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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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