All of the runs this time involve NES-games from a certain runner going by the name Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios, so the theme and common denominators are self-explanatory.

The first game that has been blessed by Elipsis' gentle touches on the D-pad is Eliminator Boat Duel. You can win either by racing your opponents or by sinking them. Our speed guru of this game obviously chose the latter whenever possible. This led to a time of 0:29:22 on expert difficulty. The improvement over the previous 0:30:26 (also by Elipsis) was done through some tighter execution and better strategies for pulling the opponents' plugs.

The second game is Marble Madness. While Eliminator Boat Duel was a NES-only title, Marble Madness has been released on more platforms than I care to list. The NES port has a long speedrun history, which has inevitably resulted in a very high level of optimization. Today, Elipsis brings us a top notch run that is currently the fastest run out there. The time is 0:02:45, eclipsing the previous SDA-run by two seconds (also done by Elipsis).

The third and last run is a 2p-run by the current two top players of Marble Madness, Steve 'Elipsis' Barrios & 'Toad22484'. While it's a short game, I can attest to how treacherously challenging it is. A 2p-run even more so with marbles getting in each other's way and navigating parts of the levels with the marbles off-screen. The difficulty of the run combined with getting the logistics to work for a 2p-run make this category quite inaccessible. However, our two runners decided to give it their best shot during an intensive session at this year's AGDQ. In the limited time they had together, they achieved a 0:03:17.

See you soon in NES part 2!