Have you watched the 1:01:32 Mario 64 run from the last update yet? If not... why are you reading this news update? Go read the one before it!

Kevin Brisebois sent in an improved run of Star Fox Assault for GameCube. The run is the same mode as the previous, Bronze Survival, and gets a time of 0:45:43, a little more than nine minutes faster than the first run from Jonathon Fields. His comments says it was his first run, but it actually isn't... he sent an SFA run in once before, but the quality was just awful because of a bad tape and Super Lousy Play, so we didn't post it. Thankfully he was willing to try again, and he got even faster!

Did you ever watch the run that's been up for some months on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater? Noticed how it was black & white? Hated us for it? Well now, thanks to Adnan Kauser, we have the usual color run! He ran the game on European Extreme difficulty, which I guess is slightly more difficult than just "Extreme" that the previous run was on. Adnan also gets Fox Hound rank... which, not being an MGS player, I'm not sure what that entails. He ended up with a time of 1:37:22 in a 7 segment run, also a little over 9 minutes faster than that previous run by Andreas Hörnell. This run has a minor quality problem too, every couple of seconds there's a brief flash of some white lines. Might be a little distracting, but at least it's in color.

Matt 'jaeger369' Trent did some runs in Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance for PS2. This re-release of MGS2 added a bunch of extra mini-games, which is what will be tracked on that page. Matt did the five "Snake Tales" missions and got a total time of 1:09:13. Unfortunately he didn't ever record the main title screen, so I don't have a screenshot for the Substance game. If anyone can provide one, I'd appreciate it!

Eddie 'kirbykarter' Taylor sent in an improved run for Super Mario 64, using the shortcut-crazy 16-star completion. The result is the first (?) ever completion of the game in under twenty minutes! Or more precisely: 0:19:47. There's some visible tracking lines at some points of the run because of the recording speed used, but nothing that makes it unwatchable.

Meanwhile, Jacob 'LeCoureur103' Cannon was working on the traditional run of the game: collecting the intended 70 stars to finish the game normally. Although a lot of people will doubtless look at his time of 1:01:32 and say "why didn't he go for under an hour!", I assure you that when you watch the run, you'll be very impressed with the time! The whole "just under a mark" thing is a psychological effect around what we happen to have as our units of time anyway... of course I realize I just advertised the 16-star run as "under 20 minutes" :P Meh, what do I know huh? Get both the runs, and be prepared to see things you never thought possible. Oh yeah, this is 0:11:11 faster than the previous run from David Gibbons. You can buy this pair of runs on DVD.

I received one more mini-vid of Mario 64 for Rematch with Koopa the Quick. The fastest vid uses a shell, and the other uses a bounce of a "flyguy". This third vid uses neither for a slower time of 0:00:15.6 by Curtis Bright, but it's pretty much the intended route so that's an all right addition. Plus it makes three categories for all three timed events in the game. I still haven't added these items to a page at archive.org, and I won't make you download the zip of all vids again to get this one, so you can get it here until I do.

One update on Mario Kart 64: Eric Habrich improved his Choco Mountain full race time by 0.23 seconds to get 0:01:36.68. Don't try to download it from Europe...

Brandon '19Duke84' Armstrong sent in the first "low%" run for a Resident Evil series game, and he did it on the original Resident Evil for PlayStation. So what makes a low% of RE? Using the knife as your only weapon! Lots of sneaking around zombies results, and stabbing Tyrant to death with a small AI exploit. Brandon got an impressive time of 1:09:17.

Travis 'Sigma' Lee submitted the first run of Super Mario Bros. 2, but he did the Super Nintendo version in Mario All-Stars. More than just graphical updates, Nintendo couldn't stop themselves from changing a bit of the physics in these remakes as well, so the All-Stars page will track all of mario 1-3 separately from the NES games, and of course, The Lost Levels. Travis's run gets a time of 0:12:34 using Peach in every level.

Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski finally sent in two runs that he did over six months ago. First is a run of the NES game Battletoads. It's one of those games I rented and couldn't beat without using my game genie to use multiple cheats like going directly to the last level, because I couldn't do that unicycle level. Marc finishes the entire game in a time of 0:25:59. Although some portions of the game are fixed-speed because of the auto scroll, it's definitely a worthy game to run just because of how fricken hard it is!

Marc's other run is on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for NES. He uses a completed file to start with level 8 attack/magic/health and all spells/techniques already, making it a "New Game +" type of run that some RPGs have. The result is a run that takes only 0:46:54, over 25 minutes faster than the normal game completion. Seeing all the death-abuse to refill magic in this run makes me want to have a "no death" category, but nobody even wants to do a "no Up+A" category either so who'd do that?

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron finally did a normal run of Devil May Cry for PlayStation 2. There was a bit of a fuss about the first run he did, since it used the "cheat" character Super Dante. At the time I wasn't strict about posting "out of the box" runs as the first thing on a game, which is why I didn't have a problem posting the SD run. Anyway, the new run is as plain-old-Dante on normal skill and in 3 segments, and gets a time of 0:58:27.

If you're looking for the High Quality (huge) download of the RE Knife, or Mario 2 run, then check back tomorrow or later. The md5 check didn't match for the files, so apparently they're bad. The links will appear when they're available. You can get the RE Knife run on DVD right now, and the rest of the stuff (except DMC) will be available soon. It took me about four hours to do this update ...

I'm back from my little vacation, and the life-changing fork-in-the-road decision has been delayed a bit... not that anyone cares! I have 18 runs in the queue that need timed, verified and other stuff so there should be lots of things going up very soon. Sit tight and download older runs while you wait...

Ilari Pekkala sent in an improved 16-star completion of the PAL version of Super Mario 64. His time is 0:23:11, 1 minute faster than the previous run by Stefan van Dijke. He made a mistake when capturing it though... I'm sure most people won't care, but he captured in NTSC format instead of PAL! A technical lesson: NTSC is 29.97 fps while PAL is 25 fps. NTSC is 320x240 while PAL is 352x288 (or twice that). So, if you capture PAL in NTSC format, you end up with a slightly squashed picture and ~5 duplicate/dropped frames per second. Now obviously I didn't reject the run because of this mix up, since it's still quite watchable... but I do like to make fun of people who make slip ups. :-p

On the Mario 64 page you'll also find a list of 8 mini-game runs: three with the Princess's Secret Slide, three with Footrace with Koopa the Quick, and two with Rematch with Koopa the Quick. It took me almost a month to convert these to DivX from the crappy format they were in. I'm sure the quality suffers a bit, but some of them weren't that great in the first place... but, for stuff so short, it's good enough. For now, you'll have to download all eight in a zip file if you want them. Sure, I can hear you saying "why can't you do a zip for all runs!". Well, that takes up too much space!

As for the Mario 64 run that you ARE looking for... Nate received his new VCR today (yes, on a Sunday...) and has started capturing the pile that built up. However, to be fair, we're proceeding in the order that they arrived. Also, I will be out of town from Tuesday evening until Saturday afternoon. So, it'll be at least a week.

Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger got a few tips to improve his recent run of American McGee's Alice and sped through the game again as a result. His new run clocks out to 0:54:55, 7 minutes and 53 seconds faster than the last one.

Meanwhile, David 'marshmallow' Gibbons was doing a run of the super-popular PC game Diablo II. He even includes the expansion pack 5th episode, Lord of Destruction. His run is on normal skill, so he creates a new player of class assassin and gets running. The total time, after 10 segments, is 1:58:22.

I received a bunch of videos of the Nintendo 64 racing game F-Zero X from someone who I forgot to ask his name. The vids are time attack mode runs (drives) through all 24 tracks, from three people. One of whom is Japanese and goes by 'muumu', but I also put up his name in Japanese, which you'll probably just see as three squares. This game tracks times to thousandths of a second, but if anyone ever sends me a vid that's 0.00X seconds faster, I'll shoot them.

David 'LLCoolDave' Spickermann decided to improve his run of the Star Wars PC game "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast". The new run is in 1:06:10 using 36 segments. That's about 23 minutes faster than his previous run, though I can't say exactly because I timed it a little differently when it came to mid-level saves. Maybe that's why his new run is also 18 segments less than the previous one. Even though I haven't seen Episode 3, I'll bet this speed run is more exciting, at least for certain parts.

Adnan Kauser continues his Metal Gear Solid dominance, with a run of the first game of the series: Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation. Adnan's run is again on the hardest difficulty, Extreme, in 6 segments and he got a time of 2:14:27. The file has _eu_Extreme_ in it, which shouldn't be confused with _EuExtreme_ that was in his mgs2 run. In mgs2 there was an extra "European Extreme" difficulty added to the EU version. In the original though, there's just "Extreme", but the EU version suffers from typical NTSC->PAL conversion laziness. He included an mgs3 run when he mailed this run, but since he had already improved it, he told us not to capture that one. I'm sure the new one will arrive soon. PAL tapes don't have to wait for Nate's uber replacement, which hopefully shouldn't be much longer!

Mike Uyama's 2nd Genesis speed run (I already posted the 3rd...) was on the game Revenge of Shinobi, the second game of the series. He played on the "hardest" difficulty and got a time of 0:15:09. I don't believe I ever saw a game that had a final boss who wielded their hair as the weapon of choice before.

For the 12th run category listed on the Metroid Prime page, we have a Single-segment run on the PAL version. On the Metroid 2002 forums there has been a thread discussing such a run for some time, ever since 'Spazmo' announced a 1:30. I told him though that he should aim for a little lower, since the time of the segmented PAL run is 1:11, and that would be a 19 minute difference instead of the 9 minute difference that NTSC has (1:04 vs 1:13). So... he tried some more, but also got some competition. Stefan van Dijke got a time of 1:25 which is quite good. Unlike the very difficult 22% SS, there's no 8-minute stalls, only a few 20-30 second mistakes. I'm sure Stefan and Spazmo will both keep trying for lower...

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron tried running another game which he wasn't sure he'd get under my 7-hour limit ... and again got it way under. The game in question is Fire Emblem for Game Boy Advance, the first game of the series to leave Japan. Wesley made use of the "Mine trick", which is basically an abuse of a bug in the game's auto save system, in order to get a time of 3:18:22 using the character Eliwood.

Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore improved one of his level runs of Serious Sam: The First Encounter. A trick that he was informed of results in skipping the end battle of level 7, and a time of 0:48, 1:55 faster than the previous one, bringing the total to 0:53:50.

It's been 7 months since Robert Nobles finished his 22% speed run of Metroid Prime, and there's been no other attempts at a low% run of the game since... until last week. Some people had talked about the sillyness of a Single-segment 22% run before, but no one had actually tried it (I think), until Shawn Jones, aka smilingjack13, decided to give it a shot. In one of his earliest attempts he made it all the way to Ridley and died... ouch! He kept trying, and in less than a week managed to complete a run in the not-too-shabby time of 1:41. The nasty room known as vent shaft delayed progress by nearly 8 minutes, but geo core, long thought to be the worst part of a 22%, fell much sooner. In a few rooms he goes the safe route and kills everything, but other than that there's not much slow down because of health worries. Definite congratulations to Shawn! Now we just need the same category done for Super Metroid and Metroid 2; who's up for it? ;-)

Even though in the last update I mentioned forgetting something in previous updates, I managed to forget something in that update. I must be getting old. Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore sent in a new episode 3 run of Doom on Nightmare skill. His time is 0:04:10, 8 seconds faster than the 4.5 year old run from Adam Hegyi.

The honor for the new record of "longest run posted to SDA" goes to Andy 'NTG' Nelson for his run of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for PlayStation 2. His 37-segment run clocks in at 7 hours and 46 minutes on the game's clock... certainly over my suggested 7 hour limit. But this is quite a popular game and several people expressed interest in seeing a run, so enjoy the 8.5+ hours of video.

For something much shorter, how about a Break the targets video from SSBM? 'Doraki' sent in an 0.08s improvement over his previous Fox video, achieving a time of 0:00:07.03. I kept forgetting to include this in the previous few updates because it's so short!

For something in the middle, how about a new run of the second Genesis game to be added to SDA by Mike Uyama? He did a run of Gunstar Heroes on expert difficulty in 0:41:15. Nate had this to say about the run: "if you know gunstar heroes, you want to watch this run. if you don't know gunstar heroes, you want to watch this run."

After it was discovered that the previous run had a small missing section, Peter Tiernan decided to rush through a new speed run of Final Fantasy 6. The result is a new run that abuses saving even more, in order to always get the desired battle in eg, the dinosaur forest. The run is in 32 segments vs 23 for the first one, and the time is 11 minutes faster at 5:26. If you watched the previous run and think there's no point in checking a new one for a relatively small difference, I'd recommend at least getting part 2 to see him skip Shadow in Sabin's scenario, part 11-12 to see his changed dinosaur forest strategy, and of course the final part, because who doesn't like that music?

Here's the promised missing Damien Moody speed run: a run of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga for GBA. This is a game that I never thought could be done under 10 hours, though I never actually tried to beat the game without getting into every single encounter on the way, so of course I got high times. Damien avoided all the unnecessary battles, except a few, and also performed the incredible feat of avoiding all damage. Because of the way you can dodge attacks in the game, it's possible to never get hit, and that's what he does in his 55-segment 4:26 run. I've changed the downloading method so that all parts are listed on one demo.pl page now: this should make downloading things easier. I also provide a link to the ftp for even easier automated downloads. Eventually I'll change all the previous multi-part downloads to the new system.

Mike 'TSA' Damiani has returned to his Zelda roots and finished his speed run of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for Nintendo 64. This run is in 15 parts and gets a time of 4:13. Here you'll need to click on the quality you want to expand the parts selection, or just use the FTP link.

The previous posted MM run was a "6 day challenge" video by 'Dragorn' which will remain up as a separate category, as explained on the MM page. Mike's run includes a few bomb-jumps and also uses "future knowledge". He kept playing at the end of segment 1 to learn the bombers' code, then turned it off to return to the auto-save on entering Termina. Then in segment 2, he doesn't have to find all the bombers to learn the code. Yes, I do allow this, since theoretically you could just be trying segment 2 over and over until you guess the code right; there's only 120 choices.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody recently flooded Nate with one of his customary large piles of tapes. After Nate recovered from spraining his back picking up the package and the excitement of his uber vcr being delivered, he got capturing. The runs were on Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for Game Boy Advance and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence for PlayStation 2 and are all Single-segment. Well, four of the runs are Boss Rush modes, and you can't even save in those but it still means that they're all easily downloaded to everyone out there who complains about downloading multi-part runs. Yes I'm working on a better solution for those, but for now, on to this list of runs, all of which you could also buy on DVD!

• AoS as Julius on hard mode in 0:10:17, 1 minute and 17 seconds faster than his previous run.
• AoS Boss Rush in 0:01:26.71. This one is rather confusing to watch because of all the menu action to switch souls and use items like Spoiled Milk... but still fun!
• AoS Boss Rush as Julius in 0:04:06.51. This one is much easier to watch due to simple whip & item usage.
• LoI normal game run in 1:07:12, 10 minutes and 25 seconds faster than the previous run by Matt Trent, which was segmented!
• LoI run as Joachim in 0:45:54, 1 minute and 15 seconds faster than the previous segmented run from Matt.
• LoI boss rush in 0:13:05.05, and in 0:14:41.63 as Joachim.

Of course, when Nate went to capture the next run, the uber vcr proceeded to die. I wouldn't be surprised at $50 vcrs falling apart after 2 days but seeing a $400 one do it made us just a little ticked off. Of course, it was mailed back for a replacement which will hopefully last longer. There's another run of DD's from his batch, which Nate captured before all the others, but the files all vanished from archive's upload server. Supposedly they were moved, not deleted, but it should be in the next update no matter what.

Rounding up this organized crime themed weekend, Tim 'Exinex' Juliar did some runs of the PC game Hitman: Contracts. The runs are individual levels for all 12 levels on professional skill, available in both 320x240 and 512x384 flavors. The total time of everything added up is 0:38:23.

Stefan 'xeen' Breunig did a speed run of the PC game Mafia, taking you on a flashback story of a 1930s mobster. The run was in 93 segments and it took me six weeks to process the videos into an acceptable format. The sound in some segments isn't very good because of the noise on Stefan's recordings that I tried to filter out... but I think you can live with it. The run's time is 3:41 and available in 20 parts, one for each mission. Be prepared for some German vocals.

Wesley 'Phantom' Dekkers did a run of the NES Castlevania on the slow European version. This is another game I used to own and probably sold for $3 or some other low amount on a trade in, and haven't played in a decade. It was nice to bring back some memories by watching his run in 0:17:43.

Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger has done his third speed run, on a new game this time: American McGee's Alice for PC. Follow an older Alice as she travels through a very dark and morbid version of wonderland in a mere 1:02:48.

Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore did some speed runs on the PC game Serious Sam: The First Encounter. He ran all 15 levels individually on Serious difficulty. The total time summed up is 0:55:45, but a whole game run would surely be faster from stuff carried over between levels. But it's not like the Quake players among us don't already know that concept.

Ben 'Cygnus' Goldberg did a run of the Game Boy game Pokémon Red. This game was a paired release with Pokémon Blue, but I've been told that the differences between the two are minimal. A run of the Blue version would probably be very similar but not identical, so I'll have both on one game page. Ben's run is 22 segments and gets a time of 2:40. (12:40 AM edit: time corrected)

Four more improvements on Mario Kart 64 by Steven Gutierrez bring the total down to 0:59:49.58. He improved Alex Penev's Luigi Raceway shortcut lap by 0.18s to 0:00:21.70. He improved both runs of Toad's Turnpike shortcut: his own lap by 0.05s to 0:00:28.99 and Kevin Booth's "full" course by 0.44s to 0:01:31.43. Finally, an older run of his on D.K.'s Jungle Parkway improves Ben Miller's Shortcut "full" course by 0.01s to 0:00:21.26. Unfortunately you won't be able to download these files from the archive europe link. In fact, all the stuff I've added this month doesn't exist yet on their european cluster. When they changed some things around they broke the copying, so the europe downloads for newer things just redirect to the US servers. For mk64 though, I just added these 4 files to an older item, so you'll just get a 404 instead if you try. Hopefully that wasn't over too many peoples' heads.

Another multi-platform game added to the ever-increasing archive today. Beyond Good & Evil exists on all current platforms, and simple load time differences dictate that they'd have to all be tracked separately, because the game doesn't display its time at the end. *Radix throws a brick at Ubisoft. The speed run in question was done by Astra 'StrangenessDSS' Piper in a Single-segment and achieves a time of 2:41:09.

Kevin 'Mitsukai' Shropshire has done his first speed run, a Single-segment run through Resident Evil, the Remake for GameCube. He improved the previous time as Chris by 58 seconds, and since the previous time was segmented, doing it in an SS is pretty good. The new time is 1:54:39 but he definitely lost some time with all the zombies that felt like taking a bite. I'm not very good at dodging zombies either, so it always seemed to me to be better to just kill the darn things. Of course, I'm so busy with the site anymore that I haven't had time to try to improve my re0 run in a month.

Peter Tiernan sent in his second speed run a few weeks ago, and it's another really long RPG game that he sped through very fast. By abusing a few instances of enemy helpers that respawn, he finished Final Fantasy IV for Super Nintendo in 4 hours and 15 minutes. The respawning enemies were used to get massive experience in a short amount of time, a definite necessity in surviving against the final boss in RPGs like this. The run is in 10 segments and comes in the standard three qualities.

James 'Psychochild' Conway has done an any% run of Donkey Kong Country 2, the GBA version. He used the 'ROCKARD' code to enact 'hard mode' which removes all DK and continue barrels. That makes his Single-segment run with no deaths in 0:56 even more impressive. I'd never seen the GBA port before and I must say the changes look hideous... Sure, they have to change a few things to fit the smaller screen, but the entire world map?

Luke Henderson improved the existing run of Phantasy Star Online 3 by 19 minutes. The run is still Single-segment on the Hero side and the new time is 3:32. Congrats to both of these guys on their first speed runs; hopefully we'll see more.

Mike 'TSA' Damiani was feeling a bit woozy or something on May 5th (maybe he drank too much) and decided to do a speed run of something that's not Zelda! Shock, horror! The game in question is Star Fox 64 for... you guessed it, Nintendo 64. He got a time of 0:35:13 with an Andross battle that he describes as "sooo not good...arg...". I think he's planning to improve it before he tackles Majora's Mask even though it just got sequence broken!

Lee 'Leebo' Valencia has Chicago Typewritten his way through Resident Evil 4, improving the Single-segment time by nearly 6 minutes. Yep, it's another SS Specials weapon run, this time with a time of 2:07:58. Please enjoy the Spanish cursing, finger pointing, pitchfork stabbing, Ashley screaming, and rocket launcher action. Lee plans to tackle the from-scratch first-play no-specials or however you call it run next.

Mike Uyama has done his second all S-rank run of the Mega Man Zero series, this time on Mega Man Zero 2. The time comes out to 0:31:51 but the run is over twice that length because of the things the game's timer doesn't include. It's said to be as impressive as his first... and that's the run that Nate foams over the most I believe.

Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore finally made an avi version of the Doom 2 Single-segment Nightmare skill run he did last November. The time is 0:29:56, which is 2 minutes and 3 seconds faster than the previous avi version I had up, but only 16 seconds faster than his previous run that only people eyeing the incoming directory of Compet-N would have seen. Oh and Adam Hegyi, if you're reading this, you're a bum!

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron improved his Gourmet Race time in Kirby Super Star by 0.43 seconds to get 0:01:42.43. He also did individual runs on each of the three courses with slightly faster times.

Just a note that Nate has decided to stop production of new DVDs until he is able to buy a new unit for capturing them. You can still buy the existing ones, but as soon as he heard about it from a friend of his a few months ago, he started calling it "the uber unit" and didn't seem to mind the $700+ price tag. So if he can convince a local Lubbock business to hire him for the summer, soon any runs sent to him on tape will look better than almost anything other people can produce with their capture cards. Once he gets it he plans to meticulously recreate most of the existing dvds too; he's dedicated like that. What would we do without him? :-p

Trevor Seguin improved his run of Super Mario Bros. by one second just a month after he did it, bringing it down to 5 minutes and 6 seconds. That's the time from Mario moving to axe chopping. Trevor was hesitant to release it because of a mistake... that you'll probably barely notice! When a run is this close to theoretical optimums, each second is quite impressive though, so I'm glad he decided to send it. Unfortunately www.archive.org is undergoing some maintenance today and tomorrow and I am unable to add new items. So, this run is currently only available using a BitTorrent client. Even the High Quality download is pretty small, so I think it'll go pretty fast if people are kind and leave their client open to seed...

Update May 6th 4:30 AM: Normal download is available now.

Ryan 'Benito' Bennitt did a Single-segment run of "The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind", a game that I've been told offers hundreds of hours of gameplay. So how can it be speed run? It has a main plot that if you fulfill you get the ending, so that's what is run. The basic method is to buy the ingredients for, make and drink a lot of intelligence-raising potions. The effectiveness of each is more than the last because the player's intelligence determines how well potions work, so he gets to an 8000+ int pretty quick, then uses that to speed to the end. The total time for the run is a mere 0:14:26.

Luke 'transience' Yagnow has quickly delivered on his promise to improve the segmented any% run of Metroid Zero Mission. He got a time of 0:28:50, 1 minute and 4 seconds faster than Jason's old run with one additional segment. I remember when I did my 34 minute run on this game and sub-30 seemed like it would never happen, so a sub-29 is a very impressive time!

On the forum recently, 'Wak' suggested the idea of doing a run on SSBM's Adventure mode. I wasn't sure how it would work, but 'pyh189' quickly started trying it out and soon got a run he was happy with. He used Jigglypuff, the sleepy pokémon and got a time of 0:03:15.27. That's derived from adding up all the elapsed times on each course. The run was of course done on Very Easy skill. I wonder how fast someone could do it on Very Hard... who's up for it?

There's seven new improvements to Mario Kart 64, I was starting to wonder if everyone had stopped playing it. Thanks to mjf for sending me everything:

• Eric Habrich improved his Luigi Raceway full course to 0:01:38.55, 0.11s faster.
• Eric improved both his full course and lap times of Choco Mountain: the full course is 0:01:36.91, 0.16s faster and the lap is 0:00:31.80, 0.08s faster.
• He also did Banshee Boardwalk in 0:01:44.49, 0.47s faster than the previous from Mike Simmons.
• Jeffrey Gutierrez improved both his times of Yoshi Valley on the same day. The full course is 0:01:25.98, 0.39s faster and the lap is 0:00:26.37, 0.06s faster.
• He also improved the full course shortcut of Rainbow Road. He made the extra hard jump to the top of the spiral on all three laps, resulting in an over 11 second improvement to get a time of 0:03:19.83. I believe mjf was the first to do that feat though, but I rejected his vid for poor quality. :-p

I added up the total time of all the mk64 vids just for some additional information, and it is currently 0:59:50.26. That means this update brought it under one hour total, congrats to all mariokart64.com players! Although they'd have had the <1 hr total for some time, this is just the 'videos that are decent quality' milestone I guess...

Four months ago, Nick 'Thrull' Alward did a run of PC game Deus Ex on Realistic difficulty. He contacted me in December and I told him how to compress stuff, and then I didn't hear from again until this month... Took him that long to try using VirtualDub to compress the stuff. Make sure you don't do that, or I'll embarass you in the news when I post your run too! Deus Ex is another of those brain-damaged games that tracks your time but doesn't display it at the end, so the listed time of 1:29:02 for his run follows my standard timing method.

The timer for Mega Man X8 is updated on the save at the end, so using it is perfectly fine for runs. Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk did a 100% run in a time of 3:06, but it seems he can't hold it long enough to do a 10-minute segment without pausing to go do his business. There were two such pauses in the run which we edited out so you don't have to see watch the pause screen for ~2 minutes both times. Just because I'm a nice guy, I subtracted four minutes from the time and list it as 3:02. So make sure you don't pause in your segmented run or I'll make fun of you for that too!

It's snowing as I write this update, at the end of April, a week after it was 80 degrees F (26 C). Surely this is a sign of... something. Enough weather, onto the runs!

Adnan Kauser did some runs of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I hope someone can provide me with a better title shot for this game, one without a VHS rainbow in it... (done!) He did two runs, but both are only on the introduction 'Tanker' episode. If I had realized this when he first contacted me I'd probably have asked him to do something on the rest of the game before posting them... but because I didn't catch it, Nate already had them processed before someone informed me. So, here they are... maybe someone can do something on the rest of the game to fill the gaps? Yep, that's TWO requests I made for this game. Anyway, Adnan's runs are on European-Extreme difficulty in 0:10:36 and Extreme difficulty with all Dog Tags in 0:23:06.

David Gibbons did a 4 hour, 8 segment run of Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for... do I need to say what system it's for? The game has a timer that it shows on saves, but not at the end. So I timed it manually and got 3:55. The game's timer seems to run rather slow, probably because the game itself does. The number of duplicated frames in the videos from a low fps is evident.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron has improved his Devil May Cry speed run as Super Dante, aka "I'm a dirty cheater for using an intended bonus in the game" mode. The new time is 0:49:35, 1 minute and 54 seconds faster than the previous run.

Luke Yagnow, perhaps better known as 'transience', has done the first Single-segment any% run of Metroid Zero Mission. This nearly-forgotten Metroid game hasn't had any runs on it since July! I must admit to trying an SS any% a few times myself last year, but I wasn't good enough at the zipline skip. Luke gets it without any problems along with various other things... though he does have a few problems crouching sometimes. He ended up with a time of 0:29:58, just four seconds slower than Jason's segmented run, which he's after toppling next!

Mike 'TSA' Damiani has been releasing segments of this next run as he went on the forum, so perhaps you've already seen his 6:42 of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The run is in 22 segments, four more than the previous run by 'marshmallow' and 26 minutes faster. It should be noted that this run was recorded on a '2nd quest' game, which has a few minor changes from the first play. They're not worthy enough to be listed separately. If someone wants to figure out the exact second difference between the two some day then I'm sure the runners will stick to whichever one is faster.

Ben Fichter has done a run of the PlayStation game Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. He actually was recording runs on this years ago, before I started this big giant archive of speed runs... but he was cheating! He actually sent one of those recordings to Nate by accident previously and that's what made him think to try the game legitimately. He did a Single-segment run and got a time of 3:16:42. This is the first long SS run that Nate has captured and the resulting high quality file was over 6 gigs in size. Unfortunately archive wouldn't take a file that's greater than 4 gigs, so we had to cut it in two. I'm sure you'll cope.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody did a run for the traditional "let's try to change things and see how it goes" game of the Resident Evil series. Unfortunately the popular opinion on Resident Evil: Survivor's first person take is that it's a horrible game, getting 3 out of 10 reviews. Since there's a time displayed at the end though, why not do a run so everyone can see just what was so bad about this game? Surely that's what Damien was thinking anyway when he ran it and got a time of 0:42:02.

Simon 'EzekielMartyr' Berggren did a run on Silent Hill 2 for PlayStation 2. The run is Single-segment on normal skill and the time is 0:57:12. So come along the dark streets of Silent Hill and squint your eyes, struggling to see what the heck is going on in this run. The game definitely keeps up the atmosphere from the first SH which I already made fun of before...

Mike Yi, aka MrBlarney, has improved Steven Brooks's run of Milkyway Wishes in Kirby Super Star. He got a time of 0:15:45, 6 minutes and 23 seconds faster than Steven. He only picked up three of Kirby's abilities, using the same plasma strategy on bosses he used in The Arena. Unfortunately archive.org is taking forever to copy this file to a public server so it's not actually downloadable yet, but I'm sick of waiting and will just post this update now.

Paul 'Bartendorsparky' Evans has finished his 3.5 month-long 100% speed run of Metroid Echoes. Having started so soon after the game came out, just two days before I finished my any% run that was 2:11, there were a lot of tricks that were discovered as he went through the game. He took it slow so that the result would be fast, and ended up with a definite 'Must Download' for any Metroid fan: an impressive 2:25. The run is full of crazy speed tricks for getting various missiles and other expansions quicker than they were intended and getting major items out of order... it's the one thirty-seven of Echoes. Also, we're trying a little experiment with this run. Since Nate recently installed a torrent tracker for the protoman.com music, we made one for the normal quality videos of this run. So, if you have a BitTorrent client, you can use this torrent to download all 24 segments at once. If you don't know what BitTorrent is, or if you're looking for the High or Low quality videos, you'll have to stick to the normal archive download. Also, we're not sure how well this is going to work, but try it out if you can!

Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields did an inaugural run of Star Fox: Assault, just released in February for GameCube. He did a run on Bronze skill in the Survivor mode, which I've learned is the same as Story mode except you can't save or die at all. So, it's the game's way of forcing a Single-segment run. He ended up with a time of 0:55:06.

Two new records for Super Smash Bros. Melee's Break the targets: 'SIGN' improved marth1's Mario by 0.01s to 0:00:08.35, and 'Doraki' improved Fox to 0:00:07.11. Previously there were separate Fox times for NTSC and PAL versions, but this new strategy apparently works just as well on both, so that's not needed now. The new time is 0.17s faster than Senju's old NTSC and 0.10s faster than his own old PAL time.

Stacy 'Kitty' Corron has done a run of Tomb Raider for PlayStation, the game that introduced Lara Croft to the world. She got a time of 2:39:30 with a tiny amount of help from her brother Wesley. If you read the forum you ought to be expecting a run that's 57 seconds better than that, but it seems the Corrons aren't so good at math...

David Gibbons continues his apparent quest of getting every Nintendo 64 game listed here, this time running Castlevania... which doesn't have a '64' in the name. It is in fact the same name as the old NES game, but I've gotta distinguish it somehow, even though nobody has run said NES game yet, so the html has a 64 in it damnit! Err yeah, David's run is Single-segment as Reinhardt Belmont and he got a time of 1:13:35. Be sure to keep account of marsh's pickups as he apparently gets "too many meats". :-p

Tomi Salo sent a bunch of new improvements to his New York Minute mode runs of Max Payne 2 last week. I had them all ready to update on the 5th and even updated the game's page but forgot to mention them in the very long news update. Since then he sent me two more so I guess it worked out well anyway. I don't feel like linking to them all here; you can find them easily on the page by looking at the dates... anything done in March and April is new. There are several new shortcuts with the super jump and one shortcut that didn't use it, so a bunch of the stuff is new categories.

Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger redid his run through Unreal and got a time of 0:49:18, an improvement of 6 minutes and 11 seconds. And now I must practice more re0.

It's with great chuckles that I'm adding the 100th game to the game list here at SDA.... with a run that I rushed to completion last night! I'm not very satisfied with it and plan to improve, but I wanted to have Resident Evil 0 for GameCube be the 100th game just so I could use the headline... yeah. The run is only 2 segments, on normal skill, and I got a time of 1:59:37. I had been trying for an SS run but decided to go for 4-5 segments or so instead, but then when my 2nd segment wasn't going that well but it was OK enough, I kept going and said I'd post it if I got under 2 hours. Despite a few large gaffes, I still got it, so here it is! Please give me suggestions for improvement.

On Sunday, the Quake section held the 4th annual Nolan awards for the best Quake demos made in the previous year. This year I figured it would be a good idea to have DivX avi versions for everyone out there who played and enjoyed Quake but won't have it installed anymore, or even if you never played Quake at all, check them out! Congratulations to Connor Fitzgerald for winning the most Nolans!

Mike Yi, aka MrBlarney, did a run of the final game in Kirby Super Star, The Arena, a marathon of all 19 boss fights from the other games. The game tracks the time spent actually fighting and he got a time of 0:05:16.48

Stefan van Dijke has improved his PAL version run of Mario 64 by 22 seconds to a time of 0:24:11. I think it contains a few more mistakes than his previous run, during some of which you can easily think of the curses Stefan was probably saying. The reason he ends up faster is several new shortcuts that could certainly be useful for other categories on this game.

Freddy Andersson did a run of Mega Man 3 for NES. Since he's Swedish, he was playing the 5/6th speed PAL version, so his time of 0:48:08 would be about 40-41 minutes on the US version. I know someone who's been working on a run for the US version for quite some time, so hopefully he'll get something soon to go along side Freddy's PAL run. I probably haven't played this game in a decade, and I had no recollection of some of the areas at all, so it was a nice run to watch.

TSA had said he was going to go through all the levels of Four Swords Adventures but he's changed his mind and delayed it until November on his schedule. Before he did, he had finished a run of level 1-3 at least. I was waiting to post it until I got some more, but I guess that's not a good idea anymore. He improved his time by seven seconds to 0:06:57... but I decided to change the way I time some of these levels. I had been removing parts of the time during the maiden scenes so it would be possible to compare runs on a new playthrough, like TSA's first speed run, to "redo" plays that let you skip dialogs. However, nobody was able to figure out how I was timing them so I just decided to count everything again. This means the time is now listed as 0:07:45, and several other levels are retimed to higher times.

Pfew, this update was too long.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody improved his hard mode run of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow recently. The new run is 0:08:29 faster than the previous one, mainly by killing less things and a few route changes. It's segmented almost exactly the same, just one segment less. If only he'd kept the save from the end of segment 1 from his first run, he'd be 0:08:31 faster, as the new segment 1 is actually two seconds worse than the old one. :( After that, though he quickly gets minutes ahead of the previous run!

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron whipped up a run of the Gourmet Race from the just added Kirby Super Star, the mini-game that I complained about Bartz not doing. He got a time of 0:01:44.66, then after a few tips got it down to 0:01:42.86.

David 'marshmallow' Gibbons did his second run on a Bomberman game, this one also for Nintendo 64 (of course), Bomberman Hero. This game doesn't have a timer and seems to be a lot shorter than b64, because the total time was 1:07:00 compared to the 2.5+ hours of real time in his b64 run. Watch this run, and you'll be saying "I did it!" all night long.

The first game featuring Kirby, the pink guy that can absorb his enemies powers by swallowing them, has been added to SDA. Steven 'Bartz' Brooks did runs on Kirby Super Star, a set of mini-games for Super Nintendo. He did runs of the five main games, though I think he should have done the racing game too as it even includes a timer. The 'Megaton Punch' and 'Samurai Kirby' aren't really applicable for running though. The total length of the five videos he did is slightly over an hour, check out all the sucking action!