Speed Demos Archive

You Killed it! Now Make Sure it Stays Dead & Blind Guessing #3: Segmented Speedruns

Welcome, boils and ghouls, to the 🔦🌌 Highlight Zone! 🖍️💅🏻 Bunch around, iF yOu DaRe, puns abound, this I swear! Well, I suppose it ghost without saying. After some scareful dreadtegic analysis of the spine-chilling Jumanji of a situation we're ensnared in, I've come to an unsettling conc-BOO!-sion: the problem with this here cobwebsite (is that a self-burn?! severe burns are dangerous!) is the simple fact there's no-one there mournitoring the ceased-to-be simian. That is to say, anyone who overSees DeAd chimp. That's right, I have seen the future 🔮 and the future is a ragsman. I mean, anagrams. But for the fear and now, and while it hasn't dug itself up again, we have one little gamepage refresh blood and I thought I'd also skullster it with some amusing (you'll die laughing!) musings on a topical['d eyeballs] topic. But let's go from the top down the drop... (I've vowed to one day figure out a way [of all flesh] we can go from the bottom instead, but I'm still stuck on how to turn the undead... into fruitarians.)

The only little gamepage disfiguration for today's release comes from 'PROX', who has also come to a conclusion: one of the strategies used in his previous MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat Werewolf campaign ILs also had to make way for the future, despite how far-temporally-removed[ coffin lids] the frightional universe in question already appears from our limited human perspective, cowering at the feet of our cosmic overlords, screaming pointlessly for mercy. 3 seconds came off (like chunks of rotten flesh) the formerl-de-Hyde record of Mis-shhh-you-fool!-ion 2, entitled "Brain Tongs". The death throes end at 1:04, with the full-table epitaph a sombre "Rot, birdy, birdy blue at 0:30:32".

Entering the "Blind Guessing" portion of the show now, you might recall the last one was on volunt-eerie-ng, and all you memory monsters out there know it specifically stated it was a "part one" of some fashion. Well, long excuse short, my ambitions for part two were to see whether there had been a global/NA drop-off in volunteering in general, and while I found some evi-dance-of-death suggesting there was (it peaked in the US after 9/11), I didn't ultimately think I could emanate lethal enough levels of beta and gamma radiation in the social sciences... And so shall séances today inspire other[world]ly-themed automatic writhing. Topical this topic is not because Halloween but because we had talk of segmented speedruns in the previous, surely rather grim and... there's no other way... diabolical announcement, and the grisly whodunnit around their mysterious general disapparition is likely as well unraveled here as wherever else. Maybe we could scare up a little more inte-Rest In Segments? (See, that's a good one. That one's undeniable!)

🎃 <----------- behold, a punpkin

A segmented speedrun, for you sickly-greenhorns and grilled-tenderfoots, is when you take just one snippet of gameplay from dusk till dawn loading till saving and keep boiling it until the fat has all dripped off. Now, I don't seriously believe many people reading this wouldn't have known that, but they've certainly been a lo-viz, vulnerable or even endangered species as of late. I remember a time (say you're old without saying you're old, and a witch) when runners would dead-relative-ly frequently hand over BOTH a single-segment AND a segmented run even in the same exact changeling swaddle. That should [The Pit and] upend[ulum] any claims segmented runs used to ever be regarded a destitute second, strapped to the iron lung of necessity. It was in fact the case segmented runs were the initial default amongst "other", non-Quake, runs on SDA; check any of their URLs and you can see there's no special segmentation tag. Of course it's also true that especially those Slenderman JRPGs, with scaly legs that won't quit (think "legs" more like the Tour de France), required a marathon mindset before the Neo-Pheidippides of the Games Done Quick events had even finished his warm-up routine, and most critically, couldn't be recordead on a single VHS tape or DVDie, so there's many sides to the horror story. Here's sever-all of my highlight goriest reasons why segdemented speedruns are so scarece now (the numbe[The]ring is for ease of reference only, not strictly for order of importance; also I'll abbreviate "single-segment" to "SS" from now):

The combined influence of speedrun.com's popularity, all the marathons, speedrunslive.com and streaming in general has made SS the default mode of speedrunning. These things work on a feedback loop. There was a time before "Googling" was THE verb for it, with people now calling it that reinforcing the notion Google is the best choice, or at least sufficiently good to obviate alternatives. Competition is where the main spotlight seems to lie and how people new to speedrunning are likely to be introduced to it, but competition just doesn't marry up with segmented running as well as collaboration does, especially after new route upgrades stop being an everymonth thing.
The aforementioned recording woes with longer runs having been greatly alleviated by larger hard drives and whatnot.
Some runners now get enough in donations to afford a life without a day job, so longer unsegmented runs can fit their schedules. These runners are probably not that numerous, but they must by definition be some of those with the most eyes on them, again reinforcing the SS mode of running.
Again about streaming, I can't imagine drilling the same 5 seconds over and over again for hours in Half-Life bewitching similar masses as full-game attempts do. In segmenting a run, getting a lower variety of outcomes from execution and RNG rolls being one of your explicit goals homogenizes the gameplay.
Intuitively, I want to link the lowering attention spans somehow with the abandonment of segmented running, but I don't know how to divide and conquer this topic right. Certainly that same 5-second segment will start numbing the runner's mind too, and drive them up the wall unless you are of THAT particular make that really enjoys repetitive tasks. And do segmented runs invite a more analytical mode of thinking, implying stopping to just think about things? At the same time, isn't SS'ing a whole long game also taxing on your ability to focus? Myself, I don't think I could even do that at all, any more than I can crunch away at an update endlessly. Maybe there's apples and oranges at play here. <irony>Unlike literally everything else in my updates,</irony> this is a point I'll allow my readers to harbor independent opinions about.
In some indefinite but increasing count of cases, a segmented run loses too much time going out of its way to save anywhere if the game's not save-anywhere, if you see what I did there. (Somewhere in the lonesome and creepy universe, there's someone called Bill who has no idea what I mean.) Little Big Adventure I know of to be an example of that. Even if you can save when you please, the menuing might drop too many seconds. In the end, this phenomenon might be a bit marginal, but worth mentioning.
Officially sanctioned TASing has become more widely available across more platforms, will-o-the-wisping away many a wayward soul otherwise inclined to pursue real-time segmented running. (I'm not expressing resentment here, to be clear, but it's probably true to say.) In some ways especially save-anywhere segmented runs occu[lt]py an uncanny valley between TASes and SS runs.
If you don't know about or care enough about SDA, there's no official site that fully endorses segmented runs. This may turn some people off.

nate pointed me at a Metroid Prime speedrunning -related chronology on YouTube by someone called nick_at_day. There's a short chapter therein discussing this exact theme, working well as a case study that I can heartily recommend you to watch, as unrequited as the love may be (broken heart? also could die from that).

So that's all a bit of a shame, but you know what they (the demonic dual entity known as Lennon-McCartney) would say! "Ob-La-Di, ou-bli-ette, life goes on, after death! The horror of how life goes on..." Thinking back to MechWarrior for a minute, don't you just feel "Spicy Pumpkin" would chameleon perfectly in the list of missions? I can't believe I neglected to order one of those luscious lattés somewhere on my recent trip to grave England. One of the moments we immortalized (bwahahaha!) has me gawking at a pub a-frame, one that had a row of glowy pumpkins chalked on that looked eerily 3D. I was inordinately in awe of those pumpkins. Still, they were nothing like this guy: 🦄 <-- this was also in the "Halloween" bin at Emojipedia. I can see why. 😱

Actually one point that's worth bringing up is, and I'm kind of perpetually out of the streaming loop myself (disoriented? lost? can't find my bearings but the bears can find me?), but I've been told people stream ILs of stuff like Golden Eye or Mario Kart, and those kinds of streams may actually get lots of views? Of course those are some very popular games and famous for their speedrunning, but maybe it's all a bit more nuanced than I've made it seem? This Blind Guessing COULD well get a part two grafted on like an extra arm at some point, perhaps one where we discuss in more detail what the merits of segmented runs might be. Simply being able to run effectively at all without having to have entire days of free time was always one of them, but again, if no-one's put the thought in your head (subliminal messages? mind control?), it may not have occurred to all.

I'm pre-empting the next fleeting season with this:

Silent Night, Blasphemous Night
Great Ones reign, Death's in sight
Horrid beasties enslaving mankind
Cosmic terror destroying your mind
We're all going to SDA
We are all going to SDA

No bells, whistles or novelty speedruns today, just a brief brief on something that's been simmering beneath the surface. A little while back, it was brought to our attention that one of the speedruns published on this site had signs of something potentially a bit fishy happening (what did fish ever do?). We've been hosting a Diablo speedrun by groobo, any% as the sorcerer, banishing evil in just 3 minutes 12, which for a big-budget RPG title is really up there (down there?) as times to finish go. This 2009 record hadn't been challenged to this day, in either sense of the word. As a result of painstaking investigative efforts led by dwangoAC, Senior Ambassador from TASVideos.org, with significant aid from of a large team of Diablo subject matter experts (dwango's exploits you can read about in this WIRED article), and counterbalanced by a direct correspondence with the runner in question, it has been determined that groobo's run very likely does not stem from only legitimate techniques, and as such, has itself been banished barring new developments.

The full analysis is available here. A summary of its findings and some clarifications are given below. For reference, this is what the gamepage with the run in question used to look like.

1) The run was segmented, i.e. consisting of different parts recorded at different times instead of all in one go. It was never portrayed as anything other, and segmented speedruns have a very long history on this site.

2) The segments were recorded from different playthroughs. I.e. they're not from the same continuous sequence of save files. It seems the runner consulted the main admin at the time, Mike Uyama, to confirm his Diablo runs would be accepted if he did that. To this day, we've okay'd rerecording segments within the same playthrough by returning back to a previous save, redoing the segment, and splicing that together with later segments, to allow for easier optimizations without having to redo every subsequent segment, provided this is sure not to have provided any unfair advantages. The way it was done in this run would never be allowed on SDA now, though. This is what enabled the runner to combine different RNG seeds to get significantly speedier progress through the randomly generated dungeons (and more).

3) The run was determined to be recorded using a combination of different patch versions of the game. v. 1.00 and 1.09 are seen in the portions before and after gameplay, while it is believed v. 1.04 or 1.05 is used during the timed gameplay portion. If all the gameplay was recorded using the same version, this isn't really any major issue.

4) The run had missing frames of gameplay. While this is obviously a mistake and a bad look, it's also not unprecedented. Accidentally snipping off the first or last frame of a segment is an understandable mistake and by itself not an explicit sign of foul play (better keep a little before and after each segment for the verification copy you send us!).

5) The main cause of the suspicions lies in the total inability of the team working under TAS conditions to replicate several parts of the run without modifications to the game code. The final duel with Mr. Death Breath is perhaps the most eyebrows-lifting. The fight has only been possible to recreate if the damage from the fireball spell is artificially boosted using external means. The other problems lie in the level generation in levels 3, 4, and 9, also seemingly impossible to recreate.

6) There is no similar evidence at hand of foul play in groobo's previous Diablo or other runs at the moment, but removing a runner's other runs when there's strongly suspected cheating is par for the course anyhow. For now, the Diablo gamepage has been rolled back past groobo's three runs to the very first Diablo one we ever hosted, which very likely constitutes the most epic necro of any speedrun ever. :P If groobo can provide something concrete to help his case, we can revert this decision. Meanwhile, and independently of that, feel free to send us a modernized Diablo segmented run (using just one seed, plz) so we can all see what's new in this precinct of hell without all the fishy fish! (Seriously, what did fish do??) Of course any SS run beating this resurfacing segmented one will automatically obsolete it so let's see how long this Lazarus will last.

Today's update only features the very superlative, most deucedly capital words and augmented expressions the kind that simply do not rub off without hydrogen peroxide or nitroglycerin. Speaking of...

Quote of the Run: "Jack can hold up to 9 coins at a time. Picking up a tenth coin sends him to the torture chamber (very bad)."

You know, in my halcyon years – and what a years that was! – I always thought it was "something boom boom down" cascading from the lubed-up pre-Scatman motormouth of a one-hit wonder in that one part of his wondrous one hit "Informer" you feel you've got some discernible chances to eventually intelligibilize for yourself if you can manage to sidestep summer jobs until you're at least sixteen. This Snow lad, from North York (is this a place that you want be seen being from?), was that Canuck spitter assimilating the Jamaican patois who, despite this probably having out-street-wised "knapsacks" and "washrooms" as lingos go, everyone thought was even more boom-bastic and exactly as sus as that other early 90s North American white rapper dude who thought being cool was just a nautical mile downstream from sounding that; from having a name suggesting low-temperature conditions. Snow wasn't necessarily on "snow" at the time, but rather "on ice", contained in a "cold storage facility", so the story goes, after refusing to rat someone out in a fine-enough fielding of felon fealty. Anyhoes, can't have been just me with that particular mishearing of what amounts to a different language (I think the line is drawn when they're no longer able to interbreed). And it only makes sense accurate information is hard to come by when loose lips are deemed so damning, eh!

Now, being me, there's nothing I can do to go straight to the point, given anything I can do to avoid it. But like a rubber band, I do feel the tension mounting, the glares intensifying, the heat building, the ice cracking, as an imaginary but animate, fully unanimous, inane and animose* chorus of parasocial peers decries how heedlessly I wear my heaven-conferred informer's cape at this chill storage facility of ours and guilt trips me into making my due delivery post-haste. While being reminded of random things like reggae rap songs is my foot in the door for getting one of these thingzoes in simultaneous translational and rotational motion, I think I've picked up on something here you can love or hate but never deny. And like the many subtle fragrances of your life that you've been putting on ice, you already missed it. Cause what in the blazes do you mean "picking up a tenth coin sends him to the torture chamber"‽

Yes, that's mighty boom boom interrobang-worthy that! That just sounds like a winning prank at a jokesters' symposium of classical antiquity, hosted by Hades himself. The most diabotical edition of Nim. You know, the one where you take turns picking one to three small objects out of a finite set. (Thanks ChatGPT for telling me what that game is called! Friends totally are electric these days.). Am I the only one left blinking and rubbing me world-weary eyes? What... kind... of... game... is... this Mighty Bomb Jack of yours, 'ktwo'? Any BOOMs and BANGs are buried deep like the remains of that one oopsie nuke in North Carolina (for that scoop, search that page for the headline "Weapon No. 2") and stuck through a heavy delay like David Gilmour's guitar. Without knowing better, and I'm not sure that I do, it kinda looks like Jack isn't here to save any days, but to save the bombs instead! He keeps pinching out fuses with his bare fingers or whatever his prehensile organ of preference might be, to stockpile a whole New Year's worth of gunpowder for one evergreen grand finale. After the pyramid's innards have been explosed, as Jack starts sinking into the quicksand-like mixture, you can tell the structure is being held together using exactly the same technique as I outlined in the Night World update (March 21, 2023). That them EGY pyramids got oodles of sand inside is not a joke by the way! Let's blow one up IRL and you'll see 😈 There, on a watchlist now...

The sands of time are quick indeed! 0:06:26 quick to be exact, with another 31 seconds buried by desert storms from a closely related run that was cross-obsoleted by this one. This category utilizes every technique to avoid the good ending like LotBlind avoids speedrun talk.

* Means "full of spirit; hot; vehement" or some such crud. The for-all-I-care pronunciation: "any-moose"

Quote of the Run: "The final odds for all of that going right are ~0.06%."

Sentence-ending punctuation marks galore today, as we usher through another improvement to Super Punch-Out!!, one of these games that seems simultaneously the big and little brother of its NES counterpart. On the one hand, it does everything with more flair: detailed score breakdown; the speech doesn't sound like seals barking (wait, is that an improvement though?); etc. etc., but on the other hand, will it ever appreciate the simple things? In both hands a boxing glove fulla dynamite, blowing up all over one egg-headed self-obsessed had-it-coming right pillock/prat/prick/git/tosser called Narcis Prince, who gets disinherited by 'Akiteru' 0.08 seconds faster in 8.20. The post-pugilistic papers might have riffed on the Chili Peppers with "Several Uppercuts to the Cold Upper (just upper) Class". Seriously, these are the child-abusey types that you've heard of swarming the House of Lords. This updates the ILs to 0:02:16.73 with just one time remaining non-TAS-perfect! I wonder if the TASes themselves are perfect? I have a feeling they are. Seems a boxing game should be one you can brute force.

(Somebody had some serious self-restraint / head injury -related amnesia not to spill the beans on that fully implemented two-player mode for the first 28 years... Next submission, remind me to write something more on it, you know, philosophically. Someone's gotta!)

Quote of the Run: "These quick kills are exceedingly rare. Maybe about 1 in 30 runs get one, and it's 17 minutes into the run. So grinding for one of these is extremely brutal."

You know who's incredibly well-salaried? The Capcom "come up with another ten-odd boss names" team. Ten VERY ODD boss names, actually. By 1997, the creators of the Megaman series felt they had reached the bottom of the barrel, and so they broke through into whole 'nother barrel beneath populated by bioluminescent deep-sea creatures defying scientific classification. It was like a duck-billed platy-weirdo in the face of the Mammalia. And that's just as well, things get old. Take the word "wiz" for instance. Dunzo since before 1998, apparently, because I checked and it looks like absolutely no-one has ever said "wiz" on SDA once. (Rectified!) Gated reverb got old. Live social interactions same. Virtues are out, bird flus are in. Wearing watches got old. The Spice Girls will viva forever. And ultimately, happily haywire'd robot adversaries being called something-sensible-but-unlicenced -man did get old in the end. No more x-men in Megaman X, if you see what I've done there. Furthermore, this being the nub, sucking, or being a nub, at video games got oooooollld as the hills. Beverly Hills, where be yer skills? Nikolaj 'ThaRixer' Sørensen cleverly kills dem mecho-mobiles with venomous bills to see how it feels. Them red and blue pills, the Matrix unveils, unplug from yer gils, start breathing for realz.

It needed to say "Beverly Hillbillies" in there somewhere. Can you see where? No wait, I got it...

So how's he done it then, assembling this Mega Man X4 in 0:40:57 automaton? Simple, you simpleton! He just beast-slashed off the whole 6:34 minutes of faffing about, daydreaming, making phone calls, watching Beverly Hillbillies, throwing darts and picking one's nose till it hemorrhages a blood donation's worth from Mike Uyama's old old-timey time minimum. I asked around the office and I don't know why no-one seems to remember the single-segment 100% Zero run had all that in there. Whether Mike's prophecies have otherwise held up, I couldn't tell ya, but his "I feel like I am very close to the theoretical lowest time for this run" in the obsoleted run's comments is just SOOO KAWAIIIII <3

But brother, those names tho. How bad were they in this one?

Split Mushroom: What are we making? Sakamushi? Hoiruyaki? Can I turn a Split Mushroom into a Mushroom Split?
Cyber Peacock: Is this like... someone who blew tons of money on non-fungibles?
Web Spider: Friends with Hole Mole and Spawn Fish? ChatGPT informs me only about 50% of known spider species actually weave webs, so I suppose this makes sure we're all on the same page. The same web page. That's SDA, bitch.

Aaand to finish this little weave, as a "fun" extra, I wanted to point you over here where nate reposted the epic struggles of what I imagine were hundreds of engineers and servicemen all responding within minutes to an infinitesimally unlikely black swan event at the data center housing us. By "black swan" I'm referring to the evil seductress character from the excellent 2010 movie by that name. Basically I think Natalie Portman did it.

That's in reference to a Shakespeare quote I picked up off a Magic the Gathering card (that's about what those are good for amirite?), and to the you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it in today's first run. Speaking of, I'd like to extend (protract, lengthen, stretch out) a heartfelt apology to the relevant runner for the super-sized delay with their well-earned airing. It's because I... just wanted to spend a few extra mo[nth]ments savoring it all by myself. <3

In the statement "It's difficult to picture the perfect X", the "X" could be a lotta things. X could be an aeroplane. X could be a piano. X could be a particle accelerator that doubles as a skate cross track. X could be an amusement park ride, an amusement park, or just an amusement. Furthermore, a lot of speedruns can be plugged into this variable. It's easier to confirm a correct factorization into large primes than to chop it up yourself. You watch this run and you're happy to believe "yes, this makes sense, this must be it". As far as the I can see, in this 0:58:15 of a hard [difficulty] mathematical proof, with the abilities, foremost the psychotic "hya-hya-hyaaahs", flaunted by that most risque of these rat-reared rascals, redband-Raphael, (after Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a name that, just like most Italian names, is definitely fun enough to reprint here, or indeed anywhere at all – I don't think it can reasonably be morally condemned as a graffiti tag either), and given the exact timings and placements of these ninjoform adversaries waddling one by two by three onto the all-the-world's-a-stage, there's simply no mistaking it! This is it, I've fallen in love. E' amore... a prima... pizza.

Indeed, this is the first glimpses caught of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge's Juliet by 'lxx4xNx6xxl''s Romeo. FYI, respectful of the fact the runner, whose name I shall not attempt to type or even copy-paste into this particular river delta of a ramifying sentence (my lame claim to fame, I'm afraid), probably did NOT score this run first time playing, the sentence preceding, the one you're probably going to have to reverse back to like a fire engine to catch my drift here, was not designed with making sense in mind, any more than our bittersweet natural universe. I just wanted to dump both of the remaining two links into it, and much like post-Romeo Juliet, I don't see any serious competing suitors for this job, so...

The point is, this game is very new, 2022, and old it isn't to SDA either. But it is a good-ooool' classic tragedy in five acts. Here's why that's definitely five-sigma confirmed: Instead of the House of Capulet ("capo" is to "Capulet" as "ham" is to "Hamlet"), you've got the Foot Clan. Instead of Benvolio and Paris (remember those guys? oh man, those guys 🤣), you've got Bebop-a-lula and Get-Ready-Rocksteady. Instead of... you ready for this? Told you to get ready! Instead of star-crossED demenTED loveRS outta room throwing their lives A-way to the flies... you've got throwing starS outta DimenTION X flyING YOUR way A-cross the room... with love. And instead of the plan of waiting on Juliet for those two courtesy years to make marital consummation less youchey (and more wow! ^^ -chey), you've got... okay, I think this is where the analogy FINALLY breaks down. Phew!

Quote of the Run: "you can play a replay on the exact frame the M16 rampage ends to receive ~30000 ammo"

In case you can't fill in pretty poetry with the necessary rap pizazz using the power of your imagination, here, all done for ya!

(The File of Destiny in .ogg)
(The File of Destiny in .mp3)

(Local queenpin, ringing up the runner)

"How do ya, fine neighbor?
I need a... kind favor.
First mend that ride over there:
it got nicked in a night caper.
Then drive to the shop'n center,
and find me a retailer
stocking a wide range of
varieties of aqua vita.
Provide me some tequila,
and one of that French liqueur,
lime for to add flavor...
Then whip me up a Marg-rita
and one for the señ-rita."

(Like 40 minutes later)

"What's with the flightless bird?
Is it dry? You a rainmaker?
Wait, it's my booze Uber!"

(Calls the runner again)

"Yo, thought you would take the car!
And what is that, pipe vapor?"

(Runner)

"I'm 'guywithalightsaber'
and I'm high as a kite, bay-beh!
And I'm flyin' like a kite paper!
Uh, meant paper kite! Lemme alight
here on this skyscraper
construction site where I'll
tryst with a Triad member,
or was it Aunt Brenda?
I know we met on Tinder...
And so I cannot render
aid with your agenda.
Can't fix your car fender
or be your bartender.
The raven's... a harbinger."

(Queenpin)

"...
A guy with a lightsaber?
My, what a wiseacre!"

What I'm saying here is allowing your children to play Grand Theft Auto III and derivative works is bad parenting in more ways than the FCC is letting you in on. And the game itself is bad at parenting. Not only are there frequent replacements of what you've been expressly and unstutteringly instructed to do with another unrelated, self-assigned assignment... but those aren't ever even properly followed through with! "I'm gonna be a firemannnaaahhh, there's risk involved. Hey, I wanna be a par-a-med-ic... Nah, you gotta care-a-lil'-bit. No, I got it! Gonna be a taxi driver in Calcutta (reference only EU peeps will get). Nah, I'd actually rather just drive myself around Liberty City, hence the name." And THAT'S rewarded by making you hugely wealthy. Yeah, this will prepare you for life, won't it. What the constant camera slapping like davie504 to wipe traffic off the road translates to is "C'mon, move, people occupying my friggin' lane! No that's ALSO MY LANE!" Claude's simply the consummate narcissist. Just the basic ability to self-reflect is inherently compromised here – you KNOW replays are shoddily implemented when they cause massive rodent-induced-dam-failure-like upheavals to the gamestate when you return!

I don't know, man. I see there's definitely been upheavals to the state of the game/art/category (single-segment by any selfish means necessary), 15:11 off previous SDA run, downtown to the dam in 0:56:46. Help yourself, you're a lost cause anyway.

This update features two double submissions by the same runner and one odd one out. So it's like two pair? And the kicker is an ace! Always bet on SDA...

— T. Otal Don Quay

Quote of the Run: "I've studied the possible potion trajectories and now aim to take out the two art pieces to the left with a potion and then fight the right piece with the hammer."
— ktwo, a sworn misart-thrope

So normally I go ahead and do some laid-back research first before engaging my aggroed-cat kyphotic serious writing mode. Well, there HAVE certainly been rumors to that effect. It's like Mothman. Any case, today you've caught me on the day before the research day, and that's when I painstakingly formulate the most jaw-droppingly astute and sexy hypotheses to help the research get a good kick-off towards the right exact conclusions. It's the world we live in. For instance, I really think the character of Beetlejuice must be a personification of red dye. Think about it! Or read about it, directly below! Like move your eyes less than an inch.

Firstly, to pop the big pesky pimple here, what's the more obvious "essence of beetle" exactly? I think we're talking about carmine, a.k.a. cochineal (a word you can pronounce any way you like, so long as there's a voiceless postalveolar affricate in there somewhere). This is a dye, "natural red 4" or E120 in Europe, used historically and contemporarily in textiles, paints, foods and make-up, though luckily, synthetic alternatives are at least being looked into. The cochineal beetles are dried and crushed in very large quantities, not dissimilar to how Murex snails in the Mediterranean region were the long-time source of the color called royal purple.

Secondly, red dye certainly sounds appropriate for a horror movie set, and the original draft of the script is noted for far greater exuberance in the area of blood. Ketchup is neat and all but soon or late you'll get more actual creepy-crawlies "ketching up" with their respective recommended calory intakes (and each other) than you can afford the qualified animal handlers to handle. Unless you're the next Siegfried or Roy I guess, who, contrary to outwards impressions, did not in fact do all their cat cultivating by themselves.

Thirdly, red dye... sounds like red-eye. Think about how the main characters red-die! Swerved off the road huh? You say you were dodging a dog, eh? Well, I think you were DOWNING a DUBLIN Dog, you sneaky inebriate!

Finally... and perhaps you thought I was going to gloss over this... the homophonous star, Betelgeuse, is, and I quote Wikipedia: "a red supergiant star of spectral type M1-2 and one of the largest visible to the naked eye." A RED supergiant. Visible to the nakED EYE. Which rhymes with what? I rest my case.

The soundtrack to this game, revisited by the NES supergiant 'ktwo', is soooo beautiful and uplifting. The composers back then working with 7–8 channels (the last channel was used for SFX usually) really had to make the most out of each and every channel so it ended up sounding like classical 4-part composition and/or The Beatles. The same kind of minimalism benefits the graphical esthesis too. The negative space around Beetlejuice's head when he utters his lines is rather striking. The improved w/ deaths time is 0:10:52, with 37 seconds gulped by a passing sandworm. This run is definitely a fun watch, given that 90% of Beetlejuice's damage output comes through usage of a knick-knack akin to Xena the Warrior Princess' chakram or a Tron Identity Disk, living on a prayer about them magic bulleting all the meanies while you're off on your own, equally mean, errands.

What might also be a fun watch is an actual, living, breathing movie sequel coming next year. :o

Quote of the Run: "Most of the previous attempts had ended already on the 1st puff, so I didn't get into the fight with high expectations."

For those of you who don't like ktwo, there's 'ktwo'. And, I mean, I can't see someone continuing their OP unbreakable "NNNGGHHH NERF IT ALREADY!" air juggle combo this long without a condensation of jealous wannabes ramming down the gates of his save-stately* manor while he's just lounging in the pool room** minding his own NES. Haters gonna hate. I don't actually know if he has any dedicated anti-fans, I'm saying this just to cater for that very real possibility.

(*I'm not saying he cheats! Haha... he just also does TASes for the same games. XD)
(**This room has both pool tables and a swimming pool, with one of the tables inside the swimming pool so you can... well, you know.)

So ktwo's second hurrah today is Dragon's Lair for the you-guessed-it NES. This and related games were known for their extreme take on the eternal animation realism / control "feelalism" debate, and so the criticism is the same as that against Red Dead Redemption 2. The criticism, in fact, was so mouth-wateringly venomous that I would happily just quote Wiki here: "The game was panned by critics and gamers alike due to its poor controls, trudging movement, and immense difficulty level. Gamers especially criticized the game for the player dying from one hit by any object or enemy, DESPITE THE PLAYER HAVING A HEALTH BAR." (The all caps is mine but it shouldn't be!) In Dragon's Lair, you don't have to tame and ride any dragon... You just have to tame and ride the big ornery state machine that gets you to it!

As per usual, as per the other run above, ktwo has documented his knowledge in a laudable way. Warms my heart every time I see someone picking apart the game's steaming innards in memory addresses and/or variables. It's like catnip dip to a feline. Or bamboo salad to a panda. Or "32 seconds saved, down to 0:06:49" to the superparticular SDA speedrun "fastronomes". That's what you are, and what you are is why you're here!

Quote of the Run: "We wanted to compare which category is the fastest, the limits of Easy category and what kind of crazy strategies and optimizations we could find and employ in a segmented setting."

For those of you who don't like ktwo, OR ktwo, OR speedruns making appearances in pairs, there's 'Blacksecret', 'Tarakan3000' & 'Carbonehell'. This trio of true tradesmen of fast-tracking have traipsed the... you know what? Alliteration's ass. While we've seen speedrun relay sack races before, the elephant here, if any, is "why isn't the Easy difficulty necessarily the fastest in this case?". As explained in the run comments, it's just not masochistic enough! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You can't hurt yourself with rockets, which as a rule adhered to by all serious FPS games equals "you can't boost yourself with rockets", which sorry condition both spacefarers and Nazi test aviators can confirm feels like nothing once you've had a taste of the good Stoff (look up "Messerschmitt Komet" nudge nudge wink wink). "More crazy experimental war machines" is one of the few good replies to "reasons to have delayed D-Day Führer... I mean further".

(The timestamps here are the IGT rolling by at the top of the screen)

In Serious Sam: The First Encounter, you are given to high vault over some of the lowlier (get it?) enemies like they're air to you. The bowling aspect of it I covered with the last submission. Of the other sporting activities that made the route cut, I'd like to highlight the let's-call-it-floor-surfing at 23:27. Some other excerpts: the textbook heedlessness towards the readie-thingies the game is insisting on to derail psyched-up players with at 0:25; the Kamikaze boosts like Eminem with his career after Revival (NB: Revival was just fine :| ); and the measured and necessary act of deforestation exacted by The Beeline Express at 4:36. The fact this run has the music on mute forefronts the ominous rumblings of all the skeletal Kleers and the booming cannon shots when these Three Musketeers square it off with the Gorossus of Rhodes in the finale. It's a soundscape like one of the Napoleonic wars; the complete no-bars-hold'd version of the 1812 Overture. Wait so maybe this game IS an allegory of the Russian campaign? And so the big bad is the cheese wiz himself? :o

I guess it would've been remiss to leave out the cannon from a game that has this much surplus in what they eat. There's no basic ammo concerns, any more than there are colorful ball concerns for children at most professionally maintained ball pits. Run time is 0:28:37, and as you may have pieced together, the run was, indeed, pieced together from segments, not run three abreast. That might have required another tree to be felled somewhere...

Availing himself of the "abandoned-ware rule" whereby an incomplete game is fair game for SDA submissions so long as it "represents the most complete version the game is likely to ever have", 'RockoSonicFan' gets another Flash-driven Sonic title out of the way. This time it's Sonic In Angel Island, wherein Sonic... is... in/on Angel Island. The dramatic term "act" is indeed a little dramatic in this context, but by the principle of reasonable economy of game assets, Sonic levels tend to be two-punch combos from the same piece of cloth, and so at least they'll always have each other to keep company. If the game only had one of the dual acts, it wouldn't be allowable anymore, it'd be a freak of nature requiring summary sanitation. Side note: it's rather strange seeing Sonic without camera scrolling, even for a duration of just 0:00:39!

Did you know? Nickelodeons were originally cheap movie theaters. The first one starting business in Pittsburgh, 1905. With a 5 cent admission fee. What's another name for 5 cents? It's "nickel" isn't it? As in "pumpernickel". As in 'farting Nick', one of the tentative attempts at swaddling that German expression in an etymology. Did you know nickels are mostly copper? Cupronickel, it's called, the alloy. The "odeon" of "nickelodeon" is from a big Parisian théâtre in neoclassical style, which was in turn derived from the name for ancient Greek theaters that (unlike Roman ones), came roofed for better acoustics. The first of the odeons dates back to roughly...

*Comes up for air and clicks away dozens of Wikipedia tabs before it's too late*

The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odd Squad. You've all seen the Nickelodeon show Fairly OddParents, except for those of you that haven't. Like me. As a quick 'n' gritty summary, the show is the embodi-mation-ment of the phrase "Be careful what you wish for!" This run is for one of its little Flash accompaniments, terminates at the 0:01:52 mark, and now exists on this site. And yes, this is the other pair of the two pair, so it's also by 'RockoSonicFan'.

This is a clearance sale of a few runs that have been kicking about for ages. The reason is simple: three comes tantalizingly close to four. Been mighty tantalized over here, but now's the time to come to terms with real life. "There is a crack in everything", quoth Leonard Cohen.

"'kazn' is like a box of chocolates" is a true statement. This isn't as evident if you didn't see the Tetris-like run that didn't quite make the cut (run for a Tetris-like game, not that the run was of its nature like that game, although I find it sufficiently easy to believe such runs exist). But if you DID see that run, you will be able to see ME, spotlit center stage, when I state that stately statement of mine. Honestly just going from Melty Blood (fighting game) to Mario Kart 64 (not a fighting game, but liable to stir up real-life fights like Black Friday sales) is quite a space-time warp in and of itself.

What kazn, specifically, made his mission to do with this game was to hop up a level in the taxonomic hierarchy, past the individual-lap runs and individual-race runs too, into the phylum of entire cups (phylum off, those extra seconds) and even the [Mushroom] Kingdom of the Whole Dang Ding! We didn't have those entries before but we didn't see any reason not to. So here's some very state-of-the-kart motor sports, dauntlessly incorporating every finicky trick (i.e. shortcuts) to make whatever shenanigans you and your feuding friends ever thought of to aggravate each other in this game seem kinda feeble. Very feeble in fact. Lamesauce!

Mushroom Cup: 0:05:45.76
Special Cup: 0:06:03.43
Star Cup: 0:06:12.73
The Whole Dang Ding: 0:23:16.53

But wait, there's [Dennis] Moore! Another runner to have made an imprint on the same game page is 'yat1', stealing time from the rich/poor and giving it to the poor/rich! My eyes just couldn't focus on what I was seeing in this more recent submission of the Rainbow Road w/ shortcuts Individual Level, and specifically the one-lap version of it. That lap time was 1:05.16 before. That lap time is 0:13:33 now. I thought I was looking at the wrong category or something! You do the maths how much the physical, virtual corner-cutting has snipped off the elapsing time. I can imagine dozens of runners' bloody bodies heroically frozen around the mountainside creating footholds so that The Chosen One was finally able to reach these heights. But maybe not? Maybe it was easy, work smarter, not harder -like? Full table time is now 0:05:29.27.

yat1's comments double as a reminder of what even count as shortcuts / large-skip glitches in this and kazn's four runs.

Reports of my Lotsa Stuff are Greatly Exagge-not-the-Case-at-All now that I Think About It

So I've been absent, and you've been sad. Runs are languishing in line like good ol' USSR (or Russia in like a couple years from now maybe?). But ought this to be the case? The cause of congestation is I organized a "coming-out party" having had the regretfully belated, rather invaluable insight I'm actually all kinds of female. I know y'all been talking about me – and do keep up the good work, fellas – but do help yourselves to these freshly baked ❤️-shaped vegan female pronoun cupcakes going forward, why don'tcha. Catch! Catch!

(disclaimer: LotBlind has never baked a single cupcake in her life, and don't even get started on cakes. The cake isn't even just a lie, it's not even a talking point.)

The precious statuette side (Jade Falcon campaign) of MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat has been subject to further chiseling. We catch 'PROX' green-handed adding extra engravings in the little shack behind the local fake ancient relic parlor by the ruins of the mysterious city of... Incabamba. With 23 seconds of felonious flakes all over his person, there's no doubt he's the guy forging ahead with these forgeries!

Arkham Bridge down 7 to 0:01:41.
Bone Machine down 5 to 0:01:30.
Plum Wine down 1 to 0:00:39.
Rust Heart down 3 to 0:01:12.
Iron Piston down 7 to 0:01:38.

Wait, there's more suspicious sand pouring out his pant legs like Leslie Nielsen's prison baseball! It just keeps coming... enough to turn home base into an expedition target for mountaineers at 41 more seconds for 1:04 total savings. Woot woot!

Trial 1 down 9 to 0:00:43.
Trial 2 down 9 to 0:00:39.
Trial 3 down 12 to 0:00:42.
Trial 4 down 11 to 0:00:41.

The complete table is accessible through the following link, doubling as information on what it would put you back seeing all of them: 0:26:42

Quote of the Run: "Better mashing on both tanks can save 0.3, a more aggressive duck can save 0.2, and a slightly better UFO kill can save 0.1."

Someone's not pleased with the overly agreeable waterfowl but must surely be satisfied overall with a second WR ownership in some old run & gun called Contra. That's quite the underachievement! And yes, I mean under-achievement considering what we're dealing with here. 'K1ngK0opa' has limbered up limbs for the evening limbo jamboree, cause that low% is all about bending but not breaking: bending the limits of rapid, well-timed bursts of inputs on the B button, as well as something a bit more elaborate and recondite on the others. Recondite meaning "hard to understand". Why can't I just say "hard to understand"? "Cause I get bored", she said and snored (( _ _ ))..zzzZZ

Despite the bar being set increasingly low, the One True King impresses the convivial crowd with a 0:10:57, 18 seconds off the previous SDA-submitted time... and did I mention the WR thing? That's WR by 15 seconds ahead of any competition ever. In Contra. The way the bases blow up wholesale after you've punched through to enough of their provocatively positioned funny bones reminds me of those toys designed to come apart at the joints when taking a critical hit in the abdomen (which, let's face it, is just a physical euphemism for the groin and whatever they've got going down there). This expediting contrivance only somewhat subdues the manliness inherent in refusing to augment your armaments in case you get cooties – which, by the by, is what low% means in this game: no weapon upgrades – and the manliness inherent in your badge of honor count incrementing mid-mission. I'm guessing those icons up top left are more like your continual self-evaluation for the performance review.

"I sure dun well, cap'n!"
- "No good, I wurn't watchin'."
"Well darn diddly doo, railroad tracks."

It's a-me, the name is Tour. James Mario Golf: Advance Tour.

Okay, that was dumb enough for a paragraph break.

Heck, it was dumb enough for two! XD I was invited by 'carterferris07' onto a "golf"* safari outing deep out on the veldt. Golf, as he explained, is the tribal religion of the local inhabitants. My first object of inquiry at the destination was the soundtrack roaming its natural haputtat. Motoi Sakuraba's** appeasing audio accessory is evidently the apex predator of the golf soundtrack ecosystem. It feeds on all the lynxes and tigers like they're to-be-chopped liver to it. Rolling in the deep... I mean in my Jeep, with roof hoisted as means of insulation from the wind, the rain, the lightning, the beastly appendages... wading through the shoals of the protracted intro sequence, I spotted a congregation of natives on their approach to the primary house of worship, the one known to them since time immemorial by the sacred name... the Club House. Inside, when briefed briefly on the coming trials, the sacred words are received with solemn reverence, as they will underpin all actions taken by the participants from this point onwards. At the crux of it all lies one holiest mantra, which I managed to record and decipher as follows: "To become the strongest golfer, you can't afford to waste any time." (That's right, this is officially a speedrun game first and foremost. If you see what I did there. And when I said "underpin". Did you catch that one?)

* This may or may not be the first golf game anyone's ever run for SDA but it's certainly the first that has "golf" in the title.
** This man is responsible for other killer soundtracks too! Think the Tales series, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile... and obviously (yeah yeah, I'm getting to it...) Earnest Evans.

The natives, having advanced with emboldened hearts and exalted spirits forth onto the undulating and mottled sacred mettle-testing grounds, will exhibit the curious habit of swinging their "four irons" like detached helicopter blades to effect an exceedingly ungainly but like for like character-building forwards momentum of their countless little bleached globoids, perhaps a dried fruit or nut of some local flora. The entire act I presume to have purely ceremonial significance, given they could, with the full accedence of physics, simply pick the globoids up... and carry them in their hands. Once set foot on the hors d'oeuvre (the first course, hors durr!), it is imperative, despite being expected to send one's globoid up again and again in lofty, majestic arcs, never to allow one's fancy to follow into the birdie's-eye view, wherefrom the shapes the courses assume are not always appropriate for the sincerity of the ritual.

This somewhat commercialized safari tour sacred not-exactly-mystery in full swing, the globoid is self-defeatingly deposited inside, then withdrawn from the ritualistic round orifice wherein once stood the pin (yes, that pin from that pun, now do you get it, finally?). Across the 0:46:30 span of the ritual I observed, altogether, several dozen iterations of this Sisyphean chore, and the character erects like soybean curds in China. On occasion, a course is given a token try, then turned a cold shoulder, perhaps in a futile attempt to curry favor with the spiteful seirei spirits that keep blocking the balls at the final approach. That's life! Balls will be blocked. Like if this update was to just

360° into Darkslide into Butt Slap into Darkslide into Spaz Gas into Darkslide into Brass Jazz into Darkslide into Darkslide

Hi there! I'm an rising star 11-dan judowondokarateka and a black band Nak Muay breaking hearts and making headlines in MMA rings in every corner of the world, but my coach just bailed owing to his... well... chronic wrist arthritis, which I 100% you can happen to anyone! Sayyyy... would you coach me if I told you I need... yes, I NEED... a series of STURDY BUTT SLAPS (dare you to click this link) on both cheeks before every bout to arouse my... fighting spirit? It's, you know, a platonic thing. Like one of 'em snazzy solids. An octahedron by the octagon? Makes all kinds of sense to me, hehe! Just some good ol' athletic homosociality. SLAP MY BELT-BAGGIN' BADONKADONK LIKE IT'S A FLEABASS YOU HOMOPHOBIC DICK!

(Not my fault! Keep reading...)

Quote of the Run: "Buttslaps have been a powerful tool for speedrunners since Tony Hawk's Underground 1, and they are at their most powerful in Project 8."

When you launch a modern console, the home screen is referred to as the dashboard. I've never launched a console newer than a PS2 so how would I know? It evokes a joyride in your pimpmobile compared to the dreary old PC "desktop", which in turn sounds like you're about to get behind the mule, spreading some sheets or editing a dumb news post. Things that happen at an alarming frequency! What took me by storm is the apparent fact updates to the dashboard software implemented between production runs can have a dramatic impact on the handling and acceleration of your joyride ride. I always thought consoles gave the same cookie-cutter experience to every Tom, Dick AND Harry unless you do something funky with 3rd-party peripherals like an SSD, but turns out that's far from the case with XBOX 360s at least.

Yes, the 360. Sounds like the optimum choice for games where going for one is never a bad idea or not conducive to your goals. I suppose the dashboard should just have been called "Skates", not "Blades", for Tony Hawk's Project 8 to nestle in perfectly. "Getting their skate[s] on" we have 'ThePackle' who uses the journaling method (read: "has written awesome commentary filling a void on the gamepage") to guarantee this "joe" skater a Chris Rea upwardly mobile freeway through the ranks of wailin' jazz artist wannabes. And I mean it is like free jazz a lot of the time isn't it? But as with at least the most recent epoch in the history of music, more notes in less time is seen hereabouts as virtuous and virtuosic. And thus ThePackle causes a daring debacle on the gamepage by yanking out over 10 minutes of largo parts from the last record (yowza, that's more than 20%!), letting the tumultuous trombone tootings shred your reservations about what is and isn't musical in just 0:37:24 – like a spiny desert succulent to a wedding gown. Like try this bad boy on for size, Ariel-with-legs!

Now how do you write "There isn't much to talk about that isn't already self-explanatory" in your comments, ThePackle? How?! Is this a "if you have to ask, you'll never know" kind of situation that we're in? Really?

Quote of the Run: "The game, at least to my knowledge, only has one checkpoint, the start/finish line."

Imagine you've been tasked by your agency with headhunting for future speedrunning talent. In keeping with the times, you're sent to try out 4–6-year-olds that haven't yet had their entire lives programmed for them. Now how do you go about that? Simple! Walk into your nearest kindergarten (Waldorf ones are good), make sure everyone's got crayons and an age-appropriate picture to color in with like a princess or a castle or a hobo or something. You're looking for someone that colors in EXACTLY NOTHING within the lines... and EXACTLY EVERYTHING outside of them. If it's in a Waldorf 'garten, there's less chance they'll step in to interfere with das Experiment.

So yeah, if you want your speedrun to look like one, you'll have to have at least one of those kids in your team. And I think that might have been the case with 'arielus05' and his cohorts making short work (literally) of Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity's Heroes Story fork with, if you squint and turn your head, some subtle large-skip glitches included. It's about 0:08:04 in the chronometer and the run is indeed very... meta, which isn't me saying it, it's the game itself breaking the fourth wall like it's from the Silent Hill continuum. :P I couldn't have thought of a better word for it though. Not much help from your master's thesis in formal logic in trying to pin down any sound arguments about the game from this headless chicken dash alone. I think there must have been a leak from a secret military warehouse of some wacky gas that makes you go temporarily guano. Batshit, that is... and that shit somehow ended up in the Heroes team locker room right before the starting gun went "bingo-BANGo-bongo!" I think Knuckles was dozing right by a vent, the poor devil. Echidnat've been any worse for him. If you insist there's any method to the madness here, you may turn to arielus' run comments for confirmation biasing that to your satisfaction. I'm keeping a safe distance!

BTW: I definitely didn't plan out the Ariel-arielus connection but this run's most certainly also got legs, legs for days. Don't think anyone's come close to challenging it so far. And talking of bats, would you believe there's a genus of bats called Arielulus? HAHAHAA! I'm very close to rewriting this to make it look like I did plan it out like one brachiosaur of a brainiac. My god!

Given only a few measly letters separate the last two titles appearing in today's update, and both are 'RockoSonicFan' to thank for, I thought they'd be happy sharing a room without a privacy screen. There's something of a... RUNNING THEME... to this update as we pile on more Sonic Sonic Sonic. The two games in question are both simple Flash miniatures without the luxury to partition off any collateral categories either: there's Sonica finished in 0:01:41 and Sonic Xs in 0:00:08.26. That's two more Flash games down, and like a gazillion to go, but while the front page fanfare might not be as resounding for short 'n' simple... fan fare like these two, that doesn't mean they're not worth speedrunning. Gotta go fast and all that.

Frags [High-]Strung[-Out?] Together at the Payne Factory: Yourene for One Hell/Heckuva Treat (1/3 Sugar, Kuz You Only Rive Once)

This time I have no clever comments on the update up here in the "attic" but if I weren't to fill it in with anything, I'd be somewhat admitting it's not a necessary addition with great universal utility. It'd instantly be demoted into some lousy gimmick. But as it stands, it's fine. Well, okay, I guess I might as well congratulate myself on another outstanding headline. Like this, for instance: "Gratz, brah! You're mere inches from fame. There's a reason why it looks so much like the word 'famine'. Same with 'star' and 'starved'." Thanks, self! Where would I be without you?

There's a special category of 2D games where you're looking at the finished product but you can't unsee the editor! Like you can tell exactly how the levels were built, like seeing the individual tiles of the mosaic but not the picture they're supposed to congeal to. I know I've had that feeling when playing Jazz Jackrabbit 2 at least – but not the first one – and also not e.g. when watching Abe's Oddysee runs. I don't know what causes that but I suspect the lack of legitimizing lighting effects may be a tributary. It's a bit tough to make a game like that immersive. Many of these Game Maker type of games are like that.

The premise in Honeycomb Factory Frenzy is you're in the factory where they make the Honeycomb cereal... and you get a little frenzied because ADHD is your God and ADHD demands things of you! And you hurtle into a meshuga sugar rush down the long abstraction of a production line and you win when you... reach the... other... end. It's like one of those childhood "race to the X" kinda affairs except this kid is self-ADHD-motivated in his extracurricular excursion into where his cornholio-o's come from. And that's all fine! We love everyone equally here. But did you not see Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, my little pumpkin pie? I'm pretty sure it took less than 0:06:59 for the first little angel to get... urm... angel'd in that one. There's gotta be a dope Wonka game out there for you to run later, 'RockoSonicFan'. Wonder what kinda skip you'll find in the creepy boat ride. Maybe you just set it on fire like ancient Roman naval warfare. Bitch, I seen Ben-Hur!

While I do not and never have endorsed drug usage of any sort (mmmkay?), I just can't help but think this silly game offers the perfect experience for the stoners even more so than us no-ners.

Quote of the Run: "A few months ago, the runner 'pirohiko' posted a speedrun of this game showing "alternative exits" of some doors. These are reached by pressing down (instead of the standard method of pressing up to enter a door)."

So you hear about that time* when scientists (yes, scientists!) drilled a hole through the earth to a depth of kilometers (yes, kilometers! They work in SI units.) and ran into a surprising cavity down there. Then they lowered a thermometer and a microphone (yes, microphone!) into the hole and found out it was really extra death pepper hot (you know, infernally so) and it sounded really really bad, hellish almost (yes, hell-ish, hellish screams, probably from something burning, e.g. eternally, as if, say, human souls in some hell-like location, which is a location known (known!) to be found somewhere within the bowels of the planet, which is exactly the sort of locale they (those scientists!) had been scouting out at the time... That's quite the coincidence!). Well while all of that (all of it!) really happened of course, they did get some of the data (data!) corrupt and it was only quite recently that they went back and cleaned (cleaned!) the tape properly before playing it back again and whaddya know, it turns out it was actually identical to whatever the heck (yes, "heck"! that's another word for "hell") Nebulus, if you have the wrong sounds setting, emanates at the unsuspecting young players with all the unreasonable rancor of the sun from Super Mario Bros. 3.

Doesn't sound familiar? Well, maybe cause you know this cosmopolitan of a game by one of its other titles, such as "Kyoro-chan Rando", which is the version run here again by 'ktwo'. I have tremendous difficulties myself deciding if the game is ultimately more "nebulus" or more "rando". The wrong sounds setting in question is the RIGHT sounds setting for speedrunning and thus you're all severally invited to tweak the volume in your individually chosen media player to moderate the levels of pain to match your personal "UNGH" threshold and any recent underruns in self-flagellation. This time dip of 47 seconds down to 0:13:19 is largely off the back of the incorporation of one of the stranger sorts of shortcuts I've seen. You just hit a different key at certain doors and... shortcut! It feels like step 2 is missing like gnomes and underpants but hey, the profit is demonstrably there!

* Source, of course.

The last run for this next one was in the Friday, June 25th, 2021 update, and that's one you will want to get revised up on to prep for this one, because it definitely feels like one of those "standing on the shoulders of giants" moments. Only the giant was You, Yourself and Yourene. You can strike that paradoxical pose in Portal you know! Yourene, AKA 'fearZZz' amasses the winning scoreline, increasing brawl-by-brawl, in a spellbinding Tchaikovsky-esque ballet of death across all the 26 pit-like enclosures. It's such a rapturous synthesis of knowledge, stategy and skill to slay the stochastic leviathan that is Quake III Arena! The irony here is you end up seeing maybe 25% of said arena in the average case... This is the kind of game you must be fully warmed-up, brain and body, to play on the kind of level you get with the 0:21:49.46 continuation claim.

So to clarify, these ILs are for the hardest difficulty. The run comments complement those from the easy difficulty from before and introduce you to some of the subtleties of the Nightmare grind. Especially the very last level is one that holds your face down to the pavement and grinds it until it bleeds... until the pavement does, that is. On this difficulty, the bots have superhuman hitscan aim the kind you can only really counter by moving like electricity moves along greased copper wires (but not in a straight line towards or away from them!), or hoping for "if I can't see you, you can't see me" to hold more true today than it did the last 9999 days. Also they're more resilient, the damned vermin, spawning with more "stack", i.e. health and/or armor, meaning the days are long gone when you could erase one with a single rocket or rail. So watching these runs for all of us who remember strapping ourselves into the passion play that is this game's highest difficulty (feeling precisely like an out-of-shape crash test dummy... about to be more out-of-shape than ever) is to take vicarious revenge at it – the best medicine, let's not forget – and coming from the easiest difficulty is to "increase the dose from least to most" to quote some Eminem lyrics here as we often don't. But ought to.

High high up on the list of my personal first-world peeves is the misfortunate gaping hole in my game-sume between Max Payne and Sam & Max Hit the Road (it's organized thematically). The omission is that of the second in the Remedy series, which is probably sufficient so you can understand which game I'm referring to but I'm legally obligated to include these three given links per game in these updates so, here we are! Link numero uno: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Links numeros dos & tres: 'Koci' & 0:17:05.80. The former slightly compressed the New York Minute ILs table time down to the latter, with the poeLEES Station level being traitorously stuck up for 3.03 seconds' worth of Dunkin' donuts. This inside job – and the next link is BECAUSE I LOVE YOU – would therefore clock in at 1:26.90 roundabouts.

Trundle through the Jungle; ya Hear it Rumble? My Storm is Frontal, your Base will Crumble, I'll make you Humble, I'm Contrapunt

...al. The headline is missing "al" at the end. Contrapunt-al. Punt-all. Like kicking everyone's ass in a complex musical weave of motion. You might just be able to glean what one of the games in this update is gonna be from all that :P

Things are looking up for science! Experts at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (dilettante called LotBlind over on SDA) have just announced the successful restoration (shoddy rewrite from memory) of a believed-to-be-lost (accidentally deleted) ancient (quite recent actually) informational stele (uninformational front page update) with new insight into (made-up facts about) the life of clerics in late dynastic Mesopotamia (of speedrunners in the early Anthropocene in the USA mostly).

Ain't that's just grand! Like... five grand, seeing what my hourly wage should be up to by now.

Quote of the Run: "Fall damage kicks in at 3.5 blocks and will gradually reduce your health as you fall, making it possible to die before you even hit the ground."

It was a dark and stormy night (in some part of the world) in 1985 when this thing came out on an old desktop data-doodling machine that British school kids of that era will remember more or less fondly, the BBC Micro. Back then you had about ten bytes of RAM and enough CPU to redraw maybe seven pixels out of the 24-ish your monitor could even keep tabs on without crashing and burning. That's why it was fashionable in those days to limit the play area and incorporate static or mostly static elements in your graphics. You can tell Night World is assuming nothing about the player's rig when the collision checks are as primitive as they are, although I have an alternative theory as to why everything seems so infirm. It's also assuming nothing about the player's holding any interest in seeing the majority of it, as evidenced by the decades-long wild goose chase it led its nocturnal suitors on until the first report was finally filed of puncturing that wall of darkness. More on the fascinating details of this daring endeavour in the links provided here by someone who was amongst those who kept their eyes on the glinting prize long enough to allow them to adjust to the lower 'Lum'inosity. Yeah, girl, that's only the first of a potentially endless number of puns on your name! Didn't think this through, did ya?

What's my theory? Well, you all may have seen that scene where in one of the more recent Star Wars debacles a bunch of half-fledged torsos sink into quicksand... and then out of quicksand. :/ There's a cave / macguffin showroom in there having the compact convenience of a Swiss army knife with attached surgically fine-motoric neuro-interfacing robot arms. I put forth THIS game was the necessary predecessor of that location. And I put forth that all the walls are embedded with electromagnetic generators. And I put forth that the sandy material of this subterfuginous subterrane is magnetic. Could be made of something along the lines of... you know... some lunar basalt, some kinda titanomagnetite like, obviously ulvöspinel springs to mind... or just like some honest-to-goodness franklinite. What's wrong with franklinite? AND I put forth that this is how the world of Night World can remain so paradoxically unsound and sound all at once. For good measure, I'll throw in that's how they built all the pyramids, too. Those ancient aliens did.

The amount of tenebrific this game is, it's difficult to shine any light on what constitutes a brilliant speedrun of it in any other sense than the visually verifiable perpetuity of progress inside this network of undiscernible chambers the likes of which served to inspire Sanctum. You just have to accept THIS 0:05:35 is a Banksy. THIS ONE's a van Gogh (The Starry Night perhaps?), an Edward Hopper (Nighthawks maybz??), a Nat Jones (okay, hear me out... there's an American artist by that name who drew the cover art for both some Dark Souls comic book, a Dark Ark one AND the same name appeared in my search for who the Night of the Living Dead poster from '68 was by even though there's no basic chance he's connected with it cause he probably wasn't born yet. Thank you for listening! And also you'll thank yourself for listening to the runner's dulcet and finely calculated audio commentary track.)

'PROX' has kept whittling away at mission completed time stamps and we're keeping pace with him (well, we're doing our best!) on the MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat gamepage. Here's all of the latest and greatest improvements:

Jade Falcon campaign:

Rogue Chariot in 0:00:56 (down 4s)
Trial 2 in 0:00:48 (down 2s)

Wolf campaign:

Pyre Light in 0:00:54 (down 2s)
Burning Chrome in 0:00:39 (down 1s)
Trial of Position 3 in 0:01:03 (down 3s)

Quote of the Run: "boss that is random and sometimes gives you an impossible pattern"

So this next game was last brough up on Thursday, May 28, 2020 (by LotBlind). In that update, I lured you in with something about Contra, then sucker punched your boxing shorts off with Contra III like you're King Hippo from Punch-Out!!. A different king in the ring today, though, and 'K1ngK0opa' to be specific, and I guess you could define this brave 0:09:47 spectacle as "boxing" in a fairly loose sense. Just-attended-four-different-advanced-yoga-classes-while-toked-outta-mah-mind kind of loose. There's not a lot of loose time to shake the any% 1-p category down for (in case there is for any of them) so just 6 seconds are given the boot (punt-all, remember?) and WR it is! In case you didn't know Contra, it's not exactly like yoga. It's not exactly boxing either. It's more like the game equivalent of a 500 kg (1100 lb) deadlift. It's the only passable excuse to pass by gym day. Supposin' something like army service makes you a man... Contra will scale you right up into Overman! Yeah, that Nietzsche Übermensch thing, with no ties to the Nazis preferrably.

It's sort of customary around here to pun around this game's name (and I wrote this part before the title and I've committed enough deletions already) so... I think I'll just quote the English nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary". AHEM!

"Mary, Mary, Quite CONTRAry..."

etc. etc. cause it has "contra" in it. Inside the word "contrary". The first six letters. I could easily have written that into the text organically but I'm DONE with being judged on the basis of how neatly I can knit things together like a... like a damned old maid. Punster not a spinster I tells ye. Punt-ster. Done with knotting things together like a scout or a sailor or something. And I'll have you know I'm burning this bra too. Burn baby burn! Gee, that would have been even more fun with a flamethrower.

*proceeds with disgruntled dark web searches and keyed-up hardware store visits for the rest of the day* <3

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