...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.

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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.)

 

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'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)

 

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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

You might be wondering what happened to those wonderful extra articles (extrarticles) I was writing to accompany the normal run postings. Well, they've been left in the backdrop to wait for a better day with more energy. It's taken me a little bit by storm how much work the next one would require to be actually insightful. But normal postings don't require that much brain-wracking or fact-chacking at all! Sorry if such an impression has come across.

Just one run in this update since some of the others met delays so more coming before too long I hope!

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Quote of the Run: "The biggest mistake in the run happened in the kitchen... This cost ~0.7s."

In their hit single Black no. 1, parody of youthful identity-seekers of a specific hair-dyeing strain, the late great Type o Negative sap the anthem's sincerity with mocking interspersals of materials from BOTH the 60's main gothic goof-ons, the one being The Addams Family, the other The Munsters. This includes not only the verbal pointer to the matron Lily, but musical mimings of both their merry theme songs as well. The two shows aired alongside each other between '64 and '66, but with The Munsters achieving a higher so-called Nielsen rating (i.e. more views I guess) which must have had to do with factors other than the show's quality. (At this point I'm going to crank the "contrast" setting of my opinions to a setting one higher, but only one). The Addamses had the freakier freaks and odder oddities. AND its satire was more pointed. AND it had actually funny lines and gags like in the first episode when the truant officer is trying to convince Gomez they ought to send their children to school, saying "I was referring to more formal learning... Reading...", and Gomez replies with "What is there for a 6-year-old to read?"*. AND it doesn't repeat itself as much. And can we even begin to measure the stark luster-lack of Lily Munster against the unearthly pulchritude of Carolyn Jones' Morticia Adams? Can we? We... no, we can't. We just can't.

* Try this exchange from episode 3, 16 minutes in, if you're in the mood of doubting the Addamses could pack a comedic whollop. Honestly the comedy of errors that follows that scene is A-tier as well!

While any convictions you had that this was all segueing – with all the grace of a freerunner through the market district of Agrabah – towards Apogee's '93 DOS title Munster Bash (if you see what I did there) would have been justified to the degree of having to award the same points as for what it said on my cue card, there is in fact a different horrorfest setting up stalls in this metaphorical town's metaphorical market district today! Aside from all of the above, there's one last decicive cause as to why the speedrun-planney-outy lobe in runner 'ktwo''s brain, barring a concussive head injury, could not, between the two shows, ever have quantum collapsed into running a Munsters-themed video game. The Munsters video games suck. Let me try that again. The one The Munsters video game sucks. The Addams Family for the NES does not suck. As much. Maybe it does? What money-grubbin' mountain-of-a-man Mr. "K2" does in his 0:11:16 is to Dennis Moore the family's own mansion for virtually every last lupin (this is just required, it's not a 100% run), then reclaim "Tish" from the clutches of a few bozos that didn't know about the clandestine canoe conduit. The sampan circumvent if you will. The gondola go-around if you won't. By this fancy footwork, ktwo not only obsoletes his old PAL w/ deaths run (by about 20 seconds effectively) but also overshadows another w/o deaths effort also by His Truly. So for now, this is the king of the hill. Of the K2 mountain.

BTW: Do check out the Knowledge Base guide linked in ktwo's comments. Up top of the guide, you'll see a very neat diagram showing how open-ended the game is!

Am I to supply my own beat here? Today, I ended up experimenting with the update format in small ways. Hope you enjoy!

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Quote of the Run: "Make a mockery out of it. This is fun."

We've been there, done that (low attention span) with MechWarrior 2 but we haven't been anywhere or done anything with the third big Mech power fantasy since 2008, a year most inductive to escaping reality. MechWarrior 3 has the player, his can-tank-erous task group and supplies make slapstick landfall after their tentative dropships come under fire from clan Smoke Jaguar's friendly automated greeting system. A system hailing their frequency from planetside with special futuristic communication lasers that encode friendly messages into super-concentrated packages completely unambiguous to any receiving entity including hiveminds and races from QuasiSpace. Thinking of the topology here, is that more like "coming over fire" then? You can't tell which way is up on planet Exegol! Oh wait, this planet's called "Tranquil", which ends up being like if Venus was called "Chilblains". From there on out, aside from ganging up with the surviving allies for a stadia-packing comeback tour, the player is expected to stop making excuses and start making lemonade with the unaltered general orders. There are Places of Interest in the vicinity in spirit not unalike where Arthur Dent holds residence at the start of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (primed for demolition, that is). Along the way, whenever the player makes contact with the clan that designed the greeting system, new friendships are forged for life. Only they're not a long-lived type of people, or one resistant to skull-boring. (Am I describing a friendship here, I have basically zero experience?)

Whatever parts are spared in each destined mech disassembly become spare parts for the player's mean menagerie to avail themselves of instead. Even completely serviceable vehicles are recoverable, which seems to be a standard in warfare these days. In the 0:30:44 run, also wisely disassembled into parts (part-wise you might call it), this fact is never lost sight of by Cmdr. 'Falconer Gray', nor are other avenues of avid exploitation. But what exploitation could you possibly be referring to, LotBlind?

There's really a similar knotty optimization problem here as something like Megaman Network Transmission, with the fastest mechs being far from always the breadwinners. The many interweaving systems leave those aching for realism and immersion – and exciting speedrunning applications – sitting neck-deep in a balmy 19th century Parisian hydrotherapeutic bath. It... just... makes... sense! There WOULD be bits and pieces left over to repa[r]triate. There WOULD be concerns about the heat produced by the mech's components and that heat WOULD rapidly dissipate when entering a body of water, take said hydrotherapeutic bath. The player WOULD be able to delete targets from the next mission early if the missions play out in the same neighborhood. Oh, and the enemy WOULD blindly attack arbitrary points in the terrain in the present because you've suggested to some squad mates to go hang out there and have a cold one sometime in the future. Wait, what?

So yeah, while this run on the whole doubles as a demonstration of what our recent MechWarrior 2 runs might have looked like in the developers' minds, there are still quirks left over to quip about. More quipping I'll leave to Falconer now and his objective multi-angled coverage he's broadcasting in his comments like the one-man band of independent news crews. Like this is really one of those times I could hardly even think of anything the runner could add to what their commentary had already intimated. And good job redoing the whole run after a watermark first got in the way! Remember Aalyah's immortal words: "Cause if at first you don't succeed... dustoff and try again!" Did I mention this run dusts off the gamepage in a big ol' way? As in beats the crap outta it and shakes it down for over 12 minutes of loose changeS in strategies. 28% of the old segmented run time winnowed off. Winn[ow]ing!

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I lied some about being done with MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. 'PROX' brought another IL down a second, making it dangle unesthetically just below the round 1:10 mark. We still prefer it that way! Here's mission 11 of the Wolf campaign, Aquiline Fire (meaning "eagle-like"), in 0:01:09, total down to 0:30:41.

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Quote of the Run: "I guess the developers never ever foresaw that people would try shooting him immediately."

You know mountain bike racing? The nerve! The thrill! The verve! The... hill. A careening precision sport so adrenaline-injected and holistically engaging as to wipe all memories of bothersome physical ailments. The ones you got mountain bike racing. Next, do you know hobby horsing? No, not hubby nursing. No, not Habbo Hotel either despite being the brainchild of the same evil / misunderstood geniuses of the north. As this article has it, "the sport is still largely a grassroots, DIY activity in its native Finland. There’s no official rulebook or governing body[.]" It's the great equine equilizer; anyone can afford a stick with a horse head stuck to it like that weird stables-and-quidditch-related nightmare I've been having since that ill-fated Harry-Potter-but-also-The-Godfather movie marathon...

Okay, so that's your comedic setup and heeeeeere's your payoff: You combine the flawless ache-relieving drift of the one with the lawless make-believing thrift of the other and whaddya get? Why, you get speedruns of Sniper: Ghost Warrior of course. I mean, look at it! Isn't it kinda like mountain bikes but your budget ran out before the mountain bikes? There's traverses like show jumping if you watch closely – at one point you can see the hobby horse hobbyist 'ImEliteGlitches' vaulting a live crocodile. That and countless fences, crates, barrels... nothing's off limits here and even the objectives are willing to flex. And like the bikers shoot through the dirt of the race track, so does the sniper shoot bullets through the dirt BAGS of the... race track. I mean, that's what it amounts to. A-mountain-bikes to.

Don't believe me? The sniper dude's called "Razer" but also "Raser" depending on how they felt like spelling it in each cutscene and briefing. That's clearly a subconscious pointer towards the word "racer". "Change your position! Change your position!" barks the overwatching officer at the pro racer person in one of the missions. This is doubly insulting as the game is telling both the sniper and the speedrunner their jobs. To be honest, only one can save their face here and it ain't the bush wookie! There's always a fearsome paradox when speedrunning a game that's politely asked you to "enjoy your STEALTH action I said, Sir or Madam". After blowing through an enemy military camp in what can only be described as Thomas the Engine's clickety-clack approach to a 90-yard touchdown run if Thomas the Engine was also asked to channel Mr. Bean from that Snickers commercial, it doesn't escape you the hilarity of the stone-faced "Fuck! I've been compromised" at the sound of the clickety klaxon. More or less all of the stealth left standing in the single-segment 0:36:43 trumping even the old ILs table by a whole 1:42 is solely a merit of solitary principled scripts, like in school when there was just one guy busting their ass on the assignment and hard-carrying everyone else's. And if you think that's perversion of tacit rules a-plenty, think again! Mr. Glitches scores a second six-pointer with a complete overhaul of said ILs table (down to 0:33:38) – aside from one asinine mission that, like the future when you lose at Chrono Trigger, refused to change. Your immutable future is to consume both runs and tell your friends / neighbors / complete strangers about them and tell us how that affected the net number of friends. I'm taking notes.

Something I can't say I noticed at all was apparently they re-used the same areas multiple times by making consecutive missions show the same events from varying points of view. Try and catch what I couldn't.

(yeah, that's about what the character limit in the title is)

"...but then sometimes the tentacles come back and disrupt your dragon from breaking the magic door down."

Oh sorry, we're just enjoying a casual conversation about Bullfrog's Dungeon Keeper with a man known as 1:50:34. He's just mined through its delightfully depraved 20-level gold seam, as it seams, in only '12114''s time and so I thought I'd spend a minute breaking ITS magic doors down like it's a cube of undisrupted earth and I'm a possessed level 3 Imp with a handprint on my butt. Yeah, there's some things to unpack here.

Dungeon Keeper you either know or you don't. Well, okay, you might have come across its sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2. That would give you a good idea. Or you may have strayed into the two Evil Genius games. That would give you an idea. Or you might have seen its massively popular DIY sequel, War for the Overworld. And that one would give you a pretty good idea again plus I hear it's dope. What none of them can boast is the awe-inspiring originality at Bullfrog's ground zero. If you look for games where you're driven to the sudden suspending realization (like Nazi David Mitchell) that you may actually be clasping distinctly the wrong end of the playtime squabble, let alone ones where you've had it hammered in crystal-clear from the kick-off, you'll find... well, SOME examples prior to the June 24th 1997 launch of Dungeon Keeper. There's a city-storming gorilla cabinet called Rampage having appeared at the arcades in the eighties; there's the first Wario Land ('warui' meaning 'bad' in Japanese); there's the callously carnivorous Carmageddon birthed just a few days before today's subject; and I won't knock the walls down looking for more counter-examples because in its own subgenre of dungeon management games, it's very much the very first anyway, and past that has an ambience that felt entirely unburrowed from anyone else's atmosphere, barring one arranged by a shrewd player himself! (it's one of what must be a meager handful of games that you can literally make play your own selection of ambient sounds at runtime)

It was also the last Peter Molyneux game unadulterated by Peter Molyneux as we now know him. What's inside the cube? Just hot air, I'm afraid. At least he learned his lesson.

One of the things you definitely WILL need the landlord's (i.e. Lord of the Land's in this game's parlance) permission to knock walls down in a desperate scrabble for is earlier games that combined, more or less completely seamlessly and successfully, a first-person view and a top-down third-person view of the nefarious proceedings in your little evil petting zoo. And perhaps even more amazingly, both view modes approximate equally important in a speedrunning context as well, so you'll get to see it first-person! And third-person! First hand! Speaking of, the "Hand of Evil" is a special evilution on the mouse cursor that goes beyond what innocuous itches Windows 3.1 desktop toys ever could scratch. A lengthy spiel of all this game's innovations is unnecessitated by the newcomer notes already nested into the numeral man's run comments, which deliver a tale of petty-no-doubt yet reproducing rivalry with the long-time uncontested 'zoonel'. If for any reason you'd like to see what the page looked like for a dozen years before this update, here's an archived copy. Those are always available, by the way.

The time improved by in a game waterlogged in slowly sauntering scrappy scripts overflows 4 whole minutes following a recipe of pain, pain, spam, eggs, sausage and pain. Both for the runner and his undeserved underserved underearth under... serfs in desperate need of unionization (for which I produce this verbatim quote: "I don't want a hatchery*, it would slash my workshop productivity by a lot." *THAT'S WHERE ALL THE FOOD COMES FROM) Amidst the multivaried spec tech the most exotic sight is seen in level 11, which despite its full-on carved-in-granite bank vault -esque timer is accelerated from "quick as laws of nature will allow" to "just a little quicker than that", an effect only robbers whose gruff gunpointing skills are one-pixel sharp can hope to elicit. Mission 17 is the same but even longer, more drunken and slobbier. Shows the human side, methinks. With those two records robbed as well, there is nothing stopping 12114 from gaining on his antagonist across each and every segment.

Past that, this update also stars more of those steely Jurassic megafauna -alikes on an inward bound stampeding trajectory. Having dipped his toes into the well-maintained (pun unintended) SDA watering hole with the expansion run from an update ago, 'PROX' even less hygienically dives in deep with two more for its Mama, MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. The format is intent ILs this time around, both for the screechin' Jade Falcon campaign in 0:27:52 and the howlin' Wolf one in 0:30:42. The Jade Falcon clan mascot, a suchly colored bird of prey, is of lesser stature so compensates by clutching that clichéd katana everywhere it goes (guaranteed bully repellent, kids!). The Wolf clan's mascot... well it's just a wolf ainit? It's a six-star wolf. That converts to between 2 and 3 Michelin stars, reflecting on its standards for fine dining venues; keep your local wolfdom well-gourmandized and they won't bother with your sinewy Sapiens. Both campaigns feature heavily in missions clichédly katana'd short – or ferally fanged as the case may be – with oracle-like precognition of where the critical targets are to be crossed paths with. Or just guessing till it goes right. Or looking at the map. DUNNO, they fast tho.

Compared to the single-segment run from before, it's largely the same, only more violent. We're still sniping dormant enemy mechs who forgot to plant hands on their heads to show they're not actively LARPing. We sometimes enter the poly-counting view mode again to mock the establisment game industry and its dull devotees with their insatiate infatuation with the graphics gimmick. We're still min-maxing mech-mounted munitions such as the llascivious LLASER, the mllow MLASER and the outright slly SLASER. (Make a splash with the SPLAS!) In the one big "auto-stroller" of the Wolf campaign, PROX perks it up with the best dance moves a military man in make-believe-mammalian mail can muster. So not that good, better skip it and go back to yer M.J. videos or Singing in the Rain or something to that effect. Nobody liked the dancing, PROX. Nobody.

To save face, PROX reasoningly resurrected this old concept with another TAS-timing speedrun if you're a gourmand like the wolves and missed that waffle-thin mint to round off your relished repast. Those mints... they never go wrong...

A random and completely pointless observation I made watching 'PROX''s inaugural incursion into MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy is that sometimes these super-spiffy fully customizable upright tank-mobiles freeze in motion and are left standing on one mechanical foot like some sorta servoed seagull. A clockwork avian? No problem with the right kind of gyroscope built in, and a ho-hum ol' gyroscope ain't gonna make a hard-hitting farsighted sci-fi universe sweat one beadful. A hard-hitting farsighted sci-fi universe will make ME sweat like the back walls of refrigerators, though, by encompassing (being encompassed by?) over one hundred hard-hitting novels. So excuse me while I be shallow on the topic of what it's actually about.

One part that's obvious just from the beelinin' 0:29:19 run is that in this hard-hitting realm, everyone's cleanly cut into clans none of which welcomes being pushed around. Death before dishonor is an everyday reality during planetary system –spanning battles and doubly so in-between them. You'd think all the gore-splattered hard-hitting military steel would have an equally unyielding counterpart in cliffs and cave walls meeting any attempts of transgression with stiff rejections and gruff ejections... Yeah, when you have a bug oh-hey-look-what-we-forgot-to-include-in-the-manual that acts exactly like a no-clip cheat code would, you know the run isn't going to look quite the same! Aside from craven confinement to the mindless mores of physics, PROX averts, in his single-segment easy difficulty run, both of said death and dishonor in the main campaign missions to earn an entry into the fateful "Bloodname trials": bonus brawls where all but one must fall.

As an aside, you'll notice there's some traces left of artifacting PROX was struggling with when it's in the wireframe view mode. If you see anything similar in one of your recordings, try increasing the bitrate, which seems to have been key to get this run up to par.

Sam 'Samtastic' Locke strikes again, continuing to give more reasons to refresh the Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee tab in your browser. Today's offering is one of the large skips and deaths category, as fast as fast gets at 0:08:57, but how fast is this new fast vis-à-vis the old fast? The new in-game timing method continues to obfuscate things so a stiff upper limit to that is the best I can bestow, which is 1 minute 14 seconds. So it's less faster than that. Got it? Sam's touch is light and measured, leaving the viewer with at least the immovable impression of flawless execution. That combines with some new diagonal bee stuff that's alluded to in the comments.

We've talked about this game quite a lot in recent years so I think I'll leave it at that... well, why not throw in the uncut version of that Ars Technica interview with Lorne Lanning (one of the two founders of Oddworld Inhabitants) uploaded in 2020. He's quite the gripping raconteur and there's parts that non-fans too might find somewhat stimulating. So that's how you get in with the ladies!? Now where did I stuff that old Pong cabinet?

Nextly and lastly, we've got a cousin at most once removed of Serious Sam's. It's Earnest Evans in his similarly titled adventure that plots a firm second data point into the graph showing an inverse correlation between stiff-lipped names and the stiffness of the lips themselves. I burst into a well good guffaw seeing what fell out of this particular envelope. The sender was none other than our Evans veteran Phillip 'ZELLLOOO' Shanklin himself and it's a sub-1-second amendment down to 0:08:33.15 for a game that, by the sounds of it, effectively randomizes your whole speedrun for you. More importantly, it's what he believes will remain his quietus in the reliquary of quick absquatulations, which is a made-up-sounding word that means "fleeings". Because are games not escapism all round? Thanks as well for the Doom 64 and Mega Man Network Transmission runs over the years ZEL! They never disappointed.

In case you hadn't beheld it yet, Earnest Evans is one of those sights apt to being done that with. My ten-word summary of the protagonist might come to something like "profane crossbreed of Indiana Jones and the reptile he despises". Whatever the inspiration for the eldritch sinusoidal motions, that inspiration needed to be reserved for things like Contra bosses. Even the whip is better clutched by Terrence, the Underworld Lord from Area 8 in Blaster Master. What, you didn't know he was called Terrence? Evans should have all his limbs amputated and be repurposed as a bowling ball and/or pin. Or just one of those boulders he's getting harassed by. That's kind of rough but... no I'll give you that's rough. Poor Evans.

The slow but steady upheaval of our Project I.G.I.: I'm Going In page continues today with a 12-second betterment of Mission 10, the mission with the objective to defend mah boy Priboi. Прибой! Which is a town in Serbia, and a word meaning 'surf'. Waves like. But not here, here it's mah boy, the same we needed to "get" just back in Mission 6. What you needed to realize about this mission is that Priboi is not only unseemly needy, but also very much set in his ways and only makes a move when the mission timer reaches certain fixed values. (Almost like there's... a... plan?) And so there's a lot of bottle-necking during which you just need to clear off all the rubber-necking... scumheads. At certain moments, though, it's evidently best to act with alacrity and Minority Report -level forethought, and that's what 'OdDzBall' wishes to educate us in with this 4:25 that drops the ILs table to 0:39:02.

Continuing on the theme of education, wanna be that little bit more of a pro in your hasty hobby? When you start looking into a PC game, get out yer Cheat Engine or the like, wait till gameplay starts and search for a 4-byte value. At first just search for anything that's above 0. Then look for increased values. Repeat until you find something that keeps ticking up and resets to zero if you start a new game. If you're struggling, you can also try pausing the game and searching for unchanging values now and then. There's a chance you'll strike gold with a memory value that stores a timer the game uses to run all its systems punctually. Now you just plug it into your Livesplit or whatever and you're automatically cutting out loading times and so giving everyone a level playing ground.

Now, that's not necessarily going to sail as smoothly as I'm sirening you to think here but either way, it might have been through a similar process that allowed the run time of 0:35:55 to exist, seeing as the two first Oddworlds are now being in-game timed with confidence. Well, that and all the new tricks implemented by Sam 'Samtastic' Locke. The specific context here is the Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee any%, no tricks no gimmicks (as much as that ever applies to a speedrun), minutes faster but a little unwieldy to compare to the old run directly owing to this new timing method.

Lastly Super Smash Bros. Melee has one of our very most ancient pages, with even the extant version sporting one run from 2003 and the majority of them from just a year later. The updates since the earliest filling in of ILs tables (including the 10-Man Melee one in the spotlight today) have been scant but today we see some tonic splashed around courtesy of Michael Brancato. 11 times of 25 get flipped like a house, with 3.18 seconds worth of home renovation, an average of 0.29 s per character (that's a 0.29 s that whops, mind you), bringing the whole table from 0:02:58.76 to 0:02:55.58. You can picture this submission on a meta level as an 11-man-melee against the old runs, them getting punted into the pernicious "up too high" that seems to be the doom of many these phantasmal fighters.

One of the big upsides of having something of a lull in submissions is I've finally managed to pull off writing one of the several articles whose topics keep crossing my mind, which I've decided to call "Blind Guessing", to liven up the front page. Honestly we're still all about quality on this site so we'd much rather take less incoming runs but all of them passing with flying colors rather than a lot of iffy stuff that hardly punches through the whatever you call the tape suspended at the finish line of some running events. And that quality is a function of the run commentary as well. So let's address the topic of SDA's waning "relevance" (hard to find a word more steeped in soggy individualism). There are a lot of constituting factors given here in a haphazard order:

1. Elaine Marley's election slogan is laconic but irrefutable: "When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice." If you wanted your run up on the Internet somewhere, for a long time for the great majority of games, SDA was it. Just because everyone was sending their runs over doesn't mean they were in any way subscribed to SDA's deeper philosophy or even aware of or in agreement about what it should be exactly (it was something that evolved over time and in part out of sheer pragmatic reasons). This goes for a lot of stuff in life. You can find threads on the forum brimming with displeasure all through the times. You can't have what SDA does without a greater amount of effort from both the runners and site volunteers, so now when easier alternatives to just plop it out there exist, it's not really a big statement to stop doing it the more complicated and slow way, with another big delay before publication, if you never appreciated any of the benefits it might have brought along with it. BTW: The same applies in equal measure to finding high-quality runs to watch – that was similarly an SDA monopoly once, although compared to a randomly selected run on any site with no specific standards to aim for (and especially if you care at all for clean audio/video and some helpful commentary), it still is! Just not on as large a scale I suppose.
2. Ever since the marathons broke off from SDA (which I understand was inevitable due to the increasing complexity and workload of organizing bigger and bigger events, and whatever else), not only did a lot of the staff go with them (I don't know how many would have stayed without the marathons but we may assume some would) meaning less manpower to continue developing the site, but also SDA stopped getting regular shout-outs anywhere in particular. None of the current staff is particularly oriented that way either, to any greater degree than I am. When something stops being marketed, it starts being forgotten about. Even when newcomers become aware of SDA, it's often in a somewhat negative light because they're asking on sites other than SDA itself where people who've been around long enough to have anything to say about SDA at all, obviously, will be ones who have made the choice to stop using it (I suppose some small part use both). Or the information they're getting isn't sufficient to understand why some people see it as the "gold standard" to quote someone from not long ago.
3. Relatedly, when someone finally took the initiative to launch Speedrun.com, it was obviously far better-suited for what it was specifically designed for: mainly leaderboards and active competition in single-segment runs. SDA is for single "ambassador" runs prepared for the benefit of those masses of people who aren't interested enough in a particular game to go out of their way to look for those "random runs" for it elsewhere like YouTube, which in many cases are very much just a work-in-progress at best. SDA wasn't ever amazing at constant updates of the game pages with each passing WR, which in some cases drop far too often. To submit a run on SDA is an act of extroversion (and altruism) that contradicts the generally introverted Discord servers etc. around a particular game.
4. Popularity breeds popularity. YouTube isn't a gazillion times more popular than DailyMotion or whatever comes second because it's a gazillion times better by any other metric. It's mainly because it's THE site. What led to that situation is another matter. Of course being THE anything means you tend to have the resources to keep streamlining and improving your system, even if it's just more volunteers. Things tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies in a situation where decisions are made on anything other than principles, which don't seem to be of the essence these days in case they sometime were.
5. Because independent communities became more commonplace, more commonly the advantages of SDA's universal rules started to be lost. They're not visible until you start zooming out and thinking about games as a whole. Why should one community make arbitrary decision X and another arbitrary decision Y when we have a tradition of going with X by default? And wouldn't more people participating in the discussion have more wisdom on the matter to begin with? (Here's a thread serving as an example of that.) Long story short, our rules aren't really even very often at odds with what communities are doing anyway (which in turn might be partly inherited from SDA, either that or they're just very natural rules to have), and whenever they are, we tend to have an argument that's not just "this is what the community decided". I have a big bone to pick with the words "the community". That tends to be an argument by popularity (and doesn't mean everyone who's not just sheepishly tagging along agrees with it anyway) which is a primary culprit in all kinds of harmful status quos. I know that SDA's argument is, to a large degree, an argument by tradition and thus in a similar camp on paper, but those are still useful in not having to reinvent the wheel so many times with different standards each time. I might have to write more on this some day but the main takeaway should be, because it's veritably true, that most of the time SDA is actually fine with the category divisions used by "the community" even though timing is done in a different (arguably more sophisticated) way and even though there's a limit to how many categories we'd accept. I mean, it's a fact not every category that's been suggested on speedrun.com is actually being run by anyone anyway. It's a line in the sand drawn differently for the benefit of the average run quality.
6. Streaming: When Twitch took off, many people switched from local recordings to streaming, which naturally made them wanna interact with chat. It's just kind of the default these days to stream I guess, and also helps to prove your runs aren't cheated. If they don't know how to or think it's too much effort (it's not, in OBS at least) to separate the game audio into its own track, none of what they do is eligible for SDA anymore due to a lack of clean game audio. Also there's the temptation to tack something like a timer onto the game video. I don't personally understand what the big deal is to assume there's some portion of the audience that's really mainly interested in watching the game output and not hearing the random chatter and live reactions or knowing what exactly your splits were when most of that stuff doesn't mean much to the casual viewer anyway. Also the stream viewers (and YouTube comments as well) are more tangible than the "potential" viewership of SDA even if SDA's was the same size (in some cases it will be bigger, actually), so those wanting a quick-n-easy fix of gratification through social means won't be attracted to what SDA promises. To comment on someone's run, you need to go to the forums, find/start the relevant thread, and express it there. Just not what people are used to going through I guess.
7. Unfortunately, the prices on console games and cartridges and such are skyrocketing because of increasing rarity and also recently, some kind of artificial speculation that can go to hell. Because SDA doesn't accept emulated runs or clone consoles (with a few exceptions), this can put a pretty major hurdle in the way of anyone interested in submitting for an older console. Of course, it's not like everyone needs to have that capability anyway: just one submission per game per category every several years is plenty when the SDA audience isn't collectively so actively interested in any particular game anyway. You can still look for strategy improvements and such on an emulator, or just practice various parts of the run individually. You should! Maybe you can even borrow someone else's gear for the time it takes you to complete a submittable run, once you're truly ready? In the future, let's hope we get more stuff like Analogue's hyper-accurate clone consoles, and more affordable too. And everyone who just cares for the games as they were back in the day is suffering from the current hyperinflation of prices, that's not just an SDA thing.
8. A surprising number of people complain about the way the site looks. I know it's not had a mobile-friendliness pass done. Other than that, urm... I'll let you be the judge of it, but it's never bothered me at all.

This isn't a complete listing by any means, just some stuff mostly off the top of my head. For more points that I missed, try this thread for instance (and probably a bunch of others). If you like SDA, it's likely the reasons are one or more of those suggested on this page. If you're new and interested in submitting a run, refer to this post. Okay, let that be all for today! Regular posting of runs will continue with the next update tentatively slated for January. Cyaz!

Apologies for any and all tardiness in publishing runs recently: I've been moving house and couldn't keep up my usual pace. The same certainly cannot be said for the runners featured in today's update however!

Speaking of moving houses, curious how it seems you can find utterly spotless yet A-grade affordable domicile inside bosses' hitboxes sometimes, eh? Is this at all akin to how you can poke your head inside a lion's maw and come off none the worse (something we surely discussed in that Lion King update)? Do you need to coat your pate with Marmite or fat-free mayonnaise for that to work? Are there similar preparatory measures for hitbox camping? Actually and obviously there are – like having lots of health for starters, or some kind of shield thing. I was gonna call hitboxes out for being an exceedingly abstract source of pain but it's in the name, isn't it? A hit-box. A hit-you-box. A smack-in-the-box! A slap-box?

The one promoting the ranger's mode of lodging here is Phillip 'ZELLLOOO' Shanklin who couldn't resist the call of the wild once again. The wild being the wasteland of the infected cyberspace in Mega Man Network Transmission. It's understandable a runner would feel at least somewhat entangled in its snares: where could you reallocate your know-how? It's too unique a combination of gameplay mechanics not to feel at least an initial sense of loss handing in your resignation letter from this particular game. If you want a full exposition on why that would be, hark back to the January 24th and June 25th updates, BTW. Maybe ZEL will dig something up and educate my proverbial ass on what is and isn't unique in the world of vidya games though. I think we could probably accommodate more card platformers, inside hitboxes and out. Anyway, to one-up previous efforts this time, it came down to things like saving a crusher cycle here, fitting in another damage boost there... Multiple gold splits culminate in a 0:54:06 of the any%, a cybernetic enhancement of 1:32 from his old already robotically robust record.

There hasn't been much news from the Toadstool Estate since about 2014. If I had the kind of paranoia that affixes all my experiences with the external agency of people who can, quite casually, read my mind, I would be inclined to think this prolonged dry spell of acrobatic takes on Super Mario 64's various run categories is only because they understand how much gnashing of teeth and subsequent jaw-locking needing to find an original train or strain or central European -style S-train of thought on a game whose want for talking-about has been as dotingly nursed would have incurred me, and is incurring right now gnash gnash. I don't normally go through any Action Button* -levels of preparation to pinpoint, for each game and run, the most rarefied of words that the reader, having exhausted all other ports of sacred insight, has been left most grievously strapped for...  but that's not because I'm at all confident what I'm about to say on each of them has not been, to some extent, said before somewhere sometime. Today, I'm almost perfectly convinced I'm about to rehash a thing even if I rig up a random number generator to a dictionary search bar, run it for half an hour and stick the resulting dough into an oven of faltering machine translations, going English-into-Icelandic-into-Zulu-into-Some-Dialect-of-Akkadian-Spoken-in-the-Western-Parts-of-the-Middle-Assyrian-Empire-into-English again, so long as I remember to spank a bright tag on it saying "Baked You a Cake". Speaking of, Gabe Newell says this game is his favorite ever. Valve's Gabe Newell. Valve? Portal? Cake??

As per the old venerable code of LotBlind SDA updates, this is where we're likely to enter the nitty-gritty of who and what, with some potential of a how or why. 'Xiah' is who. 0 stars is what. 0:06:44 is how [long]. "Cuz" is the most I can say on why. The run is significantly faster than the old SDA record, though how much exactly I'm not sure since it was timed using a different method.

* That guy's work comes highly recommended BTW. If you think the video game review had been perfected before him, I think YOU a damned fool!

In the left-field oddball of this update, in On the Run you're... you guessed it... actively retreating. In a vehicle. From other vehicles. I think that's about it. If you only watched the run, you'd be excused for thinking its storyline would make a great deal of sense only if framing a comedy: why do you need to do a full lap around the city first before getting to scoot over to the exit, thenceforth emerging into what looks like the Aqueduct trench from DOS classic Street Rod 2 (ultimately from Grease, no doubt) like it's some kinda pinball machine where the big booty is all stuck behind secured side lanes? Since you're also getting the benefit of reading about the run in this update first, you'll realize that... Those beams might imply an awkwardly timed train. Doesn't stop it from being a comedy though. As is statistically probable, this one wasn't particularly unpopular within the very large clan of what we cannot actively retreat from calling "random" Flash games that were effectively all freeware/adware and thus sort of "what-can-you-expect?" on the mean... or is that me being mean? In fact, as is statistically probable, this was some kind of hit in its own right with several similar sequels. At its core, this game series has honored its legacy all the way to the latest iteration, FFX Runner (a fair bit better-suited for trawling out of a search engine), being like a GTA 1 in mini-miniature through a chase cam if it wasn't out to shock the elderly and rouse the politicians who know that's who's voting for them.

On the Run [itself] now: One of those nostalgic or bored enough to give it a swift swing was 'RaulFran' who effects the laziest iteration of evasive maneuvers in 0:03:13.9, actually employing the AI drivers, bent to bulldoze, to overcome a far-too-languid maximum speed. This is the fastest run around in a competitive field so don't scoff at it, you scoffy person, even if you were for some reason going to.

The next one really had me a bit lost as I confused it with one of its siblings. It's Lost Lands: Dark Overlord from an expansive series which are mostly pay-once, but a few of them Five-BN implemented something more mobiles-like in. A system where, while the download is free, your daily play time is limited by in-game "energy" obviously on offer for cash and I was wondering how the runner circumvented that but that was all in my mind. Secondly, I've lost the big difference between a traditional point-and-click adventure game and this "hidden object" game. The small difference is the specific emphasis on, well, hidden object puzzles, but in this game and presumably the whole series, there is also tons of everything else – rotating wheels, sliding tiles, and your common-or-garden item combination – so the lines are very blurry though certain conventions exist (like you need very crisp graphics to effectively hide things I suppose). Past that, I've been lost about what it means if a game is "casual". According to the definition currently up on wiki, shouldn't a lot of graphical adventure games always have been casual since something like Maniac Mansion or Loom? That is if we only require "simpler rules, shorter sessions, and less learned skill", since such games tend to be quite intuitive on a basic level. There's things you'll want to commit to long-term memory, and there's following the story through mindfully, whereas the little exposure I've had to hidden object stuff suggests the stories, at least, a child can understand. But wait, the Nancy Drew games are casual too apparently? I think "casual" is as much a calculated marketing/profiling move as anything.

Anyway, while this game is normally paid-for, there IS energy required in marathoning through all the puzzles without insensible stumbles, so
Michael 'arglefumph' Gray instead split his 0:33:26 into smaller, unerring morsels, numerically 28 of them, which conveniently also interrupts certain animations that otherwise hog up time at no-one's behest. There are subtler time-saving techniques here, too, including choosing the right way to pass between screens efficiently and trying to make many things happen concurrently, all explained in the pro-grade comments. This is argle's second go at the game with increased zeal after he found his first casual tryst with this casual game accruing views on his YouTube. NB: The StatID says something about a 34-minute run which is incorrect, and also segment 23 has the wrong segment number. Poop occurs.

Would you believe Marti Wong is selling NFGs now? That's my man, one half of the dev duo that wooed every freeware lover's heart with 1999's Little Fighter 2 smackstravaganza. Himself, Mr. Wong doesn't seem wooed, or even wonged, but rather woed, by the swashbucklers of the Waterworld we're increasingly living in, causing what was meant as a commercial sequel's, Hero Fighter's, all-important monetization scheme to capsize. Now, I have a soft spot for talk about pay-for-production instead of pay-for-distribution. It seems, on paper at least, like an ideal solution, removing a big nasty unknown from the aspiring software developer's calculations while also obviating the money-grubbing middle men where they still be a-lurkin' 'neath the waves. But that's not the sort of open seas* that these Chinese hackers in question are paving the... sea road... towards. "Pay-for-nothing-at-all" isn't some kind of lost evolutionary link between the traditional models and the one I'm presently espousing, waiting for someone to sea change my mind.

Anyway, what are NFGs? Beats me brother! The guy also has a traditional Patreon account, which, now that I think about it, kinda IS that missing link. So we've been doing it for so long already? Aside from the Hero one, Marti is also remaking the Little 2 one. Which you get a very narrow glimpse into through Antonio Peremin's latest run, completing the single-fight any% mode on Easy in an (apparently) record-tying 0:00:10, having made sure the opponent he's fighting is the weakest one.

* I swear I didn't realize Open Sea was also the Web's most saline... uh... salient NFG marketplace, lolllolololollullz! Is it kinda ironic that their currency is "Ether" when the reality of The [A]ether was disproven some time before the 20th century? Is this is what we all be investing in nowadays? I can't say I'm surprised after Theranos came and went.

We're going to briefly revisit something next that's probably still hanging on for dear life at the bottom of our rather longitudinal front page, in the November 16th update. I never found the time for 'HIKARI_MGS''s Single-segment European Extreme Foxhound Rank 1:17:30 but I DID for this new iteration in 1:17:09. I think I'm hopelessly late to any and all social events themed around pointing this out but... Metal Gear Solid 3 is hilarious. In case you're also still in the middle of brushing up your ballroom bangs or priming your party pumps, you can rest assured copious comedy awaits you on the other side of this alternate history portal to the high definition remake thereof.

There's plenty of small snack-sized snakes slithering about, but Mr. "Snake Eater" doesn't seem too peckish. Snake does, though, look like he's always about to eat the next trickily placed piece of masonry, flailing his arms and poking his head far forward like he's an anime... thing. Looks like Naruto DID come out a few years before this. The voice work is also suffused in that severely uncalled-for melodrama you'd be likely to hear in an anime. I'm pretty sure this effect always requires the translation to be uncanny valley at best to guarantee that authentic vibe. Is it just me or do all the guards sound one age rating too wide-eyed as well? They're always as readily beguiled by Snake's "C Box A" ("It's just A Box, C? An innocent cardboard box on its regular migration from Novosibirsk to Mumbai."), and the guard dogs always as fussy about whose permissionless passage it's worth their while stirring from rosy slumbers for. None of it is far from show wrestling levels of make-believe. Just look at the way Snake does that flying tackle special of his to INSTANTLY AND INDIFFERENT TO ANYTHING benumb a central nervous system, systematically overruling objections from causality.

Hmm... I seem to have made the assumption before that because this type-o-run goes for the elitest of grades, it must also be the least straightforward to flying tackle. However, just because removing that would give you a free hand on various grungy gadgets and less discreet modus operandii, its superiority in this sense doesn't strictly, by pure reason, have to be the case. What we CAN safely discern staring at the SRC leaderboard is this run is not only the fastest in its category that doesn't use a turbo controller... it's faster than ALL the other runs except those played on the other extreme, "Very Easy", difficulty. Those are runs awarded flimsy ranks like "leech" and "flying [tackle] squirrel". It's clear just from how cramped the times are near the top of the category Hikari has doggedly continued to whale away at that this very one is that which has been placed the most pressure on, making this an even more illustrious crown on his forehead. The run looks almost perfect. It's easy to forget it's not a scripted Machinima show or something. Just another brilliantly executed plan by the bright mind of Hikari and whoever else might be responsible for laying the groundwork for it. For paving... the sea road for.

Speaking of bright...

Blinding News Flash (sorry this is late, technical difficulties)

Another month, another marathon! This time it's the Big Bad Gameathon of 2020! Of 2022! Lulz just bein' funny ol' me... of 20X6! You wouldn't believe the "Stinkoman" emanating from these massive piles of whatsit! Thank our good neutral deity Jove for the swift decease of the Smell-o-Vision. Malodorous details in this thread in urgent need of sanitation.