The Star Fox games have been receiving some attention recently and we are now able to bring you seven separate runs on the different paths that can be taken through the original Super Nintendo game, both with and without warps, and including the "slot machine" ending. I won't clutter up this news post with details other than to tell you that these runs finish with times between 0:13:11 and 0:31:53 are all the work of Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe.

There is already a comprehensive collection of individual-level runs on Nintendo 64 destruction orgy Blast Corps - the existing runs were apparently quite useful in the production of this new single segment 0:57:12 by Stefan Mahrla on the predictably slower European version.

Next up is a run on the sequel to isometric PC classic Little Big Adventure: Little Big Adventure 2: Twinsen's Odyssey has been rushed through in 1:21:29 by Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns. This contribution was performed across 9 segments and abuses death to save time. Daniel used a patch to enable the game to be run on modern machines, but it is not believed to affect gameplay significantly. Segments 4-6 of this run are very short owing to flagrant luck manipulation !

Finally, Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger has greased his way through Oddworld game Abe's Oddysee for the PC in 0:56:42 over 10 segments.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson is treating us with his "last" run of Quake 4. His previous run has had about 16 and a half minutes chopped off to yield a new time of 1:46:06, on Private skill the same as before. Be sure to read his comments for the reason for today's news subject.

I've no idea how many Batman games have been released on assorted systems over the years - I've played three on 8-bit CPUs alone - but the one on which we bring you a run today must surely have been among the earliest. This is a 0:13:05 dash through the NES release by Daniel L. Henry. Daniel is unlucky in a few places and dies once, but for the most part it's good old-fashioned walljumping nonchalance. Mike Uyama adores NES games because they're quick and painless to process ...

Another individual-level spreadsheet joined my rapidly swelling collection today: Stepping up to accompany the incumbent single-segment run on Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal comes a set of individual-level performances on the Qwark Vidcomics section of this title. Sam 'TeNFoLD' Blair has run all five vidcomics; his times sum to 0:10:11. As usual, please consult the table on the game page for the full details.

Patrick W. Weisgerber has gone postal in Paradise. To be more specific, he's stormed through PC release Postal² in 1:06:28 across 8 segments with guns ablaze - I'm afraid it's not SDA policy to track body count, so you'll have to tot that up for yourselves.

Finally, please bear in mind that with the holiday season fast approaching there is likely to be a decrease in the rate at which runs go up over the next few weeks. Thanks.

three weeks short of a year ago, i called on you to run sonic games. i offered up the new sonic 2 individual-level table, every run in it lovingly crafted by yours truly, and i implored you to build on my times. i said i was prepared to wait no longer for sonic runs worthy of the speed demos archive name.

today, my wait is finally over.

0:20:02 seems quite appropriate to me—the time is symmetrical, like seeing oneself in a mirror. it represents a community working together through one person to achieve something truly over-the-top. it represents an unparalleled event available to everyone in the highest possible quality—completely free of charge. and it represents dedication of the kind money could never buy.

the man behind this feat is, of course, joe stanski, 30 september's "rising star" and today's virtually unchallenged sonic 2 dominator. this time he brings us—in addition to his 0:20:02 single-segment—no fewer than seven individual-level improvements, and all but one (mystic cave zone, act 2) are in pristine dvd quality:

• chemical plant zone, act 1 in 0:00:23,
• chemical plant zone, act 2 in 0:00:40 (breathtaking),
• aquatic ruin zone, act 2 in 0:00:39 (don't miss this one!),
• casino night zone, act 1 in 0:00:28,
• mystic cave zone, act 2 in 0:00:45,
• metropolis zone, act 2 in 0:01:03 and
• metropolis zone, act 3 in 0:01:39.

his new times bring the individual-level total down to 0:17:46, an overall improvement of 0:00:41. in addition, he has redone aquatic ruin zone, act 1 (again 0:00:23) in dvd quality, and i have redone my only remaining time in the table, emerald hill zone, act 1 (again 0:00:20) in h.264 mpeg-4 and embedded flash versions for voluntary promotional purposes.

work continues on the less famous sonic games as i write this, and i am sure that this update represents only the beginning of a proud tradition of sonic running here at sda.

will you be the next joe stanski?

There are two new runs on Zelda 2, The Adventure of Link for NES. The runs are by Kristian Emanuelsen on the European version, which runs at the requisite 5/6th the speed of the intended speed of the NTSC version. The surprising thing though is that in the standard category of "with Up+A warping and death abuse", Kristian gets a time of 1:10:26 which is almost two minutes faster than the NTSC run by Scott Kessler. Of course, Scott's run is over two years old, and Kristian does things like skipping the candle and only getting the required four magic spells, so it's no surprise really. Kristian's other run is a "New Game +" which comes out to a time of 0:46:35, and this is slower than a more recent NTSC run by Tommy Montgomery.

At the crazy rate at which we've been posting runs recently, it was fairly inevitable that the three hundredth game would be listed on SDA sooner or later. This update consists of three new games, so as Radix did for game 200, you can choose which one corresponds to the magic number - personally I'm picking Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, simply because the video started with a title screen; the others didn't. Owing to the substantial potential for glitch exploitation on this game, we will be listing glitched and glitchless runs as two separate categories. Aleš 'Ewil' Horák's 48-segment glitched run on the PC version was painstakingly timed by Mike at 2:48:51.

Candidate number two is a game that was released in Europe but not in the US - this should happen more often ! Terranigma for the Super Nintendo appears to be typical Enix fare and has been sped through by Alex 'Madzombie' McIver in 4:48 over 19 segments.

Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti might be accused of hogging the limelight with his third run in four updates (nothing wrong with that). He brings us a 30-segment run on PC Fur Fighters, the cuter shooter, in 3:01:58.

Joe Stanski kicks us off for December with a four-second improvement to Sonic the Hedgehog 2's Wing Fortress Zone. His new 0:01:54 from October beats Phillipe 'Suzaku' Henry's older 0:01:58. The total individual-level time has fallen from 0:18:31 to 0:18:27. Go Joe !

I'm pleased to see original Game Boy flagship release Super Mario Land finally hit SDA's hard drives, as my former brat self spent many a satisfying hour in the back of the car playing it. This 0:14:25 run by Martin Hauer is solid, although he remarks in his comments that he could have been a bit less cautious; Mike and I agreed that he might have taken damage to save time a bit more often. There's also a nasty mistake in 3-3, but overall it's a pretty good effort, worth a watch, and provides an appealing target for someone to try to beat.

Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti is right back in the headlines - having clambered back out of the rabbit hole he's charged through PC shooter-puzzler hybrid MDK2 on easy mode in 1:24:48 with a segment count of 49.

Several people got in touch to suggest that we made a mistake by replacing Brandon '19Duke84' Armstrong's Silent Hill 2 0:06:32 Maria's quest run with the 0:06:29 we posted on the 21st. Mike has watched both runs and agrees with the assertion that they are pretty much equivalent in play quality, so we can only assume that there's some minor difference between the in-game timers on the PC and console versions of this game. If anyone can provide any further details we'd love to hear them, but for now we've decided to resurrect the older run and just list console and PC runs separately. We offer our apologies for any confusion this might have caused.

"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti ignored the King's sage advice by continuing to improve his own runs on PC American McGee's Alice. His old 0:48:19 easy skill run has been replaced by a 0:42:35 in 46 segments, and the old hard skill run in 1:01:10 has been made obsolete by a harder yet much faster nightmare skill contribution in 0:47:52 across 57 segments. There is a slight continuity error in the easy skill run but the verifiers and Mike agreed that it was not sufficiently significant to warrant a rejection. These runs feature cunning trickery aplenty, including some clever damage boosting and liberal bunny hopping, although I'd expect it to be called "hare-hopping" for this title. As this is a PC game, there are also demo files available for both runs at archive. Andres may be grinning like a Cheshire cat but I wasn't when I found out that the videos had been uploaded with PCM audio instead of MP3, necessitating a tedious correction process mitigated only by the ever-wonderful video Swiss army knife that is ffmpeg. Off with his head !

Finally, a new single-segment any% joins the existing 100% on Mega Man X8, played on the PC version this time. Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen has made this game his own in 1:16. At D1 F1 PAL DVD capture and using the mvbob() deinterlacer, Nate feels that the IQ version of this run is among the highest quality videos on the site ! Apparently it took him two days to make each of the HQ and IQ (yeah, Nate made me add that part - at gunpoint).

Once more I fall victim to "polyrun queue creep", the phenomenon by which I list the files comprising a run on dreamhost and discover that I have to do three times the amount of work I was expecting. Brett 'Psonar' Ables brings us not one, not two, but three runs on Star Fox 64. For starters he beat Mike 'TSA' Damiani's old 0:27:29 pure speed run with his own 0:25:45. He has also added two new categories to this game: An Expert mode redline route (i.e. staying on the hard path for the whole game) completion in 0:35:35, and a single-segment, 100% expert mode run in 1:24:52. The "single-segment" tag here is a little strange because collecting all medals using the fastest possible route requires the console to be reset twice, but nevertheless this was a feat achieved in one sitting and this fact has been recognised.

In the five weeks I've been handling virtually everything in Ready to update we have managed to clear a lot of older runs from the queue, but I think today's second sacrifice to the speed run gods breaks some sort of endurance record; the end of last month marked the first anniversary of its completion. Adrian 'InsipidMuckyWater' Feiertag is a runner who has been something of a fixture in the news recently, and he has kicked Beavis and Butthead's asses, propelling the disgusting delinquents through their Genesis spinoff in 0:12:41. Adrian should be a happy lad today, as he's apparently also been looking forward to the Star Fox runs above, so expect him to be pulling his T-shirt over his head and strutting about with his hands aloft. Bungholio.

Aurélien 'slade' Pilet has comprehensively demolished the previous time for PlayStation Metal Gear Solid's Extreme difficulty on the European version of the game. Not only that, but it's been done single-segment, when the old record was a six-segment affair. The final accolade is that the two-hour mark has been broken with a run that was practised for a year before completion. 1:59:46 replaces 2:14:27. Mike would like everyone to know that he loves in-game timers.

The other feature we have for you today is a Maria's quest effort on PC Silent Hill 2 on Hard mode. Adam 'Introverder' Titowicz kept matching the PS2 record of 0:06:32 until hard work paid off and eventually he achieved this 0:06:29.

During the the summer I worked on a speed run which you won't find on SDA because it violates Radix's out-of-bounds rule. However one thing I wanted to do with the run was to record and insert a second audio track containing spoken commentary, because I believed it would increase the depth and watchability of my videos by an order of magnitude. As it turned out, I wasn't the only one pursuing this goal.

Nate introduced me to a guy called Michael 'sternn' McEnroe via IRC who was also trying to sort out a commentary track for his PS2 Devil May Cry attempt; according to Mike (Uyama) this is a superb speed run, one in whose presence I am apparently blessed - 100% on "Dante Must Die!" skill across 15 segments in 1:35:34 speaks for itself. Michael and I both achieved our goal of dual track audio, but there were some caveats; if you want to listen to commentary on this run you'll need to keep reading.

I chatted to 'sternn' for a little while and he shared with me his experiences of trying to multiplex two audio tracks into the MP4 container format. It seemed that Quicktime's apparently non-negotiable default setting was to play both audio tracks at the same time. I was having no better luck with the AVI container that I had been intending to use for my dual-audio videos. Windows Media Player suffered from exactly the same ridiculous both-tracks-at-once problem when confronted with dual audio AVI.

In the end we both plumped for a similar solution, which was to use the Matroska "mkv" video container format - an open source creation which was built from the ground up to accommodate many modern features, one of them being multitrack audio. The problem with Matroska is that it is poorly supported by the major vendors. This prolonged rant leads me to the following conclusions:

• We cannot support Matroska video here on SDA because, quite apart from the fact that we're making between five and seven versions already, the installed base support for playback is not large enough. This run has no less than ten versions: single audio, low/normal quality DivX AVI; single audio, low/normal/high/insane quality H.264 MPEG-4; and dual audio low/normal/high/insane quality H.264 Matroska.
• The dual-audio .mkv versions of Michael's run are not linked from SDA but we have dutifully uploaded them to archive.org. You can get hold of the .mkv files at archive via HTTP here or FTP here. We will not support any problems you have with these videos.
• By far the simplest and most reliable way to play back the Matroska files is to use VLC Player (go audio menu -> audio track -> 2). If you are determined to use Windows Media Player you can try experimenting with the Haali media splitter.

It would be really advantageous if major software vendors and the open source community could stop waving software patents in each other's faces and actually standardise upon and coherently implement some sort of dual-audio container. Then we might not have to upload ten freaking versions of a single run.

Joe Wiewel can't get enough when it comes to big hairy gorillas. He also likes beavers - giant beavers. Throw in some exploding oranges and what do you get? Donkey Kong 64 of course. Joe did his second run through this game, but this time he went for a 100% completion. With its fair share of death abuse, and 14 segments total, the run clocks in at 9:02.

Now wait just a minute you say, that time is waaaaaay higher than the limit listed in the FAQ, how could I possibly post this? Well, we already have a 4:36 run on this game. This 100% is almost exactly twice the length. The limit in question was designed for 'default' runs, but this doesn't mean you can take a game that can be completed in 5-7 hours and do a 100% run that takes 20+ hours! I dont know what the limit might be, but let's just say that this one maybe only got posted cuz I like the game mmmmkay?

As for the performance of the run, it's pretty good in most places despite Joe's inability to try a segment again. There's a lot of spots that make you cringe though. Not restarting earlier on clearly failed attempts at Beaver Bother. Playing the worst game(s) of Donkey Kong arcade you've EVER seen. Having a few cases of forgetting what kong to select next and where to go with them. But adding all those up, I don't think it's much more than 2% of the run's total time, so enjoy it if you can.

First of all, another correction. The time for the Zen: Intergalactic Ninja run in the previous update should have been 0:19:20, not 0:20:35. Many apologies go to 'InsipidMuckyWater' for the goof. This has been fixed in Thursday's news.

Back to business. We bring you three improvements to Max Payne 2 PC individual-level times courtesy of Tomi 'sarou' Salo. 1-6 (Mona's Funhouse) has been improved by 2 seconds from 0:01:38 to 0:01:36, and there have been revisions on 3-3 (Slum Neighbourhood) in both "shortcut" (i.e. using the "super jump" glitch) and non-shortcut categories. For the non-shortcut category, the time has fallen by a massive 31 seconds from 0:00:48 to 0:00:17, and for the shortcut category the saving was 9 seconds, the time decreasing from 0:00:19 to 0:00:10. The overall improvements, then: shortcut category - 0:24:44 becomes 0:24:33, an 11 second decrease; non-shortcut category - 0:28:47 becomes 0:28:14, a 33 second decrease. Please note that at the current time the Europe archive FTP link will not contain the updated files yet, so if you want to use an FTP listing to access the files, please use the US one.

Three more new additions.

We seem to have been posting a lot of RPG runs recently, and today is no exception, as we bring you more Squaresoft shenanigans courtesy of John 'chessjerk' Kearsley IV. John's 21 segment run on Final Fantasy Tactics for the PlayStation was completed a month ago and finishes with a time of 5:19.

Erik 'Goggen' Krug Aase's comments for his run on Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb are gargantuan - they remind me of Radix's room-by-room discourse for his Metroid Prime 100% 1:37, the game which started the "other" section at Speed Demos Archive. Erik's run is equal parts zip and whip as he hurriedly ushers the swashbuckling archaeologist through this PC release in 1:46:43 across 58 segments. Pretty speedy work - Lara Croft would still be stuck in traffic somewhere near Oxford. There are some cutscene videos included with this run that are not part of the run itself - we're not linking to those from SDA, but they are up at archive if you want to watch them.

Finally, there comes another effort from Adrian 'InsipidMuckyWater' Feiertag. Adrian admits to buying NES comic-book tie-in Zen: Intergalactic Ninja solely for the purposes of running it, and according to his comments, the whole thing was done through a DVD recorder exhibiting video lag, which should probably earn him some bonus points. The time ? 0:19:20.

One other thing - a correction. 'groobo' queried a level timing in yesterday's Lego Star Wars update, and as a result we have revised e3c3 from 0:01:28 to 0:01:26 and his total time to 0:55:23. This has also been changed in yesterday's news.

Lego Star Wars is one of those game concepts that sounds like marketing Seppuku but actually proved to be a highly enjoyable and delightfully irreverent romp through Star Wars canon. Maciej 'groobo' Maselewski returns with a set of individual-level performances on the PC version of this game; his level times sum to 0:55:23.

Asa 'spikevegeta' Tims today unveils the final revision of a run that started off with a time of six hours. The run was retooled for two months before we eventually got our sweaty hands on this 5:06 eight-segment-plus-ending completion of PS2 Kingdom Hearts II on Beginner mode. Enjoy !

Katamari Day rolls around again, and I'm pleased to announce there's been some serious angular velocity picked up on both PS2 titles.

First, the hors d'œuvres. Tom 'slowbro' Batchelor has completed a single-segment 0:30:26 on Katamari Damacy, which should provide some company for his existing single-segment on its sequel. He has contributed four improvements to individual levels on this game too, chopping a 0:02:43 chunk from the total IL time:

• Star 4: improved by 28 seconds from 0:02:24 to 0:01:56;
• Star 5: improved by 13 seconds from 0:02:48 to 0:02:35;
• Star 7: improved by 40 seconds from 0:03:28 to 0:02:48;
• Star 8: improved by 82 seconds from 0:06:00 to 0:04:38.

Tom has also produced a run on one of the bonus levels, effectively achieving 100% on Make Taurus by collecting the Holy Cow in 0:03:18. I've listed this in the table, but unless we get runs on all the bonus levels this won't be included in the total time, which for now remains the sum of the "main" star/moon level times only.

Now comes the main course. There have been no less than twenty-three improvements to individual level times on We ♥ Katamari by the crack quartet of Tom; Maria 'The Prince's Bride' Risher; Stephen 'yoshifan' Chan and Matt 'matthew69' DeMoss. In fact, of the 26 levels listed on this game, only three have survived the hurricane of this update. I was considering listing all the improvements here, but it would have swelled this news update beyond critical mass and the entire universe would have imploded as a result, so check out this text file for the scoop. The total individual-level improvement on this game clocks in at 0:07:18. Since nearly all the old levels were beaten, I decided there was a requirement for some ZIP file action, so you can download all the We ♥ Katamari individual levels (whether new in this update or not) as normal quality DivX AVI here.

Erik 'fluffy kitten' Beisick has added another GameCube game to the list, rounding off the Sands of Time trilogy with a 100% hard mode run on Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. Of course, some of us still remember the two original 16-bit Prince of Persia games ... how about a run on one of those some day ? You can skip the sword in the original ! Anyway, Erik's 19-segment sprint finished with a time of 2:38:07.

Next up we have Wesley 'Molotov' Corron destroying his old GBA Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones run by over fifty minutes - just the sort of thing we want to see ! He took the Eirika route this time and bent the game's random number generator to his will, getting 1:37:56 across 26 segments. Since this run beat the old one so comprehensively and was produced by the same runner, we have decided to unlist the old Ephraim run; you can of course still get hold of it at archive if you really want to.

A quick note from Mike: he would like verifiers to know that he appreciates all offers but that there will be a delay between a run being posted as requiring verification and the verifier copies of the videos actually becoming available. Don't expect a response until Mike and Nate have the videos ready. Patience !

Two new additions in today's update ... a pair of games that were released nineteen years apart.

Pick of the week for me is this NES Ghosts 'n Goblins effort, a game so fiendishly difficult that mere mortals would struggle simply to complete it. Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown almost buys the farm half a dozen times and is forced to improvise heavily during the course of his 0:22:56. The run also boasts some neat damage boosting and represents an all-round nerves-of-steel performance which Mike, Nate and I thoroughly enjoyed.

Hot on the heels of the first PSP videos, we bring you the first Xbox 360 run to hit SDA's shores - completed back in April, it has finally wheezed its way to the top of the queue. Adrian 'InsipidMuckyWater' Feiertag has burned through Condemned: Criminal Origins in ten segments and achieved 1:56:25 for his troubles - and if you're a fan of verbose comments, Adrian's near-dissertation on this run is sure not to disappoint.

Joe Stanski is back with yet more Sonic the Hedgehog 2 individual-level mayhem, exploiting new glitches which have allowed him to subtract a whopping 70 seconds from the total. Consult the table for the full story, but here are the spoilers:

• Chemical Plant Zone, Act 2: improved by 21 seconds from 0:01:03 to 0:00:42;
• Aquatic Ruin Zone, Act 2: improved by 2 seconds from 0:00:45 to 0:00:43;
• Hill Top Zone, Act 1: improved by 7 seconds from 0:00:50 to 0:00:43;
• Hill Top Zone, Act 2: improved by 5 seconds from 0:01:07 to 0:01:02;
• Mystic Cave Zone, Act 1: improved by 6 seconds from 0:00:40 to 0:00:34;
• Metropolis Zone, Act 3: improved by 29 seconds from 0:02:20 to 0:01:51.

In other news, our first PSP run goes up today, captured using the Innovation PSP TV adaptor. Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk has greased his way through Mega Man Powered Up, the remake / update to the original Mega Man. The result is two single-segment "good ending" runs: a 0:22:20.48 as Mega Man and a 0:24:07.67 as Protoman.

Also new to SDA, cult PlayStation platforming RPG Valkyrie Profile gets the single-segment treatment tonight courtesy of Josh 'rashreflection' Ballard. This default "B" ending run was planned for over a year, with dozens of route changes, and it shows. The game was timed by looking at the in-game timer just before the final boss and then adding on a manually timed start-of-control to loss-of-control final boss fight, Radix-style. Since we cannot guarantee future runners will necessarily pop up the menu screen directly before the final boss, and because we would wish any improvement to this game to be "significant", we have decided to drop the seconds from the in-game timer and just list this excellent run as 1:03.

Nicolas 'Neth' Kopp has published this Easy Mode 1:03:16 run on PC horror shooter Clive Barker's Undying - but we came very close to rejecting it. Why, you ask ? The reason is that the encodes all used crazy bitrates and resolutions. Normal quality was 512x384 at roughly 1024 kilobaud when it should have been 320x240 at 512 kilobaud. Low quality was the correct 320x240 resolution but at a whopping 700 kilobaud instead of 128. We discussed nuking the run for a while but in the end Nate decided to derive a new low quality version at the correct bitrate, and we substituted the provided "low quality" for normal quality, which gave us something at least approaching spec.

One of the reasons we took mercy on this run is because it predates the SDA knowledge base. By far the best way to get your run encoded correctly is to send it to Nate on VHS or DVD (although remember that Nate is still on schedule to stop providing VHS capture services in approximately eight months from now). If you insist on doing your own encodes (usually because you are playing a PC title), be sure to read the KB, and if you are even slightly unsure about what you are doing, to post samples of your encodes plus any questions you might have in the Tech Support forum. With the release of the KB it is becoming increasingly likely that we will reject unsuitably encoded runs out-of-hand.

I'm also going to reiterate that it would make our lives several times easier if runners could include a title screen at the start of their runs so we can framegrab it for the game pages. There have been two cases recently where I have had to acquire a copy of a game purely for the purposes of capturing its title screen. This is not always the runner's fault, of course, but if the game is new to SDA and your run video does not include a title screen, please consider supplying a separate clip of video that does - it really would help.

Thanks for reading, and keep the runs coming !

Bouncers, eh ? Always throwing you out for not wearing the right cufflinks. Arthur 'MatrixTN' Boelter must enjoy forcibly refusing entry, if this triple whammy on predictably-named PS2 title The Bouncer is anything to go by. 'MatrixTN' has played as all three characters on this game, and his times exhibit an uncanny symmetry: single-segment 0:19 as Kou; single-segment 0:19 as Sion; and single-segment 0:19 as Volt.

I'm not quite so old as to have been alive when Hendrix was at the peak of his powers and the Soviet Union firmly held the lead in the space race, but if, like me, you have a certain fondness for 1960s kitsch, you might do well to check out today's feature presentation. Ulf 'HidoiMidoriRyuu' Strömberg has produced this 1:39:30 run on Bond-inspired female-fronted PC spy shooter No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way. Not only is the setting somewhat retro, but also the run itself, being as it was completed back in January of this year.

I thought it would be appropriate to let all you little speed run vampires get your teeth into something with a spectral theme this Halloween. James 'Psychochild' Conway currently holds the single-segment record for PS2 flagship title Devil May Cry 3, but apparently he's not satisfied with that - and we wicked types at SDA adore dissatisfaction, because it usually leads to more speed runs. 'Psychochild' has taken full advantage of the release of the Special Edition of this game - one which introduces a number of new play modes - to conjure up two magical items from his bubbling cauldron.

The first is this 1:40:07 Hard Mode run as the antagonist, Vergil, who was added to the Special Edition as a playable character. The second run is billed by James as a (and you might want to read this twice) 'Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition Segmented Heaven or Hell Any Percent Turbo Mode Gold Orb Fresh Super Dante Speed Run' (sic), although we're going with the slightly punchier incantation 'Turbo, Heaven or Hell Mode as Super Dante'. Those unfamiliar with the meaning of all these arcane magic words would do well to read the comments for this run, but to start you off: Turbo mode is 20 percent faster, and Heaven or Hell difficulty means that one hit kills anything ... including the player. Don't worry - squabbling over the precise categorisation is our job; yours is simply to watch and enjoy this novel, death-abusing, demonic 1:03:03. Are you scared yet ?

I still have the scars on my elbows to prove that I was once a skateboarder. I find it a little weird while watching the intro for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 to see that many of the big names I knew fifteen years ago are still shredding concrete, and stranger still that I've met two of them. It's great to see that while I sit behind this desk like a hopeless nerd posting SDA updates one of the kids from my hometown is doing really well for himself in California - but I digress. Simon 'Sorcerer88' Schmid has produced a single-segment run on the PAL version of this game for the GameCube, unlocking and completing all eight levels. At one stage he admits to using something akin to death warping, but apparently none of the verifiers commented on it and it seems like a very minor infraction, so for the time being we've decided to let it slide. Simon also admits that this run, while a good effort, could be improved, so perhaps we'll need to make a more concrete ruling on death warping in this game at some point in the not too distant future. For now, just enjoy this gnarly 0:08:53 - trust me, it's a lot less painful than the real thing.

satoru 'hotarubi' suzuki of japan has achieved a record you are sure not to believe until you see the video--and even then you may not believe it. you see, hotarubi's level of play is so far beyond anything yet seen on this site that his run got stuck in verification for weeks while the verifiers tried to decide whether or not the video was legitimate.

however, no evidence of foul play was ever found, and so today on behalf of metroid 2002 / speed demos archive i am proud to present super metroid in 0:32 ...

single-segment.

The trend of many-headed runs masquerading as single runs in the queue continues. Fellow SDA crew member Mike Uyama has skillfully torn through new Genesis addition Contra: Hard Corps as Browny ... five times. Because of the multiple routes a player can take through this game (and bear with me here), we have the following: Chase Joe, surrender path in 0:16:43; Chase Joe, fight path in 0:17:31; Lab, surrender path in 0:19:27; Lab, fight path in 0:22:00; and, as if that were not enough, the secret ending path in 0:05:40. Personally I think Mike's earned a nice sit down with a cup of tea.

Luke 'transience' Yagnow of Metroid Zero Mission fame remarked to me a few days ago that he wasn't familiar with many of the newer 3D games being posted at SDA these days. I hope that transience and others that share his taste for 2D action will enjoy Mike's runs and the clutch of 2D runs we posted on the 22nd. Remember, kids, flashy graphics don't make a game !

maciej 'groobo' maselewski brings us a massive improvement over the old diablo time of 0:53:13 by david 'marshmallow' gibbons - an astonishing 0:17:38. how in the hell was this achieved, you ask? according to mike uyama, it was simple - 'groobo' manipulated luck in a hella tas-like fashion and made sure he planned ahead with his mana use. run like hell, 'groobo'! run like hell!

I cannot really begin to describe the pleasure it gives me to be posting this particular update. Here's why: Scott 'sdkess' Kessler has managed to shave a single second off legendary NES platformer Super Mario Bros. His astonishing achievement takes the time down from 0:05:06 to 0:05:05. Torrents of both the normal quality 60 fps h.264 MP4 and the normal quality 20 fps DivX AVI are available, as well as the usual dreamhost / archive combo. What the hell are you waiting for ?!

Nate is also pretty happy about the fact that there is another Genesis run up, and happier still that it's on Ecco the Dolphin. In fact, there are two runs on this game, one being an individual-levels effort in 0:22:31, and the second a complete single-segment run in 0:28:32. Both these runs were forged by the talented hands of Jared 'BlueGlass' Minnihan. (You can also download a temporary .zip file containing all of the DivX AVI or H.264 MPEG-4 Medium Quality versions of the Individual-Level runs.)

There is also a run on Gunstar Super Heroes for the Game Boy Advance, the sequel (or should that be "tribute"&nbsp?) to the original Gunstar Heroes. John De Sousa tears through this game as Red, single-segment style, on Easy mode in 0:18:51.

What, you want more ? Okay - the game is F-Zero X on the Nintendo 64, on which Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica has improved his Space Plant 2 time to 0:01:16.433.

It must be pretty galling to have a run rejected on grounds of play quality, as happened to Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson when he originally attempted PlayStation title Crash Bandicoot 2. Fortunately for everyone, a change in the death abuse rules helped persuade him to keep going and he finally produced this 100% run in 1:39:59 - faster than the rejected attempt by over 25 minutes !

With another new addition to the gamelist, the dynamic duo of Richard 'chillout' Karlsson and Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson has produced six runs on PC title Aliens vs. Predator 2 and its expansion pack, Aliens vs. Predator 2: Primal Hunt. On the original game, we have Alien in 0:18:50, Marine in 0:40:03 and Predator in 0:23:47. On the expansion pack, we have Corporate in 0:09:36, Predalien in 0:06:25 and Predator in 0:14:24. Phew !

For a long time I wanted someone to beat my Mega Man X low percent run. I even mentioned it on the forums a couple of times. Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson took my whining into consideration and got a time of 0:34:51, over a minute faster than my run.

When I first read that Xbox offering Jade Empire was based on ancient Chinese martial arts, I could not help but wonder whether there were any giant enemy crabs involved. I suppose the gentleman to answer that question would be Trevis 'garrote' Hall, who whizzed through this new addition to the SDA repertoire in 2:41.

metroid zero mission gets a shot in the arm today by metroid 2002's mark 'kridly' meisner. mark lowered the hard 100% time in metroid zero mission from andy bolton's long-standing 1:00:59 by several minutes to 0:58:24! because this run was processed with my newest game boy player methodology, its quality ought to be quite extreme, especially in the "high quality" videos. of course, if you just want to stream it, our streaming flash solution is there for you (and don't forget to embed segments you like in your own sites!).

fourteen-year-old movie tie-in games might not be much fun to play today, but when jonathan 'barrage' bean runs them, they're a blast to watch. his run of predator 2 for the genesis clocks in at 0:11:39. i bet danny glover wishes he could run that fast in real life!

william 'pirate109' tansley's 22% run in the european version of metroid prime isn't new today, but its quality is. thanks to the fantastic improvements made in capture and encoding methodology over the past two years, i can finally release this run the way it was meant to be seen. it's not the fastest low percent run in metroid prime, but if you want to see the game in superior pal color and resolution, it would be a great way to do that.

Mike Uyama has conquered another game in the Metal Slug series: Metal Slug 3. He did a run on hard mode in 0:33:19.

joe stanski, sda's new rising star, has ripped apart virtually all of my individual-level times in sonic the hedgehog 2. after appearing in the sda forum about six weeks ago he quickly surpassed all of us who would have hoped to have competed with him. there are too many new times to list here, and there are even more still to come ... sonic 2's individual-level total is down 55 seconds today alone -- and why are you still here reading this!? check out the massacred table now!!

Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove has been working for many months on an improved Single-segment 100% run of Super Mario 64. By complete coincidence, the run is now ready to post during the same week as the 10-year anniversary of the release of Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 itself in North America. So, celebrate one of Mario's birthdays by watching Peter's very impressive 2:09:40 run, available in six different flavors. (two via torrents)

Thanks again to mikwuyma for helping me post some really old but not forgotten runs. This time it's Trespasser for PC, based in the Jurassic Park universe. Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti completed it in 0:47:30. Near the end there's a strange moment that seems like mysterious teleporting... but according to a fan page that Andres links to, it's apparently a legitimately put in secret in the game.

Queue.html watchers would have noticed 1 run in 'ready to update' before this update... but it's really three. I just counted it as one because they're all on the same game: the eternal source of speed runs: Metroid Prime. Besmir 'Zoid' Sheqi sent in the following:

- Single-segment 100% in 1:34, two minutes faster than his previous.
- Hard-mode any% in 1:15 in 18 segments, 9 minutes faster than Benjamin Feng.
- Hard-mode 100% in 1:37 in 22 segments. This is a new category - it's 9 minutes slower than normal 100% segmented and matches the time of my original 100% on normal.

Tom 'rdrunner' Votava sent in his first run on a Nintendo 64 game: he stomped on the recently posted run of Donkey Kong 64. Tom got a time of 4:36, vs 5:04 that Joe Wiewel had, but Tom's run is Single-segment and Joe's wasn't. Not that segmented really got anyone much in this game anyway.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did a run of Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero for Nintendo 64 / PlayStation. His eight segment run, completed back in 2005, finished in approximately 0:50:32.

There are three new speed runs on some Mega Man X games... the worst of the lot. X5, X6, and X7. I haven't personally played them, but I hear they suck. The runs on each game are by three different people - it wasn't one person conquering all of the suckiness.
X5 is 0:11:54 by Ben 'Cauldrath' Hanes in 5 segments, over 4 minutes faster than the SS.
X6 is 0:31:00 by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk, nearly 7 minutes faster than his previous run.
X7 is 1:02:41 by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols, new to the site.

For non Mega Man, read this bit written by mikwuyma:
Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger did a run of Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2. Don't know the game, well not many people do, which why it took over a year for this run to be posted. However, the run isn't nearly as long, being a 28-segment run with a time of 0:43:18.

Total number of hours Radix put in for his job for the two weeks spanning August 27 - September 9: 127.

Ben 'Mkt2015' Fichter sent in a run on Jak II for PlayStation 2 again. You may remember that on 2005-11-17 I posted news about his first run, which had a significant portion missing due to a tape vanishing in transit (lesson learned: package your tapes well). Rather than redo the exact same run, Ben did the game on a different mode, the unlockable "Hero Mode". Normally at SDA we require a "default" run first, but due to Ben's unfortunate luck, we'll let this one slide. You can find his 56 segment 4:42 run on the game page. That's 33 minutes faster than the default run he did w/the missing parts (link to that in his comments BTW). There was a couple encoding problems with this run the verifiers told us about... I'm not honestly sure if we got them all straightened out. There's so many runs in the queue, and I've put in 60 hours for my job in the last week, so I don't exactly have much time for the site. If there's still problems I'm sure people will be nice enough to complain about them on the forum.

in case you haven't been following events in the forum, i'm here to tell you that a large number of requests for flash encoding have been fulfilled as of tonight. click on that crazy link in the previous sentence if you want to find out exactly what is available now as embedded flash. keep in mind that you're free (and encouraged) to copy the html code offered on these flash.pl pages and use it in your myspace, blog, website or whatever to help spread the gospel of sda!

also joining the party tonight are three completely reprocessed runs of old. richard ureta's super mario bros. 3 in 0:11:11 and mega man 2 in 0:30:39 as well as andrew 'ajbolt89' bolton's latest hard low% run in metroid zero mission (finishing with a time of 0:45:42) have all been recaptured and reencoded using my latest methods. x264 ftw!

for my next trick, i will release the speed demos archive knowledge base! this wiki-based, genius-powered answer center is my latest attempt to keep the documentation around here somewhat more up-to-date. note, though, that i still recommend you send your dvd/vhs/whatever to me for processing (rather than wading through all the stuff in the knowledge base and feeling stupid because you can't get it right).

Francis 'F-Man' LeBlanc has submitted his first run. It's an improvement to the run as Sonic in Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast/GCN/PC. Francis's run is 0:34:33; compare to the previous 0:46:11 by Mychal Jefferson and draw your own conclusions.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson has finished his nearly year old project to run Doom 3 on nightmare skill. The final result of his struggle is a 38-segment run coming to a time of 1:25:11, about 5.5 minutes faster than the previous run on Marine skill!

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has improved his run of Mario & Luigi for GBA. His new run is 29 segments (compare to 55 of the old) and clocks in at 3:26. That's one hour faster than his old one, which just goes to show you that his previous run really sucked!

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe has saved Earth from alien invasion in the PlayStation version of the classic game Space Invaders. He plays on normal difficulty and gets 0:39:51, and then again on expert and gets 0:51:59. In keeping with the theme of the last update, this item is named wrong at archive because I'm an idiot. Not that the item page actually exists yet at archive since I had no time to create it. Updating everything in two places sucks.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson sent in a bunch more individual level 100%s on Yoshi's Island. I'm too lazy and tired to list the levels, but the total improvement was 8 minutes 42 seconds if I didn't fuck up the HTML.

Mandela Shabazz submitted a run on a game called 'Shinobi'. According to GameFAQs, there are eight games named that. Mandela's run is on the 2002 PlayStation 2 edition and gets a time of 0:38:29.

Just a note to the queue watchers: I've dropped four runs from the queue that have been in there for over 6 months with no interest, or some other problems associated with them.

There's a run of everyone's favorite Sonic character - Big the Cat - added to the Sonic Adventure page. Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti completes the fat purple cat's story in 0:09:03.

There's a new run on Rescue Rangers for NES by Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson. His run clocks in at 0:10:57, which is faster by an impossible-to-know-for-sure-due-to-idiot-PAL-programmers-amount-of-time than the previous 2 player run.

Tonight, two new runs on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for NES. Tommy Montgomery improved the "New Game +" run, previously by Marc J. Dziezynski. The new run is still full of Up+A warping and death abuse, and improves the previous by about 5 minutes. The other is a run "like the game was meant to be": starting from scratch, and no use of that second controller, and no killing poor old Link (on purpose) to refill magic. That run clocks in about 5¾ minutes longer than the from scratch run which does use those things (by Scott Kessler).

A new game has been added to the front of the game list ... if you're sorting alphabetically. The game is ActRaiser for Super Nintendo. Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe did runs on both the default setting and professional (which is less than half the time, due to not being the entire thing, I guess).

Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson has improved the run on NES Contra, getting 30 seconds faster than the previous record.

News updates will probably not be as wordy from now on; apparently nobody reads the news anymore aside from the people on IRC who correct my mistakes.

There are two new-ish games added to the list: Strife for PC and .hack//Infection Part 1 for PS2. There are two runs on Strife, both Single-segment, leading to different endings (good and bad I guess). Dot Hack had a run before, but I had to delist it when it was discovered that a large part was missing. If only I kept track of who verified the original run, I could fire them! The new run not only contains all parts, it's 47 minutes faster. No torrents today, but everything is at dreamhost for a speedy download.

With .hack you'll also find flash links. Nate decided that if other sites are going to copy our content and upload it as the horrible format known as flash (usually with no credit to the runner), why not just do it ourselves and make them realize there's no need to copy it anymore. So if you're a happy windows XP user too clueless to install DivX or use VLC or something, go with the crappy flash!

Joe Wiewel recently took on the burden of speed running a game with a horrible save system. A game that auto saves on every pickup you collect, yet still has a "save" in the menu (it doesn't actually do anything). A game that doesn't let you copy your save file from one slot to another. The game in question is Donkey Kong 64 for N64. As a result of this horrible save setup, it's not possible to do a proper segmented run of this game. You can only retry the first segment... after that if you make a mistake, either start all the way over or just take it. Joe gave the run a few tries and ended up with an 11 segment run (which relies on save warping... the only benefit of segmenting a run of this game at all) in a time of 5:04.

There's a new run posted to the Resident Evil for GameCube page... well, it's not really new. The run was made over 2 years ago and the runner, Trevor Seguin, has decided to submit it for unknown reasons. Hey, I'm not complaining, I always like it when people decide to share their runs, even if they're old! The run in question is sort of a new game plus type of thing, he has the rocket launcher unlocked. From that you probably think 'oh so he just gibs every zombie', but no, he still does A LOT of dodging. The total time for this Single-segment run as Jill is 1:24:35, a little over 5 minutes faster than the run without RL.

I have made a slight change to the submit page in the contacting me section. I have added a note saying to NOT send me offline ICQ messages. They are very annoying. Today there was like six of them for me when I signed on. I usually just close the windows and forget about them. If I'm not online, do us both a favor and send me an email so I have this thing called a record and an index of what was said.

Here are the things that should've been in the last update when I complained about archive having issues. Tomi Salo improved eight of his individual level runs on Max Payne 2 for PC. I'm feeling lazy so you don't get a list of what levels were improved by what and to what with links, because they're easy to find on the page. Anything with a year of 2006 is new! Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica has improved one of his times on F-Zero X 64DD: Sand Ocean 3 is now 0:01:33.098, nearly 6 seconds faster than his previous time.

Another obscure game from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava has reached the top of the queue: The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES, another one of those really hard NES games. Tom finishes it without dying in 0:24:28.

On another note, just after nate moved and before new speed runs started arriving, he recaptured some older runs into the newer divx+mp4 flavors, with a few more to follow. The first two were done due to poor color balance treatment in the past. If you didn't like the quality of Brandon Armstrong's Silent Hill 2 or my Luigi's Mansion runs the first time, check them out again!

Saturday, July 8, 2006 by Radix and ballofsnow

Aria hat trick

Thursday, July 6, 2006 by Radix

The importance of labelling your tapes...

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has sent in three more runs of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Two of the runs are new categories, one is an improvement, all are on hard mode. In fact, this game doesn't actually have a 'default' run, on normal skill as Soma. I didn't know at the time I first posted the game that hard was only available after beating it once, so I'd appreciate it if someone could do such a run. The improved run is playing as Julius, speeding through and beating the game in 0:08:44, about a minute and a half faster than the previous run. Before that run, Damien did a 'new game +' run as Soma, where you start with anything you have from a previous playthrough, but still at level 1. This finishes in 0:19:57. Finally, he did another Julius run, but this one is 100%... not 100% map completion - that's not even possible with Juilus, but simply beating all of the bosses. This finishes in 0:16:46.

There'd be some things in this paragraph if item checkout wasn't broken at archive.org today. As a result, I can't add files to existing items at the moment.

Starcraft: Brood War gets a punch to the face with four new runs from Alex 'Aresake' Eustis and Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell with combined savings of 0:11:13. Alex ran Zerg 1 "Vile Disruption" in 0:01:40, 0:01:31 faster. Philip ran Zerg 2 "Reign of Fire" in 0:03:05, 0:05:39 faster. Back to Alex with Zerg 3 "The Kel-Morian Combine" in 0:10:43, 0:01:14 faster and Zerg 4 "The Liberation of Korhal" in 0:10:54, 0:02:49 faster. The total Brood War time goes down from 3:28:56 to 3:17:43.

Starcraft gets a slap on the wrist compared to Brood War with three new runs. Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell ran Terran 3 "Desperate Alliance" in 0:20:11, 4 seconds faster, Zerg 5 "The Amerigo" in 0:03:44, 21 seconds faster and Protoss 5 "Choosing Sides" in 0:00:43, 4 seconds faster. The total Starcraft time goes down from 3:29:08 to 3:28:39.

Try finding your speed run in this.

Tim Bright has finally finished a run that I've been begging people to do for what seems like two years, but it can't be that long because the game has only been out 17 months. The game is Resident Evil 4 for GameCube, and the run is one from scratch, without infinite weapons! The only submission on this category so far had been a 3+ hour run done merely so I would post infinite weapon runs. After several rants on the forum and many months, Tim finished his run in the amazing time of 2:06:24. That's less than 2/3rds of the previous time and only 7 minutes 17 seconds more than the infinite run, although that one is SS vs the 19 segments of this run (one per chapter).

In other news, Alex 'aresake' Eustis cuts down the total Starcraft time from 3:31:57 to 3:29:08 with two more runs. They are Protoss 1 "First Strike" in 0:03:17, 0:00:52 faster, and Protoss 3 "Higher Ground" in 0:09:09, 0:01:57 faster.

Freddy Andersson improved the existing 100% run of Mega Man X after acquiring an NTSC Super Nintendo and recording equipment... not an easy task in Sweden. His improved run clocks in at 0:39:41, compare to the previous 0:41:36 by Mike Uyama and you'll know that it's bound to be a great run!

Trevor Seguin did a run of the original Mega Man... a game that took me at least 20 game overs to beat when I got the anniversary collection. A game that was voted by some site I can't remember as having the worst video game box-art of all time! All that and Trevor beats it in 0:23:58.

Note that the second kind of normal quality has changed yet again. Due to massive peer-pressure, nate has succumbed away from the trusty avi format to some weird mp4 thing that you might not be able to play in your favorite player. If you don't want to change, you can stick with the divx normal quality like me!

It's time for another case of old runs made new! Vincent Catalaa took the lmp recordings of the best runs of Final Doom for PC and converted them to multi-flavored avi files. Final Doom consists of two episodes which are practically whole games, and are run individually. The records from February 2002 are both by Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore, who got 0:55:34 on 'Evilution' and 0:41:11 on 'Plutonia'. Both runs are Single-segment through the respective episode and on Ultra-Violence skill.

In other news, shareware Quake turned ten years old yesterday, and to celebrate, QdQ released an avi version of Quake done double Quick lite, a two player run through the one-and-only Quake on easy skill in a time of 0:09:55.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson improved on his run of Quake 4. Playing on the lowest skill, Private, he finishes in around 2:02:35. I didn't quite time this the same as the last run, which was marked 2:09:54. In that run I didn't stop timing until after Peter typed in a save game name and hit the save button to start saving... rather silly. This time I stopped timing as soon as he goes into the menu and added half-a-second. I wanted to have that as the standard "save penalty" on games where you can quick save, although I haven't always consistently added it... oh well. So anyway, the conclusion is that this run isn't actually 0:07:19 faster than the old run... maybe 5 and half to 6 minutes though. This is why I strive to have "consistent" timing rules so that future runs of a game are always timed the same, but sometimes I mess it up.

There are two new runs on the game Ico for PlayStation 2, now notable as the game with the shortest name in the list. The two runs are both by Kevin 'Enhasa' Juang and he does both a Single-segment run and a run in 4 segments, with less than six minutes between them; pretty impressive for a run almost two hours long.

Another run from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava gets posted, and it's only his second run on Super Nintendo instead of NES. His run is on Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The previous run on the game, by Adam Sweeney, finished with the max of 10 victims alive at the end, but Tom's new run saves all possible victims in every stage along the way in order to have a 100% run. Tom's time ends up at 2:17:16. This is actually a few seconds slower than Adam's run but I removed his because of the 100% vs non thing, the time difference was so small for a 2+ hour run, it's esentially the same.

Freddy Andersson did a run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game for NES. His time on the European version comes out to be 0:46:32. Enjoy the beating up of numerous faceless foot soliders and the usual Turtles' enemies like Baxter, Krang and Shredder. Special thanks go to Michael Pölzl in Austria for sending nate the new stereo PAL VCR. The quality is much better now, but it's too bad this had to be a NES game so it's only in mono anyway.

Last year, Rolf Karp did a speed run on System Shock 2 for PC. Today I'm finally posting his 0:36:11 run. The run is supposedly in 27 segments but there's no way to prove it because of the crappy recording program used to capture the gameplay not recording the game's menu screens. This is why the run starts right in the game and just ends with no ending cutscenes.

Jared 'Ifrit' Nicholson sent in a run on Mega Man 8 about two months ago. We didn't post it... only nate and I saw it I think. Nate pointed out a few things to improve and Jared started to redo the run before I had a chance to time the original run. He told us to not bother posting it and eventually he got an improved run and sent that, which actually got timed (though not by me...) to 0:58:20.

Tom 'rdrunner' Votava sent in another batch of runs on obscure NES games. The first to actually be verified is The Guardian Legend, which he ran Single-segment in 1:03:12.

Mike Uyama sent in a run on another Metal Slug series game, number 5. Again he plays on hard mode and still doesn't die, and achieves a time of 0:25:38.

Alex 'aresake' Eustis continues to knock minutes off of Starcraft: Brood War with two more runs. He ran Protoss 2 "Dunes of Shakuras" in 0:10:41, beating David 'marshmallow' Gibbons's run from exactly a year ago by 0:01:32, and Protoss 3 "Legacy of the Xel'Naga" in 0:06:48, beating René Kamp's run by 0:02:06. The total Brood War time goes down from 3:32:34 to 3:28:56.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson sent in 18 improvements to the individual level 100% runs on Yoshi's Island for Super Nintendo. The runs either improve his previous runs or first-time runs from the original set done by David Gibbons. Here's the required dotted list style update:

• 1-1, "Make Eggs, Throw Eggs" in 0:00:53, previously 0:00:58.
• 1-2, "Watch Out Below!" in 0:00:56, previously 0:01:04.
• 1-3, "The Cave Of Chomp Rock" in 0:01:13, previously 0:01:20.
• 1-4, "Burt The Bashful's Fort" in 0:02:17, previously 0:02:32.
• 1-6, "Shy-Guys On Stilts" in 0:01:59, previously 0:02:07.
• 1-8, "Salvo The Slime's Castle" in 0:02:28, previously 0:02:38.
• 1-E, "Poochy Ain't Stupid" in 0:01:03, previously 0:01:49.
• 2-3, "What's Gusty Taste Like?" in 0:01:44, previously 0:02:04.
• 2-4, "Bigger Boo's Fort" in 0:02:58, previously 0:03:21.
• 2-5, "Watch Out For Lakitu" in 0:01:58, previously 0:02:14.
• 2-6, "The Cave Of The Mystery Maze" in 0:01:58, previously 0:02:14.
• 2-7, "Lakitu's Wall" in 0:02:43, previously 0:03:08.
• 2-8, "The Potted Ghost's Castle" in 0:04:25, previously 0:04:56.
• 3-1, "Welcome To Monkey World!" in 0:01:18, previously 0:01:27.
• 3-2, "Jungle Rhythm..." in 0:01:11, previously 0:01:21.
• 3-3, "Nep-Enuts' Domain" in 0:03:12, previously 0:03:33.
• 3-4, "Prince Froggy's Fort" in 0:04:16, previously 0:05:01.
• 3-5, "Jammin' Through The Trees" in 0:01:16, previously 0:01:23.

The total improvement is 5 minutes 22 seconds. I should note that some of the times I got are one second off from the times Mychal lists in his comments... I didn't bother editing them.

Adam 'Coolboyman' Vierra did a run of Banjo-Tooie but it's not at all like the first run on this game. He made full use of a large, talking red book known as Cheato. I wouldn't allow this run until someone had done a full game run without it, just because it's so "cheesy". Sure, it's part of the game, and therefore it's not like a gameshark type of cheat, but it still makes the game so easy I wanted a normal run first. Adam's run involves just running around collecting notes to learn the bare minimum moves to make it to the end of the game and beat it in 0:56:25.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did a run of the RPG Mega Man X: Command Mission for PlayStation 2. This 20 segment run comes to a time of 5:46, a little over six hours of video.

Alex Nichols also sent in new runs on all three stages of Mega Man: The Power Battle from the Anniversary Collection. He improved the previous runs by Philippe Henry by between 16 and 38 seconds to bring the game's total down to 0:05:08.94.

Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown did a run of the always-loved Jaws for NES. Daniel's run clocks out to 0:04:48, just two seconds shy of a full minute improvement from the first run by Adrian Feiertag. That's quite a lot of improvement for one of the shortest runs on the site!

Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho did a run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one of those notoriously difficult NES games. Blake did his run with only one death... which was on purpose to save a little time, so I label his 0:19:32 as 'with death abuse'. Considering the amount of damage he takes when plowing through enemies, it should perhaps be called 'with complete turtle abuse' instead.

These two runs come in six possible versions instead of nate's usual four. Due to a lot of heated discussion on the forum lately, he has started encoding things in an H.264 codec. If you don't already have something that can play them, you can try VLC player. For now at least, normal and low quality versions will still be available in DivX.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron did a very long run, now the longest on the site. Some people will once again wonder why I have a "7 hour" limit in the rules if I let people do longer runs, but I always said it was never intended to be a hard limit, only so people wouldn't take <random huge ass rpg here> and do a 20-50 hour "run" and try to submit it. Wesley's run is on Chrono Cross for PlayStation, indeed a pretty large rpg. It took him great effort to take a run down from the 12-13 hour range to finish his 50-segment run in 7:55:08. There are actually two endings to this game (a lot less than its predecessor) and Wesley does both by having two part 50s since that's the only change needed. The good ending gets 7:59:15, just under 8 hours. I'm very glad this game has a timer that's updated at the end, although including seconds in such long RPGs seems a little silly, but I might as well include it since the game does!

Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns did a run of Thief: Deadly Shadows for PC on Expert mode, getting an approximated time of 1:31:15. Due to the nature of buggy PC recording programs, loading screens and some other things are missing, causing some segments to abruptly end... and a resulting blurring of the timing. Daniel says his run is "100% loot" but only in the missions, not the city, since 'there is no way to tell what I have got so it can be safely ignored'. I'm not sure about that but I left it as _100p_ anyway.

I kept forgetting to mention it, but 'LonelyBob' on the forum has announced his creation of a speed run contest with $100 of his own money as the prize. All you have to do is do a speed run of Resident Evil: Code Veronica in a Single-segment sometime by the end of July and submit it to the site. The "best" run wins. Unfortunately due to the game being cross-platform and loading times counting in the game's timer, judging just which run is best if we receive lots of entries could prove difficult. But that shouldn't stop you from trying.

Alex Eustis did a run of Final Fantasy V, originally a Japan-only Super Nintendo game, later released for PlayStation. Alex's 25 segment run comes out to 3:26 on the game timer, but apparently this game's timer acts a bit differently than previous FFs which included everything. The real time of all the videos is 5 hours and 5 minutes, so the time must not be including menus or cutscenes or something.

On a personal note, I've moved 98% of my stuff out of the hell-hole apartment I had the unfortunate mistake of moving into last August. Of course, I'm still typing this from that place right now because my computer is there, since Verizon takes a week to hook up a DSL connection.

There's a new run category on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes by Kim 'Silent echo' Siafa. Kim did a Single-segment run on hard mode to go alongside his SS run on normal. The time is 2:24, 27 minutes slower than normal. In case you didn't know, on hard mode all of the enemies have twice the health, resulting in longer boss fights and needing to get more ammo and energy. The run's biggest downfall is not skipping the Dark Suit, but since it's hard mode, doing that is pretty darn difficult so it's not that bad.

Tom 'marth1' Radovich has helped expand the list of obscure NES games on the list. He sent in a run on the game Felix the Cat, one of many NES games released after the Super Nintendo was available. His run through the game clocks at 0:26:03.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody submitted an inaugural run of the Castlevania game from last year's holiday releases: Curse of Darkness for PS2. His 14 segment run comes out to a time of 2:21:02.

Freddy Andersson improved his run of the European version of Mega Man 3 for NES. Almost exactly one year after his previous run he improved the time by three minutes on the dot. The new time of 0:45:08 is quite good. It's a shame the worst mistake in the run was on the final boss. Freddy wrote a book on his comments for this run... I like to see that.

Besmir 'Zoid' Sheqi has reclaimed his record for Metroid Prime's Single-segment 100% run from Ted 'Ding Chavez' Broyles. His new time of 1:36 is two minutes faster than the previous by Ted and notable for being faster than the first posted segmented run on the game by yours truly. Similar to the above, it's a shame that the last boss's randomness added at least one minute to the time of this run.

Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell has completed a 20 segment run of God of War for PlayStation 2. With four available difficulty levels, Philip picks the hardest one, aptly named "God" difficulty. This game has a timer, but it's only visible on loading and saving a file. To make things easier for me we'll require any runs of this game (including Single-segment) to end at the final save point. There's nothing much to the game after that, just a few seconds of walking up and sitting in a chair... any other games end by sitting in a chair? The game's timer doesn't count all the many unskippable cutscenes, so the run's time of 2:16:23 is a little over an hour less than the total length of all of the videos.

Another whole game run from Doom 2's Compet-N site has been turned into avi files for those without Doom installed to enjoy. The run is a 2-player coop run on Ultra Violence skill done by Radek Pecka and Vincent Catalaa a year ago. The time is 0:22:27; compare with 0:26:09 for the best single-player UV run by Radek. Be sure to watch both Radek's and Vincent's point of view.

Adam 'Zhegan' Steidl submitted a run of Silent Hill 3 for PlayStation 2. He did it Single-segment on the easiest skill in a time of 0:45:49. Commence complaining about how dark this video is in 3..2..1..now!

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson improved four of the 100%s of individual levels on Yoshi's Island for Super Nintendo: 4-1, GO! GO! MARIO!!, in 0:02:00, 11 seconds faster. 4-2, The Cave Of The Lakitus, in 0:01:53, 17 s faster. 4-3, Don't Look Back!, in 0:02:06, 20 s faster. 4-4, Marching Milde's Fort, in 0:04:53, 32 s faster.

That's just the beginning of the Yoshi's Island runs in this update. Mike 'grndino' Arnold has been working for a few months on low% runs of every level, including the six new levels on the GBA version. Nearly every level ends with him getting hit on purpose and then waiting out Mario's crying until he has a score of zero and crossing the goal with that, the lowest possible score. Some levels have unavoidable red coins or flowers, while other levels have no enemies with which to take a hit near the end, so not every level is 0%. The levels have mostly different strategies from the 100%s (aside from 'go fast'), so they're worth checking out. Unfortunately I didn't have time to set up a torrent link, so you'll have to use the archive ftp link for easier downloading.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson did a 100% run with some death abuse of the cel-shaded PlayStation 2 game Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. The run comes in at a hefty 41 segments which Mychal says is why he got it done so quickly. The time comes out to 2:55.

Mike Uyama has made a mockery of the previous runs on Turtles in Time. Not only did he beat the previous Raphael run by almost two minutes, but he played on Hard skill instead of Normal. He didn't suffer a single death. He also put me to shame for ever posting that first run. Since I own the game and have played it dozens of times, I thought the first run was a good start. Maybe it's because I never played as Raphael or always played the game 2-player with non-gamers, but I didn't realize just how fast some parts could be done until I watched Mike's 0:22:31.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody decided to do a speed run of the original Metroid for reasons he can't fathom. His goal was to improve the 100% run, and after a few runs he almost sent in, he finally got one he really liked. The time of his run is 0:52:23, 4 minutes and 17 seconds faster than the previous run.

I have finally posted all of the individual level speed runs of We ♥ Katamari. The combined effort of Wes 'Arrow' Fathauer, John 'Dr. Thinker' Masteller, Tom 'slowbro' Batchelor and Aaron 'khfan1' Surette churned out all of the levels in a total of 0:41:21 on the game's timer. Correction: Turns out the wrong ALAP2 video was posted initially. A 0:01:11 is now available on the game's page. If you got (or still want to use) the torrents you'll have to download that one separately.

After 13 months in the making, a new speed run through Half-Life 2 was recently finished. This team effort run came up with a lot of new tricks, shortcuts and jaw-dropping stunts to drop the time. The previous run was by David Gibbons and had a time of 2:14:58. The new run is 1:36:57, 38 minutes faster, and also on a hard instead of normal difficulty.

It's been eight years to this month since Blizzard released the phenomenal game of Starcraft, and it's still going strong. Alex 'aresake' Eustis has submitted two more runs for our viewing pleasure. They are Protoss 9 "Shadow Hunters" in 0:06:20 for Starcraft, nearly half the time of the old run, and Protoss 8 "Countdown" in 0:13:23 for Starcraft: Brood War, 0:03:16 faster. The total Starcraft time goes down from 3:37:51 to 3:31:57 and the total Brood War time goes down from 3:35:50 to 3:32:34.

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe has improved his runs of Legend of Mana - all three of them. Dragon and Faerie are both about 12 minutes faster than the previous run, while Jumi is a more significant 28 minutes better.

Alex 'aresake' Eustis has submitted his first run for Starcraft: Brood War. He ran Zerg 6 "Fury of the Swarm" in 0:09:08, a whole 0:06:03 faster than the previous record from 6 months ago. The total Brood War time goes down from 3:41:53 to 3:35:50.

Christopher 'Lokarin' Albert sent in the first run for the site which was recorded with a DVD recorder instead of VHS or live capture. The result is rather amazing quality and only three qualities necessary for the run, with HQ being only slightly better than normal quality since DivX didn't have the need for any more bits. Christopher ran the indie game Out of this World for Super Nintendo and achieved a time of 0:17:20. This game is the first added to the site which starts with O.

There are three improvements on F-Zero X by Miguel Lefebvre. Mute City 2 is now 0:00:56.920, 0.611s faster; White Land 2 is 0:00:37.592, 0.184s faster and Big Hand is 0:01:47.864, 0.758 seconds faster.

Tom 'slowbro' Batchelor did a Single-segment run of the rolling-up-giant-balls-of-stuff sequel: We ♥ Katamari. Yes, I really do have to use the heart symbol and not spell it out because that's really the game's name on the box! If you just see a square, you're probably using a really outdated browser or operating system. In addition to the SS run, Tom sent in individual level runs of all the levels from himself and others, but I haven't gotten around to organizing those yet. For now all you get is his SS which is manually timed to 1:05:31. Somebody please send me a better title shot for this game... the one on the page now is the best we could get on the tape since people like to not record them; grrr!#*(!*

There's one more new run on Mega Man: The Power Fighters, part of the Anniversary collection. Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk did the 'Recover the New Parts' scenario time as Bass in a time of 0:03:13.18. That's over 6 seconds faster than the previous fastest time on this scenario with a different character.

Next week I'll be starting a new job. Although it barely pays more per hour than the current job I have, it's a lot more time involved and more chance for higher pay and advancement without much delay, if they actually like me. Apparently I'm extremely high risk! Whether or not it will work I can't say yet, but I do know that I'll be online a lot less and have much less time for the site. I'll still work on it but I'll have even less tolerance for people who do things like contact me with "I did a speed run on X!" and then nothing else. Here's a hint: if I don't respond, it's because the only appropriate response would be "and...?" which I refuse to do. Tell me more information!!

Mike 'TSA' Damiani has fulfilled his promise to improve the record for the original The Legend of Zelda for NES. Using the standard warping around with second controler (well, not really, he played on GameCube), he improved Tom Votava's time by 30 seconds to get 0:33:34. Getting much better than this would require dozens of random encounters to all go favorably.

Jérôme 'tagh_azog' Bouzillard improved the existing run of the PC game Doom 3. The run was done under the same conditions: Marine skill, one segment per each of 27 levels, and appended to one file. The time comes out to be 0:09:18 faster than the previous run at 1:30:52.

Devin 'Mimir' Herron improved his run of Fallout for PC, almost exactly one year after his previous run. The new time of 0:09:19 is 0:01:58 faster than his previous run. There's nothing quite like seeing such a large RPG so quickly trounced. If only the ending made sense to someone who hasn't played the game! There's also a blooper file even less likely to be understood.

Brandon '19Duke84' Armstrong has improved the run of Silent Hill 2 for PS2. Brandon's run is the same settings as the previous run by Simon Berggren and is nearly 7 minutes faster, getting a time of 0:50:25. I hope you have a good monitor to watch this run, the game is very dark.

Americans might never have heard of Alien Soldier for Genesis, it was only released in Japan and Europe. Apparently copies of the cartridge are quite pricey, but that didn't stop Tyler 'MrMonkeyMan' Needham from doing some speed runs of this Contra-like game. Tyler did runs of both of the game's skill settings: "Super Easy" and "Super Hard". Why they didn't just call them Normal and Hard I'd like to know, but whatever. Tyler's Easy run is 0:11:37 and Hard is 0:12:40.

Vladimir 'Knu' Semenov, of Morrowind fame, has submitted his second speed run. This time it's on a game not quite as open ended: Far Cry for PC. Vladimir's run on the default skill is in 21 segments but all merged into one file as is common with PC runs. The time comes out to 1:07:02 after subtracting away all the annoying auto-saves the game does. This is the 50th PC game added to the list, although some of the games listed for PC are cross-platform games that most people would consider console games.

Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica improved two of his times for the F-Zero X 64DD expansion: Port Town 3 in 0:01:33.321, 1.349 seconds faster and Fire Field 2 in 0:01:23.154, 0.831 seconds faster.

Paul 'IRbaboon' Wagener submitted his first run, an improvement of the previous run of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for GCN/PS2/Xbox/PC. The previous run by Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman was done in February 2004 and had a time of 2:09:56. Paul's run is still Single-segment and gets a time of 2:06:03. This run got delayed due to some technical problems with the sound that just kept coming back.

Kevin 'clone rizzo' Horst submitted his first run, an improvement of the previous run of Baldur's Gate for PC. Julien Langer had done the run in a time of 0:36:47 and Kevin improved it down to 0:30:24 with two extra segments. Although I've been playing this game lately and have put probably 16 hours in, I'd just be spoiling a lot if I watched the run, so I still can't comment beyond that.

I have finally updated the Super Smash Bros. Melee Break the Targets section a bit. My table was rather horribly out of date for a few months now and, while it's still not quite done, I have updated with many newer times from Tom 'marth1' Radovich. Bowser, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Captain Falcon, Falco, Ness, Ice Climbers, Kirby, Samus, Jigglypuff, Mewtwo and Mr. Game & Watch have faster videos than before. I have included links to zip files of all characters for slightly easier downloading. I'm only doing that here because Btt videos are so short.

Tommy Montgomery sent in runs of two more NES games. First was Kid Icarus, starring a boy with wings, in a time of 0:33:44. Second was Contra, the first in the series of 'kill everything' games, in 0:11:25.

Kevin 'Mitsukai' Shropshire did a run of the four-month old game Gun. This game is for all four current platforms (GCN, PS2, Xbox, PC) but also for the Xbox 360. Kevin plays the GameCube version but I always list such games as being for all systems they're on. However I'm not going to add Xbox 360 to the game list until someone does a game unique to that system. Kevin's time for his six segment run is 2:14:20.

Joe 'snorlax' Linssen did some runs on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. When the runs came in, it was pointed out to me that the game's timer is not what it's cracked up to be. Although Joe's time as Raphael is 0:15:16 according to the game, there are over 21 minutes of actual play time in all the levels added up. So, the game timer is going to get ignored and my standard 'start of control to end of control' timing will be used instead. That makes his Raph run 0:24:24 instead. He also did a Donatello, an improvement to the previous one from Nicholas Hoppe which had been listed with the game's time. Joe's 0:27:58 is almost three minutes faster (in real time) than Nicholas's. Joe also did Leo and Mike ... but they weren't very good.

There's a run of Pokémon Gold by James 'Brown Bomber' Bunkley. The run is in 13 segments and is a time of 4:15. It seems this game is the source of some confusion for someone working for Nintendo. Their own website lists it with the plain Game Boy games.

Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti did a run of another character in Sonic Adventure DX for GameCube. He played as the robot E-102 'Gamma', whose normal stages are a bit difficult to time. The game's timer starts at 0:03:00 and counts down, but when you shoot enemies, you get a second or more added back. In order to still have the stages be done quickly, and not having people trying to get the 'highest time' by going out of the way to kill things, the time bonuses are removed. Andres's run comes out to 0:10:02.

Ted 'Ding Chavez' Broyles is a newcomer to speed runs. He's been working for some time on Metroid Prime and targetted the Single-segment 100% record. While he was trying, the time kept getting improved by Besmir Sheqi, but finally managed to get a 1:38, two minutes faster than Besmir. This time is just one minute shy of my old segmented run from November 2003 that led the way for this site's current growth.

Robert 'Trebor' Nobles has been working on a speed run for quite some time now. Maybe not every day, maybe only once a day on the days he tries. Eventually he got something he was almost satisfied with and decided to send it in. The run in question is on The Legend of Zelda for NES, the game that just turned 20 years old a few days ago. I have been hoping to get a second quest run for over a year and it's been over a year since Robert started working. His run is different from other Zelda 1 runs in another respect: he doesn't use "Up+A warping" because I don't really like that. He has to walk where he wants to go instead of just teleporting back to the start. Some people will say "what's the point of that!" but to them I ask why nobody would accept a run using Up+A warping on Metroid but they do on Zelda? Robert's time of 0:44:43 is almost 11 minutes more than the first quest run for all the more exciting Zelda speed running moments.

Travis 'Sigma' Lee did a run of Manhunt for PlayStation 2. It's one of the most violent games you've ever heard of... maybe that exists; apparently banned in several countries. Does that mean speed runs of the game are banned in those countries too? Well, if you're underage or in one of those countries, I can't be held responsible if you click on his 1:53:27 run. Or can I? Damn, I hope not! I've heard that SDA has already been blocked by some high-school Internet filters, so I guess this will just get it blocked by even more, muwhaha! Anyway, about the run: I've been told that it would be better to do individual level runs because of the game's nature. Travis's run is 10 segments through the 20 missions, and I posted it to get the game started. If someone comes along and does individual level runs for all the levels in less than his times, then his run will go away. A Single-segment run of the game would be a separate category though. Can you take that much violence in one sitting?

On the other end of the spectrum we have a run of a game by Disney: Disney's Aladdin for Super Nintendo. Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry did a run of this fun-loving game in 0:18:23. Can you take that much cutesy color in one sitting?

Freddy Andersson did some more runs of NES Mega Man games, doing both Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5, both released in 1992. Freddy plays on the European versions, so they run a little slower than the US version, but it's only really noticable on the Wily and Cossack maps, where there's a long period of silence after the music has stopped. Freddy's time on #4 is 0:50:48 and 0:51:24 for #5.

In addition to his three individual level runs in the previous update, Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry also did a Single-segment run of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. His time of 0:24:23 is about three and a half minutes longer than the sum of all the individual level runs, but it's quite difficult to approach such optimizations in a single go at the game.

Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry was inspired by nate's January 1st Sonic update and decided to improve three of his individual level runs of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It just took him a month to send them in along with two other runs that aren't ready yet. The three levels are:

• Emerald Hill Zone, Act 2 in 0:00:38, 1 second faster.
• Chemical Plant Zone, Act 1 in 0:00:24, 2 seconds faster.
• Wing Fortress Zone in 0:01:58, 7 seconds faster.

There are two improvements on the F-Zero X page, and they're actually on the original tracks for once, not the 64DD expansion. Dave Phaneuf did Port Town 2 in 0:01:20.076, 0.345 seconds faster than his previous, and Sector Beta in 0:01:09.537, 0.589 seconds faster than the previous time from 2001 by Jimmy K. Thai. This brings the total down to 0:26:25.632.

Bigger things coming in a day or two...

Ben 'Cygnus' Goldberg redid his run of Pokémon Red for Game Boy. His new time of 2:19 is 21 minutes better than his previous run with two additional segments.

Unfortunately everyone was using the dreamhosters links too much, or the site is just too popular or something. We pretty much used up our monthly allotment of bandwidth in just eight days, so no more until March 7th or so. There's a torrent link though... please seed!

Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns did a Single-segment run of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal for PS2, perhaps better known as just 'Ratchet & Clank 3'. He does a little bit of death abuse toward the end of his run and gets a time of 2:22:38.

Stefan van Dijke is still playing Metroid Prime for GameCube, but today it's not a whole game run, just the frigate escape. Nate once calculated the loading difference for the doors of the escape to be 4.65 seconds between the two versions, but that doesn't accommodate the time from scan dashes possible in the original NTSC version. Stefan has a time of 0:04:23.70 left when he finishes, 6.35 seconds less than the NTSC run.

Wednesday, February 8, 2006 by Radix

I just keep getting older

Tuesday, February 7, 2006 by Radix

Raiding those tombs

Saturday, February 4, 2006 by Radix

Sextuple whammy

Friday, February 3, 2006 by Radix

Double-shot of Circle of the Moon

Saturday, January 28, 2006 by Radix

Dinosaurs, stealth and goblins, oh my!

Tuesday, January 24, 2006 by Radix

One year of com-ship

Monday, January 23, 2006 by Radix

A pink-haired hammer-wielding hedgehog

Sunday, January 22, 2006 by Radix

Minor stuff

Thursday, January 19, 2006 by Radix

Fire Red runs (no, not pokémon)

Saturday, January 14, 2006 by Radix

MMM good

Friday, January 13, 2006 by Radix

Patricide and other fun stuff

Thursday, January 12, 2006 by nate

RUCK ZUCK!

Wednesday, January 11, 2006 by Radix

It's Metroid Prime again

Monday, January 9, 2006 by Radix

The taste-free greasy alternative

Saturday, January 7, 2006 by Radix

Swing that axe

Sunday, January 1, 2006 by nate

HAU RUCK!

Mike Janiak did a run of Final Fantasy X-2 for PS2, the only actual sequel of the series. My only exposure to this game was when I saw a friend of a friend playing it briefly and his file had something like 140 hours on it. Yet Mike speeds through the game in only 4 hours 9 minutes in a 19 segment run.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did a run of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks for PS2. I'm not sure what else to say about this except that it's 12 segments and gets a time of 1:43:37. The game has a timer which would make the run lower, but it's only visible on saving and loading so it gets ignored.

It's time for another 'shaky cam' Genesis run from Adrian 'InsipidMuckyWater' Feiertag. This time it's on Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention. Follow the chihuahua and cat on a 9 minute 2 second run through this game.

Shaun 'MMAN' Friend redid his run of Tomb Raider 3 for PC, improving it by just over 40 minutes to get a time of 2:28:20. The run is 19 segments, just like the previous one.

This update should have contained more but things keep breaking or going slow or I didn't feel like posting them yet.

It's a big one.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson did a run of Quake 4 on Private, the lowest skill, in 26 segments. The timing of a game like this which has such high cpu/gfx requirements that recording it really taxes your system should always be considered a "good faith" estimate more than any console game run. The time comes out to 2:09:54.

James 'Psychochild' Conway improved his run of Devil May Cry 3 for PS2. His previous run was a segmented 2:29:53 and the new one beats it by over 15 minutes and is Single-segment on top of that, getting 2:14:34. I heard that he also did a much improved segmented run but it seems he hasn't mailed it yet.

Astra 'StrangenessDSS' Piper did a Single-segment run of Yoshi's Story for N64. There was already a run but it was on the eu/PAL version, something I forgot to denote when it was posted. Astra's time is 0:16:48

Astra also did a run of The Lost Levels from Mario All-Stars for Super Nintendo. She plays as Luigi and gets a time of 0:17:25, 40 seconds faster than the Mario run by Tom Votava. Unfortunately the run contains a few deaths, proving just how fast Luigi can be I guess.

Another All-Stars run is on the souped-up Super Mario Bros. 3. David 'marshmallow' Gibbons set out to do a Single-segment 100% run, completing all stages, killing all the hammer brothers, etc. After a few weeks of continuous "one more time" attempts, he finally settled on a time of 1:24:07. A very impressive run indeed, but what happened during all those other attempts? Check the Bloopers + Credits file to see a few examples.

The final run from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava's big batch of tapes is finally getting posted. He did a run of Mission: Impossible for NES that proved to be impossible for people to beat. Apparently if you thought Battletoads was a hard game you were wrong: this one is much worse. It almost drove my co-worker insane (hi JP). It was finally a crazy Japanese guy who was able to finish the game to verify Tom's 0:30:59 run.

I did a Single-segment run of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on 'Fighter' mode back in September, but I wasn't too happy with it. I started a segmented run with the goal of getting the best STRength increasing item drops and finished it on Halloween with a time of 0:31:14, about 9.5 minutes faster than the SS run. Although I knew I could never approach that time on an SS run because of all the LuCK involved, I had to try it again. I ended up getting a pretty successful 0:36:58 the very same day. It's taken me three months to get them online. So, you see, even MY OWN runs can be slow to get on the site. Maybe that'll make everyone feel better?

A lot more runs are already ready or will be ready tomorrow for posting this weekend, so expect a huge update... the timing of which will depend on when I get drunk for my birthday.

Adrian 'InsipidMuckyWater' Feiertag did a short run of Jurassic Park for Genesis. He plays as the Raptor and gets a time of just 0:03:33. Unfortunately the run has a bit of a "shaky cam" feeling, despite being recorded on VHS. Nate is really looking forward to DVD recordings replacing VHS and recommends anyone new to speed runs to buy one instead of a VCR or a capture card.

Matt 'Solid Snake' Powell sent in a run for Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation on Extreme difficulty. We already had a run on this difficulty, but it was done on the European version which runs slow like many old games. Matt's run is 16 segments and gets a time of 1:54:02 compared to the 2:14:27 of the eu run. I'm not actually sure which one is a better run!

Julien Langer sent in an improvement to his run of Baldur's Gate for PC. The new time is 0:36:47 in four segments compared to 0:40:06 in 5 segments for the previous run. It looks like I'll finally get to play this game after all these years as I've borrowed it from a friend. The site is sure to suffer now! :-p

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did the first speed run for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for Game Boy. I had to die about 14 times in the final stage before I confirmed the ending point for the timing and came up with 0:32:06 for his time. Of course, Alex doesn't die at all so the run is sure to be better than watching me play would be. This game is pretty tough, you know?

On another note, it's been a year since SDA moved to its own .com domain. Exciting times!

Dan 'NintenDan' Zurad has added one more run to the page for Sonic Adventure. He did the story for Amy Rose, which is only three action stages and one boss. The time comes out to be 0:10:36. Nate was pretty impressed. There's a non-archive non-torrent download of this run, something we'll hopefully have for new stuff from now on. We tried to do torrents on this host two weeks ago but they pulled the plug on us because it seems they think torrents = piracy. So we'll just do normal http links and hopefully it's faster than archive.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols sent in three runs for Mega Man: The Power Fighters, doing all three scenarios as the strange Duo character. 'Search for Wily' is 0:04:37.55, 'Rescue Roll' is 0:02:54.68 and 'Recover the New Parts' is 0:03:19.43.

Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica improved two tracks from F-Zero X 64DD. Big Blue 3 is now 0:01:46.637, 0.588 seconds faster and Devil's Forest 5 is 0:01:35.790, 1.664 seconds faster.

Even small updates like this are a lot of work. Meanwhile the runs keep pouring in, on games I've never even heard of before. Processing them is only going to get slower.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron has improved his run of Fire Emblem for GBA. His previous run was 3:18:22 and the new run comes out to be over 45 minutes faster, even though he did the optional opening as Lyn this time which he didn't do before. He also didn't use the "mine trick", although I'm not sure if it's because he decided it's not worth it, or if he just didn't want to. The new time is 2:32:50 in 35 segments.

Henk 'henkie196' Pietersen did a run of Red Faction for PC. The run was done in 30 segments but appended into one file, so everyone who can't figure out how to download lots of files at once with FTP can be happy. The time is 1:01:55.

Just a reminder that even if you've submitted a run to me before, please read the submit page before trying to submit something again. Some things have changed in the last year because submissions have increased. I still get people who say "i want to submit a run" and then nothing else on AIM. It's not my job to drag information out of you that you don't feel the need to tell me.

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe has created the page for Mega Man 7 for Super Nintendo. He did a Single-segment run with 100% item collection, but in order to do such a run the quickest, you have to kill yourself in two places because of route forks. He actually did two runs, the first of which was only seen by Nate who gave some advice and Nicholas immediately redid it so you only get to see his 0:59:29.

Robert J. 'MyCatSucks' McLeod submitted his first run, and it's on the original Metroid for NES. He does the intended route, beating both Ridley and Kraid, and finishes in a time of 0:28:02. That's one minute and 8 seconds faster than the previous anonymous female runner. As with any Metroid run, it gets a little sloppy in Tourian, but it's practically impossible not to.

There are four whole game runs in this update, and I'm choosing to post them in order of best to worst video quality.

First comes Castlevana II: Simon's Quest for NES. Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown did it for his first submission, and got a time of 0:48:45, one minute 13 seconds faster than the previous run from Tom Votava. There's a really embarrassing set of deaths at one point here that costs about 15 seconds.

Elsewhere on the Castlevania front, there's a significant improvement for Symphony of the Night for PlayStation. Adam 'Lucid Faia' Sweeney achieved a time of 0:43:51, a 12 minute improvement over Adam Grise, using several sequence breaks. The route in the first castle is quite crazy. I don't want to spoil too much but if you've played this game, you'll like it. Unfortunately the sound gets a little noisy/staticy about half way through the run. It was possibly caused by bad or loose cables on Adam's end, or minor damage on the tape itself.

Stefan van Dijke continues to take over the PAL / Euro section of Metroid Prime, although this time he's adding a new category. Everyone knows the low% run of Prime collects only 22% and the hardest item to skip is the boost ball. Did you know just how hard it is to do geothermal core though? It's so hard that when Stefan did a Single-segment 22% run, he took over 10 minutes of attempts to get into geo's bomb slot. If you just remove that, his 2:00 time looks quite good compared to the current record 1:48 for segmented! The problem with this run is that Stefan captured while playing and sometimes the picture freezes for up to three seconds. The sound continues without a problem so you can still tell what's going on, and it often happens during cutscenes or dull moments. I probably would've rejected it but Nate is giving it some slack given how hard of a run it is to do.

The final run in the update looks horrible. If it weren't done on Final Fantasy IV for Super Nintendo, where all of the important things take place in battles, and therefore look ok because there's little movement, I'd have definitely not accepted it based on the quality. When moving around on the overworld, it just looks horrible. I've now put up a notice on the submit page that self-encoded runs I don't find acceptable will be rejected. This is why I expect people to send me samples of runs before they encode them, but almost nobody listens. Well, if you fail to listen now, don't go crying when I reject your run. Anyway, the new ff2 run is by Kevin 'Enhasa' Juang in 3:56 and is an improvement over the previous run from Peter Tiernan. The amount of segments increases from 10 to 38, with Peter's long early segments being replaced by many short segments (not that there's anything wrong with that). Actually, if you already watched Peter's run, I'd only recommend getting a few segments from Kevin's. The major difference is that Kevin doesn't level up Cecil after he becomes a Paladin, so he's still level 1 for Baigan. Get part 16 to see that fight. I guess I've bashed on this run enough, it is 19 minutes better after all.

the string of small updates continues today with 56.65 seconds of sonic 2 action courtesy of arthur boelter. his 0:00:54 death egg pulverizes my pathetic 0:01:07, an improvement of 13 seconds (and actually only three frames short of 14 seconds)! this video is brought to you by the "mega collection" emulated version of the game released for the ps2, and, even though this version has been ruled equivalent to the original for speed running purposes, the sound is definitely not equivalent: cover your ears at the start of arthur's video, or risk having them sheared off by the horribly emulated spin dash sound effect!

in other news, they weren't big fans of us seeding hella torrents over at dreamhost - you may have noticed that all our new torrents suddenly vanished yesterday. well, we're busily working on another way to utilize the new host that fits inside their terms of service, and we promise that the torrents and/or direct links to high speed downloads will return in the near future. until then ...

you're not working hard enough!! follow arthur's example and get those sonic runs in!!!

Besmir 'zoid' Sheqi continues to work on his Single-segment 100% run of Metroid Prime. He got a new run that comes to 1:40, a four minute improvement. This one includes "the fetus", getting the artifact of newborn early, which can save around 2 minutes in a segmented run, but is a huge risk in an SS. Because of some extra cautions he does, it probably only saves one minute or so, but it's still the first SS run to include it.

This update was to contain another run but the runner forgot to send me the completion date with his comments. Lots of people do that... it's annoying. Please don't annoy me.

Banjo and Kazooie return for their second speed run, in Banjo-Tooie for Nintendo 64. Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove likes to do runs with complicated route planning, so when he saw a run of this game being discussed but nobody wanting to do it, he took it up. A few months later, he finishes with a time of 4:54:13. This run is in 12 segments, and since you always start in the same spot on loading a file, it includes save warping. He also does a bunch of death abuse, since this game gives you infinite lives, and killing yourself is a speedy way to teleport around. I wonder if anyone will ever do an SS run for no save warping or a run without suicides.

Remember, SDA accepts no responsibility for soiled underwear as a result of viewing this speed run.

Everyone likes Quake right? The Quake done Quick team, of which I am one of the four founders, has released another of its continuous runs through the game... and this one comes with a twist. The goal was to complete the game on easy skill with 100% kills using only the axe. A sort of low% run of Quake if you will. Although a Quad-powered axe will gib zombies, it's not possible to get all zombies in the entire game, so it was decided to spare all the zombies and just kill everything else. It's much harder to axe a shambler, a vore, or a spawn than it is a zombie anyway.

This project took a LONG time to finish: seven and a half years. Sure, it wasn't worked on every day, and for a while it seemed like it would never be finished. But here at last you can watch all 601 monsters face the wrath of quake guy's axe in 1:12:14, unless some die due to monster in-fighting, which is probably possible... I haven't watched it yet. Since most people reading this probably don't still have Quake installed (or maybe you never did!?), you'll want to download one of the two DivX avi versions.

For a little bit of non-Quake: Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk has done two more small runs on Mega Man: The Power Fighters in MMAC. He improved his 'Search for Wily' scenario Bass time by 29.60 seconds to get 0:04:30.95. Next he did the first run of the 'Rescue Roll' scenario as Bass, in a time of 0:03:45.90. This is slightly faster than the Protoman time on this scenario but significantly slower than the Megaman time.

i have a confession to make: i am a hypocrite.

even though i firmly believe in voluntarily sharing all relevant information with the community so that the community will produce ultimately superior runs, i have been keeping my sonic 2 runs a secret from everyone for the past six weeks. frustrated by the lethargic appearance of sonic runs here on the site, i tried several times over the past two years to put my underhyped and underappreciated sonic skills to work, but other things always got in the way ... until now.

i chose sonic 2 because it is the most widely-produced and widely-played sonic game, and i wanted to make the biggest splash in the community i could with the limited amount of time i have to put in. since i started my runs, other people have picked up some of the slack, and i like what i see ... but we can do more.

when you watch my runs, i want you to think about what you have to contribute to this site, and then i want you to follow through and make it happen. i want you to rip my times apart with the power of your focused rage. i want you to fill my mailbox with tapes of sonic runs, and i want you to fill the game list with all the sonic games you can. i want you to show the world what we are capable of. i want you to make this the year of sonic.

i want you.