world. As such runner 'The Barrel' has decided to decree walls to be more of a decorative design than an integral part of the game world and decided to just go where ever it pleases him. It should be no surprise then that his all bosses run in 0:24:43 deals with things in a rather unusual order, abusing the game's engine to the fullest.

Anybody that has had the pleasure of meeting Patrick 'PJ' DiCesare will know that his relationship to electronic devices is rather suspect and dangerous at times. For that reason I'd like to specifically point out that his run on HyperZone is actually supposed to look like that. This trippy little space shooter is essentially the eurotrance version of Star Fox. Being mostly an autoscroller you wouldn't expect there to be significant timesavers, yet PJ still managed to shave off over 3 minutes from the nearly 10 year old previous SDA time, achieving a full loop in a mere 0:23:51.

Mega Man Battle Network 3 is a somewhat unusual spinoff from the traditional Mega Man formula of unforgiving platforming, tight energy management and difficult boss battles. Instead, the Mega Man Battle Network series features tight chip management, difficult routing decisions and unforgiving action-RPG battles. Maybe it's not actually as big of a departure as I first though. As usually, getting a good run on an RPG involves just the right mixture of good planning, solid execution and the right amount of luck and it seems like 'Tterraj42' succeeded in finding that perfect balance to achieve a time of 3:28 on the Blue version, not only improving the old time by 6 minutes but also doing so in a single segment this time around.

As some of you may have noticed, the usual updating staff had been struck with a severe case of reallifeitis. In the meantime submissions still kept on flooding in at a record pace and a notable backlog has started stuffing the internal pipeworks at the SDA headquarters. Having overcome my masterthesiosis I am proud to present the SDA August Augstravaganza (Seriously, this month is terrible for puns): two weeks, two runs per day. Not sure if it will help any but it should be fun nonetheless.

The first game of the day is Cool Spot on the SNES, a bizarre platformer featuring the anthropomorphized red dot from the 7 Up logo as a main character. You know, that dot that somehow separates the logo into two parts yet isn't actually part of the product name and which most of you won't recognize ever wearing gloves and shoes as the logo has been redesigned twice since this game was released? Yes, exactly, that thing. 'darbian' has refused any statement on a potential corporate sponsorship for his 0:11:27 run but reports indicate that he has last been seen installing a mildly citric water park in his backyard.

Next up is the PS1 stealth classic Syphon Filter. Surprisingly none of the high-tech biological weapon manufacturers have decided to associate their corporate branding with this title. At least that'll keep the players from developing an insatiable urge to eradicate an entire subcontinent. Martin 'J.Y' Söderhäll went back to the game with some new tricks and route changes to improve on his old time by almost 9 minutes, achieving a run in 1:00:55 across 20 segments.

If you'll excuse me now, I've got an inexplicable thirst to quench.

If you have nothing to do over your 15 minutes lunch break, we got you covered! Four speedruns under ten minutes and another three to read this update. The last two minutes? Cooking speedrun! Practice at home and stream it as well!

Our longest run today begins with a title that never got released on the NES in North America, and was the last game ever released in Europe for the NES. Actually this trivia is probably chewing off your spare time so I'll just state that The Lion King was the answer. Taking control of the wild and untamed Simba Dave 'bangerra' Janssens goes through the RNG-hell-bad-platform-collision-pixel-perfect-jumps-invisible-enemies game in a super fast 0:06:13 to defeat a coconut-throwing monkey and become King of the Jungle. Probably a good thing it didn't get a North American release.

Next up is a twist on playing with yourself. Cursor*10 is a short game where the objective is to lead your cursor through floors and solve puzzles using your current and previous cursors. Andres 'Almarac' Vanlandewyck finishes the game in 0:01:47. To the curious, the lack of LQ is on purpose, as it's due to the new yua (coming soon). MQ is being encoded in the same profile and features as LQ/HQ which means some runs may not produce LQ, and some will no longer have HQ.

Ether Lunu is a first person platformer/shooter game created by a number of students as their university project homework. Your task is to use an Ether to perform Sun Busts to jump around the level, passing traps and other obstacles. Ben Hogan speeds through in 0:01:31 and gets my A+.

The last run on the update is so fast that if you blink you'll miss all the action. Actually I'm not sure how much action Picture Puzzle can have, but Dave 'bangerra' Janssens provides us with 0:00:01 of action and solves a picture of a swag crocodile. The intro on the other hand is way too long.

Since speed is the name of this update, a certain blue blur just has to go fast. We're talking Sonic and the great folks at The Sonic Center are having their third charity marathon, which starts on the 18th of August at 2:00 PM EDT. All money raised will go to the American Cancer Society. Check out their stream and scroll down for the schedule.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 is approaching and you can now submit your games! Follow the instructions in this topic and hopefully you'll get a game in as well! If not, don't salt. Instead use the salt next time you stream your Chikin Sammich speedrun and maybe that will go on AGDQ! Donation category is who will make the food (and then eat it). Can even be done as a race, or Co-op, or maybe one handed?

The most recurring theme in Castlevania games is that Dracula comes back from the dead only to die very shortly afterwards. If this was to happen to me I'd get annoyed and politely ask to stop reviving me please and thanks. If they were to keep doing that anyway then yeah, I would like to destroy humanity as well.

Kickstarting our biggest ever Castlevania block is an awesome game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Normally one takes control of Alucard as he sets on defeating his own father, while Dracula decides to recite the bible in his spare time. I don't think being a pastor is something that would be a good career choice. Anyway you also have an option to control Richter whose moveset from the get go is so impressive that he gets to shaft super-fast. So fast that when you let Todd 'Mecha Richter' Foreman play this game he does it in a swift 0:05:19, on the XBLA version and Single Segment.

The following runners have produced multiple runs, because they are not satisfied with just beating the game once, but making sure that the day is saved from multiple angles. First one up is Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag who's set on having a new legacy, and what a better way to start it off if not with Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness. Wolfing through Cornell's story, DeMoNFLiP84 saves Henry and Ada while defeating Dracula's career resurrection plans in a mere 1:22:32, in Single Segment. Talking about Henry, DeMoNFLiP84 also goes through his story to save 6 children in 0:17:17, 20 seconds faster than the previous run, and also Single Segment. I would like to know how the children got there to begin with because some of those spots are crazy.

Now for a different type of legacy. A sequel to Castlevania III comes in the form of Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. Normally one plays Hector as he goes through a journey to battle his career-related old-friend turned nemesis, Isaac, and ends up fighting against Dracula. Having already done that, Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody decides to take up Trevor Belmont and his trusty whip instead. Blazing through the castle and surrounding areas, Dragondarch destroys the game in a brief 1:22:20, done in Single Segment. This is 21:15 minutes faster than the previous run on the site, which was segmented. If this wasn't enough for you then you'd be happy to know it wasn't enough for Dragondarch either as he also plays the Boss Rush mode as Trevor in 0:09:49.33, a 2:09:72 minutes improvement. Now having his name exclusively on the page I'd like to ask if we'll see an improvement on the Hector run. Preferably Single Segment.

A few months ago LLCoolDave has asked everyone to submit a Vampire Killer run, a MSX2 exclusive, before you got to the end of his update. It appears that 'Jaguar King', who did Haunted Castle in that update, has decided to do just that and actually make a run for this game. Taking control of Simon Belmont, Jaguar King has to traverse Dracula's castle and collect Skeleton Keys in order to get to Dracula's room. These keys were well hidden as clearly Dracula wants to be alone, but Jaguar King doesn't let him be. And then we wonder why he hates us. Reasoning aside, Jaguar King beats the game in 0:17:44, also Single Segment. Unlike Haunted Castle which has a giant fugly face of Dracula coming from the side this time you have to beat a less-ugly portrait as Dracula's second form. Perhaps a painter isn't the best career choice either.

The next two games have confused the hell out of me before this update, and thanks to Wikipedia I now know why. The first game is Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge. Christopher's Belmont son Soleiyu gets kidnapped by the evil Dracula, as he turns him into a demon (turning people to demons is a good career choice) with the plans of becoming human again and rebuilding his castle. Whipping his way in black, white and 50 shades of grey 'Jaguar King' makes a second appearance, as he saves Soleiyu and Transylvania and this time with a run totalling 0:27:19, done in Single Segment. Erm. Yeah.

The second game also begins with Castlevania II in the title, and is also a sequel to a previous Castlevania game. Now you understand why I got confused? Castlevania II: Simon's Quest sees Simon Belmont's career choice of killing Dracula taking a turn for the worse. Cursed by Dracula before his untimely death, he has to collect all five body parts in order to bring Dracula back from the dead, and then kill him again. 'Furious Paul' decided that non-sensible plots are something he could get behind as he turns his attention to bring us the maximum categories possible in this game. First off we have a deathless 0:38:42 run, Single Segment. After that we have a 0:36:52 run that contains deaths, and is also Single Segment. Lastly we have a 0:45:43 run which is 100%, with deaths and--- you know what, if you haven't been paying attention to the secondary theme of this update, of which all of these runs followed, then I'm not going to tell you anything more about this run.

To conclude this massive update, and looking back at the runs and the various career choices Dracula and co. had, I can safely say that the best possible choice is for him to stay dead. However as someone who loves watching Castlevania speedruns, I for one will be sad if this does turn out true. Meanwhile I'd like you all to take note that we don't have all Castlevania games on the gamelist yet, and since it worked so well with LLCoolDave last time, then please do a speedrun of Castlevania Legends. Preferably in Single Segment.

Until we meet again, I'm off to watch two more Haunted Castle runs which currently sit in the submissions queue. I think you know what type they are.

Many games are centralised around some sort of conflict that divides nations and pits the player as the up-and-coming hero(ine) that takes up against the impossible odds and by some miracle makes it through and saves the day/world/species/something. Pick your favourite. Some games don't even make sense as to what you save, like your frog. Perhaps UraniumAnchor has an answer but he's busy encoding the SGDQ videos. You can help him out by verifying the audio/video syncs, or just go ahead and download them – be warned that not all are verified and not all runs are uploaded just yet. Don't bother to save the gigabytes of space on your hard drive or the time you will be spending watching those, you just won't win.

Let's start with a one man war. Max Payne is a name familiar to many of you for his ability to almost die a number of times, and always come out firing to destroy the ultimate evil that destroyed his life to start with. To help Max bring in the pain is runner Nigel 'ridd3r' Martin who Super Jumps and save-glitches his way to a new low time of 0:51:35 on a deathless run of Dead on Arrival difficulty, Single Segment with resets.

A different type of conflict comes through Global Operations. This game puts you in the shoes of both terrorists and counter-terrorists as you fight one another on different parts of the world. The game has a huge variety of weapons and allows you to select several different classes, resulting in very interesting combinations. Carsten 'djcj' Janssen makes full use of the arsenal (and suiciding because it's faster), as he takes on both campaigns in 1:46:51 in 26 ILs done on Easy Difficulty.

Aliens and zombies really like killing humans as it appears, otherwise why else would we have so many games centered around this theme? Better yet if we combine the both together we'll get something pretty epic. Dead Space 3 continues the saga with Ryan 'LivingLooneyBin' Nicholls taking control of Isaac as he sets to destroy the marker home world (spoilers: aliens' homeworld). Battling through space, ice and out of bounds, LivingLooneyBin saves humanity (spoilers: Awakened) in 2:41:43 in a New Game Plus, Casual difficulty and Single Segment, with resets.

Robots. No, not the kind that are going to take over the world and kill us, but the kind we control: massive, powerful walkers. You guessed it, mechs. MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries continues giving people the enjoyment of raining hell with giant walking hulks of metal. Today runner 'Mewyabe' takes control of some Ãœber mechs and completes the game in 0:58:33 on Recruit difficulty, Single Segment. This is an 8:09 improvement over the previous run, which also was segmented.

I can't see how this run fits the theme of this update, but I'll give it a serve and hopefully ace it. If the ball didn't hit you in the face with these clues, then perhaps tennis isn't for you. If you are a fan of tennis then you should check out the latest contestant! Aiming at the number one spot, runner 'ike6252' battles the RNG-hell of Virtua Tennis. But being #1 isn't very easy as you have to train between matches, get better equipment, handle your not-so-fantastic partner and time your shots properly. ike6252 wins the crowd as he completes the Arcade Mode in 0:05:31 and the World Circuit in 2:03:33. Both done on Very Hard difficulty and Single Segment of the European version of this game.

As the title says I have other tasks to do on SDA, mainly timing speedruns and taking screenshots for the gamepages, but I got lazy and decided a front page update is more fun.

Investigating the kidnapping of humans by aliens can a tough task, especially when you must recruit other people and aliens for the job. Thankfully they don't know you don't care about them as you let them die but they're still necessary to get to the last mission of Mass Effect 2. Runner 'letterswords' takes the role of Commander Shepard as he kills your favourite aliens all in the name of speed, 1:32:28 done in New Game Plus with DLC on Casual difficulty, and Single Segment. Main differences include a glitch to attain more skill points and DLC for best weapons and do different recruit missions, saving many minutes in the process.

Often games like to compete which can scare the player more and feature the most gruesome scenes. One such game is F.E.A.R.. The game itself is supposed to have several jump scares and a whole bunch of horror scenes that will kill your character, but 'Freezard' is having (almost) none of that. Mainly using ladders to glitch Out of Bounds, Freezard beats the game in 0:46:29 on Low difficulty using 55 segments. This is 9:30 minutes faster and 20 segments less than the previous run.

The plot behind Naughty Bear: Panic in Paradise is that the bears on Perfection Island decided to go on vacation on an exotic island and didn't invite Naughty, who in return decides to hunt each of them and kill them in various entertaining ways that PETA won't approve. Taking control of Naughty is Michael 'MAS8705' Solseth who wipes the island from its inhabitants in 0:21:39 on New Game Plus in an individual-level table consisting of 36 murderous levels.

The last game today is part of the Doom series, meaning it is fast-paced and is all about killing demons without much care about the plot. I don't think I need to introduce Final Doom much longer so let's get to it. Christopher 'Dime' Dewey should be familiar to those in the Doom scene and today he gives us an impressive update to the Plutonia Experiment episode, improving the previous run from 2002 by 10:49 minutes and clocking in at 0:30:22. The run is on Ultra-Violence and is Single Segment.

And now back to my ever-growing list of runs to time I should really be working on.

Summer Games Done Quick 2014 is over, but wow. I'm amazed at how much the marathons keep growing on a yearly basis. Last year you guys helped us raise over $257,000 for Doctors Without Borders, and this year the total as I'm seeing it is sitting at $717,000+! It seems marathon totals follow a pattern, with each AGDQ raising two to three times as much as the previous one, and the same goes for SGDQ too. I wonder what this means for the next marathon we put on...

The event was a huge success - surprise crossbows and scythes aside - and all thanks to the people who make this community great, speedrunners and viewers alike, and I don't need to be the President of the United States to say that things are just going to get better and better. So whether you're a fan of Mario giving Bowser what-for for the umpteenth time, or prefer to watch Gordon Freeman perform feats of acrobatics that imply that the world is made out of rubber, or even someone casually taking a look at the marathon stream (or front page of this site, hi mom) to see what's up with this whole speedrunning thing, thank you. Thank you for helping us go fast.

For those of you not quite ready to let go, some kind folks at the speedrunning subreddit have made a catalogue of the twitch VOD links for the marathon speedruns for you to peruse at your leisure. Note that high quality encodes of the marathon runs will be available here in the not-too-distant future, so if you'd prefer waiting for a higher quality experience, watch this space.

For those of you looking to the future, Awesome Games Done Quick 2015 has been scheduled for the 4th-10th of January, and you can trust me when I say that it will be awesome. I mean, the clue's in the name. Duh.

Finally, I'd like to remind people that another speedrunning marathon, the European Speedster Assembly 2014 will be running from July 27th until August 3rd in Skövde, Sweden, hosted by Ludendi. So if you're still riding on that post-marathon buzz, you won't have long to wait until you can watch another one.

Time for us updaters to get back to our normal schedule.

...whatever.

So, you may have noticed by the shiny new banner up there that our next marathon Summer Games Done Quick 2014 is happening soon. 3 days soon. I don't think I need to explain how pumped I am for this marathon (update title is an indication), 7 days of non-stop speedrunning should be enough to make anyone's awesomeometre burst. Check out this slick promotional video our very own Cool Matty put together for us, with help from mistermv's amazing musical talents. (there will be speedruns in this update i promise)

Still here? Good. I wouldn't want to let a little thing like an awesomeness overload stop you from watching the good stuff. First up, Ikari Warriors 2. Now I know I called this the good stuff, and those of you unfortunate enough to be familiar with this game might disagree, and I completely understand that, but I'm sticking with what I said. This game is really hard, so knowing that someone exists that can beat the game pleases me greatly. Anyway, the speedrun. Marko plows through this admittedly weird game in a brisk 0:08:47, single-segment of course. Also the antagonist of the game is called Zang Zip. Just thought you'd be interested.

Anyway, onto less silly things. Ninjabread Man. Yep, less silly. You might be interested to know that this game started life as a reimagining of the old game Zool, from 1992. I certainly was. 3D platformer, you play the part of a gingerbread man who is also a ninja, and your primary opponents are cakes. This game is just a little bit too saccharine for my tastes, but I can definitely see the resemblance to Zool. 'SCXCR' makes liberal use of a level skip glitch and crushes this game in 0:06:57, presumably longer than it took to bake the protagonist. I bet he was delicious though.

Another platformer for you guys, this one has one less D in it though. Wonder Boy in Monster Land is one of the Master System's better known games and... Holy balls that cover art. Hahaha. Sorry. Anyway, yes, one of the Master Systems' better known games and Mathieu 'Mpatard' Patard smokes it in 0:18:50. That face. Whyyyyyyyyy?!

Renegade X: Black Dawn is a pretty cool first person shooter based on the old Command and Conquer first person shooter Renegade, which started life as an Unreal Tournament 3 mod but then made the jump to fully-fledged standalone game. I have yet to play it, but I probably will after I finish this update. Thank you, 'cortez', for reminding me of its existence. But I digress, 'cortez' blows through this game in a sweet 0:18:42 in 9 segments. However, we consider it an IL table as nothing carries over between levels, so this run is one of the few that exists in a weird single-video full-IL-table limbo. Still worth watching though.

Last up, the longest run of the update by far, Eternal Sonata. Not too familiar with this one, though wikipedia tells me the game tells you about the final dying dreams of a pianist/composer, Frédéric Chopin, which makes it pretty cool in my book. 'zxcvalor' wanders the mental wonderland that is this game in 2:55:12, on the PAL version. Also, if you're interested, the game features Chopin's music. That's a really cool detail.

Anyway, SGDQ HYPE! Tell your friends, tell your parent, tell your dog, HYYYYYYPEEEEEEEEEEEE.

The ships heaving on the waves felt like a heartbeat, the chains and ropes clanging rhythmically, twice in fast succession. Ba-Bum. Ba-Bum. Once on the way in, once when the wave had reflected off the old stone pier. If you listened closely you could sense it getting more and more nervous as the evening progressed, both in the ships and the sailors on board. Ba-Bum. Ba-Bum. As the sun set slowly in a glowing summer red along the horizon the port was unusually busy for this time of day. Lines of ships queued outside the harbour's gate as the harbourmasters scrambled to make room for all of them. The Bastion had arrived earlier today at 14:00, when good and safe spots along the inner pier were still available. The concept of haste seemed foreign to Captain 'Vulajin', having barely covered 30 miles along the coast this day. "Valuable cargo requires utmost care." was his motto, and the crew didn't mind, getting a night of leave having thoroughly prepared the deck for the storm.

Marvin strolled the streets with aimless, short strides. It was obvious that the town was just a tourist trap, the waterfront being lined with countless restaurants, cafés and shops selling all the things nobody has any use for except for when they seemed to be on vacation. The street merchants had already dragged their fragile wooden carts to the city centre while the shop keepers were busy moving all their extravagant display stands inside. Hand knit carpets, hideous portraits of the countryside, wooden figurines and whatever other worthless junk you could sell to ignorant visitors as exotic souvenirs. Marvin stopped at a small corner restaurant named Bamse where a waiter was furiously waving his arms about in the exaggerated local fashion. With some resignation, the family of four agreed and moved inside just as Marvin seated himself on the table next to them. The waiter turned: "Sir, would you be so kind to move inside? A storm is brewing and you wouldn't want your food be blown right off the dish now would you?" Marvin didn't deem the remark worth consideration. "I won't be staying for long and the wind's still calm for now. I'll have a cup of coffee, black, and today's paper if you please." The waiter resigned. Tourists had a sense of mind, but arguing with sailors was a futile effort. He carried a table inside and soon thereafter reappeared with a cup in hand and a paper under his arm. "Lovely place, isn't it?" he remarked as he placed the order on the table. "My great-grandfather Dan 'DanE' Söderhäll founded it back in 19:19 and it's been in family possession ever since. The view on the coast from here is outstanding on a clear day, but I'm afraid you don't get to see much when it's gotten this dark already." "I still see plenty enough." Marvin replied, but something seemed to have reminded the waiter of his task as he had already picked up another piece of furniture to carry inside.

The local newspaper proved to be rather uninspiring as nothing of any interest seemed to happen in this town. A new hotel had opened last week, a story clearly demanding a full four page report, some man turned 80 and plenty other that bored Marvin even more than that. The yearly EarthBound festival grasped his interest for a while at least. It seemed that '__sdfg' had broken the long standing record in the glitchless competition, setting the new bar at 4:11:02. In what was a huge upset, the five times champion in the major-skips competition struggled near the end and underdog 'nemi' was able to take a surprise victory with a time of 1:25:31. That certainly would have been worth watching, but Marvin felt that reading about sports just wasn't quite the same. The comic page was no better, something about the local humour just didn't click with outsiders. The Escape from Bug Island comic seemed to be hugely popular in the area, being printed in every paper Marvin had laid his hands on since the Bastion had reached this coast. Today's strip ended with a panel simply reading 1:00:22 on a blank background, with the author's cryptic signature of 'SCXCR' in the bottom right corner. Marvin couldn't even tell if it was meant to be funny, but if it was he surely didn't understand why.

Unusually, Marvin had finished the newspaper before his coffee, and frankly, he was quite glad he'd gotten through it. The winds had grown stronger rather quickly, and sudden gusts were strong enough to rip the paper from his hands if he wasn't careful. The moment he had taken the last sip the waiter was already in his back with the check. Marvin hadn't even taken a single step when the waiter was carrying the cup inside, and the table right with it. The sun had lost its fight with the ocean, and so had one of the smaller ships outside the harbour walls. The waves on the open sea kept rising, and the heartbeat on the pier was growing anxious and restless. Ba-Bum. Ba-Bum. Ba-Bum. The late arrivals were scrambling to fasten everything they could, and whoever was still moving along the waterfront made sure he wouldn't be doing so for much longer. Everyone except for Marvin, who still paced himself in small strides, slightly shorter than before, but not nearly as aimless. His hand slid into his inner pocket, the cold steel giving him an uneasy sense of reassurance. His finger slid across, and a short stinging pain confirmed that the blade was still as sharp as it had ever been.

Sometimes you simply know. Whenever I start to prepare one of these updates, my eyes scour the queue, getting a grasp of what is ready to be posted, looking for some kind of theme or sturdy string to line these pearls up on. Games I fondly remember, games I have never even heard of. For some reason, it is always obvious when one of Sean 'MURPHAGATOR!' Murphy's submissions is in the list. He's surely one of the most prolific and typecast runners on SDA, but truth be told, even if I didn't know the game there simply isn't anybody else out there that would dare stake a claim at something called Mighty Final Fight. Once again, MURPHAGATOR! picks up his trusty gamepad to clobber through neigh endless ranks of faceless, palette swapped goons on a quest that might very well be directly lifted from an episode of an early 90's Saturday morning cartoon that had long, long overstayed its welcome. Taking turns, the three playable characters of Cody (0:15:07), Guy (0:14:52) and the spinning Mayor Haggar himself (0:14:24) set out to brawl streets in a display of complete and utter incompetence on behalf of the Metro City police force.

Despite having established some context now and setting the bar for plot lines and characters low enough to challenge the limbo world champion, Battletoad's synopsis still reads like something out of this world. The main characters are originally computer technicians who get sucked to a distant planet and turned into the titular battletoads while testing the Battletoads video game in a virtual reality setting. I couldn't make this up if I tried. If someone pinned a gun to my head and forced me to write something more ludicrous than this setting, I'd gladly reach out and pull the trigger for them. Beneath this absurd justification for its existence however lies one of the all time classics in the beat-em-up genre, with a long and star-studded history of speedrunning to boot. Standing on the shoulders of (virtual) giants today is 'jc583', utilizing the latest strategies and warps to finish with a time of 0:13:20 and winning the right to hop on a Sega CD on one leg until he gets turned into a two dimensional sentient pogo stick.

At this point, radioactively mutated chelonian martial arts experts seem surprisingly tame as far as mind bending concepts go, so there's no reason to even linger on that subject. One could even say that one could come up with that idea while blindfolded, after all vision is not all that useful for conceptualization. This incredibly forced segway leads us to the next runner, as the last time I saw 'sinister1' he was boxing blindfolded to the (very carefully timed) cheers of hundreds in a live audience and thousands on the internet. Today he proves that he can hurt people in more ways than just sticking a curiously heavy red glove up their nostrils, clobbering the hordes of the evil, possibly even sinister, Shredder to a pulp as Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. The game has spent some time on and off the speedrunning shellves in the past years but sinister1 managed to Krang out a sizeable improvement to the already fairly optimized previous run to finish on a time of 0:19:24 on hard difficulty.

Sypha Belnades prefers a less ... brawny approach to combat, showing an affliction for elemental magic. A more civilized weapon for a less civilized time, given that she has to hide her gender as not to be hunted down as a witch. Putting such a fierce warrioress...ess(?) in the hands of 'kmafrocard' can only lead to great results and it sure did in this case. Showing up seemingly out of nowhere about a year ago, this runner has already left his marks all over the Castlevania series, taking down numerous records in these anything but uncontested games and this run on the japanese release of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse is one of them. His time of 0:28:24 beats the old US run on SDA by over half a minute, which is quite remarkable for a game this optimized despite some version differences you can take advantage of if you undust your original famicom.

In what is at best a mildly interesting coincidence, 'ZakkyDraggy' shares the spotlight in one of my Friday updates with MURPHAGATOR! for the second time this year. The game that gives him this honour today is even the same as last time, as he felt slightly unsatisfied with his previous submission on Journey to Silius. With further dedication and the speedrunning mantra of shaving frames in mind he managed to cut out another 4 whopping seconds of mistakes to improve his time to 0:11:13. Decomposing everything into its molecular constituents with a futuristic blaster rifle is either the most or least civilized way of resolving a conflict presented here today, but I'm uncertain on which side I should stand on.

Finally, as a slight change of pace for today, we leave the realms of 2D-kill-em-ups and take a look at Klonoa for the Wii, which despite its fully 3D rendered environment is still very much a 2D platformer in spirit, as the player's path is still essentially restricted to two degrees of freedom. As the Extra Vision unlocked after getting a full 100% completion at the game mocks the player with a timer, Pierre 'Skullbot' B. deemed it necessary to strike back by making the timer show as small a number as he could. 0:02.04.59 later the level ended, with loads of floating animals being grabbed and abused in rather horrifying ways. I meant to end this on a high note, but dropping countless innocent beings into molten lava just so you can get some additional height on your jumps is just detestable behaviour and I will not stand for this. I'm going to punch some puppies to calm my nerves. This is what you've done to me, I will take no blame in any of it.

February 3rd, 1927
My dreams have been getting more vivid recently. When I am able to recall them, they are invariably strange; evocative of a feeling of dread. I am also having trouble in my daily happenings - just today, I was reminded by my housekeeper of a meeting I didn't remember ever planning. This state has persisted ever since I arrived in Innsmouth, three weeks ago. In an effort to document what I do day-to-day and to better remember my dreams, I have decided to start this dream journal. I heard of something similar during the lectures on Freudian psychoanalysis my last year before I got at university; supposedly, keeping one is a novel method to enhance dream recall abilities. I guess I will find out.

I never thought I would have to do this. I fear I am going insane.

February 4th, 1927
First night of keeping the journal, and already I can feel writing this down is helping jot my memory. The scene was full of monsters of weird shapes and sizes, looking almost as if cut from cookie dough. The sky was filled with black clouds; while there were no raindrops falling, a definite Risk of Rain was brewing. I could almost feel the... randomness... of the whole universe in the air. Chaos, straight in the middle of a possible Downpour. I had a bow in my hand, like some sort of hunter or Huntress, out in the world, looking for the next kill. The name Maik 'Onin' Biekart kept resonating in my head; perhaps that is some sort of an allusion to a Norse god? The dream continued uninterrupted, with the bow felling many enemies effortlessly, until I awoke.

According to the ornate clock in my room (which has the capacity to track seconds; a most curious, intricate device, with an almost hypnotically entrancing pendulum), I awoke at 0:17:48. A lot calmer than the dreams of previous nights; maybe the prospect of writing them down helps.

February 6th, 1927
Back to intense dreams after two nights of relative rest. I'm beginning to affirm myself in the belief that these dreams are not merely random musings of a barely conscious mind, but actual visions. It feels like someone something is trying to give me some clues; I cannot explain how I ascertained it is so, but I feel that it is so. Tonight, I have dreamt of swords and magic; of dungeons, villains, and medieval heroes. Perhaps this is implying that these visions I had have sort of A Link to the Past. When I woke up, I could swear the clock - stuck unmoving at 1:25:06 - had the name 'Jadin' etched on it; upon closer inspection, there wasn't anything there, and the pendulum returned to full swing. I recall a similar dream in the past, but this one was at least a minute shorter and felt more entertaining. It also felt like... the dream was late, due to error by either me or my close associates. So strong is this feeling that I can't help but apologize even on these pages; pages not intended for anyone other than me.

I have just noticed my journal entries seem to contain randomly capitalized words. Weird.

February 8th, 1927
Today, I have dreamt of many pictures of kittens with white words written on them in, frankly, disgusting typeface. What could it all mean? Is this a vision of some kind of a possible, dystopian future; one where people waste their lives making such affronts to civilization?

February 11th, 1927
SUPER METROID

This is a most precarious situation; I have sat down to write down today's entry and saw those two words already etched in the notebook, along with the correct date. I do not recall doing that. Perhaps I sleepwalked? In any case, tonight, my visions showed me a world far away, a world in which Matt 'zoast' Thorne reigned king over the mysterious... space pirates. I do not know why the celestial domain would have pirates, but there you go. I awoke at 0:44:26; as ridiculous as this sounds, I could swear the clock only showed minutes just before I went to sleep. Almost like the timing method has changed, just for this dream - it must be important. I just don't know why it would be.

February 12th, 1927
I had the same dream today. Well, I say the same; it felt more... complete, like 100% of everything that can be found in it was finally clear to me. Again with the mysterious 'zoast' in charge, same other world... but with all the nooks and crannies clearly explored for my benefit. It's 1:17:54 now - later than yesterday, which fits the length and depth of the dream; it is a small comfort to know even in the midst of this paranoid episode of mine, I at least have a handle on the passage of time.

This might be the key to everything. Am I being warned about something? A war? Mysterious creatures?

As crazy as that sounds, for a second there, I thought one of the weird locals I've seen yesterday was in the room. Just my imagination; time to get back to sleep - I must really be quite exhausted.

February 13th, 1927
Tonight, it started the same as last night. I was almost convinced it was a repeat, maybe with even more detail. But as it went on, it dawned on me that that it wasn't a more complete version of the previous one. There was less freedom, less exploration. Not to mention it wasn't as exhaustive as the one on the 12th. The similarities were merely superficial. I was in another world entirely; one made to look similar, but still. I seem to have the words Metroid Fusion etched in my mind, along with a name: Alex 'kirbymastah'.
0:46. Where the hell is the seconds' hand?

There were a lot of gooey... things. Microorganisms of some sort. Maybe it's meant to represent a plague or something of that nature?

February 14th, 2014
Gotta prepare myself for the V-Day. The missus will probably want to visit a cinema to watch some new sappy Julia Roberts movie; snore. I'd rather play a cool game, like Wario Land 4. Oh well, what can you do.

Oh yeah, had a dream tonight; my therapist says I should keep a log of these, so whatever, here goes. I've seen some guy, Mike 'mike89' McKenzie I think. And he actually was playing Wario Land 4, now that I think of it. He did really good - single-segment, Normal difficulty, with resets, the whole nine yards. 0:47:50 for all that, that's not something you see every day. Obviously, cause it was just a dream. Is this whole log thing really supposed to help?

February 15th, 1927
Woke up with a horrendous headache today. Nothing special since the 13th.

February 26th, 1927
Something weird is going on in this town. I have burned this notebook after seeing the February 14th entry, but I just found it intact in the drawer. At least the bizarre dreams have stopped for the last two weeks.

February 29th, 1927
The dreams are back. I do not think I have long to live... I feel faint just tryying trying to write this down; and I think I've seen too much. A secret order, full of psychics... Psychonauts, they called themselves. They infiltrate dreams in order to convert people. Was this all this was, me, just listening to some man called 'Grimdonuts' toy with my grey matter? Does he have accomplices in Innsmouth? I swear, every wall is beginning to look like it slithers, like a snake octopus. The clock stopped at 0:50:11; I think it's been broken since yesterday. Funny thing is, it showed a time 17 minutes higher before I went to sleep.

I hope someone finds these notes. Soon something terrible is going to hap

March 1st, 1927
Completed my preparation of the altar. He will not remain dreaming for long.

Giant Iron strengthens stranglehold on local property market; Hat evicted.
Adam 'KHANanaphone' Ferguson, 0:00:57

'Giant Wings enable quicker browsing of libraries', Israeli study says.
'ktwo', 0:13:26

Coin operated locks found largely ineffective; plumbing based crime rising.
'Laplacier', 0:03:56

Irafghanistastan ravaged by mysterious flying white men; local population terrified.
Patrick 'PJ' DiCesare, 0:07:52

Quite a few shorter runs today, and just like my last update, we'll start with a game about which there can be no question that it definitely lifts: the good old Contra. Well, I say old, but this is a run on the Xbox 360 Arcade version. Zakkie 'ZakkyDraggy' Starres manages to use that fact to his advantage incredibly well - his run is much shorter than other runs on the page, clocking in at 0:04:52 of sweet, old-school shooting action.

Staying in that general 80's video game area, we have an update to the Marble Madness record. Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios used a few new strats and applies some extra minor timesavers to pull off a 4 second improvement, which is a huge deal for a run that takes 0:02:50. It was an especially mad achievement to attempt considering the record was previously held by the legendary Andrew Gardikis; in fact, without video proof, I would go as far as to say a man trying to beat it lost his marbles.

*crickets*

Diligent readers of the SDA frontpage (who apparently still exist, as I was assured before picking up the updater's mantle back again) might recognize our next runner, the man going by Benjamin 'UraniumAnchor' Cutler, who decided a 5 year old run of his in Metal Storm needed an improvement. He then proved his suspicions correct with a single-segment 0:12:14, 30 seconds faster than the run that graced the game page previously; mostly through new strategies and some extra polish here and there.

The longest run in this update happens to be a Sonic 3 & Knuckles record. Adrian 'HDL' Perez noticed the Knuckles time wasn't the fastest one on the page any more and decided that was something - much like most moonshine - in need of quick rectification. The result of his exploits is a 3 minute, 48 second improvement to get a time of 0:22:40. This is a single-segment with deaths, by the way.

Finally, to round it off, an IL improvements to the Duke Nukem 3D table. Alex 'pogokeen' Dawson submitted a new Episode 3, level 3 run, an improvement of almost 2 seconds to get a time of 0:00:25.75 (getting the total time down to 0:20:43.85 in the process). Apparently, it is a whole new route to get it done faster, so go check it out! I mean, it's not like it's a big time investment.

Maik 'Onin' Biekart is no stranger to the SDA frontpage, quickly gaining a reputation for not only unearthing long forgotten gems from our childhood, but also promptly figuring out how to break them. His entry today is the realtime strategy title Empire Earth, lost to the annals of time being overshadowed by the Age of Empires series. Specifically, Onin rushes though the Russian campaign in 1:02:25, featuring a futuristic reunited Soviet Russia with robots. Somehow that probably sounded sillier a decade ago than it does these days.

The Elder Scrolls titles are well known for being vast, immersive experiences featuring a detailed history, society and storyline for the player to explore. They are also well known for being some of the buggiest titles out there, and Oblivion is no exception in this regard. It is therefore no surprise that the game can be beaten in less than 10 minutes, but André 'Xevro' Gagné Bouchard figured that the game deserved a more extensive treatment. Opting to complete the full storyline he finished all of the main quests in ... 0:27:15 across 45 segments. For a game that takes most people days to complete that is quite the feat.

Inexplicably, most of the towns in fantasy settings seem to be founded on top of the congregations of evil. If you run into possessed gigantic rats, the screams of tormented souls, rotting ghouls and other demonic beings while you dig out your new town's sewer system, you might want to consider settling elsewhere. However, it seems like the accepted modus operandi is to throw passing adventuring parties at the problem until the evil spirits are either satisfied with the sacrifices or get defeated. The town of Waterdeep in Eye of the Beholder is no different, and a party spearheaded by Jay 'DeMoNFLiP84' Cabasag is sent to the town sewers. As heroic deeds are not paid by the hour the entire clean out is over in a mere 0:12:12 before the adventurers immediately got back to the town pub, almost 5 minutes quicker than the last group that made it back out alive.

Local inebriation expert Patrick 'PJ' DiCesare is famous for pretty much destroying anything electronic he gets into contact with. These traumatic experiences might very well have influenced his taste in games and speedruns, often leaving bystander simply question 'why?'. Sometimes because the game is incredibly punishing to run, sometimes because the game is just punishing to endure and very frequently both. Solstice passes my tests for being a good game, which simply means that it has had to have been a nightmare to run. An isometric 8-bit platformer with room transitions and fast, precise movement is hard enough to play as is but the run still goes further with plenty of frame precise tricks. By his own account, PJ finished two deathless runs of the game, both of which are featured here today: a 0:05:58 pure speed run and a 0:12:22 100% run collecting all the hidden pickups. Please note that SDA can not be held liable for any damage watching these runs may do to your computer or brain.

Due to time constraints on my part, this update will be a quickie. One might argue that's a disappointment after the last couple updates, in which we smashed through the 1000 games barrier and broke new ground in referring to ourselves in the third person, but the runs are as stellar as always. Let's check what we've got for you to feast your eyes on!

To put us in an appropriate, adrenaline filled mood, let's start off with Streets of Rage, a side-scrolling beat-em-up from around the fall of the Iron Curtain (or, more importantly, the announcement of the thankfully temporary dissolution of Devo). Noted SoR player 'galedog' took a lot of fight strategies, sprinkled them with infinite combo tricks and then topped the whole thing off with some skillful execution to obtain a single-segment record, to wit: 0:29:46 as Blaze Fielding on Normal difficulty.

If you fancy something less poisoned with pure testosterone and Arnold blood, you would do well to avert your gaze to Wild Arms 4, a Japanese RPG with a load of main characters that can't legally drink yet. Kenneth 'Tide' Cheung took on the extended task to get a record in this shockingly long game, and managed a 34 segment recording that takes 5:04:54 - which is a nice achievement considering the scope of the title.

More jRPGs for the RPG god! A fellow Speed Demos Archive updating partner in crime Michael 'Flip' Dix decided to tackle an entry in the acclaimed Tales series, Tales of Graces (specifically, the PS3 version). Showing a blatant disregard for the holy behind-the-scenes queue process by which SDA operates, he got his run stuck in the pipeline, waiting for his comments; truly shameful. Despite the delay, it's still a highly well made run: 33 segments for a time of 2:35, a New Game+ time. This one has audio commentary!

Finally, to round it off, another Tales game, this time Tales of Vesperia. Sarah Jahnke adds to her records in the series with a New Game+ run on the PS3 version, just 20 segments combining to 3:23:52, which is actually a good deal shorter than the Multiplayer run on the page, though how much of that is due to the PS3 version having cutscene skip is uncertain. Still, it's definitely worth watching, especially considering it has audio commentary. If that's not enough to whet your appetite... well, if you think you recognize this surname from somewhere, you aren't mistaken: the hidden hand that makes SDA go round a.k.a. Nate helped with the planning of the run and is in the commentary! If that still ain't enough for you to be convinced to watch it, I'm just gonna paste a sound bite from Sarah's text commentary: "[Thanks to] Nathan for [...] being on Cockface Duty."

Yeah, I thought that would do the trick.

It's been a short while since Fancy Pants Man visited us on the front page, but it seems like his fashion sense has made no progress since then. Those giant orange parachute pants may have been in style some decades ago but they certainly can't touch this generation's stylistic choices, for better or worse. Besides, those pants might have been rad at some point, possibly gnarly or maybe even a bit bodacious, but there's no way they ever deserved to be labelled as fancy. Luckily, proper leg attire is not a prerequisite for mighty quick platforming, so we can present two runs on the Fancy Pants Adventures today. James 'cooopercrisp' Mernin provides us with a small improvement on his World 1 run with a time of 0:02:28.13 while 'Newtmanking' puts World 2 on the page with a time of 0:08:01.

In fact, you don't even need any legs at all for mighty quick platforming, as everyone's favourite butcher's-leftovers-come-to-live Rayman has proven time and time again. After a short stint with rabbit based entertainment this character returned to jump and run glory in Rayman Origins and it's about time that game made an appearance on SDA. 'Twyn' decided to forego the option of playing coop with his friends and rather blasts through the game on his own, with large skips and resets, in 0:46:55.

If people stopped spending so much time pondering about the precise sepia filter to apply to the picture of their now only lukewarm meal they might find that camera's have much more practical uses as well. Like cutting and pasting parts of your surroundings. Snapshot explores this feature of modern photography in depth, placing the player in ever more convoluted puzzle scenarios armed with just their reality bending picture device. Due to the way momentum of objects can be preserved 'Aaron_Haynes' has found some rather interesting solutions to some of these obstacles, beating the game in a mere 0:20:02.

Unfortunately, Phantasy Star Online does not chronicle the tales of the construction of a Vietnamese interstellar telecommunications network but rather turns out to simply be an action RPG. This has not stopped 'saintmillion' from dedicating some time to the game however, picking up the previously unlisted Ranger class and figuring out a way to seriously confuse the poor merchant NPCs in the game. Breaking the equipment system this way has allowed him to cut the previous best time for episode 1 almost in half with a single segment run of 1:04 on the Gamecube version. If you'll excuse me now, I've got a game idea to pitch.

And with this update out of the way we have officially broken the 1000 games mark at SDA, with a precise count of 1001 different games on our gamelist as of right now. Thanks to all the runners that have made this achievement possible and continue to submit runs for all of us to enjoy. With a bit of luck, we might be able to add another digit to this number some day. There's certainly enough games left unexplored, for now. What are you waiting for?

"Well, this hasn't changed much," dex thought as he stared at the edifice that - in a past long forgotten - used to be his workplace. He spent the last year convinced he would never again stare at the simple, practically crude, yet somehow evocative coat of paint; that he would never see the sun glistening off the intricate stained glass windows. The sight brought him back to a similar moment, back when he was still a rookie trying to gather enough courage to enter the building and report for his first day. He was just as nervous today, for the Archive has evolved since then - if not in look, then certainly in size. Back then, it was merely beginning to show its presence on the map, aggressively so.

Aggressively enough that he got his first assignment instantly. Paired up with a guy called Kyle 'chairbender' Hipke to watch over the proceedings in the Hammerfight sector. Jesus, that was a hell of a first case to draw. Stone cold single-segment, too. The toughest you could find. As if all that weren't enough, 'chairbender' was not a man to be trifled with - a man who smashed things with impunity when it was necessary, and wasn't afraid of casualties in the line of duty. Still, the assignment was finished in just 0:36:10. The Archive valued expediency.

An abrupt breeze broke him out of his deep thought. Good thing, too - he didn't want to be late for his grand return. He began confidently walking towards the entrance, when suddenly, a sharp pain interrupted his stride, reminding him of his still not fully healed leg. An injury incurred in the line of duty, and the reason for his retirement; a retirement cut short by yesterday's proposition from the Chief. We've got something we could use your expertise for, the Chief said. Why did he even consider that proposition, anyway? This wound is reason enough to decline, he thought as he hobbled through the enormous, wooden doors.

The entrance hall looked just as impressive as he remembered it. The marble flooring, the pillars, the oak receptionist's desk - just like old times. Hell, there even was good old 'cortez' behind the desk, likely doing some lighter work before his next assignment. The tales of 'cortez's exploits in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky were stuff of legends back in the day - and for good reason. Even on Novice difficulty, running around in a zone full of radiation and bloodthirsty hostiles was nothing to scoff at, and it got done in a record time of 0:15:39. I mean, 'cortez' was back in office before the morning coffee was cold, how crazy is that?

Abandoning the trip down that particular memory lane, dex entered the elevator and pressed the second floor basement button on the panel, then hurriedly pushed the 'close door' button so he didn't have to wait - old habits die hard. The doors began to snap together when someone wedged a boot between the two sliding pieces of chrome.
"Pardon," said the man dressed in security garb as he entered the cabin. He waited for the doors to close properly before speaking again, a definite threatening note to his voice. "Second floor basement, huh? That area's off limits. I'm gonna have to insist that you leave."
"That ain't happening. I'm supposed to go there."
"Oh yeah? Who the hell are you?"
"Does it matter? I'm meeting the Chief."
The uniform relaxed himself. "Oh, you're that vet. You're shorter than I expected."
"Yeah, well, appearances can be deceiving."
"I guess. I just expected the man who tackled the whole Spider-Man debacle to be more... menacing, you know."
"Spider-Man?"
"Yeah, year 2000? Kid Mode difficulty? Don't tease me, man."
"Wasn't me. Not into the comic book stuff, honestly. I think it was, uh, someone going by 'Piston'. Real fast guy, good at aiming his swings."
"Sounds about right."
"0:37:39 was the time on that one. A real pro, that 'Piston'."
The guard raised his eyebrow. "You struggle to remember the man but recall the exact time?"
"Time," said dex, "is what matters, kid." He let the weight of his words sink in for a second. "Let's move, huh? I don't like enclosed spaces," he said, exiting the cabin and entering the hallway leading to the center of operations.

"So, what cases did you actually handle?" the uniform asked.
"Don't ask. It's a long story."
"You back for good?"
"Nah, it's just temporary."
"Probably for the best," scoffed the guard. "Cause I'm telling you, a lot changed since you've been gone. Hell, just last week Greg 'The Thrillness' Innes did an Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception gig."
Uncharted 3. Crazy stuff, thought dex. That must have been an extended deployment. "What difficulty?" he asked.
"Very Easy."
Very easy. Thank God. Even that was hard to believe. "Time?"
"2:35:37," the man said smugly. "71 segments"
Mental. Absolutely mental. These new guys really weren't joking around.
"Hey, we're here." They stopped in front of the Chief's office. "Good luck. You'll need it," the guard quipped as he returned down the hallway.

Maybe the rook actually had a point? Would the Chief even entertain hiring him again after seeing what a mess he is? Here he was, standing in a subterranean hallway, pretending he still had what it took to do this job - the same job that got him heavily injured. It was a Serious Sam: The First Encounter assignment with the SSDQ folks, 'Freezard' and Bart 'TheVoiid' de Waal - great agents with a lot of experience who assured him it would be a simple in-and-out job. It was, for them. 'TheVoiid' did things by the book in Tomb of Ramses (0:01:36, was it?), then went off the beaten path and skipped a lot of surface area in Luxor (got it done in 0:02:10). In his hospital bed, dex heard of 'Freezard's unconventional exploits - Sand Canyon (0:00:35), Valley of the Kings (0:01:51), Moon Mountains (0:01:05), Oasis (0:00:49)... amazing operations in which he was absolutely no use, and got shot before they even began. He was already mediocre enough to fail then, and only gotten rustier since.

Yet, recalling the day of the injury made him realise that, for the first time in a long while, his leg pain receded. He could already feel the adrenaline surging through his veins, and the feeling was not one of fear, but excitement. Perhaps that's why he agreed to come. Maybe, just maybe, he still had the touch. It was time to find out.

He entered the room of the boss man. The Chief was sitting in his chair, a dimly backlit silhouette in a dark room - you did not get to be the head honcho of the Archive without a little theatrical flair.
"It's been a while, Agent," the Chief bellowed in a familiar tone. On the desk in front of him lay dex' standard issue semi-automatic .57 and his old badge.
dex smiled - this would go much more smoothly than he expected. He couldn't help but feel like he was back home.
"Reporting for duty, Sir."

Today's first entry is provided by everybody's favourite Bruceman impersonator Ian 'RoboSparkle' Green. Well known for his dedication to the 3D entries in the Batman saga and a passion for clobbering through every single thug in a city whose biggest export is insane super villains, he finally manages to get his name to stick to the Batman: Arkham City game page. And what an entrée it is with a time of 1:49:19, improving the previous time by 14 minutes while increasing the difficulty to hard in the New Game with Catwoman DLC category. You should definitely check out this run, if only to see all the corners the Gotham architects cut in presenting what seems to be, at least on the surface, a properly built urban environment.

Alice: Madness Returns is quite a strange game indeed. Not only was it released as a sequel to an 11 year old title at the time, its combination of horror, plain odd surrealism (literally peppering pig snouts with wings) and surprisingly strong themes for a game of its kind combined with reimaginings of characters that most of us probably best know from the colourful Disney movie somehow just seems to work just right. Unfortunately the actual gameplay doesn't quite stand up to the artistic vision, but in usual speedrunning ways 'zawj' decides to simply bypass the boring and repetitive parts by abusing the game's area load code when necessary, yielding a single segment time of 1:44:17 on Nightmare difficulty in a New Game Plus run.

New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a title that needs no introduction, which is convenient because I'd find it very hard to say much about it at all. Bowser kidnaps Peach, plumbers set out to rescue her yadda yadda blah blah. It's a first party Nintendo title ending on a numeral, you should know exactly what you're getting into. Jordan 'Greenalink' Greener continues his dominance over the DS Mario titles, this time opting for a single segment run with warps, finishing in 0:27:00 flat.

Calling Power Blade the Australian Mega Man would be immensely culturally insensitive so I'll refrain from doing so. Although rumours of a hidden cyborg kangaroo boss are unfounded, the game still features an upgradeable boomerang as the protagonist's main weapon. 'InfestedRiche' deems himself to be worthy of this outstanding tool, adding a 0:17:24 run on the NTSC release to the previous PAL run on that page. Not content with a mere quarter hour of boomeranging, he also submitted a 0:23:34 run on the sequel Power Blade 2 which bears the even more magnificent name of Captain Saver in Japan. Crikey.

If these runs still haven't satisfied your hunger for speedruns for the week then let me remind you that this year's instalment of Crystals for Life is starting in a mere 24 hours for almost 5 days of consecutive RPG speedrunning action. If disjointed story lines from out of order unskippable cutscenes, impossibly low level boss encounters and Roman numerals tickle your interest be sure to give them a watch and spread the word.

We have a run of Alex Kidd in Miracle World in 0:14:24 by 'ocelots1990'. This is 20 seconds faster than the previous run done about a year ago.

The first submission for the game Bugdom 2 is a single-segment in 0:17:09 by 'Newtmanking'.

There is a single-segment 100% submission for Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in a time of 0:58:20.40 by Zack 'PiePusher11' Maher. Note that this run got better times than so many of the individual level 100% runs from a table, that the table was removed.

The first submission for the game Addams Family, for Game Boy, is with large-skip glitches in a very quick 0:01:30 by Dave 'bangerra' Janssens. The runner complements the programmers, who left an obviously intentional shortcut right into the final level.

Next up is a submission for a game so obscure it's not even on GameFAQs, Wolfschanze 1944. Carsten 'djcj' Janssen completed it on blitzkrieg difficulty with large-skip glitches, in 29 segments, in 0:19:44.

Another new game submission, Runner 'gammadragon' did Might and Magic VII: For Blood and Honor in a time of 0:37:41, with 23 segments.

Last up we have a new category submission on Resident Evil 2 PC version. William 'Smallvillecs' Júnior got a time using Hunk of 0:01:59.66. We already had a Hunk run on PS2, but I'm sure the times are hard to compare because of loading.

No time for introductions, getting flooded with runs.

In fact, the first game of the day probably needs no introduction. Grand Theft Auto 3 pretty much defined the 3D sandbox murder-em-up genre and has been a fairly popular title for speedrunning for a while now, so it's not a big surprise that a new run of it ended up on the frontpage today. This submission by 'Eidgod' finishes the game in 1:11:57, improving the old run by... precisely 0 seconds?! Unlike the old run, Eidgod however decided to forego any safety saves and deals with the randomness of traffic and AI driving patterns in a single segment that just happens to clock in at the exact same time as the old segmented run. Quite the coincidence.

Thief II: The Metal Age is a game that takes a less manslaughtering approach to dealing with opposition, instead focusing heavily on stealth, tricking the AI and taking a slow, deliberate approach to 3D gameplay. This poses an interesting dilemma to the speedrunner, as hiding behind a conveniently placed crate or pillar does not clash well with the concept of going fast. Joe 'SocratesJohnson' Lunde has managed to find the perfect balance, sometimes by blatantly disregarding basic concepts of physics such as not being able to operate a key through a solid wall. The result is an impressive time of 1:02:09 in a single sitting.

Lyle in Cube Sector also involves thievery of the worst kind. Lyle finds himself punished for his rather short sighted real estate purchasing habits, having his cat stolen right outside his house inconveniently located in a rather uninhabitable and unfriendly place. This sets in motion a Metroidvania style adventure involving coloured blocks scattered throughout the world being (ab)used in rather unusual fashions. The game has gained speedrunning attention ever since its release, but this marks the first time one of them has made it to SDA with 'Gliperal' besting through the game in a catrescuingly quick 0:14:52.

With a little stretch of your imagination, the gap between cats, otters and weasels is small enough for us to make a seamless transition to the next title, as long as you're willing to play along and look away while we redecorate the set and then act as if nothing happened. Doing so we transition right on into Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, one of the many PS1/PS2 era 3D platformers that have been immensely popular among speedrunners in the past couple of years. Stephan 'Freak4games' Toews is one of them and he brought a massive improvement of over 16 minutes to SDA's show and tell today, clocking in at 1:23:44 in a single segment.

While we're on the subject of beloved franchises, let's move on to Ghost in the Shell. This popular cyberpunk anime series spawned a game of the same name that, unlike many popular media adaptations, actually features an original storyline and well designed gameplay that involves being able to relatively freely cling to walls and ceilings. Alliteration expert Zachary 'Zastbat' Zimmerman manages to avoid disorientation for 0:25:34 to stop the evil Zebra 27 (I think the proper cyberpunk name should be Zebra 3³) from his evil scheming.

Against our statistical expectations, this update doesn't just feature one but TWO whole popular media adapted games that have survived the transition without turning into the usual pile of unenjoyable garbage that's associated with that phrase. Admittedly, the source material for Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a tad older than the previous entry, but arguably even more well regarded by its fans. Despite being stuck in development hell for years the end product is a finely crafted survival horror that manages to completely forego a HUD for atmosphere. Unfortunately, the programming has suffered some as the player can simply lean through a wall to grab a lock on the other side of it. Patrik 'Pafi' Varjotie properly abuses these oversights for a slight mockery of Lovecraftian horrors lasting 1:38:27, a foolish endeavour that hasn't ended well for anybody else in the past.

Dead Space 2 is a horror game of a different kind, tingling a different part of your spine than the Old Ones but is no less efficient at doing so. This particular game offers a Hardcore difficulty option that very much deserves the title, limiting your saves to a mere 3 across the entire campaign. 'Jehuty' decides to one-up this challenge further, electing to not make use of any savepoints at all and just rushing through in a single segment of 2:14:40. Spooky.

Finally, with a complete non sequitur of a segway: Bionic Commando. No, not the NES classic, the 2009 game of the same name, which is actually a sequel to the remake of the NES game that WASN'T simply called Bionic Commando. This naming scheme is just utter bullshit. Nevertheless the game at least features the well known grappling hook for movement and asinine dribble for a story line. Frontpage regular Sean 'MURPHAGATOR!' Murphy took on the challenge of not accidentally swinging outside the level boundaries and dying, finishing the game in a mere 1:05:46.

This ending paragraph has no real connection to the rest of the update.

Merry Monday to you guys. I've got some more sweet speedruns for you to enjoy.

You may remember that a little while ago we had a marathon called AGDQ. At this marathon we had a gentleman known as 'CGN' completely murder F-Zero GX, known to be an incredibly hard game. Well, it turns out that he's pretty good at the other F-Zero games too. He went and improved the Port Town 1 stage of F-Zero X by 1.381 seconds, bringing the time down to 0:01:01.371 and taking the total table time down to 0:43:07.510. What a beast. If you haven't watched his F-Zero GX run yet, you really really should.

Next up, Super Mario 63. Contrary to what the name might tell you, this is not the prequel to Super Mario 64, and all similarities between the games end with the protagonist being called Mario. It is, in fact, a fanmade 2D platforming flash game, and Jeffrey 'I have no name' Bardon - you liar, you have a name, I'm on to you - ran through it single-segment in 0:11:35. Maybe this time Peach will finally stop getting herself kidnapped. We can only hope.

Kick Master is a simple game. As the name implies, you're a master of kicking and you use your kicking ability in the best way possible: on everything ever. Of course, there's more to the game than that, such as RPG elements and collecting plot devices, but nobody cares about that boring stuff. Ethan McKee saw things my way, utilising his legs of steel and bringing us this 0:13:03 single-segment run, an improvement of 34 seconds over our previous run. The astute among you will realise that this means that the run time is no longer leet, but we must all make sacrifices in the name of progress. Such is life.

Xardion (also known as Super Attack God Xardion, what a metal name) is one of those side-scrolling mecha games that are all the rage these days. As you might expect from that, it's also originally Japanese and thus the translation work in the game is terrible. Unique among side-scrolling games of this type is the backtracking feature added in to prevent you from beating the game quickly. Hah. Resident 'o' guy (check the run comments) Justin 'Zerst' Kvithyll decided that being a Super Attack God struck a chord with him and improved our previous run of this game by a little under 6 minutes, for a final time of 0:27:09. Also one of the robots is a cat. Cat robot best robot.

I love the Gauntlet games. I recently played through a Gauntlet-like game called Hammerwatch with some buddies of mine and it was tons of fun. I haven't played Gauntlet Legends, but from what I can see it captures exactly the kind of mindless gameplay that the previous games in the series had and for that reason I think it looks pretty sweet. Also apparently you can kill Death in the game, which is pretty damn cool. Anyway, 'Boyo003' also shared my affection for this game, providing us with this 1:40:50 single-segment Expert difficulty run. Good stuff.

International Track and Field is one of those games I don't have much to say about. It's just a bunch of sporting events. They don't even include Wife Carrying, for shame. Regardless, 'Chris-X' overlooked this grave oversight in the inclusion of REAL international sporting activities and created this 0:08:31 single-segment run on Hard difficulty on the PAL version. They didn't even include bog snorkeling. What a joke.

Last up, another Resident Evil game, this one going by the name of Resident Evil Code: Veronica X HD. The plot of these games confuses me greatly and is probably incredibly nonsensical to those of you who do understand it in its entirety, but suffice it to say there's probably a bunch of zombies, overgrown mutant creatures and a smarmy dude with sunglasses involved in this game. 'sshplur' cut through the bullshit and brought us this 1:41:14 single-segment run on the japanese version, presumably for the faster text speed. I feel like my updates may not be doing the Resident Evil series justice, but there's only so much "because viruses" reasoning that games can throw at me before I just stop caring about them. Eh.

Yeah, it's been a while. But let's skip the pleasantries; I have runs, lots of runs.

I remember a few years back posting funkdoc's run for the original Castlevania and stating something to the effect that it was a healthy improvement to a run I thought was really good to begin with. Well, here we are again. Runner 'kmafrocard' went in hard on this game and chopped 18 seconds off the incumbent time, grabbing the final orb at 0:11:48. So yeah, a healthy improvement to a run I thought was really good to begin with. Check it out.

Let's keep the classic Castlevania train rolling for one more paragraph here. The black sheep of the original trilogy, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest has been getting some attention from the community as of late, and as a result we have the inaugural submission for the deathless category for you today from runner 'FuriousPaul'. It takes him 0:43:48 to reassemble and then again disassemble Dracula, defintiely worth a watch.

Moving on, we've got probably my favorite game of the last decade in Super Meat Boy. Runner John De Sousa brought no small amount of innovation to the any% category on this one, and has done on the PC version what only a small handful of people have done in pretty much any game: cut the Exo, and by a healthy margin no less. His time of 0:18:24 is a full minute's improvement over the previous run, and that run blew minds when it hit. So yeah, pretty good to say the least.

We'll move on to the only actual new game being added to our list today, and it happens to be another one my favorites of recent years. Though in runs, my favorite part of playing Bastion casually (the narrator) is decidedly minimized, the large skips category more than balances this out with letting you see the game get broken all to hell. Runner 'Vulajin' is very adept at breaking this game all to hell, as evidenced in his 0:15:09 run on the PC version. Not bad for a Kid.

When the first batch of games based on Jurassic Park were being planned out, somebody at Sega definitely demonstrated good judgment when they threw out the idea of "Let's let them play as the dinosaur!" Truly, the Raptor mode was the big draw of the Genesis version of the game when it came out, because who would rather play as a middle-aged paleontologist over a big, fast, scaled death machine? Count runner 'Lecorbak' firmly in the big, fast, scaled death machine camp as he liked the mode enough to run it. He blazes through the Raptor stages in a very quick 0:02:50, over forty seconds faster than our previous run from way back in 2005.

As long as we're on the subject of the obsoletion of really old runs on the site, we're retiring another one today from all the way back in 2004. Road Runner's Death Valley Rally was one of Tom Votava's early barrage of submissions back when SDA made the jump from Quake running site to speedrunning site ten years ago. A handful remain on the game list to this day, but this is one more being picked off, this time by runner 'Lenophis'. It's a healthy improvement as well, just over two minutes faster than the incumbent time, clocking in at 0:23:40.

I'll be honest, I don't have much interesting or witty to say about Crash Team Racing. It's a kart racer, you go fast, you get power ups, there are cool shortcuts and glitches, and it makes for a pretty interesting run. Davy 'Lechanceux100' Menan demonstrates this with his single segment Adventure mode run on the European version of the game, crossing the final finish line in 0:56:53.

Hey it's me again, and I've got some more sweet speedruns for you today. Take a look!

I love Devil May Cry. While the plot may be paper thin and the voice acting questionable at best, the combat is fluid and fun and the artwork and enemy design are top notch.. 'ahuynh' has shown himself to be an absolute monster at the game, with this segmented normal difficulty improvement to our old run from 2005 joining his previously submitted SS Super Dante run on the site. He saves a little under 17 minutes, with a final time of 0:41:33. That's right, I said 17 minutes. Go watch it.

Anodyne is one of those pixel art style indie games that are all the rage these days. This one is a top-down adventure game involving a dream world, Zelda-esque puzzles and combat and - if the speedrun is to be believed - walking through walls into random jumbles of textures. Pretty brave gameplay decision right there, and 'lifning' makes the most of it with this 0:04:51 single-segment run through the game. Oh, wait, you mean the clipping isn't intended gameplay? Well bugger me. Who'd have seen that coming?

I've wrote a couple updates for Resident Evil games before, and I always have trouble with them. It's not that the games aren't compelling at all, it's just that I have no idea what goes on in them, and Resident Evil 2 is no exception. Zombies, evil megacorporations with questionable names, terrible voice acting and knife combat abound in this run by 'Carcinogen'; a single-segment run using Leon on the 'A' story in 1:06:51. What else can I say about this game... the final boss looks scary? I guess that's pretty cool.

If any of you have played the original Prince of Persia game, you'll know how bloody hard it is. The combat was clunky, the traps were fiendish and the level design baffling at times. The remake cleverly titled Prince of Persia Classic alleviates some of these problems and adds a little more depth to the gameplay, and is actually quite fun to watch. 'Jaguar King' went ahead and did this 0:12:46.02 single-segment run for us, and having watched it myself, I can say that the play quality is pretty darn high. You don't need to take my word for it though, the link's right there.

Final Fantasy IV (Final Fantasy 2 for us non-Japanese chaps) is a game I find myself drawn to. From a speedrunning perspective, the only downside to it is the rather lengthy block of grinding towards the end of the run (which has been cut down quite significantly with recent strats, thankfully), and the fact that the end boss is a colossal jerk. That said, I'm clearly not the only one with some affection for this game. Shawn 'obdajr.' Nakashima is probably the best FF4 speedrunner I know of, so I'm sure you guys will find this run a treat to watch. It's 3:24:33 long, by the way, so make sure you set some time aside for it.

Next up, Secret of Mana. A game that is apparently based around trading weapons back and forth between party members and then hitting things for 900+ damage. This run is a single-player single-segment affair, with resets, in 3:16:24 by a fellow named 'Crow!'. I wonder if he wants people to vocalise the exclamation mark at the end of his name? Hmm.

Finally, Dragon Warrior, the game that spawned the JRPG genre. It's almost 30 years old at this point, and people are still playing it today. Kind of blows my mind to think about it. At any rate, Eric 'Lhexa' D'Avignon adds the game to our listings with this segmented 4:47:36 run through the game. Good stuff.

in the late summer of 2003, we were trying to skip the boost ball in metroid prime. my friends and i were trying to beat the game without collecting this item - just to see if it could be done.

there were still three places where it was required to progress. the game's developers hadn't intended for boost to be skippable, so there was a lot of doubt that someone would solve those problems.

kip said, "i think it will happen if it's pushed hard enough."

"if it's pushed hard enough" - as though anything were possible in this world if it's pushed hard enough.

and then it was.

i was looking at the list of marathons on sda's wikipedia page this morning when i remembered something mike uyama said recently: "we raised the big million for PCF, which I didn't think we would hit when the event started," "the event" of course being awesome games done quick 2014, sda's most recent marathon. the total raised from this event was more than the total from all of our previous marathons combined.

this has been a thing for agdq. but i think there was a lot of doubt this year about whether the exponential growth would continue. after all, in this world, there are some things that just aren't possible.

the answer given to me in the summer of 2003 was to build our own world. in other words, boost wasn't skipped on its own. it took people pushing. a million dollars didn't appear on its own. if you took part in the event - organizing, running, watching, donating, spreading the word - then you were pushing. you created this world in which a million dollars was raised in a week to prevent cancer.

who knows what will happen now. i'm told that we raised enough to fund several studies. in the past, one study like this found a new vaccine.

but i think a lot of us did it just to see if it could be done.

we will keep pushing.

It's been just under a year since I made a news post for the front page, one in which I said that I looked forward to the day that one of the community's charity events surpassed the 7 digit mark for money raised. Two months ago I got to sit in a room packed with spectators witnessing the finale of AGDQ2014, where the million dollar mark was hit during the final half hour of the final run. You couldn't have scripted a better ending. And with SGDQ2014 less than four months away I can only imagine where these events will take us in the future. I've had the good fortune of being able to attend all but the original *GDQ, and helping run the events are consistently high points of the year, even if they do leave me exhausted for days afterwards.

I'm a somewhat newer face to this site, having only registered on the forum some time in 2008. I don't recall exactly when it was that I started visiting the site, but I do know that in the years prior to that, I got a chance to watch a speedrun of the original Castlevania in 13:13 (still available on Archive!). That video stuck in my memory for quite some time, and while it's since been surpassed by quite a margin I consider it the first real speedrun video I ever watched, and it stood for quite some time. These days competition for well known games (and even some not so well known games) has ramped up to the point where runs previously thought nearly unbeatable can be improved by significant margins, either through the discovery of new tricks or simply grinding out attempts until your fingers bleed.

The speedrunning community continues to grow larger, more and more gamers are joining the fold. Inevitably some leave, but that's just how things are. The community fosters friendly competition, or simply assistance in finding and refining new tricks for whatever somebody's favorite speedrunning game might be. New tricks are discovered even on some of the oldest games, and sometimes there's a mad scramble to be the first to figure out if it's something that can drive the time even lower.

Ultimately, though, video game speedrunning is all about the enjoyment of seeing just how low you can push it. Whether you have a dozen viewers on your 3am stream watching you grind out an obscure NES title or hundreds or thousands of people watching you try to shave off those last few precious seconds, or even frames, the common thread is seeing those green splits finally turn blue when the timer stops. Or whatever color scheme you happen to prefer.

Here's to ten more years, and maybe a few more after that.

I discovered SDA back in 2006, after being linked here from GameFAQS. I'm ashamed to admit that for months I thought the name of this site was "Speed Demons Archive." I've always been a bit of a speed runner, even if I didn't really know what that meant before stumbling into this little corner of the internet. I was fascinated that this many people shared my hobby of playing games fast. I'm serious, folks, dozens of people were posting on the forums every day!

I was immediately sucked into all of it. I couldn't get enough speed runs. I finally submitted my first in 2008. Initially it was a big deal - the first multiplayer console speed run on the site. Before that, multiplayer speed runs only existed in the Quake section of the site. I was led to believe that old people lived there and I wasn't to go sniffing around. Only a joke. Well, mostly a joke.

Despite having a run accepted, I was still hungry to contribute to the site in whatever way I could. I looked for ways to help out, and found an opportunity in the Trading Post board. I offered to create a Master List of all the offers in all the threads (back when this was relatively do-able), and Mike green-lighted it and made me a mod over that board. All I did was offer to help where I thought I could.

That action, the offer to help, really defines the rest of my time here. When updates were getting scarce and people were calling for more staff, I just let Mike know that "Hey, I've got some free time on my hands, and I know quite a bit about games" and voila - next thing I know I'm helping write updates and alleviating some of the pressure on then-updaters Breakdown and dex. This went on for some time until Mike let us know that he planned to step down from his administrative duties (submission through verification). Nobody seemed eager to jump on it, so again, "I've got some free time, I'm on SDA basically all day anyway, and I wouldn't mind learning a new job." As most of you know, that "free time" I advertised was not to last, so eventually puwexil was brought on to take some of the weight off of my shoulders, and I focused purely on verification for some time. In all of my time here, I was never motivated by power or fame or the killer salary, I just wanted to help my favorite website be as great as it could possibly be.

Nowadays, that "free time" is a luxury I don't have nearly as much of, so I kick back on the sidelines and watch SDA unfold before me. It blows me away how far we've come and how much we've grown in the time I've been here. I'm so proud of all of the administrators and all of the users of this site for cultivating a welcoming, open community for new speed runners to find their legs and learn to love this strange hobby we all share. Although my time here may one day been seen as simply a flash in the pan, I'm very proud of my small part in helping the site grow, and I'm so excited to see where it's going. To everyone who has ever been a part of this site, thank you for an amazing ten years.

I wasn't sure what to write when Mike asked me to say something. I wasn't sure whether I would say anything, since I'm not an admin anymore. I was a bratty teen when Radix's 1:37 metroid prime 100% was posted. It's been 10 years, and I'm still bratty, but I've progressed from arguing over whether TASing is cheating to actually speedrunning. That's a pretty big improvement, so maybe I should say something after all.

I've been around for longer than I want to admit, but I haven't been running for that long. I mostly just watched videos. I did a couple bad runs, ultimately I think just to prove to myself that I could. One of them has since been beaten by 17 minutes, so you can tell I didn't find the process rewarding.

Now? This particular competition slash performance art has finally got an audience, and it turns out that playing to the limit of your ability is kinda fun. Speedrunning has matured to the point where impressive videos get streamed every day like it's nothing, and I've met some pretty cool people along the way.

Thanks for the memories. I hope my actions at SDA helped people enjoy the hobby. As for the next 10? Surprise me.

Most of you probably don't know much about me outside of these updates and a couple of slightly awkward and unnatural camera appearances at AGDQ events. Despite not being a well known public figure of our community I've still been around for almost 12 years now, witnessing the rise and growth of this pastime activity from a barely known aspect in the gaming world to something that can glue a hundred thousand of you fans to the screen for a week twice a year. This is my story of how we and I specifically have come to be where we are today.

The year is 2002 and the release of Metroid Prime is on the horizon and my anticipation for what would ultimately turn out to be my favourite game of all time created some new found interest in what is arguably one of the best games of all time: Super Metroid. It's a game I had some great memories of from my childhood but ultimately never owned myself and the friend I used to play it with had moved away a year ago. Lacking a local store that dealt in retro games (and yes, the SNES already was a retro console a decade ago. Welcome to feeling old.) I turned to something I had discovered fairly recently: Emulation, which had brought me many afternoons of intense Tetris Attack multiplayer action in between Windows ME freezing for no good reason during the previous winter. It's hard for me to tell whether I first discovered all the sequence breaking and knowledge about the game preserved on the GameFAQs message board (when GameFAQs wasn't the desolate wasteland it has now become) or Smokey's ZSNES input record files of his speedruns, but those two were my first real exposure to speedrunning.

The times Smokey achieved were in the 0:37 game time range, some of them with saves, some of them in a single segment setting, and all of them riddled with playback and syncing issues. The concept of short time attacks on racing games and the likes was not new to me, and I had just recently picked up competing in the single player stadium events on the freshly release Super Smash Bros. Melee but running a full half hour game was still an impressive feat to me at that point. It took another half a year for me to meet what would eventually become the core of metroid2002 and the modern day SDA as the EU release of Metroid Prime was massively delayed compared to the US release. By the time I finished enjoying the game all by myself and got into the sequence breaking aspect of it most of the major things about it had been discovered already. Nevertheless, #metroid-online was where I first started getting into contact with nate, Radix and a lot more other people you probably don't know or care about I could namedrop right now.

Although Radix' 1:37 100% run is often credited as being the first speedrun with widespread exposure people seem to often forget that CalFoolio made a couple of newspapers and online gaming media sites with his any% half a year prior to that. The next part of the story is probably best told by nate himself. It's hard for me to tell if the recent exposure of specific speedruns had brought people to record runs of games they liked or if it just had gotten people who already did so more attention, but it's probably fair to say that early 2004 is where speedrunning started to take off. There's a lot of contributing factors to that. For one, the recording of game footage for private use had started to become both technically feasible and popular, with PC's becoming powerful enough and video encoding sophisticated enough to use Fraps without massively straining the CPU and HDDs any more, capture cards becoming affordable and DVD recorders starting to gain a foothold in private households. On top of that, the spread of broadband internet was in full swing and made sharing video files on the internet a realistic proposition.

As much credit as we attribute to the early pioneers of our hobby we shouldn't forget that influence the general environment had on its success. It's not like speedrunning popped out of nowhere around 2004, in fact a lot of games have a heritage that reaches back further than that. Before that point in time though both the production and consumption of speedruns required a considerable amount of dedication from people, resulting in fairly isolated communities around individual games with a relatively low focus on audio-visual content. Once those external factors shifted and SDA provided a generic, non game specific meeting point for speedrunners in 2004 is when things started to flourish. Nevertheless, the speedrunning scene was considerably different back then.

For one, high quality video files were a rare sight in 2004. YouTube and Google Videos were still a year out in the future, and it probably took another 2 or 3 years before their general video quality started to be comparable to early day SDA encodes. Most gaming videos back then were relatively blurry, low framerate encodes to squeeze down filesize in an era where the word megabyte still had a meaning on the internet. This is arguably the major contribution to SDA's success in the early days: A focus on high quality, not just (and looking back at the early content, some may cynically say none at all) on gameplay but especially on the actual video recording of the run. This is the first time speedruns became consumable by the general public. Although there were leaderboards for various games before then and TwinGalaxies tracked speed records for all kinds of games, part of what made them disappear since then is the fact that the service they provided was ultimately useless to anybody not actively involved in the competition. The mere statement of fact of a certain time being achieved is irrelevant if you don't understand the context of it. The recording of speedruns finally managed to provide a context to the general public by making the record relatable. Watching the run unfold made it easy to compare it to your own experiences playing the game and draw your own conclusions about the run. In a day and age of watching 1080p YouTube videos on your laptop tethered to your mobile phone on a train this may seem very distant to some of you, but trust me, hosting high quality video files free of charge on SDA was a big deal back in the day.

Speedruns themselves were also rather different then. Outside of games with a dedicated community most speedruns were single person efforts, where all the research was frequently shouldered by the runner himself. Contrast this with today, where even games with only one active runner frequently have a group of people who contributed to it in the background with routing, glitch hunting and the general benefits you gain when multiple views can converge on a single product. The time commitment to speedrunning was also often times a lot smaller than what we are used to today. It wasn't unheard of for SDA submitted runs back then to be completed in two weeks, from conception through trick finding into practice and the actual recording and segmented runs were mostly the norm. If your standards of gameplay quality aren't as exceedingly high as they are today and you are only willing to commit so much of your time to finishing a run, splitting it into smaller chunks is certainly the most efficient use of your time and will overall lead to a better run within these constraints you set for yourself. The view that the mere act of segmentation should require a significantly more polished execution was something that only developed over the course of the last decade, originally it seemed that taking a save point was widely regarded as a worthwhile cost if the time lost was reasonably easily offset by spending less time perfecting a much longer section of the game. Speedruns weren't solely optimized over purely ingame mechanics, the meta aspect of the effort put into it played a much larger roll than it still does today.

As a result of this, that was the age of very prolific runners. With a relatively small community and a lower standard of effort expected in a speedrun, this is where some of the runners with the widest range of games and speedruns popped up. Today most runners are mostly known for a game or two, but in the early days of SDA it was rather common for people to simply be known as speedrunners, with a wide range of titles and runs under their belt and on the gamelist. The run I want to highlight today is from this era by one of the speedrunning pioneers named SnapDragon. There are a lot of worthwhile gaming feats he achieved that still stand up even today, but for some reason the one thing that always stuck with me in the back of my head was something that very much doesn't: His 2:09:56 run of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. If you haven't watched that run, please be aware that I can't recommend it. That time has been beaten by over 20 minutes at SGDQ 2012 and the run really doesn't hold up on any standards today. More on why I picked this run in particular if I don't want you to watch it later on.

As the community grew, so did the expectations of execution in the speedruns it produced. Once there was a critical mass of speedrunners for actual competition on more games to become a common thing the effort put into a speedrun grew exceptionally quickly, and by proxy the standards for non competitive runs rose in accordance. For games with save features we entered an era of very optimized hyper segmented runs and changes to the SDA rules with regards to death abuse and out of bounds tricks opened a whole can of new categories and tricks to be explored. Strangely, this is also when my personal enjoyment of actually running a game started to plummet. At first I thought this to be caused by me simply not being good enough or dedicated enough to produce a high quality speedrun, but I think I understand this issue in a much different light today. Again, more on this later.

Then streaming happened, and it changed everything. Not only did it lead to our now bi-annual Games Done Quick marathons, the largest exposure of speedrunning to the uninitiated public these days, it also massively influenced the way we consume and produce speedruns. Before people started to stream their speedruns, what the consuming part of the community got to see in the end were finished products, meticulously crafted paintings in a gallery, carefully arranged, all the false starts and poorly composed ones cast aside to a garbage bin where nobody would ever see them. With streaming, viewers could watch the painters in their atelier for the first time as they carefully placed their brush on the canvas, slipped and started anew. The focus shifted from the mere finished product to the process of creating it, with all the uncertainty and excitement of what was still to come being shared by the runner with their audience right as it happened. This definitely started to cast a different light on our hobby. As a result, the types of runs that were desirable to learn and produce shifted. Segmented runs make for a bad streaming experience, with constant resets over seemingly negligible mistakes, a rather short segment that's being played over and over again with small variety and a seeming lack of progress for the viewer. Suddenly, long single segment runs started to become the de facto norm of speedrunning a game and these days segmented runs are a rare sight for the most part. Live streaming leads to different types of runs being popular amongst viewers, and so the focus of the community has shifted rather dramatically in the past 3 years.

There's another interesting development that streaming brought upon us. The years leading up to the rise of twitch.tv had seen a stronger and stronger focus on more and more optimized speed runs as that's ultimately the only thing the audience got to see and experience. With live streaming and commentary being an integral part of our community now there is room for people who can act as entertainers that use speedrunning as a mean, not the goal of their performance and several of the more popular members of our community these days have grown famous more so for their commentary and interaction than solely the gameplay they produce. Speedrunning has been lifted from a passive form of entertainment where the runner and audience are mostly disconnected and only interact through the medium of the speedrun itself to a performance art where runner, audience and the speedrun interact and intermingle in ever more exciting and interesting ways, and this is where I feel we stand today.

Speedrunning is art. There's no other way for me to view it, as it serves no direct function or purpose, it doesn't directly improve any aspect of our lives and the final product isn't particularly useful in and of itself. The only use to be gained out of it is the experience felt while watching or producing a speedrun itself, whatever that may be for each individual. Although most of us probably view it as a fairly low-brow form of entertainment instead of a high art I still feel there's quite a bit to be gained by viewing it through those eyes for a moment. What I find to be particularly curious is the relationship between artist and art in speedrunning. There is no doubt that speedrunning is a very constrained canvas for expressing ones thoughts and ideas, even more so than just regular gaming. Not only are the things one can do in the game fairly limited themselves, the overall goal of doing things as quickly as possibly strongly constrains the artist even further. What a speedrun expresses is then mostly on an emotional level. The excitement, anxiety, uncertainty, relief, pressure, surprise and sheer panic runners frequently feel throughout the course of their run are relatively easily projected onto a viewer through the mere actions of playing the game and a mutual understanding of the general context of those actions. Furthermore, given their own experience with the game in question a viewer may feel all of these and many more emotions at potentially entirely different points in the run than even the runner did. Frequently, people who have spend time running a game themselves get excited at very different points in a run than viewers that have never seen a speedrun of that game before. It is in this contrast and conflict of experiences and emotions of the artist and experiences of the viewer where I see most of the artistic value in a speedrun and where I personally seem to gain most of my enjoyment of them.

Realizing this is what got me to understand my discontent with speedrunning I felt a couple years ago. The strive for more and more optimized times got me to focus on the entirely wrong aspect of speedrunning for myself. I was so obsessed with producing a nearly optimal run that I stopped enjoying the process of potentially getting there. Speedrunning had stopped being about myself and was focused on some abstract concept of a perfect speedrun. No segment I did was good enough, no jump precise enough, no frame lost considered acceptable. What I had completely missed was measuring my progress on myself, not the frame counter in VirtualDub. The act and goal of speedrunning, I feel, is ultimately about oneself. I think we should try to see the competitive nature of speedrunning less between runners and more about the runner with himself. What good is it really to be able to say 'I am the best at this relatively meaningless task'? What good is it to measure exactly how many frames off an optimal run we achieved? We should stop tracking our progress as our failure to live up to these tasks and rather treat it as the advances we have made in ourselves. Don't try to be the best runner at a game the world has seen, don't try to produce the most optimized run imaginable. Try to be better than you were a day ago, a week ago, a month ago. Try to think positively about the experiences you gain in the progress, both for speedrunning and in more general terms. And try to share those experiences with others so they can gain from them as well. This doesn't just hold true for speedrunning but life in general: Don't try to be the best person one can be, be the best you can be and then go out there and improve on that even further.

This is why I picked that particular run earlier. When I first watched that Prince of Persia run it certainly impressed me, mostly due to the low standards surrounding it at the time. I was impressed by the dedication of playing through a relatively hard game in a continuous 2 hour chunk while remembering what to do almost everywhere along the path. Granted, most of that was because I hadn't really seen much quite like it at the time, but the run stuck with me for entirely different reasons. It's not very optimized at all, it even contains a rather costly death right at the end (a rather impressive feat in a game where you can rewind time) and a lot of mistakes along the way, it misses several tricks that were probably rather easy to discover even back then if one had spent more time looking for them and in general it seems rather sloppy from today's point of view. Even as a product of its time it really doesn't stand out as something remarkable when viewed on this axis alone. What it is though, is entirely unmistakably SnapDragon's run, and his personality and experiences with the game shine through at every point. He choreographs fights not in the most theoretically optimal way but rather the way that works best for him. The execution clearly shows parts that he is rather good at and parts that cause him trouble. It's a very personal experience, and I can always compare that to my experience with the game and gain something from that. It is very much a work of a specific artist, with all his flaws and insecurities and strengths and knowledge being projected onto a 2 hour movie file.

Contrast this with one of the runs I am well known for showing a dislike to: the Half-Life Half-Hour run from a couple of years ago. Disregarding the issue of using scripts that are no longer allowed on SDA and mostly disliked in the community as a whole the run is also very heavily segmented. The average length of a segment is less than 10 seconds, and probably considerably less once you factor out the parts where nothing much happens at all. And where there is action, it is chopped up in chunks so small that there is no room for any aspects of the runner to sip through. The entire product is shaped by the merciless dictation of objectively being the fastest possible run and as a result feels very much lifeless to me. In a sense, it doesn't much matter who ultimately ended up recording the segments on that particular route because you would be hard pressed to tell the difference anyway. That's the curious curse of the speedrunner: The better a run becomes objectively, the less important the artist himself seems to be. This is part of the reason why I think streaming became so popular, in both the producing and consuming parts of the community. The live performance of a speedrun allows more room for the run to be personal and gives a better canvas for transmitting the contrast of experiences and emotions I consider so important for the enjoyment of a run from a runner to their audience, and via immediate chat feedback there's also a path in the other direction.

So this is the thought I want to leave you with today: A faster time doesn't always make for a better speedrun. Strive to challenge yourself with your speedrunning goals, not others. There's so much more to our common interest than the mere objective time displayed at the end of a run and if there wasn't, SDA surely wouldn't have grown to be what it is today. And with that, off to another ten years.

I got introduced to this site by a happy accident, back when I was a 14 year old. Yes, I'm basically a baby. I read a column on SDA in a Polish gaming magazine. It was around the time of the 15 minute Morrowind run being released. I vividly remember visiting the only friend that had any sort of a broadband internet connection - also a Morrowind fan - and blowing his mind by showing him the (in retrospect rather bland) intelligence stacking trick to make incredibly powerful potions. I was instantly hooked, though I wasn't really too active until I managed to nab an actual internet connection in my own home. That is not to say I wasn't doing speedrun related stuff at the time - the update before the Morrowind one was the old Deus Ex run. I remember sitting there and thinking "hey, I think I can do this better!" About three weeks later I did a 1:10:xx run for my own enjoyment, and then promptly decided never to publish the subpar-quality recordings. Only after taking a plunge into Quake running a year and a half later did I decide to actually record something that people would actually enjoy watching.

Because that's what speedrunning means to me at its core: making something that others will enjoy first and foremost - the nerdiest artform imaginable. It's a display of ability and capability, of patience, of cunning and, yes, of improvisation and efficiency, and my favorite runs always combined all these into a seamless, evocative video. There are of course a lot of other great aspects to speedrunning as a whole - the thrill of the fight for improvement; the cheer of achieving success - that make it an amazing hobby, but it always went back to the entertainment aspect for me. That is, until the Marathons showed that not only are we amazingly fast, but also amazingly kind. It's been a pleasure to help this site along and be a small part of something that grew to being so amazing, and all thanks to you, Dear Viewer and Dear Runner.

I have been asked to pinpoint some runs that embody speedrunning to me, so here goes. I must mention the Quake speedruns, for some of them are truly spectacular. Any run by the likes of Thomas Stubgaard, Jozsef Szalontai or Mathias Thore is a marvel to behold, but the prize must, in my mind, go to Peter Horvath's e1m3 all kills+secrets easy run - one minute of what can only be described as poetry in motion; or a tapestry intricately woven with bunnyhops and perfectly placed grenades. I really love the European version Extreme run of Metal Gear Solid, it is insane how good it is for a single segment run. I also enjoy the runs of the Metroid series in general, though I probably would point to Hotarubi's Super Metroid run from 2006 as my personal favorite.

I may be mostly inactive nowadays, but I still keep a watch on the main site, and hope to see even more fantastic runs. And thanks to everyone for sticking around with us.

My introduction to speedrunning was completely unrelated to SDA, and in retrospect, about as unlikely an introduction as you can get. One day back in 2004, I was looking at the torrent-serving website Suprnova and stumbled across a torrent for a speedrun of Doom II, which completed the entire game in 14:41. It blew my mind, to say the least. Doom II is one of my favourite games, I played it regularly with my friends over LAN way back when, and watching this guy completely demolish the game was like sweet ambrosia to me. After a solid google, I then stumbled across the archive.org page for Speed Runs. I ate that shit up like I was a starving man at a free buffet. It still wasn't enough for me. I started dabbling with my own speedruns, completing two of a custom mission pack for Unreal Tournament (the video files are still out there on archive.org somewhere). It wasn't until two years later, when someone actually started competing with me over this completely random mission pack that I found out that SDA exists. The rest is history.

What started out as a hobby I did to entertain myself has turned into... well, it's still a hobby and I still do it for entertainment, but SDA means so much more to me than that. It's an amazing community with amazing people, and almost every single interaction I've had with it has been amazingly positive. Now, following on from what the other updaters have done, I thought long and hard about what I thought would be the best run to highlight for you guys to show you what speedrunning means to me. It's not really a hard choice for me. Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore's Doom II Nightmare SS run in 0:29:56 is probably the most impressive run on the site for me. Nightmare is so much harder than Ultra Violence (for reference, I'm pretty good at Doom II and I've never beaten the game or even gotten past level 4 on Nightmare without dying), and watching this run almost 10 years after it was made still gives me chills at how well played it is. It may not be the world record anymore - it was beaten by 17 seconds by Henning Skogsto in 2009 - but to me it still embodies everything I view speedrunning to be.

If that's not to your tastes, then there's also former updater dex's realistic difficulty segmented run of Deus Ex in 0:43:20. It's also pretty old and the route is outdated at this point, but it's an incredibly optimised run and the amount of research and time dex put into the game produced something very impressive to watch. It may not have the overt in-your-face difficulty that the previously linked Doom II run had, but the tricks that are included made me shake my head in disbelief the first time I saw them.

Happy anniversary SDA. I hope the future years will continue to be as amazing for you as they have been for me.

I became aware of SDA and speedrunning in general back in 2006. While randomly surfing around the GameFAQs forums I stumbled upon a link to a speedrun of the original NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The time of 19:32 has since been beaten, but this was the run that opened my eyes to the concept of speedrunning. I was already into things like RPG challenge quests and other limiting way of playing through games to breathe some new life into assorted titles. I viewed speedrunning similarly, but as something that could be applied to just about any game out there. I took to it quickly and never really stopped. Over the next few years I had three runs accepted to the site (one of which still stands) as well as few done on emulator either just for the heck of it or through one the tournaments run on the forums over the years. It's a hobby I've had trouble explaining to people outside of it, but one I've enjoyed immensely. SDA as a whole is largely responsible for that enjoyment, and for that I am grateful.

A lot has changed from 2006 to now. The community was a fraction of the size of today with nearly all communication running through the forum. It was a time when if a game had two people playing it, that was considered heated competition, and nearly all gameplay was done in the privacy of your own home while hoping your VCR didn't eat the tape that had The Run. And as for The Run, the lack of competition on most titles made the standards largely depend on the individual's definition of "good enough." Now, the community's grown exponentially, top games have seas of players and trick finders constantly pushing the times down further and further, and we've reached a point where doing attempts without streaming just seems odd. Things have changed to say the least. This hobby's been pushed more and more into the spotlight, and the attention its receiving is awesome to see. Millions have been raised for charity, stars have been born, hell, a few people are currently successfully making a living off of this. Ten years back, that all would've sounded crazy, but here we are. Really makes you wonder what the next decade holds.

While it'd be foolish to solely attribute the current state of things to SDA, it would be equally foolish to deny the role the site has played in speedrunning reaching this point. For years, we were THE destination for speedrunning, no other site out there had such a similar and narrow focus. These days, other option exists, but SDA still fills a unique role as a center for speedrunning knowledge and home to an ever increasing library of high quality game footage. And with that library rapidly approaching a four digit games total, we're showing no signs of slowing down.

Happy anniversary SDA, here's to ten more.

I've been a part of SDA since September 2004, and to say a lot has happened since then is an understatement. The games covered on the site have gone from less than a 100 to over 900, two console generations have passed, and we've managed to raise over 2 million dollars for charity.

Speaking of two million, I remember the goal for our first charity marathon, Classic Games Done Quick, was a lofty $5,000, an amount that many people doubted we could reach. This amount might seem tiny, especially compared to how much the marathons have raised in four short years, but this was before Twitch existed, and this was our first marathon. When we ended up raising $11,000 for CARE after 50 hours of gaming, we were ecstatic, not only because we smashed our goal, but we actually managed to pull off a marathon.

I would like to highlight Jonas 'Hurblat' Martinsson's Contra III: The Alien Wars hard mode run because I used to run this game, and I considered my 0:14:59 hard mode run one of my best runs and thought no one would be crazy or stupid enough to try and beat it. Stage 1 kills over 90% of attempts alone. Well Jonas not only beat my run, but beat it quite handily, using new strategies that I never thought of, and had even tighter execution than my run. Seeing this run was when I realized that almost anyone run can be beaten, as long as someone is willing to try (and attack aggressively!).

Hi folks. This week the updates at Speed Demos Archive will be a little different. We wanted to have some thoughts from the people who have volunteered their time to work on this site over its many years. It's been 10 years since the oldest post on the old news of the main page.

Before the main page was the main page though, SDA was accepting runs on the great game Quake and it continues to do so. Although the submissions have certainly dwindled from its greatest days, last week we received a demo from Daniel Magnusson. He ran the entirety of the shareware episode, Dimension of the Doomed, on Nightmare skill with 100% kills and secrets. The previous submission in this category was nearly 10 years old, also by Mr Magnusson. The new submission is a time of 11:14, a 17 second improvement. This download is only a demo file which requires Quake to watch, but you can just download the shareware version if you don't already have it.

SDA began its movement beyond Quake 10 years ago when I posted a small selection of speed runs on "other games", that I'd gathered over the previous months. I opened up submissions at that time, and the verification system began. Now we have runs on 972 games and many more in the queue to be posted soon. I don't have to be a math whiz to calculate that's 97 new games per year on average.

These days you can find dozens of people streaming speed runs at all hours of the day on twitch or other sites, and some may wonder why bother submitting to SDA, when you'll just stream a better run tomorrow? Personally I think it's because SDA is a superior site. You won't find any ads here or poor quality videos. I don't like browsing youtube when I want to watch something, I prefer a site I can trust. Thanks to all the runners who have made this site what it is, and thanks to all the future runners who will help make it what it will be.

Here's to the next decade - thank you.

Continuing with our theme of more-than-the-usual-number-of-runs-per-update... Yeah, no more explanation needed.

So, first off, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Probably my least favourite of the GBA Castlevania offerings, mostly due to the music being somewhat painful to listen to (though I am assured that I am somewhat alone with that opinion). The gameplay is kind of stale too, BUT! There are some things about the game that make it pretty good for speedrunning. Things such as being able to rebound off of a wall-mounted candle and clip through the floor. Unsurprisingly, the ability to do this allows for some interesting shortcuts when navigating this particular incarnation of the castle. Tobias 'Charleon' Nerg is someone with a more tolerant (or more discerning, I'm not sure) sense of hearing, and he has braved the awful screechy music to bring us this rather glitchy mess of a run. It's using the Maxim character, using large-skip glitches (i.e the candle bouncy wall clippy stuff) and it aims to kill all of Dracula's boss lackeys, and it does so in a rather impressive 0:14:09. Just enough time for his buddy Juste to walk in, notice the carpets don't match the upholstery and walk out in disgust. The big pansy.

Vigilantism is somewhat of a hot topic. On the one hand, we have the unfortunate situation in Mexico (current events woo), on the other hand, it gives us wonderful game concepts; such as Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Hot on the heels of the run from last month, 'Kotti' has brought us a single-segment run of a similar category - Dead on Arrival using Resets - for a final time of 0:38:42.

Continuing with the topic of vigilantes, there's no more famous than Batman. Indeed, the Caped Crusader/Dark Knight/Poncy Git In Rubber is possibly the most successful less-than-legal crime fighter, so what better way to celebrate his achievements than to speedrun a game about him? Jason 'honorableJay' Feeney seems to have the same idea as me, plowing through the ranks of the felonious and the lawless with his trusty batarang, fists of steel and poor sense of style, in the somewhat lackluster game Batman Returns. Oh well, they can't all be winners, however don't let that stop you from fanboying/fangirling over the run we have for you: a slick 0:13:01.

I'm a big fan of the Terminator films. Watching the T-1000 melt into puddles of a mercurial substance and then reform into the badass robot we know and hate captivated my imagination like not much else has. That's why I'm tickled to bring you this run of Terminator 2: Judgement Day for the Game Boy. 'iast' has proven himself a worthy ally of the human race, demolishing the game in a fairly brisk 0:08:02.

Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf (also known as Sheep Raider in NA, a far more amusing name if you're from Wales) is a game I am completely unfamiliar with but the name strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. For one, wolves tend to eat sheep, and for two, dogs don't really like wolves eating sheep, so you end up with a giant mess of terrified sheep, hungry wolves and angry dogs. Regardless, Dan 'DanE' Söderhäll manages to make sense of the madness in this game, with this IL table totalling 0:56:59 across 18 levels. I might have to check this game out just to see if it can live up to the expectations the name provides me.

We're not done with 'DanE' yet though. Him and (I'm assuming) his brother Martin 'J.Y' Söderhäll teamed up on the PAL version of the game Spec Ops: Ranger Elite. Using teamwork, friendship, possible help from animal compansions based on the name of the game, and a good amount of segmenting (11 of them), they completed this 0:20:54 run of the game. (Note: Run probably doesn't include animal companions. Unfortunately)

Last, but not least, Wario Land 3. Wario decided to crash his plane somewhere in the woods, get sucked into a music box and it's up to Mike 'mike89' McKenzie to get him out of it. Spoilers: He does. You can watch him do it if you click on this IL table totalling 0:42:52 across 25 stages.

Well, that's it for me for today. Stay frosty.

Update: The Mighty Bomb Jack Best Ending run now features audio commentary as intended.

Apparently the larger scale updates of the past month have not helped us much in clearing out the queue so we'll handle this the only way we know to: Continuing to throw runs at you guys seven at a time until we finally catch up on the backlog. Without further ado (which is quite frankly a rather odd phrase as it is usually followed by explaining intent instead of actually getting to the action the statement intends to move on to as quickly as possible, dragging out the expository part even longer than it has any right to be and delaying the thing it tries to focus attention on even further), let's move on to the runs.

David Heidman Jr. has become well known for his love of Contra and quirky Indie platformers. It's the latter that gets him on the frontpage today with a submissions of Super Ninja Warrior Extreme ... no wait, that was 3 weeks ago. This quick return to the news post by Mr. Heidman is due to his submission on Super Adventure Island, a title which classifies as neither Contra nor Indie. Unfazed by my previous, erroneous classification of his skills he beats this game in a quick 0:17:39 and thus earns prolonged exposure on the front page.

The current SDA run on Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins has stood for over 8 years. It is no surprise that a lot has been found in the game since then. 'LaPlacier' demonstrates the current state of the game with a well executed 0:26:37 improving on the old time by over 5 minutes.

The Fancy Pants Adventure is a game most of you will probably remember from playing on a school computer years ago, if you managed to access any of the Flash game portals back then. Despite being coded in an era where Flash games were most known for being rather poorly made (as opposed to today, where good Flash games exist but probably should not have been made in it in the first place) the game is surprisingly solid in its mechanics. James 'cooopercrisp' Mernin plows through the first World in a quick 0:02:30.30 and straight on through to this news post.

Castlevania games have a strong history in speedrunning, but there's a classic title in the series that is very easily forgotten. Haunted Castle is an Arcade only entry into the series that received a very late, Japanese only PS2 port that is essentially just an emulator wrap. 'Jaguar King' fills this Castlevania gap on SDA with a time of 0:11:55 in a rather impressive manner. Unfortunately, there are still more titles in this series that are missing runs, including the MSX2 only Vampire Killer. So get to it, this update is suspended until you finish a run of that game.

Due to the temporal disconnect between me writing this update and you reading the previous paragraph, I unfortunately have no way of verifying that you've actually finished the task I set out. As such I have to politely ask you to stop reading until you've recorded a run of Vampire Killer. Everything else would be cheating! Moving on we have an improvement to Little Nemo: The Dream Master by 'HavocProdigy' with a new time of 0:24:44. Pedantic readers may notice that this time is higher than that of the old run, but after accounting for differences in cut scene length between the otherwise identical Japanese and North American releases of the game the new run is about 30 seconds quicker in actual gameplay.

Mighty Bomb Jack is, in fact, the mightiest of all Bomb Jacks. Unfortunately, that's probably the most remarkable thing about this game as it has otherwise squandered good mechanics with very uninspired level design. This didn't stop 'ktwo' from running the game and giving us two runs to post today: First there is the Best Ending run in 0:12:06 and in addition we also have a pure any% run in 0:06:57 for those that prefer a shallower story experience.

Let's end today's update with a word association game. I say speedrun, you say ... Harvest Moon? That wouldn't have been MY first choice, but Alex 'Anwonu' Morinaga seems to think differently and provides us with a run of Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon which at least features swords in addition to hoes and plows and taming wolfs to bypass walls because clearly that's how farming works. The end result is a 0:54:08 with large skips.

If you got to this point in the update without submitting a Vampire Killer run I'd like to reiterate that you are a cheating cheaty face. Cheater.

Hello to you good gentlemen and, indeed, good ladies. I've had a hard weeks procrastinating but it's about time you guys had some new speedruns to peruse. So be better people than I and don't put watching these off for several days, would you kindly?

As the title of the update suggests, we have some Turtles games for you. First up, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for the NES. A presumably smooth gentleman known as 'Whitman_Price_' decided it was time to update one of the dusty ancient runs (2006, Darn. I feel old now as I remember when that was posted) we have in our game list, obsoleting the Death Abuse category for this game by a little over a minute, for a final time of 0:18:21. Of course, it's single-segment as you would expect from this game, and I'm going to assume Shredder gets what he deserves in it. You don't need to take it from me though, the video is right there. Go on, you know you want to.

Enjoyed that? Good, because we have some more Turtles for you. TMNT (the 2007 game) is a game that didn't get the best reception on launch, but that didn't stop Nicholas 'Sir_VG' Hoppe from speedrunning the challenge maps, and indeed, did not stop him from improving his previous submission! I've created another handy dandy bullet point list of the improved times for you guys to click on.

• Level 1 - 0:00:09.00 - Improvement of 0.58 seconds.
• Level 2 - 0:00:09.13 - Improvement of 3.96 seconds.
• Level 3 - 0:00:16.94 - Improvement of 1.16 seconds.
• Level 4 - 0:00:14.67 - Improvement of 0.1 seconds.
• Level 5 - 0:00:13.61 - Improvement of 0.3 seconds.
• Level 6 - 0:00:13.54 - Improvement of 1.1 seconds.
• Level 7 - 0:00:10.86 - Improvement of 1.62 seconds.

Not the largest of improvements, certainly, but every frame counts, especially with level times this low. This brings the final time down to 0:04:41.34.

So. Tables. You like them? Good, have another. 'Freezard' is back with more StarCraft: Brood War IL updates for us, which means you get another table to look at.

For Terran:

• Terran 01 - 0:02:39 - Improvement of 6 seconds.
• Terran 02 - 0:03:11 - Improvement of 75 seconds.
• Terran 04 - 0:04:30 - Improvement of 43 seconds.
• Terran 05 - 0:02:53 - Improvement of 13 seconds.
• Terran 06 - 0:02:06 - Improvement of 3 seconds.
• Terran 07 - 0:05:28 - Improvement of 59 seconds.
• Terran 08 - 0:04:22 - Improvement of 21 seconds.

And for Zerg:

• Zerg 02 - 0:02:53 - Improvement of 12 seconds.
• Zerg 03 - 0:09:47 - Improvement of 56 seconds.
• Zerg 04 - 0:09:28 - Improvement of 86 seconds.
• Zerg 05 - 0:12:42 - Improvement of 92 seconds.
• Zerg 06 - 0:04:39 - Improvement of 269 seconds.
• Zerg 07 - 0:03:51 - Improvement of 32 seconds.
• Zerg 08 - 0:06:55 - Improvement of 239 seconds.
• Zerg 09 - 0:05:05 - Improvement of 85 seconds.

Some rather significant savings in this table. This brings the final time down to 2:21:59, almost 18 minutes faster than before!

With those HTML monsters out of the way, I'm happy to present to you a run of my favourite games. MDK is a game where you have a sidekick dog with six arms that flies a bomber spaceship, you have a parachute made out of whips and there are such items as the World's Most Interesting Bomb and the World's Smallest Nuclear Bomb. If that doesn't sell the game to you, I don't know what will. Regardless, Romain 'Spocky' Picot saw the virtue in this rather silly game, and has done us a great justice in submitting this 0:39:17 run, featuring out-of-bounds skips aplenty. In fact, the first thing I'm going to do when I post this update is watch this run, and if you have any taste at all, you'll probably do the same. Probably.

For a more traditional speedrun experience, you could always try this run of Resident Evil 2. Zombie horror games aren't really my thing, not enough six-armed dogs you see, but if flesh-eating mutants and titanic constructs of flesh and teeth are your thing, this will probably be yours. 'FierceKyo' chose the Claire A game mode on the GCN version for his run, finishing with a time of 1:08:46, an improvement of 0:07:39 over the PS2 version of the run.

Gothic is a game I can only describe as 'broken'. I remember doing an update for the 100% run, with a final time of almost 3 hours. The any% run I have here for you is considerably shorter, a mere 0:16:28, featuring as you might expect from such a short run of such a long game, large skips and resets.

Finally, a less broken addition to our game list. Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga, the sequel to Divine Divinity (what a name), is a reasonably standard action-RPG that reminds me a little of Drakan mixed with Diablo. Also you can turn into a dragon, which is pretty cool. Anyway, not much else to say about this run, other than that the runner is Patrik 'Pafi' Varjotie and his final time is 2:17:53, single-segment of course.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more procrastination to procrastinate. Until next time!

Quick question: What are the 7 best things about this day? I'm fairly certain that being woken up at 8AM by your flatmate sorting glass bottles won't quite make it but I have seven more suggestions that might just get on your list.

David Heidman Jr. has become well known for his love of Contra and quirky Indie platformers. It's the latter that gets him on the frontpage today with a submissions of Super Ninja Warrior Extreme, a game so underground that it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. As my extensive research capabilities are exhausted by plucking a game name into a search bar I now have unfortunately run out of things to say about this title so I'll just have you ponder something entirely different while I announce his final run time. 'Penguin Sandwich'. 0:08:12

Journey to Silius has long been on the list of games that deserves a proper marathon run and NTSC SDA submission. Luckily, 'ZakkyDraggy' delivered on both of these with a 0:11:17 run clocking in a mere 9 seconds faster than his marathon run earlier this month. If you're a fan of 8-bit run-and-guns this is certainly something you need to watch.

Gone Home is one of these first-person interactive story games that have been popping up in the past couple of years which are closer to visual novels than traditional games. 'your name here' (No, this is not a placeholder. If you want your name to appear here you have to submit a run of your own.) apparently didn't get the memo and treated the title as an ordinary game to run. As a result, he manages to completely ignore the entire storyline while still managing to spoil it for anybody that hasn't played it yet, all in a mere 0:00:48, which might be a new upset fans/minute record for SDA.

Tabletop RPG players unanimously agree that the Ravenloft campaign setting is one of the most intriguing places in the lore of D&D. 'gammadragon', however, seems to disagree as he skips past the entirety of Ravenloft: Stone Prophet to finish in a whopping 0:00:58. There's a reason there is no speedrunner class in AD&D after all. Roleplaying is just no fun if you don't bicker about the exact number and lengths of ropes to buy in a shop.

The Resident Evil series has devolved into games with incredibly silly plots, good controls and bad settings. I'd like to take some time to remind you of where it originally came from: games with incredibly silly plots, bad controls and good settings, such as Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Jake Tabor has taken the task of narrowly evading zombies to the extreme and produced a highly optimized run on the PC version in 0:45:10, over 4 minutes quicker than the old run while increasing the difficulty to hard. I'm slightly concerned Jake himself has been infected with a performance enhancing virus, so if he asks to bite you you should politely decline, just to be safe.

Sean 'MURPHAGATOR!' Murphy has started to take up a regular spot in these updates, usually accompanied by some 8-bit beat-em-up game you quite frankly should not play for yourself. This time he has branched out slightly with Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth, a 8-bit cross genre game you quite frankly should not play for yourself. In his own words, 'Wurm attempts to be 4 games in one, and falls flat on its face in all 4 game types,' so if you want to watch the tragedy unfold in all its glory, you'll have to expend some 0:27:54 of your time.

While we're on the subject of 8-bit beat-em-ups, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game is something that's actually worth playing and so 'Whitman_Price_' did just that. And he did so fast, improving the old time by almost two minutes to achieve a 0:33:59. COWABU-... What? I have to pay how much to licence that?

Now I'm left with a sudden inexplicable craving for pizza.

As LLCoolDave mentioned in his previous update, one of the downsides to having a marathon is that while the site sleeps, speedrunners don't, and we inevitably build up a significant backlog of runs we need to post. Hence, the next few updates will be heavier on the run count than previous updates have been. Rather than bore you with more verbiage about why this update is larger than its brethren, I'll just get to the part where I throw runs at you.

Patrick 'PJ' DiCesare appears frequently on our front page, and for good reason, as he seems to be one of the few speedrunners that doesn't suffer from chronic procrastination, seeing as he tends to actually complete his projects. His newest addition to our game list is Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, playing as NG+ Charlotte on Hard difficulty. His IL table totals 0:11:01.30, which is fairly quick considering that Charlotte is one of the two characters who does not possess a jump kick, in a game where jump kicks are 90% of the movement tech. Maybe we'll see some other characters pop up soon? Maybe?

Another gentleman I have had the pleasure of posting several runs for is Evgeny 'anarki' Gladkiy, and he has brought us some more Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne related deliciousness. This run in particular is a Dead on Arrival single-segment run, with a final time of 0:43:08, over 3 minutes faster than his previous submission. If vigilante angst is your thing, this is the run for you.

Call of Duty was the first in a line of realistic military first-person shooter games that have unfortunately come to dominate the FPS market. However, while the newer incarnations of the series are all the same recycled pish released year after year to milk people with no taste out of their hard earned money, (opinion mine) the original couple games were actually pretty fun to play. 'gndz' has completed a single-segment run on Greenhorn difficulty, with a final time of 1:43:48, which is about as much time as it took me to decide the recent games weren't worth playing.

RPG speedruns are an interesting breed. They're either an endurance test where menu skills and rote memorisation are king, for single-segment runs, or a demonstration of just how badly you can break the game over your knee if you reload enough times, as in segmented runs. First off, a single-segment run for you. Kingdom Hearts is fairly interactive as RPGs go, so execution is definitely a factor, and Daniel 'Sonicshadowsilver2' Tipton nails it with this 5:33:35 monster of a run.

As far as segmented RPG runs go, a perfect example would be this Final Fantasy 7 run. 'Kynos' has spent what I can only imagine to be a significant amount of time pummelling this game into submission (literally), cutting nearly a full hour off our previous best time with this 54 segment 6:44:49 showing. Whichever you may prefer, it is my solid belief that both types of run are worth watching.

To round out today's update, I present to you two runs of Blaster Master by our very own Benjamin 'UraniumAnchor' Cutler. UA continues his domination of the game with improvements to both the deathless and death abuse categories, with times of 0:38:49 for the deathless run and 0:32:53 for the death abuse run, improvements of 2:34 and 4:06 respectively. Sophia would be proud.

Speaking of which, for those of you who might have missed the awesomeness that was AGDQ, or those of you who want to relive those magic moments, UraniumAnchor has been hard at work getting high quality encodes of the marathon runs up for you. They're popping up HERE, and there's already a decent number of them available. So what are you waiting for?

Let's start today with a small riddle. What does the SDA queue have in common with the SDA staff in the past two weeks? It didn't sleep. There's tons of runs to be posted and most of us are still recovering from the two least relaxing weeks of vacation days in our years. As such, my usual thematic(?) updates are on hold until there is time to actually write them again. Instead, today's update comes with a 5th bonus run bundled in for your pleasure. Let's get right to it.

Mike 'mike89' McKenzie is a well known name around these parts. Gaining fame as 'English Mike' at CGDQ this Australian has vowed to quit speedrunning at least twice now. Considering his comeback features an excellent 0:15:18 full game run of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as the titular Sonic alongside an improvement to the Wing Fortress IL with a time of 0:01:44 I can hardly wait for him to quit again.

The Tomb Raider series has always been an excellent choice for speedrunning as every single instalment to the series is broken beyond belief. However, the speedrunning scene for those games has always been a bit isolated from the rest of the community. I hope that the recent exposure of Tomb Raider II can change that. Not only has the game been featured in the most recent AGDQ, 'MMAN' has also finished up a new Glitchless Single Segment run with a time of 1:43:56. If you want to see what this game looks like when a runner lets it behave roughly the way it was intended to, this is just the run for you.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has become a rather popular game for speedrunning and a lot has changed since we last featured it on SDA. Anders 'adde' Hed blesses the front page today with a Single Segment time of 1:26:19. When the runner himself describes his route as 'skipping all extra safety' you know you're in for an hour and a half of butt-clenching fun.

Pokémon Puzzle Challenge is the pointlessly branded GBC release of the Panel de Pon puzzle mechanic of shifting around blocks until you are three hours late for work and the pizza in your oven has set your kitchen on fire. Chains and Combos have to be carefully planned out to beat each foe in the fastest time possible, and 'CardsOfTheHeart' has done just that, clocking in at 0:16:06 on intense difficulty.

As our final entry for the day we return to the recently featured Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Japanese runner 奥村 'jibupo' 亮 decided that having a single run for Luigi on the game page just wasn't enough and added a 0:37:58 run through all the levels of the SNES version to it. The Lost Levels is famous for turning the basic mechanics of holding right and jumping occasionally into something that is surprisingly hard to beat but 'jibupo' makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

On that note, it's time for me to go back to AGDQ recovery by going to bed at 2PM. I'm not quite sure yet how that's supposed to fix my sleep schedule, but it seems like a very reasonable idea to me at the moment.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 has concluded, and what a success. We raised over $1,025,000 for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. As is tradition for us, this more than doubles last year's number.

A huge thanks is due for the more than 18000 donors, the hundreds of runners and fans who attended the event, and the dozens of folks who helped with setting up and run the event. We couldn't have done it without you.

Although it will be some time until we have individual encodes of the runs from the event, you can find the videos at our twitch archive in the meantime.

On a personal note, for a long time I thought maybe speed running could achieve the kind of popularity that deathmatch had back in the late 90s. I had visions of stages of players competing in races while an audience watched in awe. Last week at AGDQ 2014 I walked into the room about to start a Mega Man X race and my jaw dropped. The room was packed, full of people waiting to watch two runners do exactly that. I didn't expect one of them to be shirtless... but the rest was pretty spot on. Thanks again everyone, for making that vision I never told anybody about, come true.