Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Yugi the Destiny is an introduction of sorts to playing Yu-Gi-Oh!. In this game the opponent is Yugi. Antonio Peremin has beaten him before and he has beaten him again, this time in 0:01:26, a seven second improvement over his previously published run. The improvement comes from playing the game with the sound and music turned off. There are other games where this is done (Heroes of Might and Magic 3 comes to mind) and it may become more common in the future.

I like Castlevania: Dracula X. True, the final boss is a bit of a troll and the game can be very hard, but the music is great, the graphics are good, and it’s Castlevania. 'lildingus' takes Richter Belmont on a walk, flip, and slide tour through a burning village and Dracula’s castle in 0:16:17, an improvement of 36 seconds. The big improvement comes in the form of a damage boost off of an Armor Knight in Stage 5 that helps Richter reach his goal faster. Like the previously published run, Maria and Annette are left behind to perish in the depths of Dracula’s abode. Maybe Richter will remember them one of these days…

What is it with Russian runners and realistic military shooters? I swear there's a 90% correlation between being a Russian runner and running games like Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In. But does that mean if you're Russian, you're more likely to run them, or if you run them, one cold Siberian morning you'll wake up huddled inside a matryoshka doll with no recollection of how it happened? Perhaps "I'm going in" were the last few words you might have been heard uttering before your sudden disappearance.

Once Mihail 'horned' Petrov had managed to hatch from his ogre egg (cause ogres have layers), he was seen flourishing not an AK, SPAS, or even a Deagle but a 2:35 improvement on the old Individual Levels table. Basically every level has been whetted down a lot or a little, down to 0:42:06 total. There's nothing to hate on in an FPS where velocities only top out once you've mastered the Way of the Bunny Rabbit, maximizing odds at winning a flash round of "The floor is lava" by staying in the air as much as possible, as well as teetering on chain link fences and prancing irreverently across furniture.

The only natural course for Horned to have set from here was right into the next assignment. This one has the pretense of "stealth", being called I.G.I.-2: Covert Strike. It did actually make a stealthy infiltration into China, where it was only banned for its depiction of the Chinese military as power-hungry and notably evil after six months of covert operations under a "fake ID": the copy sent to the censor board simply didn't have the China missions included!

The second run is a segmented self-improvemement of 3:43 down to 0:50:05, played on Easy. I gotta say both the games have very nice graphics for 2000 and 2003 respectively. In case you're a fan, you might be pleased to hear some subset of the old Norwegian team behind the games is working on a new sequel. News are sparse for now... that's probably cuz they've "went in" as per its title.

-----

I thought I'd say a few words on segmented runs in general seeing as they seem to also have "went in" lately. Please read the short preface on the forums and leave comments!

Hola! Abe and his Mudokon buddies return to SDA! While a recent run of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee showed Abe saving all of his friends from becoming food, this time Sam 'Samtastic' Locke has decided that the fewer Mudokons Abe bothers with the better and he gives us a quick tour of Abe’s world in 0:10:18, beating his own large-skip glitches single-segment run by 10 seconds. Samtastic has given us some audio commentary as well this time to enhance the experience of this any% tour. Like the 100% run, Samtastic has the game audio set to Spanish.

Spore reminds me of several games: E.V.O: The Search for Eden, The Sims, Age of Empires, Civilization, and Alpha Centauri come to mind. Spore is divided into different phases and each provides a different experience than the previous episodes. 'KinglyValence' takes on the hard mode and makes it past the Great Barrier to meet a higher power in 1:03:21. Spore can have a lot of variance based on prior playthroughs. KinglyValence shows us how the game works from its “out of the box” state.I suggest you read the notes so that your immersion into virtual biological evolution, hunting and gathering, tribal diplomacy, city building, and space exploration can serve you well should you decide to give Spore a try some day.

Cthulhu and Co. are no strangers to SDA. The Old Ones can be seen in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and Prisoner of Ice. Wilson Luiz 'VonDrake' Oliveira, who provided the latter run, returns to the dark world of H.P. Lovecraft in Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet. ‘VonDrake’ explores a dreary town, crypt, forest, and even learns a new language in 1:01:19 as he tries to stop something otherworldly from… well, I can’t say any more without giving too much away. This any% run does skip a few key events so you may want to read the runner’s comments to get a better understanding of what is going on in this cool adventure game. For an ever better understanding, you may want to read Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” and The Shadow over Innsmouth. Of course, you may also want to play the game. For those of you who play the CD version of the game, you will see a whopping two extra characters... who you cannot interact with. You may also need a magnifying glass to deal with copy protection if you are playing the floppy disk version.

So sometimes individual runners' runs really start heaping up in the archive, for different categories or different games. At some point, this will pique our curiosity. Who is this guy? What does he want? Does he want attention? Does that mean less attention for LotBlind?! We believe that while run comments can and are being used to quench man's diabolical thirst for run-related info-may-schön, there are underlying and overarching aspects to every runner's "career" that we generally ever learn about sporadically and outside such a context. Hence the Community Column. If you are a long-term contributor, of speedruns or otherwise, you may find yourself beckoned to the podium and asked to share your story. Now let us hear that of someone whose works deck the walls all over one of the more strange, or should I say ODD collections...

---

 

Hello everybody – it’s Samtastic here. I am very privileged that I get to write on this blog. As you may or may not know, I am an active Oddworld speedrunner. I speedrun the classic Abe games – Oddysee and Exoddus and I also speedrun New ‘n’ Tasty. I try to run every category we have on speedrun.com but right now I am focused on speedrunning Oddysee any% as yesterday me and Legna have found a way on setting up the bee DDG that is similar to the TAS that Dooty made in 2014.

Here’s how I got into Oddworld speedrunning. In 2009, I saw an Italian YouTuber called LoStraniero91 and he finished his Abe’s Oddysee walkthrough. After his walkthrough, he did a maximum casualties walkthrough which he called ‘Kill All Mudokons’. Then after that, he made a segmented any% NMS speedrun. I was amazed on all the tricks he could do. It wasn’t until 2010 when I started speedrunning without streaming my gameplay. I didn’t know that speedrunners streamed their gameplay – so I just practised the game and learnt some glitches along the way.

In 2012, a British guy called Sligfantry taught me how to do the DDG and the stop turn glitches. With this, I was able to do more segmented speedruns and brought my time to 41:06 SDA timing (see video here). Also, I managed to do a 100% segmented speedrun with the DDG which can be watched here.

Then in June 2014, Dooty and I made a TAS together with a new way to skip Scrabania and Paramonia with the bees. The emulator we used at the time doesn’t load PSX games properly and it’s very hard to encode audio but then Feos managed to encode it matching it’s movie length, that TAS can be watched here.

In February 2015, I completed my first single segment speedrun of Abe’s Oddyse with ALL the stop turns and auto turns and I managed to beat the game in 11:08 without skipping the cinematics. (here)

Now, I am trying to beat my any% world record again with a new way to set up the bee DDG which is similar to how the TAS does it.

In 2016, I managed to complete a 100% speedrun of New ‘n’ Tasty without using the DDG. I did this as a celebration on reaching 2000 subscribers on YouTube. That video can be viewed here.

So yeah that is all my skilful speedruns I have done so far. I also done an Abe’s Exoddus 100% run here on SDA, but I feel like that can be improved much more in single segment which I hope to improve after my Oddysee any%.

That’s all for now. Be sure to check out my speedrun.com profile for updates if I beat my PB on any%.

 

---

 
Thanks to Sam for providing us with so many runs over the course of the past several years! The runs being published alongside this update are:

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee; 1:18:16; a difficult single-segment run with all of the wily wiles and tricky tricks to rescue every Mudokon (a rare case of magnanimous behaviour from Abe).

Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty!; 0:54:35; played on Hard difficulty and also single-segment.

We're also looking for another front page updater. Please see the advertisement here. There's also still a "vacancy" for wiki editor. And finally thanks to everyone who has been doing verifications or PRC. The former is easy to get into: once you have one accepted run on the site (or have generally hung around a while) you'll have gotten an idea of the quality requirements and can help us by weighing in on how good other runners' efforts are looking, whether it looks ripe for publication or not just yet. Check out any verification thread for the instructions and feel free to go back to previous verifications to see what kinds of things were pointed out and discussed.

The Might and Magic series was one of the finest examples of PC RPG games. Its history encompasses 28 years between the first 1986 Wizardry-like inception to the pseudo-old-school Might & Magic X from 2014. While most of the series got high praise, Might and Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer was the first that fans felt was a step backwards with a lackluster plot, weaker characters and less customizability. Today, 'Snabel' takes up the role of the Necromancer again and flies and warps around Jadame to save the world from the elementals in 0:08:00. This improves on the previous by around six minutes, however a new trick causes this run to inhabit a "with large-skip glitches" kind of domain so you'll be able to find the old run on the game page as well.
 
The Metal Gear series is also widely acclaimed. While its future is unknown following the departure of Hideo Kojima from the decreasingly of-interest publisher Konami, it certainly had its share of victories with one of the popular titles in the series being Metal Gear Solid 3 HD. While the original was an incredible game, the HD version brought the unforgettable experience to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 with beautifully updated graphics and other minor tweaks. 'Mr_Snawk' here takes control of Naked Snake, aka Big Boss, to complete his covert mission at 1:19:25, improvement of 46 seconds to an already-slick-looking single-segmented run on European Extreme difficulty, achieving Foxhound rank.
 
If you are familiar with video games published by LJN, you may notice a common theme of gameplay controls and mechanics feeling counterintuitive. One must take extra care when planning to speedrun such a game, and Beetlejuice is no exception. For 'ktwo' it was one thing to work around the confusing rules the game put before him, another to manage deaths that are seemingly unavoidable. It required lots of luck to get things going his way to bag the time of 0:11:29, as the game can be as unpredictable and unforgiving as its star Betelgeuse himself. ktwo also released (as he has been in the habit of doing) a parallel TAS, link right here.

Ever turn on your Nintendo 64 or Playstation 2 and watch your character wander in a direction and you’re not giving them the input to? This means your controller is poorly calibrated, which is normally quite annoying, if easily remedied, but it's also something Phillip 'ZELLLOOO' Shanklin takes full advantage of it in his Doom 64 running to make his brimstone adventure go by as quickly as possible. Aside from the movement boost you have already seen before, there's a big new trick in town – something that makes barriers more like a stop sign than a physical obstacle. The demon legions are disposed of in 0:29:27 in one any% segment on the Be Gentle difficulty, 2:54 faster than his previously published run. The hordes of Hell never stood a chance.

Some racing games want you to come in first place in every race while others are okay with you winning most of them. R.C. Pro-Am II falls into the latter category. 'ktwo' wins the number of races needed to beat the game and does so in 0:31:18 in this any% single segment run. Watch as the vehicles blaze across the tracks! Be shocked as the wicked green car begins its campaign of revenge against the protagonist’s red one! Gasp in awe as the game throws oil slicks and bomber planes in the way! Cheer as ktwo beats the odds and wins both the trophy and the hearts. This is racing drama at its finest!

Meanwhile down in the sewers, there is another competition going on. Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael are trying to determine who the best martial artist is among them. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters lets you choose a turtle and get to fighting. Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios goes with Leonardo and comes in with a plan for each of his opponents. Elipsis takes down Leonardo's friends and the other combatants in a quick 0:05:53. This game was one of the last released for the NES by Konami in the North America and PAL regions. Check it out and see how it stacks up to the other versions of Tournament Fighters. Cowabunga!

I like Contra. The game is fun and challenging. Beating the game without the 30 lives code is very possible with good memory and reflexes. How can the Contra experience become better? With friends! Piotr 'TheMexicanRunner' Delgado Kusielczuk & Matthew 'AngryLanks' Wissig have teamed up and taken down Red Falcon in 0:09:51, a three second improvement over the former run! Contra runs are notoriously hard to get lower times in so any lower time is a good improvement. The lower time comes from finding a good use for the laser while still retaining the spread gun action that we all know and love. Watch this run!

Sometimes improvements come in frames and not in seconds. Where's an Egg? is a case of frame based improvement and Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios has decided that his egg finding run from 2015 is just too slow. Elipsis has taken advantage of a Windows option and combined his mouse and keyboard to find Stalin's missing egg in 0:00:00, which is one frame! You've probably heard the phrase "Don't blink or you'll miss it!" and this is one of those cases. You may have trouble seeing the "blind accusation" shot input but you will certainly see the outcome. Watch as the ending cutscene takes longer than the game itself! Not even RPGs with very long endings can make that claim.

Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble, like its two SNES predecessors, has a GBA port that expands the game by adding a minigame or two and another world, along with a completely different soundtrack by David Wise. Small changes have been made to the mechanics as well, which is demonstrated in this River Race run. Jordan 'Greenalink' Greener shows us the difference in the way the game handles the race timer and beats Brash Bear's race record in 0:00:10.50. The main difference here is that the race timer stops and stays that way. Brash Bear never had a chance.

Sight. Sound. Smell. Taste. Touch. Dead people... and rather vapidly, the future? I'm assuming we're referring to the sense of which future outcomes will emerge from which present decisions. Skeptics say it's just preparation and all the semblance of serendipity – rote commitments to memory. Us speedrunnin' folk, we knows. We knows. And so does the cadavers.

Can't say we've had any Bring-Yer-Own-Adven... umm... Choose-Yer-Own-Adventure books in our purportedly rather eclectic displays as of yet. Someone fond of them but unable to curb the instinct to "nudge" the rolls whipped up their very own interpreter called Seventh Sense and stuck in Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series of adventures (summing up to Lone Wolf: Seventh Sense) so as to RPG-ify them. Automating aspects such as all the bookkeeping and die rolls, he finally put an end to the unrestrained "flip slips" which is evidenced at least in this one 0:10:50 going "by-the-book" in more ways than one, thumbing through the first cycle of three, titled Kai. Let's welcome another new runner, Robert 'ItanoCircus' Reid, into the venerable Order of the SDA Front Page! The run may be fairly short, but it's chock-full of insidious numbers to remember, with branching paths depending on RNG, all having been subjected to thorough investigation to ensure the greatest economy in routing. BTW: you might wanna download the HQ encode or better of this run as the default web player quality is too low to be able to read the text.

So Wikipedia doesn't have a page for 2016's Rabi-Ribi yet, but it does suggest you meant "rabbi ribs". Being somewhat un-e-jew-cated on this topic, I'll just presume rabbis might be on the lanky side on average (although there's seemingly some evidence to the opposite on a site called "thejewniverse"), so let's just neatly tie things together by pointing out the slim proportions of every character (like, you can see their ribs) in this bullet-riddled cutesy metroidvania run again by 'Deleted User'. The game is very stimulating for speedrunning: not only does it feature a specialized speedrunning mode with cutscenes... cut, there's also every kind of detail and intricacy to keep tabs on. Movement, dodging, aiming, health management, specials, cash etc. Even the soundtrack has a good deal of variety from intense dubstep down to something that reminds me of Tchaikovski with plenty of "game music" filling it out.

While the last published run – despite the high level of difficulty inherent in single-segmented low% runs going for the Post-game ending – may have been somewhat premature, all of that gets erased today together with the last 28 minutes of the run... well, actually, it's bits and pieces from the middle that are getting swiped. Many parts are just visibly faster, as they would have had to be for a 2:18:45.55.

The contrast between 1995's Rayman and Rayman 2: The Great Escape from '99 is noticeable. I remember the first game to be a patchwork quilt of worlds without much rhyme or reason to them but in The Great Escape we have an overarrrching theme of pirates. And caves. And things. Whether the environments were somewhat homogenized, the gameplay, by contrast, got a lot more diverse. At one point you get to ride plums through a pool of lava and at another you're running from the actually rather chilling jaws of death. It got releases on everything and its mom, but is here played, by 'Manocheese', on the N64. The 100% completion doesn't prevent "the great escape" from game world boundaries, abusing a heap of game logic for unanticipated cheekiness across different areas. There's evidence of a long-term relationship with one's game with even lag reduction – heck, even lag INduction – having been paid their dues. 3D platforming ain't easy, and this 2:29:47 displays a very high standard of expertise. It's also highly accessible, even coming with a long-haul audio commentary on track two. Oh, and randomly Italian is the fastest language. Mamma mia!

Right. So my feed got randomly fed with this Narcissa Wright interview w/ Liz Ryerson who I've mainly known for her coverage of that old-skool Doom mapping. It runs through the keypoints of the history of speedrunning, touching on high score runs, which is an interesting sideline at least whenever you get a bonus for being fast. 100% completion tend to be the preferred take on the same general idea, and of course sometimes they're one and the same. Other topics visited: SpeedRunsLive, tons about Ocarina of Time etc. stuff that Narcissa (formerly Cosmo) is known for; are games less broken than they were?; speedrun categories and why some people don't like glitched runs; Machinima gets a little "shout-out";  cum other topics from the none-too-distant past. This interview I happened upon myself, but feel free to use the news tip form if you'd like some extra publicity for your speedrun events etc.

Onto the runs. I'd like to trumpet out a minor improvement to the The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion any%, lest the game fall into such. The time was 3:49. With better overall execution and NPC luck, Antonio Peremin grinded it down to 0:03:47. The category is still the same: Single-segment with Large-skip glitches and resets – all the usual out-of-bounds schenanigans that is. It's looking very polished now so perhaps even those of you who missed it last time will want to play catch-up today.

This continuation run for Ikari Warriors, now with deaths, wins the "most dreamlike" award. It's a combination of factors. The way the screen keeps scrolling lullingly ahead; The random vaguely representational forms appearing and disappearing; The robotic delay-perish jitterbug; The repetitive sound effects (including something like a sleeper's exhalations) and unpredictably resetting music; Indeed the times when the player just hovers through the landscape as if having realized a lucid dream; The sudden pink, and the general absence of exact physical boundaries. I like to think the G.I. is being pulled towards some very morbid point somewhere to the South-East like Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House, but aren't they all?

The game also has this unusual property: normally the ones where the fastest is pressing up to move in a straight line are the least interesting for speedrunning. In this case, and even though 'ktwo' did tell me earlier that it might actually be easier to charge steadfast through than taking your time, all of the near misses and painstaking planning make that straight line into electrified barbed wire and so the parsimony of input switching makes this 0:26:35 a better watch if anything. If you missed my more concrete delineations of the game and what's special about ktwo's accomplishments in the July update (second one down), peruse them now, please!

I can't tell whether or not it was good publicity or bad for the Mira Loma custom-boat-builders-since-1969 for their name to be stickered onto a game whose equivalent hyphenated-through descriptor would read "custom-boat-disassemblers-since-1991". It does sound like a symbiotic relationship. Whatever you think, Eliminator Boat Duel licenses the single most appropriate brand of aquatic chariot available in an all-out waterway one-on-one sink-or-swim winner-takes-it-all collision fest of epic proportions. But you're the choir, and I'm the preacher, because this 0:28:34 is Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios' fourth coming altogether, if you only count even this one game. It's the Expert difficulty improved by 0:26 due to things that are either more or better, or sometimes more better.

You can't tell me "Elimonator" on the edge of the game's cartridge is a misspelling. "E-li-mo-nay-ted!"

Antonio Peremin has submitted a lot of runs to SDA over the last year and we are proud to present improvements to two runs. Both are in the Yu-Gi-Oh! series and feature fast card action. Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Joey the Passion is one of three Power of Chaos games. Antonio has taken his 0:55 and lowered it down to 0:00:49.  This is accomplished through better luck with the paper-scissors-rock bout and another small optimization of playing without any sound effects or music. Antonio does the same in Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Kaiba the Revenge, closely related. This bout used to take 2:03 but now takes 0:01:37. Both runs are easy to follow even if you are not familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh! so make sure to give these a watch.

'Tigger77' has been around for a while. I was lucky to meet and hang out with him at the first AGDQ. We now have a new game on our games list thanks to him. Soul Calibur II joins the near 1300 other games that we have a run for. Tigger uses Voldo to slash, stab, and ring out his opponents in 0:00:47.48. This run is single-segment, arcade mode, and played on easy mode. As of this writing, it is one of the fastest known runs in these categories utilizing Voldo. It's a bit cheesy but so are some croissants.

We’ve got an improvement for Bugdom 2 so get ready for some insectoid out-of-bounds adventuring. 'Newtmanking' has decided that finding Skip’s (the game’s main character) knapsack in 17:09 was no longer acceptable after someone beat his time and has now recovered the knapsack and stopped the bees in 0:15:34, eschewing walls in the process to victory. I was not familiar with this game prior to watching the run for this update and I was surprised by the variety of the levels and objectives in this game. Check this one out.

----

Someone asked about how you can both stream and record locally so the stream has splits and your running commentary etc. but the local recording is clean. This can be done at least in OBS. Instructions for separate audio recording. As for the video, just make sure nothing is overlayed directly onto the game itself and it can later be cropped for an SDA submission.