No, unfortunately I haven't invented a time machine. If I had I'm sure my bank account would be in better shape *cough*. This improvement of the past is a fictional past... A Link to the Past, the classic third game in the Legend of Zelda series. Mike 'TSA' Damiani is probably the only guy in the world to claim ownership of 'every zelda ever' including the unheard of cd-i games. He's been spending nearly all the time since his Ocarina of Time run working on LttP and finally got a run that is six and a half minutes faster than the previous one: 1:44:45. It contains the only - to my knowledge - use of a damage-boost (a Quake runner's best friend) in a Zelda speed run. And now I'll be bored at my parents' for a few days, zzzzz!

Today we bring you two runs that are amazingly similar, yet very different. First, David Gibbons has improved his Half-Life 2 run by over 42 minutes to get 2:14:58 using a large variety of new time-savers, such as skipping the bugbait and the rebel base by walking on the sky, like how was done in the first Half-Life at the dam. Since they never actually leave the level (levels have to be sealed) it's not against my rules, they're just walking along on the TOP of it!

Next, I have done my own run of Metroid Echoes even though for two weeks after the game was out I said I wouldn't. I decided to do one when the Dark Suit was skipped. There's two other major sequence breaks in the run as well, and I finished in a time of 2:11, something that seemed unlikely a month ago. While it's rather unpolished because I rushed, I feel it's a great example of what will be possible with further refinement.

So what's the big coincidence? Well the times for both of these runs is very close, both 2 hours and 10+ minutes. The games were released on the same day (depending on who you ask), and David and I finished our runs on the same day as well! Enjoy the runs before the universe implodes from such crazy events.

Geez it's been a week since an update... I meant to do this one on Thursday but I got drunk off my ass with 2 friends instead. The feature of the update is a run on a new game, Grand Theft Auto III. This is another game with lots of ports on various platforms, and probably no conceivable way to compare times on them. The run that Wesley Corron did was on the PlayStation 2 version, and he got a time of 2 hours 6 minutes and 1 second in 10 segments.

I've added a new category to the Super Smash Bros. Melee page, 100 Man Melee. It's basically the same stuff as 10 Man Melee, but because there's 10x the wireframes to KO, they last a lot longer (15x longer in fact). All of the vids are by 'PYh189' and you could have got them for months now at his site if you knew about it. Also there's an improvement in Break the Targets, 'Doraki' improved his Fox-PAL vid by 0.03 seconds to get 0:00:07.20. I advise hitting mute before watching. Someone on the forum said it best... why do smash players think they're disk jockeys?

Four more muted vids are available on the Mario Kart 64 page, slight improvements over previous times: Jeffrey Gutierrez improved two of Eric Habrich's times, Frappe Snowland by 0.02 seconds to get 0:01:40.93 and Yoshi Valley lap by 0.03s to get 0:00:26.43. Meanwhile, Eric improved his own times on Royal Raceway by 0.07s to get 0:02:23.29, and Toad's Turnpike lap by 0.20s to 0:00:49.21.

The third Castlevania game to get a speed run for the archive is Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for PlayStation 2. Matt Trent did two segmented runs on it, with the normal Leon character in 1:17:37, and with the bonus Joachim character in 0:47:09. Unfortunately that's all there is in this update because of some complications with the other things... so, you'd better enjoy this as it's all you're getting!

Metroid continues to be the most popular series to do runs on (besides the original Quake anyway), and two more runs are in this update. Mark 'Kridly' Meisner did a Single-segment run of Metroid Fusion and got a time of 0:51, only one minute slower than Matthew's segmented run. The video length is almost an hour and a half, 74% longer than the game's time... thanks a lot Adam!

The first 'speed' run on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, from now on called just Metroid Echoes has been hastiliy done by well-known Prime-player 'kip'. The run is more of a proof of concept video showing that the game is possible on Hard mode in low% conditions. The lowest percentage is 22%, the same as Prime's, but Prime's 22% comes from skipping 7 major items and Echoes has none. It looks very unlikely that anything will be skipped due to the nature of how items are attained and needed. Kip's time is 3:37, nearly twice his similar 'who cares' hard 22% on Prime, showing the extra length of Echoes vs Prime. But the video's total length is only 4.5 hours, a mere 24% longer than the game time, due to loading elevator & portal cutscenes since all other cutscenes can be skipped! If only the credits could be *grumble*.

Two new runs of Metroid Prime were rushed to completion in early November to be done before the players received their copy of Echoes. Since I'm not aware of any other runs that were being done, these will probably be the last runs on Prime for quite a while, as everyone is concentrating on Echoes now.

It's been over a year since I posted my 100% in 1:37 to launch SDA on the path away from being a Quake-only site. In the month afterwards, I wrote up commentary and added up all the mistakes I thought were visible, and in the end I realized that less than 1:30 is possible if you're crazy enough, even with what was known when I did my run. Well there's been a few new things now, and the route has been tweaked a bit, and my run was even beat by one mere minute by kip, but now there is a proper smashing of my run by Paul 'Bartendorsparky' Evans. He took only 3 weeks to do his run (I took 3 months) but the result is even more amazing. The final time is 1:28, available in the usual low/normal/high quality flavors.

Besmir 'miles' Sheqi practiced a bit more and then redid his 100% on the European version and got a time of 1:47, 11 minutes faster than his previous. The route for 100% for pal vs any% gets botched up compared to the ntsc route even more due to the dumb changes that Retro did. Thankfully, there are no such changes in the PAL version of Echoes because of the near simultaneous release.

In keeping with the theme of the previous update, the above runs have some problems. Sparky's run is hung up in a non-moving queue at archive, about 700 minutes unchanged at the time of updating. Miles's run didn't get uploaded to Fileplanet until today, so the FP links for it won't work until around 3:30am Eastern time. Hopefully you can figure out how to get things in the meantime. Also, if you've been having trouble getting the Half-Life 2 run, read my forum post that might help. Oh and if anyone out there can donate some mirrors for the site... it'd help!

David Gibbons, famous FAQ writer and speed-runner, decided almost right away to do a run of last month's new PC game, Half-Life 2. After a few practice runs and shortcut devising, he hammered out a run with 71 parts... most of which are because the engine cuts off a demo recording on a level load, something that they might fix in about 10 patches like the first Half-Life if we're lucky. He managed to get a time of 2:57:35, just barely under 3 hours. In the time since he finished there's already been a few more tricks discovered; the thread on the forum is very active, but I'm sure this run contains quite a few already. Either way it's a great way to see how the plot of HL2 starts, unfolds, and ends, leaving you hanging, if you haven't played the game yet... that's what I got out of it!

This run would have been up about 6 hours ago if a few people at archive.org hadn't decided that speed runs and any other movie that's game related didn't belong in the movies section but instead in software. What kind of sense does that make? Many hundreds of items were shifted around with no notice to me or others, such as the Machinima collection's curator, and the result was hundreds of broken links. Thankfully the download links to the files still work, but the 'info pages' do not, so they're temporarily removed from demo.pl. I was unable to add anything new until Simon came online to remind me he's on my side and help out.. so, it's a little late but the run is online for now. Whether it'll still be up when I get out of bed is another question.

There are two new Break the targets vids for SSBM. 'marth1' managed to about smash the Mario time, getting an 0:00:08.36, 0.27 seconds better than 'Senju'. The other vid is another PAL run, on Fox this time, whose aerial forward+a move has a better range on PAL... why Nintendo has to change such tiny things between versions I'll never know... but the result is a 0:00:07.23 by 'Doarki', compared to the 7.28s on NTSC.

When I said no updates for 'probably a week' I totally forgot about the US traditional turkey-killing holiday called Thanksgiving that took me away from my computer to be bored at my parent's house for 4 days. When I got back on Sunday I had to try out some of the latest Echoes breakages, such as skipping the Dark Suit, and fix up some things in the 100% scans & items walkthrough I wrote for gamefaqs... and that of course delayed an update here. And the new things started piling in. I'm only updating with about half of the things tonight, and hopefully the rest will be up by Friday.

A while back Ben Fitcher did some more runs on Max Payne on a different setting, New York Minute mode. The previous runs were done on Fugitive, or easy skill and didn't display a time, so we just measured the real time of everything including cutscenes. NYM actually keeps track of time by starting you at 1 minute and counting down, and adding time when you get kills. Finding out the actual total time in a level means either keeping track of what was added and doing a bunch of math, or checking the total time at the next level and comparing to the total time at the start and doing a little less math. I've put these off for too long and only realized this tonight, and instead of trying to verify the times I'll just post them... if something is wrong, someone will surely point it out, right?

A run on a game that I honestly never expected to see an improvement on... has been improved! Nathan Jahnke, my helpful capturing sla....err, assistant, decided he didn't really like two deaths on his Alien vs. Predator run as the alien. He really wanted to do it with no deaths at all, but because of a lot of forced damage, determined that just isn't happening... so he settled for one death instead. The result is an 0:08:48 run, 1 minute and 49 seconds faster than the previous one.

The first Single-segment run of Metroid Prime has finally been recorded. I tried some SS 100%s myself, and managed a 1:59 once, and kept meaning to try more but haven't. Anyway, this SS is an any%, and the time is 1:13 by Shawn Jones, better known as 'smilingjack13'. He includes a great many tricks that you wouldn't expect to see in an SS run, especially the one-shot Thardus dash. The famous 'bars' earlier in the run took quite a few tries though. Single-segment runs like this really show how the runner is capable of dealing with true random crap, since normally if you get something really bad you just reset and try the segment again. Shawn also gets shafted by the lack of pb refills, something which will certainly plague runners of Echoes!

Another runner for Mario 64's 16-star completion has come to take the current record, and this time it was by no small amount. Ilari Pekkala beat the run from earlier this month by 4 minutes and 21 seconds to get an amazingly low 0:20:56. He gets yet another set of stars for the 15 before the glitches set in... no one can seem to agree on which ones really are the fastest. The next step for this run would be under 20 minutes, but Ilari's run seems very polished; it will take some dedication to do it!

There haven't been any Mario Kart 64 vids for a while, so I thought maybe the players were all sleeping. Today I received a new record for Yoshi Valley though, 0:01:26.37 by Jeffrey Gutierrez, 0.25 seconds faster than Eric. No sound though :-\

Yeah, that's only half the stuff I have on my plate.

As promised in the last update, the Contra: Shattered Soldier PS2 run from Mike Uyama is now available. He did a 100% hit-rate run (S-rank on every stage) and finished in a time of 0:37:51. As usual with games with no timer, my start & end points might not be the best choice, especially for games like this that I haven't played. I have to relay on moving things and fades to determine the start and end of control, my standard for timing timerless games. As long as I use the same criteria for any future runs on the same game, it's fair no matter what though.

David Gibbons has realized after 2 months of his first year of college that there is still time for playing games, and he whipped up a 100% speed run of Banjo Kazooie, the N64 classic. Single-segment & bladder-stressing as usual, he clocks in at 2:55:01 on the game clock, which isn't counting various cutscenes so the real time is about 3 hours and 10 minutes. The definition of 100% for this game is debatable, but I said he only needed the jiggies, notes and honeycombs because that's what's listed on the game's 'view totals' screens. Collecting all the extra mumbo tokens serves no purpose, and the cheato books are a bit out of the way and not needed.

My copy of Metroid Prime 2 is just hours away from arriving, and here I am posting another run on the original. Benjamin 'Ekarderif' Feng was trying to beat kip's 100% a couple months ago, but managed to screw it over with a fatal mistake... I pulled the same thing back in January. Although I never did another run, Ekard decided he'd try to improve Inferno's hard any% run. After three short weeks he finished up and got a time of 1:24, 8 minutes faster than I_M. I kept nagging him to redo the final part because it's a bit lacking, and I wanted him to equal 1:23 which was the record for any% on normal for a long time last year... but he wouldn't budge... something about playing echoes. The frigate escape has also been improved, but not by 'kip', by a guy in Sweden who got a copy of the NTSC version and a capture card to record (easier said than done). TRH's time is 0:04:29.27, 1.74 seconds faster than kip's. He threw in three more dash jumps to be able to get this much... will the escape ever reach the magic 0:04:30 mark?

Newcomer Mark Korsak has submitted an improvement to the 16-star run on Super Mario 64. He collects a variety of different stars than Brad's run from June and finishes 44 seconds faster in a time of 0:25:17. A bit sloppy here and there, especially with the first 'mips door glitch', but the later stairs glitches go off without a hitch!

I've added a Halo: Combat Evolved page which includes individual-level legendary difficulty runs that have been available for a few months now from the archive speed runs collection. They were part of a speed run competition "Going Nowhere Fast" on bungie.org. The files are all in .mov format and show bad signs of interlacing; so if anyone can improve the times with proper divx files ... :-)

A few weeks ago I received a submission on Donkey Kong 64 from Wouter Jansen, getting all 201 bananas. If you've ever played this game you know it's huge... he took over 13 hours. Now while it's not actually written in the rules, I've told many people that I'd like to limit runs on the site to under 7 hours. I feel that anything longer that that just won't have an audience, and it becomes increasingly difficult to make a truly impressive run when it's that long. Although I never actually watched much of it, two people who did said it wasn't really much of an attempt at a speed run. The game auto saves and you can't copy the file, so you have to take whatever you do on your first try. Although Banjo Kazooie above does the same thing, it's short enough to just SS it and get something great, as David demonstrates. In this case though I just decided to place the video in archive's "game replays" section as a 101% demonstration video, and you can find it here. Although I can put other such 'not quite speed runs' up, I don't want to take away time from actual speed runs to do that. So please don't go rushing out and do hundreds of other 'heres how to do x' in a game and expect me to put it up there for you.

And finally, don't expect another update until probably a week... with Echoes here I'll be playing like crazy, and I got all but three things posted in this update. One of those has been lingering for a while, which I apologize for, but I'll get it up eventually. Another was delayed just because someone didn't write comments in time! The other I simply haven't looked at yet.

A large number of Resident Evil speed runs were submitted by Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody and have taken over a week for my helpful slave Nate to capture/process/export/upload and for me to do the watching/importing/html-ing work... so it's time for one big RE blowout!

Damien did no less than 5 runs on Resident Evil 2. This game has been released on many platforms, and until I can see others in action to understand their timing eccentricities I'll just list the game as a PlayStation game, since he played on the Dual Shock edition. In all runs he plays on normal skill and achieves an A rank, which for Claire & Leon means not being allowed to use first aid sprays or infinite-ammo weapons. Since it's possible to get faster times on lower ranks, the A rank will act as the '100%' category for this game. Except for Hunk anyway, because the rank there is determined solely on time! In usual Dragondarch fashion, all runs are Single-segment as well!

• Claire A in 1:25:34.
• Claire B in 1:23:42.
• Leon A in 1:19:50.
• Leon B in 1:25:22.
• Hunk in 0:03:22.44.

Next he took on the almost-original-version of Resident Evil. He played on the Arrange mode featured in the Director's Cut version, which just rearranges a few items...I think. If there's any other differences I'm sure he'll tell me when I've explained it wrong. Since I've only played the GameCube REmake, it was interesting for me to see what the original game was like. I especially found it funny that you had to have a 'walking up the stairs' loading cutscene in the opening mansion room.

• Chris in 1:36:22.
• Jill in 1:29:05.

Since these runs were all captured by Nate, they get the usual low/normal/high quality treatment. For those who've never tried an HQ file, you should know that you need a really good computer to actually watch them without lag. Probably close to 2 GHz. Obviously my mere p3-450 doesn't come close, and is the reason why I want 'normal' quality where it is. Some of these runs are also available on Nate's DVDs, and he has added a free-shipping discount if you buy the entire volume 2 set. If you check the list you might notice a run on disk #8 with the Shinobi 3 run that isn't here yet... well, it'll be in the next update, don't worry. :-p

Finally, Damien wasn't the only Resident Evil runner in this update. Stacy 'Kitty' Corron did a Chris run on the REmake, the first RE game listed at SDA with a run as Jill. I complained that nobody wanted to do a run as Chris, and finally it's been done. She got a time of 1:55:37 and did it in 4 segments.

Tonight's update features three games that all start with that oh-so-curvy letter S, including a brand new game to the archive, Silent Hill for PlayStation. Brandon '19Duke84' Armstrong completed a run on normal skill in a time of 0:35:29, which he mentioned on the forum a few weeks ago. The Silent Hill thread there was started back in June, and finally there's a run on one of the games in this series, which to me just seems like a guy running around with a magic glo-light.

Mike Uyama took a break from Mega Man X to improve the existing run on the Genesis game Shinobi III and got a time of 0:29:00, over 12 minutes faster than the previous one! He also played on 'extreme' mode but that only gives you less lives, so it has almost no effect and isn't a new category.

The final spectacular S-game is SSBM with a new round of Japanese Break the Targets videos from 'Senju'. Of course, the announcer still says 'Ready'... I guess the japanese are just expected to know that English word?

• Mario's time was brought down to 0:00:08.63 from 8.67s.
• Peach was improved by 0.09s to 0:00:10.16.
• Ice Climbers was improved to 0:00:11.78, 0.12 seconds better than before with a slight change at the start.
• Young Link throws a boomerang quicker to bring the time down to 0:00:05.06, 0.12 seconds faster than before.
• Pikachu is now 0:00:07.30, 0.05s faster than before.

Even more Metroid Prime running madness ensues in the brink of the Echoes release... how many more runs will there be for this game in the next week? The low% record that was listed on the page was 23%, this was the lowest possible collection rate for several months, but then the boost ball was skipped thanks to a series of logic-defying tricks. Because of those tricks, only one person had even achieved any kind of 22% game, much less a speed run, until Mr. kip came along and did his 22% on hard. I had planned to keep 23% as a category even once a 22% run was done just because 23% is much easier to do... but suddenly a lot of people did 22% runs. Paul 'Bartendorsparky' Evans, who holds the 1:15 record for a 23% run managed to whip up a 22% run in 1:29. Yeah, it's 14 minutes slower, but with low% the rule is always 'less is better' before time is considered. There was a slight problem with him whipping through the run in just a week.

Robert 'Trebor' Nobles was the first to do the crazy 22%, and he had been working on a 22% speed run for a much longer time... he planned it to be the ultimate 22% speed run. In order to not steal the thunder from Trebor's run, the two reached an agreement that Bartendorsparky's run wouldn't be released until Trebor's was finished. Trebor's time is an astounding 1:18, nearly as fast as the old boost-crazed 23% run. For the first time, you can order this run on DVD as soon as you've finished reading his time! So if you're on a modem and don't want to download the 160 MB low quality, 470 MB normal quality, or the crazy 3.26 GB high quality... spare a few bucks and get it in the mail instead!

Another 22% run that was held back a bit is William 'pirate109' Tansley's 22% run on that whacko European version. Thanks to things like the final boss having nearly twice the health, and the weird door locks, etc, it takes a bit longer... but his 1:48 at least proves that the 22% game is indeed possible on the PAL version.

Metroid Prime is seeing a lot of running activity lately, almost certainly because of the release of its sequel in a mere 2 weeks. The latest run is another new category, an any% run on Hard mode by 'Inferno_Metroid'. He got a time of 1:32, which is nearly 30 minutes slower than the normal-mode time. In Hard mode, nearly all enemies have twice the health, but not all take twice as long if you know how. The run is decent, but the route is pretty sketchy. He doesn't get early wild, forcing him to fight Thardus and instead of doing 'the bars' after getting ice beam, he does it much later!

About the update title: I'm being raped financially by those two organizations. Yes it's sad story time about me, if you don't care about me then feel free to skip... but remember that my mood, free time etc affect the site. You see, three years ago I signed up for this 'New Economy Technology Scholarship' from the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. It would pay $3000 a year for my last two years of university for my Computer Engineering degree. It wasn't free money though, it came with the agreement that for each year I had the scholarship, I must get a job in Pennsylvania in my field after graduating. It's obviously an attempt to keep people in the state instead of fleeing to California or elsewhere. Well I graduated in April 2002 after the 'new economy' had gone to the crapper thanks to dot bomb and planes turned bombs. I struggled to find a job, and three months later I finally managed a part-time job with programming & database work, that I only got because I knew the guy who had the job before me, and he was leaving. Fast forward 1.5 years and I still have that job; sometimes it's not much work but it pays the bills and I have enough to buy a few games. PHEAA sends out notice that I must show proof that I have the full-time job in PA that I promised I was getting. Notice the difference? Full-time. I'm sure that that was specified in the original 'contract' but it was certainly not stressed, and I assumed that I was fine! An attempt to plea with them was fruitless, and they said I'd have a 6-month grace period before having to pay back the $6000. The six months actually turned to 7 before they sold the loan to AES who insists on an EIGHT PERCENT interest rate. That might have been a reasonable loan rate in 2001 when the scholarship was created, but at this point in time I could get a freaking mortgage for under 6 percent. I feel it's outrageous to ask something like that, so I have no choice but to pay it off completely before they collect any interest at all. Most of it will be from my mother, putting it on her 5.x% home equity line, and me paying the rest with what I have. So basically, I'll have zero chance of upgrading my computer or moving this site off the hell that GameSpy has become like I desperately want. Soapbox off.

Mike Uyama has redone his Mega Man X speed run, still collecting no unnecessary items and got a time of 0:36:10, 1 minute and 15 seconds faster than his first run. He has also done a 100% run, collecting even the hidden hadouken item which requires being slightly suicidal, and proceeds to use it to kill almost all of the rest of the bosses in one hit. The time is an impressive 0:41:36.

I learned of a few new improvements to the 10 Man Melee runs of Super Smash Bros. Melee from 'Mario 64 Master'. 'Ravenyte' has improved three of his vids, bringing Ness down to 0:00:07.52 from 7.53s, Zelda to 0:00:07.25 from 7.33s, and Young Link to 0:00:06.82 from 6.87s. Another SBM player, 'Taka', has taken one of Ravenyte's runs; he improved Captain Falcon to 0:00:07.46 from 7.48s.

The 7th category for the Metroid Prime page is a 100% game on the PAL version. Because Retro Studios couldn't keep their hands off the game and kept mucking with it after the US release, my 100% route just falls apart around 30% in, and a lot more time is necessary to clean up the mess. I haven't yet watched the whole 1:58 run by Besmir 'miles' Sheqi but I did see that for some reason he didn't skip any of the game's cutscenes like every other runner of the game has done. So you can use this run as a great way to see all the differences and the full cutscenes of the game at least.

'kip' also improved his MP escape yet again... in fact, he had done it before I posted the previous one, but nobody told me, so you had to wait another week for it muwhaha! The new time is 0:04:27.53, 0.26 seconds faster than the previous.

And for a few more sub-second improvements, I got a bunch of new Super Smash Bros. Melee Break the Target vids by 'marth1'. Now I'll list them in traditional <ul><li></ul> style!

• Mario in 0:00:08.67, 0.08s faster than himself.
• Donkey Kong in 0:00:08.95, 0.04s faster than 'Senju'.
• Ness in 0:00:13.46, 0.02s faster than 'Senju'.
• Young Link in 0:00:05.18, 0.05s faster than 'Mikakunin'.
• Pichu in 0:00:05.63, 0.05s faster than 'Senju'.
• Jigglypuff in 0:00:08.03, 0.03s faster than himself.
• Mewtwo in 0:00:04.92, 0.03s faster than 'Mikakunin'.

After nearly a month of me being fully addicted to Pikmin 2, I decided to record a speed run of an 8-day completion, aiming for as fast a real time as I could manage since the game has a high score for real time. I also threw in 0-deaths to make the run classy. On the 8th day I discovered that the game was chopping off the seconds when it saves, so I had to ignore that end time I was shooting for and use real time instead. The result is a 5 hour and 21 minute run available in three qualities. Those of you wondering if you should buy the game can check out day 1 and 2 to see how it starts, since they're really just tutorial days. The days after that get longer and longer because when you're in underground caves, time above mysteriously stops. Hope everyone enjoys my first speed run in 7 months. Running this site takes a lot of time and I just hadn't managed to be able to do any myself!

The Super Mario Bros. run is the most popular download of everything at the archive speed runs collection with over 4000 downloads in the last 5 months. The run had been improved by a second and then two over the summer, but no vid was available. Finally it fell by a third second and the 0:05:07 by Trevor Seguin ended up in my hands. Wonder how long it'll take this one to overtake the 0:05:10?

'kip' decided that his Metroid Prime 0:04:27.15 frigate escape, better than anyone else in the world by over 1.5 seconds, was crap. He went and did it again and managed a 0:04:27.27.

A believed optimal time in Super Smash Bros. Melee Break the Targets has been broken. The 3.57s time for Link was getting tied by a lot of people when suddenly, 'TAKA' came and got a 0:00:03.55!

The recently found shortcut in Mario Kart 64's Yoshi Valley has seemingly already been optimized by Myles Bukrim. He got a time of 0:00:05.82, 0.03 seconds faster than the one from Martin, the trick's discoverer.

I've put a link to Nate's DVD page at the top to keep it prominent, so if you want some of this be sure to check them out! Also I've been tinkering with the CSS on various sda pages lately. I check everything in IE and firefox, but it's possible something is totally borked in something else. If so, please let me know.

The technical and physical difficulties have been worked out, and a new Mega Man X4 100% as Zero run from Mike Uyama is available. He got a time of 0:48:29, 49 seconds faster than his previous one. He still says he'll improve it but "not anytime soon".

A new runner of Metroid II: Return of Samus showed up out of the blue at metroid2002. After the usual capturing difficulties and a redo of the run he ended up with the amazing time of 1:09:23, 6 minutes and 9 seconds faster than the previous one from Brightstar. Mr 'carlmmii' did a completely different weapon pickup strategy and threw in a few new tricks like a spring ball bomb jump unmorph jump.

Another category is added to the Metroid Prime page, the frigate escape at the start of the game. The Prime master 'kip' has broken his old record and achieved a finishing time of 0:04:27.15 remaining. Even though that's only about 2.6 minutes of running it's VERY hard to get > 0:04:25 because of all the L jumping, twisty corridor rolling and dash jumps.

A few more vids on the Mario Kart 64 page. The D.K. Jungle Parkway fast lap dropped to 0:00:36.02 by Myles Bukrim, 0.11s faster than the previous. Choco Mountain shortcut now has TWO shortcuts in it, one at the start and the same one near the end, Myles managed a 0:00:20.87, 0.89 seconds faster than the previous one. Yoshi Valley also has a change in the shortcut vid, with a different way to drive into the canyon and smack into the wall, which convinces lakitu to place you right in front of the finish! The new time is 0:00:05.87, 1.61 seconds faster than before!

And now what all your high-ping-bastards out there have been waiting for, you can now buy for real cheap a select number of runs on DVD from Nate. There's six available now/soonish, including the recent Metroid Fusion 1%, Castlevania: AoS, Mega Man X/X4, and older runs like Super Metroid 100% and Metroid Zero Mission any%/10%. Any future run sent to Nate qualifies for this treatment... remember, the DVD quality is even higher than the High Quality files available for download!

In the past 7 months I received messages from at least five people saying they were going to do a run of Mega Man X for SNES. Then I never heard from them again... Well finally Mike Uyama, after optimizing Mega Man X4, has done a run in 0:37:25. He's improved one of the X4 runs as well, but sleep deprivation from Nate has delayed that one a few more days. Mike's X run is actually a low%, he doesn't collect any items besides the required two. Honestly I can't see how you could go faster by getting some hearts or sub tanks, so this is probably the same as 'any %' for this game. Of course, I look forward to a 100% run from whoever does it!

Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho has finished his quest for a Single-segment (marathon) run of Half-Life on hard mode. After some technical difficulties of turning such a long .dem into avi, it's finally available in the usual 320x240 and 640x480 versions and Demo File. He includes a good many of the crazy tricks done in the segmented run!

Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields has done a 'run' on the SNES space shooter HyperZone. This game doesn't seem to have much charm for a speed run since you're mostly going at a constant 448 speed, but if you get hit then you slow down. Since Brightstar got hit quite a bit in the later stages, it's definitely improvable...

When a joke was made on the metroid2002 forum about a 1% Single-segment run in Metroid Fusion, nobody believed anybody would ever do it. But Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody decided he'd take the challenge. After 48 hours of attempts he triumphantly declared his victory with a time of 1:06. Now some people might say that there's certain parts of the run, especially near the end, that don't seem like a speed run at all, but that's because he was trying so hard just to stay alive. If you think you can duplicate this one-of-a-kind feat and do faster... go right ahead ;-)

After he was done he had just a little bit left on the tape, so he decided to fill it with another run on Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow with a Julius Belmont run. Again he played on hard mode, and completed in a time of 0:11:34. As with all runs cheerfully captured by Nate's uber-card, there's a low, normal and high quality download. The HQ for the 1% is over 3GB! If that's too much to download even for those of you with college connections, you can wait a couple of days and instead buy the run on a DVD from Nate for a very small fee plus shipping. Check back for details.

A new Break the Targets video for Super Smash Bros. Melee for Samus rather crushed the old record... the 0:00:08.18 by 'mario 64 master' is 0.32 seconds faster than the previous one!

The shortcut in the Mario Kart 64 Kalimari desert level isn't really that much faster than taking the normal way. Previously the best time for a full race with the shortcut was slower than a normal full race. Now, Steven Gutierrez has managed a 0:01:44.33 for it, 0.13 seconds faster than the full race...

This page is pushing 90K after 7 months, so I've started an oldnews section.

Lots of new games in this update, which was delayed due to a nasty cold I suffered from Sunday night and all day Monday.

Shinobi III - Return of the Ninja Master is the first Sega Genesis game to get a speed run here at SDA. Wesley 'Molotov' Corron has done a run in 0:41:58.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is the second Star Wars and Jedi Knight game to be listed. This time the run is by David Rickard of Half-Life fame. He does each of the 21 levels in its own segment and then appended them all together to have one avi file. The final time was 0:34:03.

Bionic Commando is a 1988 NES game that I know I've at least seen a picture of the map, but the game itself doesn't seem like one I played. Scott Kessler did a run of it back in April and only now got it captured after a few people pestered him about it. The time is 0:18:20.

Next we have a speed run on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes by veteran Mr. Metroid Nathan Jahnke. Well, not quite... the game doesn't come out until November 15th. The run is on the small demo version that is available from Nintendo if you register games or subscribe to NP. Although I didn't really see the point, a lot of people were trying to speed run it so I figured I can put it up here temporarily until the full game comes out. The time is 0:05:12, available in three qualities.

Finally, some updated Mario Kart 64 vids by the Gutierrez brothers:

• Toad's Turnpike shortcut fast lap in 0:00:29.04 by Steven, 0.03 seconds faster than Kevin Booth.
• Choco Mountain shortcut in 0:01:07.52 by Steven, 1.41 seconds faster than Brent Wingert.
• Banshee Boardwalk fast lap in 0:00:34.35 by Jeffrey, 0.04 seconds faster than Kevin Booth.
• Rainbow Road shortcut fast lap in 0:01:05.16 by Steven, 0.18 seconds faster than Myles Bukrim.
• Rainbow Road shortcut in 0:03:30.30 by Steven, 5.74 seconds faster than Jeffrey by doing the super-hard extended shortcut jump TWICE!

Mike 'TSA' Damiani has finally improved his Ocarina of Time Zelda run, getting a time of 5 hours and 4 minutes in a Single-segment run. That's about 21 minutes faster than his previous one. He really wanted under 5 hours, just because it's that threshold thing at work, but it looks like it's not happening unless someone else decides to take up this long game! Just like last time the download is over a gig, but it's split into 15 parts to make it doable even for you modem goers out there.

A few new Mario Kart 64 vids. All of the vids by Myles Bukrim have been reuploaded in much better quality! Also a new vid from him, Rainbow Road shortcut fast lap in 0:01:05.34, 0.17 seconds faster than the previous one. Also an old video by Mike Simmons has surfaced, Banshee Boardwalk in 0:01:44.96, 0.11 seconds faster than the previous one... but it has no sound.

I'll be away this weekend, I've agreed to be bored at my parent's place in exchange for free food & laundry.

This weekend there's two improvements to Mega Man runs, a new Castlevania game, and a run of the Half-Life Hazard course.

Mike Uyama has improved both records on Mega Man X4, which continues to be the most popular to run Mega Man game! He achieved a time of 0:51:31 with X, over 13.5 minutes faster than the previous, and 0:49:18 as Zero, nearly 10 minutes faster than the previous demo, which wasn't even 100%! That's right, Mike crushed the previous times AND got 100% collection!

Veteran Metroid runner Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has done a run on Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the 3rd GBA Castlevania game. I had the pleasure of playing this game on a pirate copy that I bought off ebay earlier this summer... eventually I had to send it to paypal as proof that I was frauded. Don't buy from people in Hong Kong folks, even if they have 100+ feedback. :-\ Anyway, DD's run was on hard mode and he achieves a time of 1:03:03 in 14 segments, and that's getting the Chaos ending, not the 'fake' ending.

In Half-Life you wouldn't think a speed run of the training level Hazard course would be that exciting, but suprisingly the 3 minute 16 second run that's the result of David Rickard's work is quite entertaining. Sure, there's a little idle time here and there while you listen to somebody talk, but during the rest it's just as exciting as his main HL run!

All runs in this update are available in three versions. I've added an x/y/z MB size to show the size of all three runs right on the game pages for these runs, since I think on the runs that have low and high versions, people don't know about them and only see the normal quality size and maybe don't download because it's too big, or too small (!?). But if you think it's dumb and I should just leave the mention of low/high only on the demo.pl mirror list, let me know. Oh and just a note, when you contact me on aim or icq, don't just say "hi" or "yo" and expect an answer. Try asking a freaking question!

Ben Fichter has done the same for Max Payne that Tim Doherty previously did for Max Payne 2. He has recorded runs on all 25 levels. The game doesn't show a time so we just used the entire time of the level, including cutscenes, out of laziness and that they aren't cutscenes with load time. Since I'm still playing Pikmin 2 like crazy I haven't done the extra work to add this to archive.org yet, so you'll have to deal with fileplanet or wait until tomorrow evening.

Can I really be caught up? I've actually got everything out of the incoming directory... and I finally got those old mk64 and BC vids posted. So now I can relax!.... ah shit there's 3 more runs that have been uploaded by Nate, arrrrgh!

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron has done a speed run on the PlayStation 2 game Devil May Cry. He used the 'Super Dante' mode, which from what I understand is an unlockable mode and you have extra abilities from a first playthrough. If I'm not totally wrong about that, then a normal playthrough would of course be tracked separately. Anyway Wesley's time is 0:51:29 on Normal skill.

One new MK64 vid, Banshee Boardwalk in 0:01:45.07 by Jeffrey Gutierrez. That's a big 0.05 seconds faster than the old one!

I knew since I took so long to post them that a lot would be outdated by the time I did... and so today I received a set of better mk64 vids from Andrew Weatherton. I think I'll follow the standard bullet style update from the Quake section to list them!

• Kalimari Desert fast lap in 0:00:32.67 by Eric Habrich.
• Kalimari Desert shortcut fast lap in 0:00:31.85 by Jeffrey Gutierrez. No sound in this one.
• Toad's Turnpike shortcut in 0:01:31.87 and fast lap in 0:00:29.07 by Kevin Booth. No sound in the lap vid, even though these two were apparently done on the same day.
• Frappe Snowland in 0:01:40.95 by Eric Habrich.
• Frappe Snowland shortcut in 0:00:21.85 and fast lap in 0:00:05.04 by Myles Bukrim. Here the lap vid is webcam but the "full" one isn't, even though the lap one was 5 days later?!?
• Choco Mountain shortcut in 0:01:08.93 by Brent Wingert.
• Mario Raceway in 0:01:13.49 and fast lap in 0:00:23.11 by Eric Habrich.
• Mario Raceway shortcut fast lap in 0:00:15.46 by Steven Gutierrez -- no sound.
• Sherbet Land in 0:01:37.02 and fast lap in 0:00:31.74 by Eric Habrich.
• Royal Raceway shortcut fast lap in 0:00:31.79 by Myles Bukrim. This is the same time & play that was there before, but now it's an actual video capture instead of a webcam.
• Bowser's Castle in 0:01:50.89 and fast lap in 0:00:36.12 by Eric Habrich.
• D.K.'s Jungle Parkway fast lap in 0:00:36.13 by Ruokai Chen -- no sound.
• D.K.'s Jungle Parkway shortcut fast lap in 0:00:03.75 by Myles Bukrim. That's only 0.02s faster than the previous vid, and the quality is not that great, but it's a little better, especially to read the time.
• Yoshi Valley in 0:01:26.62 by Eric Habrich.
• Banshee Boardwalk fast lap in 0:00:34.39 by Kevin Booth.
• Rainbow Road in 0:04:58.38 by Kevin Booth, about 49 seconds faster than my crap-fest!
• Rainbow Road fast lap in 0:01:37.96 by Tim Everett. This video suffers obvious deinterlacing problems, but it's still better than the previous vid.
• Rainbow Road shortcut in 0:03:36.04 by Jeffrey Gutierrez.

There's always been some slight confusion over if certain games can be speed run because it's not a running game... well that's just being silly, as long as you can go fast it qualifies! So in this update there's two driving games! Both of which I've had the files for sitting on my drive for a few months now, just never taking the time to organize. Special thanks to LLCoolDave for finallly doing it for me :-p

In the Nintendo 64 game Blast Corps there's some thin excuse for a plot as the reason you're driving around crashing through buildings... although there's a bunch of levels that are just racing style 4-lap courses, and even two strange pac-man parody levels. Matthew Piper sent me his collection of recordings on all 57 levels, with each time below the required for a platinum rank.

Mario Kart 64 is the classic N64 game featuring Mario and friends with 16 courses. I received a large amount of vids on these a few months ago, but was reluctant to sort through them when I watched a few and noticed the horrible quality. Many videos are only 200x130, some have no sound, others are webcams with discipable picture quality.... so finally I'm posting only those that have been deemed worthy. There's still a couple posted with no sound or webcams that actually look good, and lots of small vids. For the vids that were too terrible to post I left the time in the table as just a goal to shoot for, even though there are other record sites of course. I'll take any good looking vid that is "pretty close" to those listed times. There are even a couple of entries for which I received no vid, not even a crappy one. One example is the Rainbow Road full course... so I whipped up a 0:05:47.94 on my third attempt. It's total crap though... I can't do that sliding thing, so... yeah, it's crap. Someone please improve it, and fill in the rest!

The first Star Wars game to land in the archive is Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for multiple platforms. David 'LLCoolDave' Spickermann has done a run on the PC version, and due to the impossibility to duplicate PC games exactly on consoles, it'd always be unfair to compare a PC version to a console version, so I just list the game as a PC game. Dave got a time of 1:29:35 which contains several half-second save penalties just like used in Half-Life for reasons of discouragement of the 'save anywhere' system and because PC games like to skip a few frames after you load a save.

There's a new Break the Targets vid for the Super Smash Bros. Melee page. I received Marth in 0:00:08.92 vid, but it was done in PAL mode. Due to the continued inability of game programmers to make games that play the same in 60fps ntsc and 50fps pal, the flippers in a few btt stages behave slightly differently on the two, resulting in a faster time on pal than possible in ntsc... so I've added a new line to the table just for Marth - PAL with the 0:00:08.92 as the record of course. For those who don't have the records memorized, that's 0.03s faster than Senju's vid. Also the vid plays slower than real time... I'm not sure if that's the PAL game at work again, or if the 'Smashbros' guy who did it has some strange capture equipment that can lag and not drop frames or what.

Wow, a whole week goes by with me addicted to Pikmin 2 and not updating. And this update is pretty small because I must get to bed and only had time to actually get one run online... The famous 'kip' has claimed another Metroid Prime record with the first recorded run on Hard mode, and also the first recorded 22% game. That's right he's done the ultimate low% in Metroid Prime. (because 21% is just not happening ever!) Although by the 2nd half he didn't quite give a damn about speed, he still went pretty fast, just did a lot of killing things to survive. He managed to still get under 2 hours with 1:54, clearly smashing the last attempt at a hard low % game (3:10 sometime last year).

Many more games to follow this weekend...

It seems there's this character called Goemon who has been in quite a few games that I've never even heard of until I got a speed run submitted on one of them. The avatar of the recently registered Goemon user on the m2k2 forum is appropriate for this update... it's Goemon with a metroid. And that's just what's in this update.

Wouter Jansen did a 100% run of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in a time of 3:46. That's my first exposure to this Goemon fellow folks!

The Metroid Zero Mission record was broken 2 months ago... but you're only now seeing the video of this 0:29:54 run, 28 seconds faster than the previous. The reason is that the author, Jason 'GameCube04' Baum, didn't put as much effort into the run as he wanted, so it has it's rough spots. He thought of redoing it completely, and then redoing just the last segment, and then redoing it completely again... but a lack of time and interest led him to eventually just send off the tape as it was. Still, it's the first run under 30 minutes, a time that seemed inconceivable when the game came out just 6 months ago!

An even older run, from April, is finally posted on the Metroid page. Scott Kessler performed the early Tourian trick to skip Norfair and Ridley's lair completely, and finish the game in 22 minutes and 11 seconds. This is a new category for the game... the only one left would be a 0 boss run for low%, who's going to do that!

Most RPG games out there take 10+ hours to complete, even if you're actually trying to go through quickly, so they aren't very good for speed runs. But David Gibbons has completed Super Mario RPG in just under 4 hours in 13 segments. The key to any potential RPG speed run is only doing enough of the battles to level up just enough that the bosses don't slaughter you, and that requires quite a bit of strategy, so if you've played the game it's definitely worth a look.

An update on the SSBM page, 'raserucort' informed me of his 0:00:07.55 with Captain Falcon, 0.03 seconds faster than the previous vid from 'Senju'.

If you dont read the main SDA news, you haven't seen that I moved the forum due to GameSpy's further incompetance, and also changed all demo.pl links.

The GameSpy dynamic server has been undergoing "maintenence" for the last 12+ hours and as a result you probably haven't been able to download anything here. Well this is just a reminder that you can use the Archive Speed Runs Collection to browse through all runs listed here (and a few that aren't) and download them from there.

Once again I stay up past 3...4...5 am in order to get an update for here finished. Good thing my job has flexible hours huh.

The other NES run from Richard Ureta is a 0:30:39 of Mega Man 2. It caused me greate frustration to capture because of the very blue Bubble Man stage, and the result is pieced together from 4 different captured files and it's still not perfect at all... but this is the best I can do. The playing is of far better quality than my capture of that stage :-\

Metroid Zero Mission hasn't seen much action lately, most players have moved on to other games, but Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has been working hard on improving his Single-segment 100% on normal skill, and after getting a 0:57:06, 2 minutes and 29 seconds faster, he's taking a break from the game too! The run is very solid for something so long, except IMHO the worse mistake is in the first minute... not sure why he didn't just restart!

The ultimate speed run challenge has come to pass for Pikmin thanks to 'Sesshoumaru' from metroid2002. Last month I told him about the 50 pikmin in 10 day completion, but the fact that The Distant Spring took 3 days just didn't sit right with him. A few days later he had figured out a plan that he was sure would work, and soon enough he did it. Since he couldn't record, I had to try to do it myself, but I couldn't manage to do the earlier day 3 at The Forest Navel... so I bypassed it by partially doing it, in order to reach DS. I recorded a day 5 and 7 as proof of Sess's strat and awaited a full video from whoever would do it. Well I pretty much knew it would be Dragorn, who had done the 10/50 vid, and he pulled it all off very quickly. What better way to prepare for Pikmin 2 than to watch this supreme ownage of the original in 9 days with only 50 pikmin?

The run that started SDA on the path away from Quake-exclusivness has finally been beaten. My own 1:37 100% of Metroid Prime has been improved by 'kip' who holds the any% record at 1:04. With such an amazing show in the 1:04, you'd expect him to get 1:25 for the 100% right? Nope, the bum beat me by one lousy minute! He wasn't even really trying, just doing a psuedo run to try out all the new things that have been discovered since my run, such as some tweaks to the route that I suggested.

Loads of problems entirely due to my old 1999 computer have caused this update to contain only two runs... the rest being delayed yet again. My computer is too slow for me to play back the files I received for one of the runs, so I'll have to view it on a computer at work to time it. I ran out of disk space while capturing a run tonight, after I'd already deleted 8GB of stuff. Then I went to watch a run which I was already uploading, and half way through noticed about 20 seconds of crap... my old capture card had freaked on something and just ate 10 seconds of video and made the next bit extremely choppy before catching up and leaving the sound off synch for the rest of the video. I tried to fix it but every time at the same spot it freaks again.

At least Scott Kessler can capture runs himself, or his Zelda II run wouldn't be here today... although I still had to help him out by taking the 900+mb mpeg file and compressing it for him since he was having sound problems. He got a time of 1:12:10 for the run, slightly more than eleven minutes faster than TSA's run from last week!

I received the comments from Richard U, so I can post his Super Mario Bros. 3 run. He got a time of 0:11:11 using the standard double warp whistles to reach world 8 after only four boards.

Richard's other run on the tape is the one above that makes my capture card shit a brick. Hopefully I can figure something out and have it online soon. Meanwhile, if anyone is feeling generous and wants to send me some $$$ for a new compuer.... :-p

I was behind before I took that 3300 mile trip, and now it's even worse. This update contains 3 runs but there are many more yet, so it should be a busy week here.

First, William Tansley has improved his record for the fastest PAL time on Metroid Prime, getting a 1:11, four minutes faster. This run features a new method to get space jump first for PAL-ers, the once-thought NTSC-only helpful Thardus trick, and accidentally forgetting the ice spreader!

The Resident Evil run has been beaten by 'smilingjack13', who once held the 23% record on Metroid Prime. His run is about 25½ minutes faster than the previous one from Sascha, brining the time under an hour and a half! Now when will someone do a run with poor forgotten Chris?

David Gibbons continues to expand the games list by doing a 2 hour 22 minute run on the Nintendo 64 game Body Harvest. This odd looking game is about going back in time to stop alien invasions in various decades.

I received a tape from Richard Ureta with two NES runs on it, but I can't post them yet because he didn't leave me any comments nor a way to contact him. So, let's hope he reads this and gets back in touch!

Two new runs this weekend: TSA has improved his Zelda II run by 8 minutes and 9 seconds to reach a new time of 1:23:13. Unfortunatly the quality is rather bad in spots because of vhs problems, but he says that there's another run on the way...

Metroid Prime sees another improvement to the low% 23% time, dropping ten minutes in a new run by 'Bartendorsparky' to 1:15. This is another classic example of a prime run where the player gets better as he goes, so the earlier segments aren't as good as the later ones. That's also true in terms of video quality, somehow sparky purchashed some kind of magic vcr with increcible quality. He commented that the high quality versions of the vids look better than they did on his TV when he played.

I'll be out of town for a week, going on a trip with my brother. Sorry for all the runs that will have to wait until I get back.

To commemorate the release of the Alien vs. Predator movie, Nathan Jahnke has done speed runs on the Alien vs Predator game for Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar was one of those not-so-succesful consoles from the early 90s, but the game was a representation of the popularity of the series. The game has three playable characters, a marine, alien and predator. He did a run with all three characters, getting 0:36:28 as the marine, 0:19:52 as the predator, and 0:10:37 as the alien.

No, this update is not about pieces of wood... it's about two new speed runs on Mega Man X4. First, Steven 'Bartz' Brooks noticed that there wasn't a run using X, so he whipped one up and got a nice time of 1:05:05. Then Kelvin Wong decided to improve Brightstar's Zero run, and he improved it by 4 minutes and 59 seconds to get 0:58:55. Not only did he improve it by that much, but he also got 100% of the items!

David Gibbons has struck again, with another very long Single-segment run through a game, Jet Force Gemini. The real time is almost 5 hours, but because of lots of unskippable cutscenes (shame on Rare!) the game's timer showed 3:21 at the end. Although it was done in a single recording, the file had to be cut up in to parts because of limitations of using mp3 in avi that I wasn't aware of until this. Since I've never played the game, this is about all I can say... hope it's enjoyable.

If your computer just won't cut it on the soon-to-be-released Doom 3 from id software, then how about getting your Doom fix by watching a conversion of many classic Doom and Doom II speedruns from Compet-N to DivX avi? You'll find all 40 Ultra Violence records and 4 Nightmare episode runs on Doom, and all 34 Ultra Violence records for Doom II as well as a recently done Single-segment run through the whole game on Nightmare skill by Drew 'stx-vile' DeVore in 0:31:59! Drew is also the guy who converted all these lmp speed runs into avi to celebrate the arrival of Doom 3.

If Doom isn't your cup of tea, or if your computer isn't even good enough to play those high quality DivX avis (...) then how about some Super Mario Sunshine? 'Dragorn' from previous speed runs like Majora's Mask and Pikmin decided to add this game to the list, and the result is a time of 1:59:49 in 9 segments. Just barely under the two hour mark!

As of this much delayed update posting, the links for all of these files at archive.org don't work yet work because their system that moves files around is going unbelieveable slow. It's been apparently copying the mario sunshine run for 3.5 hours, which is calculates out to less than 35 k/s. So I think their internal network is a bit jammed! I'll be away this weekend though so I'm just putting the links to them now and hopefully they'll be active soon.

Long time SDA-contributor Tim Doherty has done a complete set of individual levels runs on the PC game Max Payne 2 in the "New York Minute" mode on easy skill. He helped get these runs up sooner by doing the html for me ... so keep that in mind if you want your things posted sooner :-p

SnapDragon continues to fly through the levels of 4 Swords Adventure. He's improved another 5 levels: 4-1 by 0:02:40 to 0:06:53, 4-2 also by 0:02:40 to 0:07:02, 4-3 not quite by 0:02:40, but 0:02:39 to 0:05:09, 5-1 by 0:01:36 to 0:05:27, and 5-2 by 0:02:07 to 0:07:26. 8-2 looms closer! Some of these files are not yet on FilePlanet but you can get the from the metroid2002 mirror.

Some more improvements in 10 Man Melee from the Super Smash Bros. Melee page. Luigi has a large improvement of 0.21 seconds to 0:00:07.41, Ganondorf has a simliar improvement of 0.22 seconds to 0:00:07.36, Ness was improved by an itty-bitty 0.02s to 0:00:07.53, Link was improved by twice as much, 0.03 seconds, to 0:00:06.92, Mewtwo was improved by the same 0.03s to 0:00:07.43, and Marth was improved by a pretty significant 0.15 seconds to 0:00:07.33. All vids are by 'Ravenyte' as usual, except for Mewtwo which is by 'phy189' and thus is much much better quality!

The 2nd Zelda game in the series has become the 6th Zelda game listed here at SDA, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The main runner of Zelda games is still Mike 'TSA' Damiani and he's completed z2 in a single-segment with a time of 1:31:22. Like Zelda 1, he uses the 2nd controller up+a to get the continue/save menu, and continue will warp you around without actually saving... and since that's been traditionally used by zelda runners I don't have a problem with it. But if someone wants to do a run without that, I'd make it a separate category. ;-)

Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman has gotten busy doing level improvements on 4 Swords Adventure after I poked him a bit. In the last few days he's improved 5 levels: 2-2 by 0:01:33 to 0:07:04, 2-3 by 0:03:04 to 0:08:36, 3-1 by 0:02:43 to 0:05:08, 3-2 by 0:02:54 to 0:05:24, and just before I was ready to post this update, 3-3 by 0:02:19 to 0:05:18. Hopefully he'll continue his swift pace and go all the way through 8-2... at which point he'll stop because 8-3 is already perfect .... right?

When I started the other games section, I planned on linking to other speed run sites out there where they already existed, but I only got the doom page up with a link to Compet-N. Although people told me of other pages, I would go there and not like the way it was organized or something stupid which made me not link to it. Well, one of those pages is the-elite.net which has GoldenEye individual level speed runs on all three skill settings. It turns out they have a big trouble with hosting for their videos, they'll find a place and then a couple months later it'll go poof, maybe because the vids got too many downloads. Well, that won't happen here, so I volunteered to mirror their fastest vids, and you'll find a complete table on the GoldenEye page now. In a couple cases, the vid used is not the actual fastest available because the faster vid was 1 second better but the quality was horrendous, and we all know I'm picky about quality.

Jonathan Fields has done another inaugural speed run on a game, the original Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast. He used a glitch simliar to the Mario 64 glitch of going through a closed door. My acceptance of that glitch caused some confusion over my glitch rules, but I'll state again that that is the very edge of what will be allowed. Pushing through a solid object is OK in my eyes, but randomly teleporting around never will be. Oh yeah, The time of the run was 3 hours and 17 minutes in 4 segments.

Well, that cuts my unprocessed queue by 64 files... only 122 more to go!

The Metroid Fusion page has been updated with two new runs. Matthew 'Wassup Dawgs' Beach got a loaner Game Boy Player to record a few runs on and the results are a 0:50 any% run, and a 1:13 Single-segment 100%. The any% is three minutes faster than the one Nate finished up in April, and the 100% is three minutes faster than the one from DaveB in May. Both runs are available in low, normal, and high quality. The Low version of the 100% is about 174 MB, and the Hi version is a whole GB... so chose according to your bandwidth!

Yesterday I actually took a day off from doing anything related to running a speed running site or helping nate restore metroid2002.com. If you'd like to see why I've been so busy with that, and had little time to catch up here, you should read this to find out just how much I was doing.

Since I wasn't doing any website work, I actually had a chance for once to work on my own speed run. Nothing too big, just an improvement of my 8-3 record on Zelda: 4 Swords. Not sure it was worth the two hours it took, but I think it's much better than the previous one, as it clocks in at 0:17:50, a minute & 58 seconds faster than the previous one. Thanks to TSA for a few hints. Now when will somebody else try worlds 3 through 8?

The SSBM page has been updated with some new 10 Man Melee vids by Ravenyte, which I received via r1k. Doctor Mario was improved to 0:00:06.63, 0.05 seconds faster. Ganondorf is now 0:00:07.58, 0.07 seconds faster. Ness was improved by a whopping 0.22 seconds (yes, that's whopping) to 0:00:07.55. Samus was improved by an even more impressive 0.34 seconds to 0:00:06.63. Link's time is now 0:00:06.95, 0.04 seconds faster. Pichu was improved by 0.08s to 0:00:06.75. And lastly, Mewtwo was improved by 0.07s to 0:00:07.46. This pack of improvements brought the total 10mm time below 3 minutes, something which seemed impossible just a few months ago... congrats to Ravenyte and his fellow players on this accomplishment!

The Metroid Zero Mission page recently got a faster any% and a hard any% by Andrew Bolton. They're still the records, but I wanted to mention that there's now high & low quality versions available. If you're hesitant to download runs because they're large, maybe you're still stuck on a modem, you should check out the low quality versions. Those of you with really fast connections and computers that aren't 5 years old like mine can check out the high quality versions. Especially of note is that the HQ versions are full 60fps vids, so instead of the typical "always on" or "invisible" effects you see in vids when the game has 60Hz rapid-blinking effects, you'll actually see the blinking like in the game! It was quite an adventure for Nate to figure out how to accomplish this, but the results are certainly worth it. The Metroid Prime page also has a HQ version of the new 1:15 PAL run, which runs at 50fps instead of 25.

I like to have good quality for this site... not just in terms of the running, but in terms of the video & audio quality of the videos. Therefore it is my solem duty to nitpick the quality of all of the videos in this update.

Another new game is added - Resident Evil for GameCube. Sascha Zaman did a Single-segment run with Jill Valentine on normal skill and got a time of 1:55:16. The quality of this vid makes it look like an old movie from the 50s, the color seems to have just faded away, and in some places it looks overexposed from being too bright. The play quality is a lot better, though there was a small knife slipup that cost a few minutes.

The Super Mario World run has been improved by Scott Kessler after I reminded him about it a few times. He got a time of 0:10:56, 13 seconds faster than his previous run. He forgot to change his capture settings though, so in the final area on the way to bowser, you still can't see a darn thing!

Metroid Prime will keep track of different records for the US and EU versions of the game, because of the bastardization the developers did in a few areas that prevent a lot of the tricks used in the US version. Even a later US version has some of these, and a few different, changes that just plain suck. Although 1:04 remains the fastest time, the EU version was improved to 1:15 last month by William 'pirate109' Tansley and it's still worth checking out, even if you won't see crazy scan-dash jumps or bouncing off Thardus. The quality of this run is pretty good since it was captured by Mr. "My capture card kicks the shit of your capture card" Nate... but the best capture card in the world can't fix VHS flaws, which this run has many of, although most are only on the file select screen. This run also debuts the availabity of different qualities of runs, coming with a low quality version that's about 150MB smaller, much easier on the 56k'ers out there. High Quality versions of some select previous runs will be available in the coming weeks.

The Zelda: 4 Swords page has been updated with two more improvements to 1-1 and 1-2. That's the four runs on these levels ... I guess nobody is going to do worlds 3 through 8. :-\ 1-1 is now 0:04:26, two seconds better, and 1-2 is 0:04:08, eight seconds better. Because of the FilePlanet queue you might have to wait a while to get these two, until I find a temp place to mirror them.

Lastly I just wanted to apologize for the delay that a couple of these things took to get online, I spent all weekend again working to help restore metroid2002.com.

There's another improvement to the Half-Life speed run, this time done by 'RandomEngy' though the discovery of some new tricks was a collaborative effort between the previous runners, maybe you saw some of their discussion on the forum. The new run times at 0:45:45, over 5 minutes faster than the previous one, and it was done in only 21 segments so it is a lot more impressive when you think about that. There is a lot of new shortcuts that'll make you go WHAAAAT, or at least: they made me. It's available in the same 3 versions as previous Half-Life rui-res, normal-res, and .dem.

Another small update to the Super Smash Bros. Melee page, I rceived the 0:00:03.57 Link vid from 'raserucort'. That's 0.03 seconds faster than the previous vid from Senju. I still don't have a clue how the bottom right target gets hit.

The amount of vids in my incoming queue keeps getting larger, but because of the US holiday over the weekend, which I spent at my parent's place, and me helping Nate restore metroid2002.com from the ashes of an rm -rf / from an insane Marie/deskjockey... well, I'm just pretty darn busy! I only have time right now to quickly update the four vids from SnapDragon on 4 Swords which you might have already seen, since he linked to them in a forum thread. He did 1-1 in 0:04:28, 40 seconds faster than TSA; 1-2 in 0:04:16, 50 seconds faster; 1-3 in 0:07:04, 0:01:48 faster; and 2-1 in 0:05:14, 0:02:11 faster. Those are some nice improvements!

A small update, just a couple of improvements on the 4 Swords page, TSA has already started to improve them. He did 1-1 14 seconds faster to get 0:05:08, 1-2 52 seconds faster to get 0:05:06, and 1-3 36 seconds better to get 0:08:52.

The Metroid Zero Mission has been updated with two new runs from Andrew Bolton. He improved the normal any% time down to 0:30:22, 0:01:09 faster than the previous time. This run was actually finished at the beginning of May, but he decided to go ahead and record the first hard any% on the rest of the tape. He then proceeded to do something stupid to piss off his father and get grounded for nearly 4 weeks, which heavily delayed his run and its resulting appearance here. So let that be a lesson to all you underage speed runners out there, stay out of trouble or your runs won't get posted as quick! Oh yeah, he got a 0:34:00 on hard... and the route isn't the same as the normal route, so it's worth watching to see how the lower amount of missiles is dealt with.

I've redone the Zelda: Four Swords Adventures page, converting all of TSA's segments into individual level runs instead of having it be a whole game run. As I played the game, I realized its total linearity and level independence, so any whole game run also has individual level runs, and therefore any whole game run that has one segment per level is just individual level attempts and should be treated as such. If anyone does a Single-segment run of the whole game, it'll be a whole game run of course. For now, I hope some people will try to improve them, since trying just one level out of 24 for a few days shouldn't be too hard. In fact, it's already been done. Jonathan Fields improved 1-1 by 51 seconds to get 0:05:22, and I improved 8-3 by 0:01:45 to get 0:19:48. Both can still be improved, but that's where YOU come in!

Super Smash Bros. Melee sees a minor update as well, two improvements to Break the Targets made their way into my AIM folder. Samus was improved by 0.08s to 0:00:08.52 by 'marth1' and Peach was improved by 0.11s to 0:00:10.25 by 'gamepro88'. They both display far better breaking of targets than I've come close to.

The Super Mario 64 page has been updated again with that 'proper' 70-star run that I mentioned was being worked on. David Gibbons continues his contributions by completing the 70-star run without saves in an amazing time of 1 hour 12 minutes 43 seconds. That's a few minutes faster than any other time ever reported online, and surely the first completely video of such a run. There's quite a few impressive shortcuts to get stars in unintended ways and I definitely recommend it to any mario fan.

The 32nd game added to the ever-growing list is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for Playstation. It's actually the only Playstation game I've ever played, so it gets the quick treatment, no need for outside verifaction. Sascha Zaman spent a little money on a capture card so he record some runs, and this was his 2nd one ... the first is getting the not-so-speedy treatment. He played as Richter, the sort-of-a-bonus mode that you get after beating the game normally... nobody has speed run that yet, although I did have a couple people email me (when I had an address that worked) saying they might do one. Dunno what happened to them, so for now you'll just have to settle for this 0:13:26 Richter time. Note that this is a little longer than the game's time count if you would save at the final save and then add the rest of time. I guess the game isn't counting the time in those 'loading rooms' and a few other things.. but since it doesn't display a final time at the end, I have to stick with real time to be accurate.

FilePlanet is currently only operating at half capacity for some reason, it seems all of GameSpy's network is falling apart. As a result there's a line to download stuff all of the time now. That wouldn't be so bad because of the archive.org links, but last night something broke on them and so I can't add anything new for a couple days. Sorry!

Another new game added thanks to David 'marshmallow' Gibbons. He did a single-segment run through GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 in a time of 0:50:01. That's the sum of all 20 mission times, it's one of the few games that actually has a visible time display. I don't have much else to say since this is another game I never played ... but I watched it and it was good.

The game list keeps growing as today I added the first in the series, the original The Legend of Zelda for NES. Mike Damiani has 3/4 of the Zelda vids already here, and now it's 4/5. Like Link to the Past though, the 0:35:50 video he sent me on tape is not the actual world record. The first LoZ is actually rather popular for speed running, but it's also very popular for secret keeping. Nobody who claims a faster time has ever wanted to have the vid online before. Mike also promises a faster vid in the coming month in two, so you can consider this a teaser of things to come.

Just when you thought 'kip' had gone insane from Metroid Prime play, he slaps you in the face and says "I was just fooling you, silly". He kept working on it as I prepared to post the 1:05. He ended up finding something new based on a hunch, something that I very much doubted would be possible, but then I helped figure it out and make it happen. What is it? Well I won't spoil it here, but he goes into detail in his comments, but I suggest not reading them until you watch. No, he didn't do an entire run in 9 days, he only redid the last four parts since he still had the save from the end of part 11. So you only have to download another 111 MB to see the new ending for a time of 1:04. I'm pretty sure he's done now... unless he starts over from the beginning.

You might have noticed I removed my email address from the updates. It's basically unusable now, for the last week, 90% of all emails vanish or take days to be delivered. I will change the submissions page to list ways to contact me, but until I do, you can just yell for me at the forum.

I've been keeping secrets, and I've been lying about things to do so. Yep, I'm filthy... but it was at the request of the runner of the new run... another one on Super Metroid, to maintain secrecy. She started the run back in May, after getting some ideas for a possible new route to take on the 100%, and finished up on June 4 with a time 0:55. It wasn't until a week later that I found out that Smokey had got a 0:56 on June 3 ... so, he's sorta the victim of bad timing. Who is the mysterious 'she'? Why, 'Red Scarlet' of course, who used to have the record at 1:00, and still holds records on NES Metroid. She says this will be her final Metroid speed run though, and I'm sure that makes us all sad if it's true. But if it is, she's sure made a name for herself with this run, I think we should all call her the "Mockball Queen" from now on!

The Super Metroid page has been updated with a new run from 'Smokey', seemingly the only Super Metroid player left... He improved upon his single-segment run of 0:38 and got 0:36, but as I've mentioned, the SS will now be a separate category and still listed as a record, unless someone gets a 0:37 of course. He actually got a time 0:37 first, and then decided to use the famous 'murder beam' to beat mother brain quicker and see if he'd get 0:36... and of course, he did. You can download the 0:37 ending too if you like.

Smokey also achieved a 100% in 0:56, improving his previous one by 2 minutes, but it's only available on the archive.org page since Fileplanet has been really stupid lately... in fact the 0:36 should have been here yesterday but it took ~25 hours for it to become available after I uploaded it.

The latest game to be added to the ever-growing Archive is Super Mario 64, where Brad Cutler has done a Single-Segment run. He utilized a few glithces, some of which were just discovered last month, nearly 8 years after the games release. The purpose of the glitches is to get through doors before you're supposed to, and finish the game with a mere 16 stars, far less than the intended 70. The result is a very quick 0:26:01 through the game. Also acceptable for Mario 64 are 70 & 120 star runs. Rumor has it that a 70 star run is already being worked on...

Brad also did something else on Donkey Kong Country 3. There is one level in the game that times you, Riverside Race, because you have to beat the bear's time of 0:01:15 on it to continue. Anything short like that, with a visible timer, is always the subject of some informal competition, so I've added his vid of the level done in a mere 54.70 seconds to the page. It's not an old vid either, he just improved it from 55.x thanks to some discussion between him and another player on gamefaqs.

The Super Smash Bros. Melee page has been updated with some improvements to 10 Man Melee vids from 'Ravenyte'. He improved Doctor Mario by 0.07 seconds, Yoshi by 0.01s, Ice Climbers by 0.03s, Kirby by 0.10s, Link by 0.04s, Young Link by 0.06s, Pikachu by 0.02s, Jigglypuff by 0.05s, Mr. Game & Watch by 0.01s, and Roy by 0.10s. The vids are still rather crappy quality ... I guess Ravenyte prefers to make 15 second videos as small as he possibly can instead of having them look good ... oh well, you can still tell what's going on.

Six months in the making, awaited with heavy anticipation, performed by the mysterious player 'kip', the new standard for Metroid Prime speed runs is complete. Kip finished his ordeal and got a time of 1:05, 18 minutes faster than his previous run, and 12 minutes faster than the PAL record from zoidi. It includes the only 0:04 landing on Tallon IV, the first time in a run of the 'genius Flaahgra' and 'helpful Thardus' tricks, as well as others... definitely worth checking out!

Not to be overshadowed by my hype for kip's run, there's a new game added as well. David 'marshmallow' Gibbons has done his third contribution and dun a run on Donkey Kong Country 3 using the 105% code... which I call a 'hard 100%' game. There's been many requests for a dkc3 run since I have ones for dkc 1&2 so hopefully everyone will be satisfied now, it's also great stuff.

I also note that I updated the rules a bit, there's now a bullet called 'codes', since before I said "no hidden codes" but both this and the metroid runs used codes, but they weren't "beneficial" codes, the metroid one is just cosmetic and this code makes the game harder. So hopefully that doesn't make the rules even more confusing.

Two more games added to SDA this weekend... first we have Super Mario World completed in 11 minutes and 9 seconds by Scott Kessler. Mario World is the game to introduce Yoshi, the only creature known to man that can swallow something twice its size! The run follows the obvious route through the star world to reach bowser's castle quick, but it has a lot of little things that should surprise you. Who wants to volunteer to do a 100%?

Next there's a run on Fallout 2 by Larry Eggleston Jr. in a little under 18 minutes. The run was recorded back in April, for which I must take full blame that it took this long to get online. The games that I know will always take priority, so a game like this that I had no clue what's going on will always take a while for me to look at, time, and get some independent verifications on.

I just wanted to add a note about contacting me... I know from experience that some emails sent to me simply vanish, gobbled up by the GameSpy spam filter. Since I've had it happen from friends (even my mom) and I know about those emails, I wonder how many vanish that I don't know about. So if you ever email me, and after a week I haven't replied (make sure to give me a week, sometimes i'm slow) then probably your email vanished... in that case you'll have to contact me on aim, icq, or irc instead. There's also the SDA forum where you could post a "hey did you get my email!?" topic if you want, no registration required!

The Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated with a run in a 4th category... and there's still 6 more acceptable categories for runs on the game! (can you name them all?) The new run is a Single-segment 100% on normal skill in 59 minutes and 35 seconds, done by Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody. That's about a minute and a half faster than the best segmented 100% on hard mode.

The minamilist speed run isn't always the most popular to do, but many at least try to do the minimal completion of games. In Pikmin, it is only necessary to grow 50 pikmin, because that is the most required to carry one of the parts. It requires extensive use of the Candypop Buds to change the color of pikmin because of the many parts which require only blue pikmin, or only red. Amazingly, despite this very limited supply, all parts can still be gathered in only 10 days, just one day more than the minimum. The new vids of the 50/10 speed run were done by Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove, who also did the Majora's Mask run.

It's been a rather quiet week here, but I should be getting some more tapes in the mail any day now to liven things up. In the meantime, I did something myself; I improved one of the individual level 100%s of Yoshi's Island. It seems some people were confused and thought that all the files were a continuous run of the game, just with each level redone... but that's not the case at all, he was never trying to do a run of the game, only individual levels. Doing individual level records on more games is possible too, but so far nobody else has volunteered to do any. Anyway, I slaughtered the time on 4-5, Chomp Rock Zone, and got a time of 0:02:04, an improvement of 1 minute 7 seconds! The trick I pull to get this large of an improvement is quite crazy and it required nearly 3 hours of trying before nearly everything went perfect and I acheived that time. I'm doubting that under 2 minutes is possible... someone prove me wrong!

There's a new run on the game that started the 'other games' section here at SDA, Metroid Prime. The first recorded low% run was 23% in 1:38 by 'TreborSelbon', done last year in November. A 23% game is a popular low% for people to try, because it is a lot easier than 22% (which drops the boost ball), and last month someone who goes by 'smilingjack13' at metroid2002.com finished up his 23% run with a time of 1:25! After a lesson in video capturing and compression, it's finally online and ready for your enjoyment.

Tobias 'Dopefish' Lundmark has been working on an improved Half-Life run and he finished it last week. It's available as a large 650MB 800x600 WMV file, or a smaller 320x240 DivX, and of course the original dem files. The Half-Life page has also been updated with a note about a change in the timing rule for it. Since a player can save/reload at any point and do so as much as they want, a penalty of half a second for each new demo will be added to discourage excessive saving. A single-segment run will still be a separate category if someone does one. The penalty decision means the old run by -think.circle- is counted as 0:56:09, and the new run, while 0:50:16 in length, is counted as 0:51:09 for an even 5 minute improvement. Hopefully everyone understands the reasons for implementing this sytem, I'll be sure to update the general rules soon to reflect this for other games with save/load anywhere systems.

Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields has done Single-segment runs on two new games: Mega Man X4 for Playstation, zero's story, in a little over an hour; and Phantasy Star Online 3 for Gamecube, hero's story, in a little under 4 hours.

David 'marshmallow' Gibbons is the reason why Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is now on SDA. He decided to do individual 100% runs of every level. After I went through the tedious task of timing & uploading them all, and then doing a table for them you can finally get them. If you want to watch all the runs, but don't feel like clicking through 54 demo.pl->fileplanet links, you can use the archive FTP to easily grab them all!

Another new game has been added to SDA, the unique real-time + puzzle game, Pikmin for Gamecube. In Pikmin you have 30 days to recover the parts of your busted space ship, but it is possible to gather all parts in only 9 days. On top of this speedy feat, the video on the page also features 0 pikmin deaths, something that I've never been able to accomplish. These videos can also be ordered on a hi-quality DVD for the cost of shipping thanks to TomatoMan!

Also, the Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated with an improved hard 100%. Andrew 'ajbolt89' Bolton has improved the previous time from 'Red Scarlet' by 3 minutes 45 seconds to end up with a time of 1:00:59... so close to that precious hour mark!

In a place called Termina, the sky is literally falling on the center of town... slowly but surely, Link only gets 3 days to stop this catastrophe from happening in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Of course there's nothing he can do because he's been transformed into a deku scrub! After recovering his ocarina from OoT, the Song of Time takes on a new meaning, sending link back to the start of the 3 days. After that he can go back as many times as he wants, only at the price of losing some items, in order to find a way to stop the moon.

But what's the challenge in going back in time that much? It turns out you can finish the game without ever going back again, and that's called the 6-day challenge, or 3-day challenge by some. Although nobody has done just a normal pure speed run of the game yet, this will be a separate category, judged by the game time when one reaches the clock tower with everything finished, which is at 8:32pm on the 2nd day for 'Dragorn', who recorded this run last month and mailed it to me on VHS. I had to buy a new VCR just so I could start capturing stuff sent to me on tape, and then I had some problems, so I had the tapes for nearly 3 weeks before I got them online... sorry for the delay, and enjoy!

There have been a lot of people who asked about a 100% run of Metroid Fusion, but Fusion has the ability to make people hate it very easily, just ask Nate, so nobody had recorded one yet. Finally, DaveB, who hangs out on irc.metroid2002.com with me and other Metroid runners, decided to do one. Before he got crazy on optimizing parts of the game, he played through the whole game many times as practice and finally decided to record an attempt as a Single-segment run. He got an amazing time of 1:16 in the end, only a couple of minutes slower than times reported by people doing runs with saves. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you never found all 100 items in Fusion hmm?

On another note, all metroid runs, and soon everything else, now has a mirror at archive.org thanks to the connections & generosity of simoniker. You can even find all the old records we have for metroid games, at the archive's new Videogame Speed Runs Collection. Their url will show up along with the FilePlanet links in the download list, so be sure to try them out if FilePlanet is giving you trouble, or a line has formed.

Although SDA allows you to break up your runs into segments by using in-game saves, some people still like to try to do a game, even multi-hour ones, in one sitting to see how they do. A couple runs here have already been done like that but they weren't treated special, such as Brightstar's Metroid 2 100%, and TSA's The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past run.

I decided since I've got the space anyway, I might as well have separate records for single-segment runs. So today we add an any % run on Super Metroid in 0:38 by 'smokey' in a single-segment. If someone ever gets a 0:37 or lower by using saves (quite possible), then the 0:38 will still be a the SS record. The same is true for all other games that have saves. In fact, despite the crash-happy engine of the game, my decision makes me want to try to record another single-segment 100% of Metroid Prime...

So how do you do a speed run for a game that's not out yet? Why, you import the japanese version of course, since they get it 3 months before North America. Even if you can't read a single word of Japanese, the need to have that first record outweighs your clue-lessness at all the game's dialogue, right? For those of you eagerly awaiting the release of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures which contains the game "Hyrule Adventure" where up to 4 players can control 4 Links in his newest quest to save Hyrule, well then you've got yourself a nice extended commercial in the form of a speedrun! TSA has done the first speed run on the new game in about 4 hours and 9 minutes. I didn't time it too exact because I only watched the first of 24 parts, it made me excited about the game but I didn't want to ruin it for me by watching it all. But maybe you want to, so go ahead and download!

After the mere 1 second improvement from the last update, here's some slightly more significant improvements. The Metroid page has been updated with both categories improved, 0:29:10 for the any %, an improvement of 0:03:10 and 0:56:40 for the 100%, an improvement of 0:02:11. Both the new runs are by 'Red Scarlet' so she's reclaimed the any % from Scott.

Another update comes on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes where 'Karma Hunter' has repeated his extreme mode perfect game performance and got a time of 1:08:29, which is 0:01:35 fater than the last time. Note that the quality of this video is much better than the 1:10:04. Make a note kids, always record in SP or it looks like crap! ;-)

One second improvements are very common in the six year old Quake section of SDA, where a large portion of the demos are under one minute. Here on other games where there are many over an hour that'll be very rare. Of course there's still a few shorter games, like Mario 1 that just got a 1 second faster vid on for a time of 0:05:10.

Two more games have been added, Half-Life, the classic 1998 PC FPS game about invading aliens, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for Nintendo 64.

On Half-Life we have a 0:55:48 run by '-think.circle-' who recorded the run in segments using the games built-in demo recording, then converted it to avi and cut out the games loading sequences so that it doesn't count for time. The run is available as both avi and dem files if you have the latest Half-Life installed. It includes some crazy shortcuts I never would have imagined, skipping entire levels in some cases!

On Turok there is a whole game run in 1:03:54 by David 'marshmallow' Gibbons and although I've never played the game I can say the run is very impressive. Unfortunatly I had to add a 1 minute penalty to the time because he used a "teleporting death" which is against the rules... but the run is good enough it probably won't be easy to beat even with the penalty.

The Super Smash Bros. Melee page has been updated with 10 faster Break the Targets vids. Thanks to 'gamepro88' for pointing me to 9 faster vids from 'Senju', for the characters Bowser, Falco, Luigi, Mr Game & Watch, Captain Falcon, Donkey Kong, Pikachu, Ness and Marth, as well as a faster Mario from 'marth1'.

The game that made Mario a household name, Super Mario Bros. for the NES has always been a popular game to try to get a fast time on. When the record gets broken it might even get a lot of attention, but so far only vids slightly slower than the records have been availble. The current record of 0:05:14 (0:05:11 by my standards) is now available here at SDA, it was done by the same fellow who did the Metroid run two updates down.

Another Zelda series game is added to the archive today, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It's a pretty long game, and even to do it fast takes over 5 hours! 'TSA' is the resident zelda speed master, he originally had a slower run up on his site, Zelda Headquarters, but it had to be taken down due to excessive bandwitdh usage. That's where me and FilePlanet came in, and he decide to do a new run for me to host. It took about a month from the time he recorded for me to get me all the mpeg2 files he recorded, for me to convert them to DivX and finally to upload them, but his 5:25 run is finally ready for everyones enjoyment. I feel sorry for the 56k'ers out there, the total size is 1.13 GB.

Yet another speed run in the Metroid series, it's certainly the most popular at this time, but there will be other series coming soon, I can promise that. This time it's the original Metroid that got an improvement. 'Red Scarlet''s time has has been beaten by almost 5 minutes by 'sdkess' to end up with a time of 0:32:20. I'll note that it's possible to get much lower than this, and it's already been done... how? You just skip Ridley and use a little trick to get into Tourian without the bridge. Since that's allowed under the rules here but I don't want to make good runs like this one obsolete, Metroid will have two categories for "any %", one that beats both bosses and one that doesn't. We'll probably get one that skips Ridley sometime in the next month, right sdkess?

The Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated again, this time with an improvement to the hard 10% run. Ajbolt89 decided his previous run, the 0:57 that many were amazed about, was, in fact, crap. So he improved it by an amazing 7 minutes 59 seconds to get a new time of 0:49:41, and I must say it's quite impressive.

The first speed run on a game from the famous Mega Man series has been added. Brightstar did a run in 0:25:46 on Mega Man II for Game Boy, perhaps not the best Mega Man game ever made, but it can still be speed run!

In other news, the Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated with a new any % record. 'GameCube04' has achieved a time of 0:31:31, that's 3 minutes 12 seconds faster than the run I did last month. Certainly worth checking out as he used less saves than me, did a few things differently and generally kicked my sorry butt. Of course he still made a big screw up near the end. ;-)

Metroid Fusion is now listed with a brand new 0:53 run from Nate, 10 minutes better than the run he did last year. This means Metroid is the first series to be fully featured here at the Archive, with others hopefully following in its path eventually. Of course more Metroid games will be released eventually, a sequel to Metroid Prime is in the works, and we'll be sure to cover it here as well!

The Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated with the archive's first "low %" or minimalist run. In zero mission the lowest items possible is 9%, but on hard mode an extra item must be acquired. Getting a fast time when you have a very limited ammo supply is quite taxing, and this is actually at least the fourth time that 'ajbolt89' has done a hard 10% speed run, but of all of those > 1 hour didn't make it online. The time now is a 0:57:40, and it would serve as a great tutor if you're going for those elusive <= 15% endings!

The Metroid page has been updated with a new category: a 100% run which conicidentally also takes 58 minutes like yesterday's Super Metroid 100%. Note that Super Metroid was the first Metroid game to tell you your item collection %, for the first two metroids we just say that 100% is getting everything, but no need to get repeating weapons in all locations.

The Super Metroid page has been updated with an improved 100% completion: 0:58 from 'smokey' an improvement of two minutes over 'Red Scarlet'. There's still plenty of botch ups, so how long until someone gets a 0:57? It seems these two players aren't motivated to try it anymore, so maybe a 3rd name will have enter the competition for it to materialize. Why not give it a shot yourself? Oh and a belated happy 10th birthday to Super Metroid!

When this section opened just one month ago the policy for new games being added was that it had to be a game I was familiar with, but it was soon obvious that games I'd never heard of, or at least never played, had speed runs needing hosting too. I decided that if I can get at least three independent people to verify a run fits my rules and help make the pages, that I can go ahead and post runs on other games. To start things off I've added two games that have had runs with high demand done on them.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for Gamecube has a 'Perfect game' on extreme mode done by 'Karma Hunter' in a time of 1:10:04 which was eagerly anticipated to be viewed on the GameFAQs board for the game.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for multi-plats has a run done by SnapDragon of DKC fame in a time of 2:09:56 (2:05 at final save).

Hopefully I can keep up with demand that might arise from this new open policy. If I get enough reports that a run I've posted isn't legitimate I'll have to remove it, so don't try anything funny ... after all, the point of these runs is to show off genuine game play!

The Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated again, this time with an improvement to Red Scarlet's hard 100%. The previous time was 1:11:10 and the new time is a very impressive 1:04:44.

The Metroid Zero Mission page has been updated with a pure speed run, aka a "normal any %" done in 34 minutes and change by me in 5 hours last night. There's slightly faster runs that have been done but none had been recorded yet so I wanted to get one up and this is what I could get in one night. Still worth checking ou.t :-)

The Metroid II - Return of Samus, page has been updated with a brand new pure speed run in 1:02:29 by yours truly. Brightstar also improved his 100% to 1:15:32 despite never saving, doing it in one sitting! That's an improvement of 51 seconds.

There has been a minor update to the rules page to slightly change the rules with teleporting saves because of a situation I hadn't thought of before. It doesn't affect any games already listed here.

Finally, the SSBM page has been updated with another improved Falco time for 10mm.

I've added a page for The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past with an hour 51 minutes run available for download!

Also an update to the SSBM page with new 10mm vids for Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Bowser and Falco.

Another update to the SSBM page: new 10 man melee vids for Samus, Ness and Fox.

I've updated the Metroid II page with an improved 100% by Brightstar, although it might look like it's actually slower. We labelled his first run as "1:12" and the new one as "1:16" ... but the new one is actually nearly two minutes faster. Head to the page for the reason.

Also an update to the SSBM page: updated 10 man melee vids for Kirby, Peach, Captain Falcon, Ganondorf and Zelda!

After the success of my Metroid Prime 1:37 100% video, and because of my constant desire to watch speed runs on almost any game, I've finally expanded SDA into new territories! Here you'll find all the news related to anything on SDA that's not part of the Quake section. For now, just go to the game list above to see what we've got to offer!