Not long ago (in SDA time), we had a total sweep of a particular Quake table and now we're overhauling another full haul of fame. The submitter, formally, is our timer Matan 'IsraeliRD' Weissman, but looks like the workload was split over a dozen runners, with 'Nature Freak', 'Xedron' and 'Xelna' tugging the hardest. This is in a game where the appeal comes solely from emergent complexities of the physics instead of story or visuals. You control a ball with timely jumps and by applying spin. If you're on the ground, this makes you roll. If in the air, it makes you bounce in the appropriate direction off the next surface you touch. Tapping into the full potential of the greatly elastic collisions increases the skill cap exponentionally. There's several extra gimmicks and glitches to add some zest.

I am, of course, talking of Marble Blast Gold. Even though I hadn't actually seen any runs before, I can tell there must be route changes in the mix given how jumbled some levels are. Specifically a particular sub-strain of gravity-twisters that crop up here and there. I think solving them was supposed to be a little bit of a puzzle to begin with when the game left the proverbial oven at the Garage Games kitchen. Looking these people up in an effort to understand the game's legacy and popularity, the studio was founded by four merry Dynamix alumni marooned by their overlords at Sierra. Jeff Tunnell (whose massive resume is lined with the likes of Heart of China, Red Baron, The Incredible Machine and Betrayal at Krondor) held the helm when they decided to respond to the rising costs of competing in the games market by cobbling together an engine that could facilitate the ambitions of smaller development houses at an affordable price point. A lot could be said about the engine's evolution since then: seeing as this was the same tool that Tribes, a rather famous FPS predecessor to games like Planetfall, was developed on, it's evident Marble Blast Gold was either just an early roadside billboard for the product, a fun side gig, and/or might Steve Jobs have actually paid them for rights to package it with various Apple systems?

Be that as it may, the IL table now has a "0:13:23.508" where it used to say "0:14:04". 40 seconds off therefore, and an average of 0.4 seconds of fat burned per level (as the plentiful run comments explain, a certain glitch that made some old runs faster was banned, so the actual increase in run quality is greater than indicated by that figure). Note the existence of blooper reel files and two (!) audio commentary tracks as well!

Pretty sure this isn't corroborated canonically, but in a moment of all-too-much charity, I though the "Knight's Chase" is supposed to be the (Anglicized) name of Time Gate: Knight's Chase's main romping grounds, a sordid monastery residing temporally in 1329. Sounds more like a fort, actually? Maybe it's called that because the protagonist, who ancestral recalls as a KNIGHT Templar, is CHASING after the antagonist's buttocks for profuse kicking? It's accurate if not exactly that exciting. This is a game that doesn't really even try to backdrop his main motivator in any way: they took yer doll, bud... aren'cha gon' do som'n boudit? What we do own their in-house team credit for is the work put into historical accuracy, quite prevalent here and instantly incrementing the score among the retrophiliacs. And composer Philippe Vachey's score is unscoffable too, as usual.

Aside from the high learning curve just to feel comfortable navigating a world of piecemeal perspectives, especially when playing the smutty non-SVGA version (the only one supplied by the digital storefronts) it's very easy to miss points of interest. That and you'd better have smuggled a modern GPS tracker down the time well to position yourself correctly in front of them (alongside some satellites of your own I guess, depending on the flightfulness of your conspiratorial fancy re. what Templar technology was like). I noticed there's also some bizarre and regular glitching of the polygons that's non-existent in the first several games... and the fighting techniques, in a speedrunner's hands at least, look like chi projection more than appendage projection. All in all, while I can only imagine this a relatively strong (and perhaps the least well-known) entry into the broad Alone continuum, it's evident Infogrames should probably have let Raynal lead the polygonal adventure charge he had single-handedly bugled (French horned?) up in a direction of his choosing, but that's simply not how Infogrames ever was. Hey, got it out for Christmas again, didn't they!

None of this bears any relevance to the age-old question of "to speedrun or not to speedrun" as the stalward 'arnaud33200' has taken it upon himself to do! The game, and certainly this run, has its charms. Speaking of, this is arnaud's 3rd time braving the verification high security gate. The second was confounded by unfortunate A/V issues, but this time he's making headlines on his roundabout 300th Single-segment attempt at the game, cleansing the corrupt cloister in 0:19:57. Run comments give glimpses into that invisible matrix of other possibilities.

'kazn' hasn't relented with anime button-and-facial bashing in the framework of Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code, either. The character is the same as last time (Tohno Shiki), but the run still looks quite different, owing to the sequence of fights ramifying based on RNG. This, with the same proficient keyboard manipulation (i.e. execution), results in a 33 seconds scrunched time of 0:06:17.01 in the same Arcade mode, Hardest difficulty category. And it does NOT look like chi projection! As before, the run comments are bilingually English and Japanese.

It's a funny word, "spank", as things go. The jolliest form of physical abuse; generally very tame, and to tame. Just sort of a goof, at the end of the day – or whenever strikes your fancy, Nancy. Now when you tack "death" onto it, questions arise. Is this an episode of history; perhaps the doings of Ivan the Terrible? Is this an episode of "Kenny vs Spenny" midway season 3? IS this... an episode... of the chimerical mind... of the Ron Gilbert?!

Like so many legends of interactive entertainment, Gilbert started out in obsessed reverse-engineering and not entirely un-monkey-like imitation of the games he had access to, and even those he didn't. This might be what made him hilarious... we're talking about software so primitive the system they ran on had barely been equipped with a hard drive. It's dearth in which the imagination blossoms. Or maybe he just had a funny mom? What we do know is there's probably a whole matrixful of dots to connect from Maniac Mansion (1987) through Monkey Island (1990) to a game called DeathSpank from 2010. But now it's an action RPG. I honestly don't even know, I knew he'd made another P 'n' C adventure with Thimbleweed Park in 2017, and I knew he had dabbled in other genres throughout his career. I mean, it sounds like I'm totally fixated on this one guy when he's not even listed as the sole designer, but in a sea of chaos and time constraints, the auteur is a raft that's not on fire. Also Clayton Kauzlaric's Wiki is a tad too scant to extract his essence from.

Speaking of time constraints, there's no more time for hiding this 1:11:34 (with resets), very constrained in time as well, with the unfortunate side effect of condensing the guffaw-rific dialogue to an almost subliminal stimulus. This way it goes straight to the brain's funny center past the pee control unit (yup, that's a puddle of piss you're sat in, Mister), but no-one's telling you not to strategically time stretch it in your media player, wink wink. 'retailescapeartist''s first unavertible heroic deed is killing some chickens. I think I've said enough.

The next one seems to have been the most popular on our site of the many many Metal Gears in recent memory. The "Metal Gears" in those games are heavy combat mechs with nuclear armament (at least some of them?). In Metal Gear Solid 3 HD, we switch POVs to an agent called "Naked Snake" (who later in the canon becomes "Big Boss") in a 1960s Soviet jungle setting... which sounds like some very niche genre of music. You can't say "jungle" without saying "camouflage". Trust me... you can't. And so there may well be a bit of that here. Also compounding the third of the "Solids" is hand-to-hand fighting, a stamina bar and injuries and un-injuries. 'HIKARI_MGS' has mastered all of this on the PS3 for his new 1:17:30 that improves the single-segment SDA record on the European Extreme setting, achieving Foxhound rank, by basically two minutes (and is a clear WR as well), which is more than it sounds considering there's several parts where you just auto-ascend a ladder or otherwise aren't able to overtake any "ghost drivers" on the "track" easily. What is it with me and "quotation marks" today?

This game got all kinds of awards and so I'd imagine I don't have to say too much on it? You go around completing sub-objectives while intermittently radioing and rendezvousing with other essential chaps and/or chappettes. There's a heap of limitations for the Foxhound runs: no special items, alerts, kills, and not much damage taken. The hard mode of hard modes. The game had various version differences between regions (such as that peculiar difficulty setting), and also there's the expanded "Subsistence" release that quite generously came with the first two games in the series, and a longed-for unbound camera rig. The camera and some of the other new features went on to be subsumed by yet another version, the HD one here. That might be why Subsistence has seemingly been ignored for speedrunning. Now you know.

Another one level takes a big hit in the Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In shortlist (when it's speedruns, all the items are short, and select). That one level is not level one but rather the eight numerically, with the aim to demolish a SAM vehicle and ride the choppa outta there. This run utilizes a collision bug to get into position faster, then something... even more interesting happens. The new tricks were found, and the run submitted, by 'OdDzBall', and it makes the table 32 seconds faster, now a 0:39:14.

Reminiscent of the theory that Pokemons named themselves and informed human languages, it's possible that uncouth utterances originated from barnyard animals as well. That, and perhaps the callousness of industrial meat (meat-eating on the whole is a more nuanced question), might really be the only morals to be gained from this brief click-through of Can Your Pet?. Thanks to an additional quality-of-life improvement in a later patch, your all-too-jovial chicken pal now CAN in about 8 seconds less, 0:00:04. The run, from Herbert 'Water_is_wet05' Stevens, is too ridiculous to comment on intelligently. Clu-Cluuuuuck!

I can't say I've seen a game quite like this before. It's a small army-vs-army kind of arena where the friendlies consist of one human player and an unhelpful AI sidekick, two human players, both of whom helpful, or hidden option C, one crazy human player (that would be 'Manocheese') on one regular and one desk-mounted controller, which I understand is also quite helpful. At no point does the other side – the un-friendlies, that is – get to pick their meal. It's unaberratiously an entrée of Tibetan death dumplings followed by an exquisite main course of steaming death cassarole with a zestful side order of death nukage soup and for deathsert, the classic, a parfait of preeminent perishment.

It is a little difficult to follow what's happening in Gotcha Force despite the simple premise, so the abundant written comments caulk up a pretty massive gap (like prosthetic dentures). It really seems to have a microcosm of its own. You can magicate custom mobs for your army by waving a wand and invoking arcane incantations in the menus. The abuse is HEA-VY. Like multi-nationals and tax havens. These runs cover both the 1-p-w-u-AI and "2-p" sub-categories of the Challenge Mode over a 0:35:08 stretch and they really do exude every intimate evening of the super-long, super-sexy affair Manocheese has had with this game. Loving it!

In another rather unique title from the shooting star Adeline Software, a one-man damsel recovery detail (let's just call him 'RK.Walnut') tours time and space like a regular Dr. Whrecking ball, starting from the Neolithic, through Roman times, Medieval times... a whole times tableful o' times. And everywhere he goes, trouble awaits: polygonal adversaries in every shape and ethnicity. Time Commando is essentially a 3D brawler with twisty paths and all kinds of cool concepts strewn everywhere, and it looks really nice for 1996 too because the camera panning is all pre-rendered.

Just a sampler, the Japanese middle ages: It's hard to keep the fighting clean when you've got sharpened steel and they're coming at you with their this-dou stances and their that-jutsu grabs, most of them honor-bound to fight one-by-one... I might as well hand the sword over and I trust you know what to do with it. ^^ Speaking of, I tried to figure out if it was a tanto or a wakizashi. It has one straight edge like a tanto but looks longer than 30cm, which would normally make it a wakizashi but I think those are always curved. There's a type of sword called chokuto that's got a blade like this one but they predate the Japanese middle ages. And so it can't be a chokuto either dog dangit! Whatever you do, do NOT call it a katana! I'll summon herpes, you know I will.

In other epochs, you get to meet, greet, and beat up both the Conquistadors AND one of the funny cultures they brought to riggedy ruin. This time, the sacrificial ritual is on YOU! :) Wild West is my fave. You'll see the dude casually picking up live dynamite and packing it away for later. Maybe we're meant to imagine snuffing the fuse... with his calloused murderer's hands! After this, you've got a score to settle with WW1 Germans, who are obviously still Nazis. The Future world has probably the pinnacle of another groovy Philippe Vachey soundtrack. If the name of the last time period flashes by too quick, it's "Post-modern world". Here you'll see Post-Modern Bear, Post-Modern Byakhee and Post-Modern Shark-o-Dolphin that looks like what happens when you mash buttons randomly in E.V.O.. It's not a fun-packed 0:55:37 family holiday you wanna miss out on!

To see off this pseudo-monthly feature, 'ktwo' does more justice to NES Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance than any mere mortal before him, including past versions of himself. Does it even deserve this much justice? In service of inevitable fantasy righteousness, the dungeon-crawling heroes look like they're heroically tripping over their own feet everywhere. Kind of Scooby Doo; I'm sure there's ultra instincts at play. It's far less brutal though, in fact it'd well-nigh pass for pacifist. What you think are swords bobbing in their hand may just as well be empty platters they've been sent to refill with grapes and mead for the larp party up top.

Speaking of tripping, the way ktwo explains he stumbled upon the biggest time-saver is a very good example of how inefficient it really is to start grinding out runs without having spent adequate time with testing first. Yet that's all most speedrunners seem to want to do, or even have the wits for. The NES in particular is known to be a dwelling of simple but erratic games. You never know how anything was implemented given all the trickery coders relied on to make things work in the first place. And if anything ever splashes over, there's almost guaranteed to be something ridiculously cordonned-offedly important in the next byte over. Like the pointer that tells the game which enemy is the final boss or something. Speaking of, judging by how massive the dragon in question is, the one unceremoniously cancelated at 0:04:45, I think the other repliloids are probably just velociraptors. If you have been missing that sense of elation and achievement, the victory fanfare ktwo's letting ring out should do for you.

Thanks for all the runs this Summer!

Catharsis. Is it a pot of gold at the end of the story arc of a play following the classical rising and retracting format? The requital of villainous deeds? The restoration of social seemliness? The lovers' embrace? The hero's fanfare? Well... no. It's an otherwise mild-mannered and obsequiously polite anime maid beating the sh*t out of any and all other life forms she happens to cross ways with. Doesn't matter where they're from, why they're fighting, and what part of their injuries are covered by their insurance policies. What does matter is she's basically housekeeping them to submission with furniture, pots and cleaning utensils. This has to be the closest to the literal manifestation of "mopping the floor with someone", or something. In the last two fights, it's with cat-arses.

The glorious individual whom we are all to praise for this divine offering is our new friend 'kazn'. He's parading his great manliness on the hardest difficulty setting of the arcade mode of a game that can immediately be placed onto the natural-disaster-bound shores of a particular Far Eastern island state. Yeah, it is called Melty Blood Actress Again Current Code after all. This looks like a job for SDA! That's right, I'm pulling out the Semantic Disambiguation Automaton. Hmm... after some beeps and boops it's saying with 98% confidence it's a combination of two different three-word addresses somewhere in the space between which you will find the final resting place of dadaist Marcel Duchamp. The words on his tombstone are actually fairly fitting: "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent" ('Besides, it's always the others who die'). The others take 0:08:40.83 to do so.

But wait, there's more! The same runner submitted another run after I'd already written the above and do I really have to sacrifice such a gorgeous piece of writing because of it? No sir, I cannot boogie! Not like that. The same parameters apply otherwise, but the character in this one is called Tohno Shiki. Actually, I suppose the run time won't be exactly the same either... but it could have been! 0:06:50.16 this time around. Tohno is one of two brothers it seems at first. They're both suave senpai types that you would really love to share a matcha ice tea with. Really, though, Nanaya Shiki is an alternate version of Tohno. It gets pretty messy. Synopsis, if you like. It's all part of a wider world of Tsukihime (月姫) that also begat a visual novel, a TV show and a manga, as well as other games. Very popular, apparently. I'm pleased to have made its acquaintance.

日本語で書いたコメントも付いています。スピードランありがとうございました！

Among shooters, this serious... umm... this series is perhaps most distinguished by its long arena altercations, and yet somehow it's not an arena shooter? The game by itself is, and what it might now be to some of you: Serious Sam: The First Encounter. Those arenas are pretty much exactly what Roman gladiators went through on a daily basis, you know! — bursts of bulls, surges of scorpions and wellings of witch-harpies. That's right, entire murders of those flying devils are expeditiously... murdered with explosive projectiles like at a gravity-spun ten-pin alley (one of many exclusive club membership benefits). In this specific run, you will see a cannonball scoring a triple on the buggers. These intense action scenes are interspersed with rather relaxing bubble baths in the etherial medium, alongside bovine-assisted self-golf. All in the pictoresque environs of Ancient alien-infested Egypt. Ancient aliens. But of course!

'Blacksecret' lops off a whopping five minutes (to 0:30:20) from the former (which was mistakenly categorized as "tourist" difficulty when both it and this one are on "normal") by jacking up the segments count and just being smart about things in general. The better half of Sam's austere arsenal is given air time (like those cannonballs) and any and all little time-cutters are tossed in the mix. All the critical points are discussed in the runner's comments. Let's see more quality segmenters, eh fellas?

The other run that was ready for today's update improves another shooter, if just one mission thereof, by 2:20 with the entire table nudged down to 0:39:46. Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In was last touched in 2018 (second update from the top). Those runs were of a very high quality and difficult to dislodge; however one particularly obscure option was overlooked. If I told you any more, I'd already have spoiled the new strategy discovered by Omair Irfan for the fourth mission so I'd better leave it at that, but if you'd like a "behind the scenes", head over to the verification thread.

---

I also wanted to point out there's a new swaggalicious template for strategy guides now! Those are an excellent way to store and present speedrun-related information about the games you've studied since they allow anyone to see exactly what is and isn't known, and to contribute to them at any point with their own findings. It doesn't make any community look exactly professional if you don't have one. It looks like a lot of them are not really being very systematic and so progress is pretty sporadic. That's fine for all I care, but don't pretend otherwise. As with any wiki, there's a "talk" page automatically created for each page that can be used for discussions about things like nomenclature. Feel free to use the template's talk page for suggestions on how to make it better. If this causes a lot of new guides to be created, perhaps discussion about whether the tricks sub-page (or some others) could also benefit from having a template made.

EDIT: A sentence was totally not left unfinished in the above paragraph. You've got some nerve to suggest that!

Finally, a marathon ad picked up from the forums. The Big-Bad-Game-a-Thon it's called, between Sep 18th and 20th. Follow the link for details.

Sneaking in a rad tad here. It's been nearly ten full years since the last major Quake Done Quick release but that's all about to change in less than 24 hours. If you still haven't ever seen Quake runs before, the premiere linked right here is your chance to redeem yourself. Check it out and check it off!

Regular updates will continue, and continue to be rad as well.

Can we turn an arcade run 'n' gunner into another mock history lesson today? You bet your ass, ma'm! The series we're thinking of is one with a somewhat abstract-sounding title, Contra. Is this creative perusal of the dictionary meant to be understood as "versus", suggestive of really any kind of confrontation or opposition? If so, almost anything could be called that. Homer's hexametric coverage of the Trojan War? Contra. Shakespeare's most famous and expansive tragedy about a Danish prince? Contra. The title of that video where little sister gets pissed off after brother has poured a bowl of wholemeal porridge into her hair? So Contra. However, truth be told, there may be another explanation. The first arcade cabinet appeared in February of 1987, a few months after the so-called Iran-Contra affair had become public. This had to do with American arms deals in Nicaragua where an anti-socialist "contrarrevolución" movement, "contra" for short, had stirred up after disappointments with the Sandinista regime that held court from 1979 to 1990 (initially, anyway). Probably the Japanese had simply decided "contra" was now go for any kind of resistance movement, which is what it is in the game's continuum.

I hope it's not a let-down that this isn't leading to that game, actually. It's certainly not a let-up either, in the area of furious opposition that is. 'FCJ2000' has come in guns blazing with a 28-second improvement for Hard difficulty Contra III: The Alien Wars. I'm surprised that Contra III has much less runs than the first one (at a glance at speedrun.com). I thought with its big swanky 16-bit sprite boots and more creative and varied design it might have garnered the larger crowd. Improvements come from the usual: better lag strats, better RNG, more risk-reward stuff. I doubt I have to add anything to this. If a picture says more than a thousand words, how many words are packed into a whole video then, even one that's just 0:14:14 long?

[edit: corrected the time]

It's rare that a technology showcase will double as a passable ludological experience of its own right. There are exceptions, of course (*cough cough Half-Life 2 cough cough*). One of these would be the Penumbra Tech Demo. It was a kind of mini version of the first actual Penumbra games and the first stepping stone towards the Swedish Frictional Studios' (founded shortly after) stellar magnum opus, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The tech being demoed was called the HPL Engine, named after H.P. Lovecraft. If you think about it, the "Gothic novel" that Lovecraft delineated in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" and built upon himself is pretty much exactly what Amnesia was, too.

Anyway, to return to this game, somehow they first had a 2D-engine that was used to create something called Energetic, a game that "aims to enlighten and educate teenagers about the production and consumption of energy within our society", and that 2D-engine was later supplemented with 3D capabilities to make HPL 1. So what could the pre-Frictional framework do then? Well, the one thing that stands out is how it models grabbing drawers, doors and hatches and opening them bit by bit, as well as other physics, though this aspect was handled by an external component, apparently*, and the first first-person game to implement Newtonian-esque physics was 1998's half-baked precursor Trespasser. And, well, Half-Life 1 and 2 had also come and went. The engine wasn't perhaps so remarkable for trailblazing innovations, but rather by token of how adequate the DIY project was in an era when licensing engines from the big publishers was already commonplace.

* (see this interview)

Well, you may expect we have a run for the tech demo then? You're dead wrong! We've got two, one with large-skip glitches in 0:00:20.90, the other without, in 0:01:58.21. The former is an improvement of around 3-4 seconds to an older run (we've moved into sub-second tracking now). I gotta say, if you want to express what you're about as a speedrunner, making your monicker 'FPSDemoSpeedruns' is certainly one way to do it. To be clear, this particular demo is "SDA-friendly" since it's not really a shorter version of any particular game. I have to stick in a little bit of news here: we now have a rekindling of the aforementioned Amnesia series coming up on the horizon. Amnesia: Rebirth it's called. The trailer lets out there may be some parallelism between its narrative and The Dark Descent... Titillating!

Speaking of parallels, the final run today may have many with Sam 'Samtastic' Locke's own and others' past efforts on Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, but not as many as usual. That's because the 0:41:24 launches a category that has been completely neglected up till now, the no-tricks-no-gimmicks any%. It looks rather like Mahatma Gandhi's frail body and ostensible pacifism has joined forces with John Rambo's lack of being stoppable. Whenever running into guards, there's typically a sequence of raspy "Freeze!" followed shortly by a stupefied "What?" as they just can't fathom the Gaul-like gall on this bird-bone zipping through traffic like an amped-up rickshaw driver. That's what they are, by the way. Birds. Mudokons are birds, not rickshaw drivers are junkies.

The continual near-misses in this run look like the pithiest and most punctual choreography. In a sense, I suppose they are! As ever, the magical boundaries between screens are abused the ever-living hell out of. This has to be part of the sligs' perpetual confusion: "Missed!" "But I shot right at you!" "Yeah, but I was behind the black." "...I hate you Mudokon! I hate your dastardly wiles. I hate your nasal tones. I hate your ability to possess sligs when we least expect it. I hate your... wait, why am I pulling this lever, releasing ferocious unfed hounds from their safe confinement? Why is my friend getting his face chewed off? This is so INANE!" I guess, now that I think about it, cinematic platformers often have quantized movement to make jumps etc. easier to time (or more like to keep the animations seamless). Maybe that's what enables a runner to replicate such a precarious route from run to run? Or are these guys just that damned good? It's probably both — plus the Oddworld guys knew how to keep their enemy AI dangerous but fair. Kinda like me.

Peace out next time!

Would you believe what I did with that headline? Also would you believe there's a database for guns shot in movies and games?

That's one of the many tools toted by 'Skajdrovski' trotting through the merry little town of Berlin. It's springtime, 1945, but not for the Third Reich, nor indeed Hitler in specific. The seat of the last Führerhauptquartiere (which were Hitler's various HQs) is getting pincered by stampeding hippoes on both rapidly retracting fronts and there are covert operatives prancing up and down the streets, Führer... umm... further ruining the poor feller's day. One of these operatives is Karl Fairburne, a Sniper Elite, sent out to survey a ravaged childhood turf with no time for nostalgy. The crux of his campaign is the prevention of Nazi nuclear knowledge from falling in Soviet hands before it does the Americans'. Assassinations aside, Karl multi-classes as a demo man and in reconnaissance: a real Re[con]naissance man. So it is springtime for him! Am I nerd enough yet?

The game has a primary focus on realism, as you'd expect, with things like ballistic arcs and breath-baiting as optional involvements. These are, today, foregone for the fastest settings instead and Führer... umm... furthermore playing in segments to ensure optimal quality across the 0:48:27 board. I urge you to be on the lookout for those world-famous Opel Blitz dragster trucks. It's like they got springs.

PS: Not only have these Sniper games been novelized, short story-cized AND comicized, Rebellion Developments is even fashioning them into a board game now. That's one 7.92 x 57mm you didn't see coming. o_O

Many familiar robotic faces await in this next run for a game that amounts to a spin-off of a spin-off that lands where it all started more or less. Something like a 360 in revolving doors. It's a throwback to that NES difficulty as well, at least in parts. Speaking of parts, you're constantly tinkering with spares called "Battle Chips", to counterweight the one on your shoulder. It's virtually impossible to win without them but they may be something of a chore to manage.

Have I dropped enough hints yet? The game slide-tackled here by Phillip 'ZELLLOOO' Shanklin is Arika's 2003 Mega Man Network Transmission for the GameCube, co-produced by Capcom old-timer Keiji Inafune. In the rest of the Battle Networks all the battling is turn-based and locked to grids. In Network Transmission, it's largely the classic formula, though accessing levels is done through nodes plotted across an overworld map, with many areas crawled more than once. "Crawl" is probably not a good choice of words actually... A run time of 0:56:33 means over ten minutes of fat has been burned from the old SDA record with a much riskier and more refined approach, discussed in detail in Phillip's written comments. It's easily the WR as well as of writing this. While the old run went for the good ending, the differences are so minimal from any% that it has been deemed prudent to retire "good ending" as a category altogether. Which sounds kind of sad now that I've said it. I guess a runner wrestling with their game to get it to submit, so they can submit, is the always-available SDA good ending.

This first game had tons of enemies because Switchblade II, programmer George Allan's previous title, didn't. And it should have. Apparently. While I missed it in my young years, albeit not the pervasive marketing, having tested the DOS port lately I can certainly now confirm there are enemies like there are... rocks... in yo feeble drinks. They even respawn so you can never run out. Like if you lived RIGHT next to a motorway. You wouldn't want to run out cause you might get hurt.

An early and somewhat infamous contender in the 90's mascot pageant, Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension was poised to skitch a ride on the second crest of the Sonic boom (even belligerently barging onto hedgehog homeland on the Genesis), and while reviewers at the time seem to have almost unanimously seen Zool as fulfilling the prophecy, the general sentiment of those looking back now leans on fair to middling. Cute graphics and honestly rather groovy beats on the versions that had them, but at loss for entirely fresh ideas. The yes-a-ninja, not-an-ant can wallclimb, whirlwind and acquire a shadow copy of himself, with other power-ups as well. You might stumble upon a bonus shmup and other minigames. In some versions, you have to go around hoovering every last knick-knack just to advance a level. The Mega Drive might have seen the quintessential one with a fully mechanized parallax backdrop as well.

I'm telling you all of this now because you're sure not going to learn much of it just watching the 0:00:00.62 today, provided by our buddy Jordan 'Greenalink' Greener. There's a random glitch in the Master System version, as you'll see. Maybe someone thinks fondly enough of this platformer to have a stab at a full-game run someday?

The scale of the witch hunts in the traditional sense is one of those few things the New World can't hope to compete in with the old one. The glory days were already largely over by the time of the fateful colonial moorings. Yet we shouldn't forget that what we in the industry address by the entirely necessary term "wiccaphobia" wasn't institutional through all of Medieval history. The fact is, in the early Middle Ages, you would actually have numerous denouncements of the whole concept of witchery, and condemnation of those acting vindicatively on such beliefs. It just wasn't a building block of the broad Christian paradigm at the time, though there was overlap between it and the far more obvious infringement of heresy, and there are writings in which the two would get conflated. In addition, witch trials could be mainly politically motivated, as was the case with Joan of Arc in 1431.

Then there was a rather austere take on the matter, issuing from the quill of one clergyman Heinrich Kramer in 1487, by its foreboding title Malleus Maleficarum, 'The Hammer of Witches', that became an early bestseller (printing presses had just been invented shortly after Joan's demise). This jolly tome hammered home, as it were, the idea those ungodly freaks really really were a thing, that they were a really really wicked thing, and that in all dealings-with, one had to be cruel to be... fashionable. Though the book was initially banned, the Christian philosophy had also started to shift, with it being decided witchcraft was heresy after all. With these and other sordid developments, the floodgates were swung wide. The totals are estimated between 40 and 60 thousand, the majority of whom sundry female deviants, but did you know there were also parts of Europe where most victims were men?

So you can see the Salem finger-point-caper of 1692—3 was small fry, or no "fry" at all in fact, seeing as most of those condemned died in hangings (not without discomfort, this having happened long before the noticeably more decorous long drop method had emerged) or vaguely, as only one can, while imprisoned. The burning business had been based on the idea this wouldn't allow any cheeky phoenixing on Resurrection Day. Maybe this was still attended to at Salem afterwards?

I think there isn't a pre-empting pyre in the world that could stop a certain perspicatious teenage clue-cumulator from reincarnating in the pink at steady intervals, such as in her latest, the 33rd on-screen sighting of Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem. In this story, founded on the similarly 33rd novel The Witch Tree Symbol, Nancy is set to explore Salem's dark past and déjà vu present with old and new companions, including the Hardy Boys on second fiddles. Also rising from the ashes in a small way is the one, the only, Mr. Ms. Drew himself, Michael 'arglefumph' Gray. You can tell it's no copycat because the amateur-difficulty single-segment run, 0:26:05 of duration, is enhanced with authentifying audio commentary on track 2.