I've got a serious problem with the apartment I recently moved into which my landlord seems uninterested in even discussing. It's preventing me from getting a good night's sleep, interfering with my work and the site, and my sanity. Although I've already tried contacting two local lawyers they didn't respond so I'm hoping maybe there's a speed running loving (U.S.) lawyer reading the site who might want to help me?

Elijah 'scaryice' Miller did his first speed run on Lunar: The Silver Star for Sega CD. This is the first Sega CD game to be added to the ever-growing list, which ought to be getting a redesign soon. Elijah's run is in 10 segments and gets a time of 3:35. I'm afraid I can't say much else about this one.

Julien Langer worked on a second run of Baldur's Gate and did it in five segments this time. The resulting time of 0:40:06 is almost 30 minutes faster than his Single-segment run from February. Speaking of which, I forgot to remove the loading screens from it for timing when he submitted it, so it's been retimed to over a minute less than it used to be. However since someone broke something at archive.org I am unable to rename the file at the moment. Hopefully later since I complained about it.

He plays completely opposite games as me like: sports games, war simulation, The Sims, etc... blech. But if not for his PlayStation, I'd never have played Symphony of the Night. Err anyway, proceeding with the update:

James 'Psychochild' Conway submitted his second speed run, and it's of the PlayStation 2 game Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening. He plays the standard mode and gets a time of 2:29:53 in six segments. He didn't send his first attempt at this run, although he almost did. Instead he redid it all and improved it by several minutes... that's the spirit!

Freddy Andersson has been eating too many mushrooms. And flowers. 20 year old mushrooms and flowers. Somehow he survived his run through Super Mario Bros. despite this questionable food source. As the first posted run to not take any warp zones, you might be a little disappointed to know it's the PAL/Europe version. But unlike a lot of such versions, it doesn't really run slower, instead it was corrected badly. The game's scrolling speed appears to be the same but not all is equal, such as the music running fast and the sound running slow. Entering the pipe in 1-2/4-2 is the most obvious spot. Freddy's time of 0:22:52 is sure to make your head spin with the speedy music. The run would've been a little better if he'd only ate one mushroom and flower but he got hit a few times and had to eat again.

Mike Yi (MrBlarney) conquered two more sections of Kirby Super Star: Spring Breeze and Gourmet Race. SB is 0:03:51, 35 seconds faster than Steven Brooks. GR is 0:01:41.12, 1.31s faster than Wesley Corron. He also improved the three individual races.

Jason 'dingusSJr' Hochreiter made his speed running debut with a short and very confusing boss rush run of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for GBA. The resulting time of 0:01:21.38 is 5.33 seconds faster than the previous one by Damien Moody. I wish he went through the menus a little slower since that doesn't count for the time!

If you are ejm5446 and you did a run of Lunar, I need your comments!

The third play mode for Castlevania: Circle of the Moon is "Fighter" and it disables the DSS system completely; you never get any card drops. Instead you're just really powerful with high STR, DEF and lots of HP. This makes it quite speed runnable and some guy named Nolan Pflug decided to do a run. When submitting he mumbled something about working two jobs, one that doesn't appreciate him, and the other that pays 12 cents an hour (or so) although he did see a bit of an increase lately. Anyone know what he's on about? Oh yeah, the time is 0:40:48, just a little bit faster than the Magician mode run. That seems absurd since Magician mode can use the DSS cards for faster running and to slaughter the early bosses, but Wayne loses a lot of time swtching the cards, so not using any cards at all in Fighter mode catches up.

Elsewhere on the Castlevania front, Guillaume 'Shadow-Hunter' Davidson did a Single-segment run of Castlevania for Nintendo 64. The previous run by David Gibbons was using Reinhardt, and Davidson uses Carrie. Looks like Carrie is the faster player since he got 1:05:58 compared to Gibbons's 1:13:35. This run is on the PAL version, but two verifiers say it looks like the same speed as the NTSC version, which means I don't have to list it as such.

Speaking of David Gibbons, he did another game for his always-on Nintendo 64. A game so bad that he forgot he wrote a guide for it, Quest 64, also known as "Holy Magic Century", is considered a pretty bad RPG. The biggest complaint I heard was not being able to go two feet on the map without getting into another battle... and I thought Final Fantasy 3 was bad. The final time is 2:47:52 in 15 segments.

Shaun 'MMAN' Friend did a run of Tomb Raider III for PC. Since this game had a timer I didn't feel like shooting anyone, and the time of 3:08:33 is easily found. Normally manually timed games don't list seconds when they reach three hours, but I might as well keep them when they do. Although I'm still likely to turn down a 3:08:32 run ... The game even tells you that Shaun hit with 2220 out of 2507 shots fired, for an accuracy of 88.55%. Seems pretty good?

Thanks to those who gave me some dough this week. For those of you who can't/couldn't find the donate link, it's only on every single demo.pl download page. Aren't you downloading any runs?

Lately I'm feeling frustrated. Overworked. Burned-out. It's been 18 months since I expanded SDA into other games and I never quite realized what I was getting myself into. Although I implemented a verifier system to take care of games I haven't played, these games are the main reason for all the above feelings. I only care about runs on games I can understand what's going on in, and when I spend hours timing runs for games I have no interest in, it really makes me go wtf.

After this update there are 25 runs in the queue, with at least 20 more on the way. A lot of Single-segment runs on games, even those without timers, isn't that big of a deal. Just a few very long multi-segment runs, especially ones with loading time I have to remove, is really what's killing my spirit. So I'm left with a predicament. Either I start telling folks to not do those runs, especially on games I don't care about, or I need to make serious money from this site. Although I was happy to take my time necessary to post runs on the game series I know and love, it's really cutting out the time I have to PLAY those games when I have all these runs to deal with.

You're probably thinking "Why don't you just get help?". I already have help. Nate captures and compresses everything on tape and I'd have done this update months ago if I were still doing it. "More help!" you say. I've yet to meet anyone dedicated enough to keep doing for more than a few weeks what I've done for 18 months. Although the verifiers help me with runs, I still have to deal with people submitting, verify timings, upload stuff, do the html and the actual importing of stuff to archive.org and the news. It's a lot of work and it doesn't scale well to multiple people.

I really don't want to stop accepting runs just because I don't know games, I want the site to cover as much as conceivable. But I can't continue like this; it's inconceivable. It's probably insensitive to ask for money so recently after a natural disaster that affected about a million people, but unfortunately I have to. I simply can't keep spending 3-4 hours a day on stuff with no reward. I have already gotten a few donations in the past and I thank those people, and I know not everyone can give money.

Soon I will set up an advertise page in the hopes of selling some more ad space at SDA to whoever is willing to pay. The google ads are covering the cost of the server and we've seen a small amount of profit in the last few months but not very much. The space I'm targeting extra ads is the demo.pl download page, which has no ad currently. I didn't think there was much point to a google ad there since there's not many key words and the ads would be rather meaningless. See the queue page for a good example. If you're interested in advertising at SDA, don't hesitate to contact me today, no need to wait for the advertise page. Just some restrictions: no pop-ups, no animation, no flash.

I hope you took the time to read that ... proceeding with the normal update:

Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk has redone his run of Mega Man X5 that defeats all eight bosses. While his old run was only three segments, this one is 16 for much more optimization pickiness. The resulting time of 0:30:59 is 3 minutes and 25 seconds faster than his previous and includes a bit of bonus material in the ending segment. Chris also did a run for Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters. He chose the 'Search for Wily' scenario and played as Bass (pronounced like base) and got a time of 0:05:00.55.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody was back to playing Metroid Zero Mission. Almost one year after he set the previous time for 100%, he got an improved time of 0:56:11, 55 seconds faster than his previous. I've watched many ZM runs before and I never realized that at the end, Samus somehow pilots the escape ship away with only one hand ...

Mike Yi (MrBlarney) has improved two of the records for Kirby Super Star. He does "The Great Cave Offensive" in 0:06:16, one minute and 44 seconds faster than Steven Brooks, and "Revenge of Meta-Knight" in 0:14:27, 0:04:27 faster than Steven.

Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica claimed another F-Zero X 64DD record. He did Space Plant 2 in 0:01:17.156, 0.321 seconds faster than the previous. This race has an unusual ending... he crosses the finish line while his car is blowing up. The game still registers it as finishing the race, so why shouldn't I?

Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho sent in his first non-Half-Life run, going for a new completely opposite gaming experience in the original NES Metroid. He improved on Scott Kessler's time by 3 minutes and 36 seconds to get 0:18:35. If you hadn't already watched the fastest Metroid run, you might be surprised to learn that they don't beat both Kraid and Ridley, intended to be required to beat the game. As the only Metroid game that allows enemies to change rooms, you can lure an enemy into the Tourian entrance and freeze it to get in without having the bridge. It's possible to do this without beating either boss, but Tourian is impossible without at least 10 missiles, and impractical without about 40, so beating Kraid is the fastest way to get the necessary missiles.

Tommy Montgomery wasn't done with Super Mario Bros. 2 after he did a run which got promptly beaten by Scott Kessler. He decided to go for the full game completion, without using any warp zones. After a few weeks of cursing, he was unable to do a run without deaths and settled for a run with one death which costs ~12 seconds. The result is a time of 0:26:36 which unfortunately doesn't look very good. Oh sure, the play is fine, but the recording VCR was not. The details are in Nate's blog, but the summary is that while watching you'll be a little distracted by small black lines. Until you get to a part of the game with waterfalls, such as 5-1, where it really spazzes out. Anyone who can figure out why the game's waterfalls would make things so much worse gets a cookie.

After Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman was through rolling people up in a giant ball, he decided to go back to the Prince of Persia series. He worked on a speed run of Warrior Within and managed a time of 3:19, 20 minutes faster than the previous run by Ben Fichter. But this is no mere 20-minute improvement. It's also on a higher difficulty: hard vs. easy. It's also Single-segment vs. 7 segments. It's also "100%" vs. not. All that and it's still faster you say? It must be a super-impressive 3:19 indeed.

Ben 'Mkt2015' Fichter has done a run of the first Harry Potter game: The Sorcerer's Stone for PC. Given the subject matter, it seems more like a "casual" game than a gamers' game but I suppose even games marketed to the masses can be speed run. Ben does his run in 4 segments and gets 2:06:04. Huge thanks to Mike Uyama for timing this and other recent runs.

Elliott Feiertag, brother of Adrian (killer of Jaws), has done his own speed run for a short NES game. I do believe it's the shortest whole-game run to hit the site: rolling his way through the six stages of Marble Madness in 0:03:13. He did it all without losing a single Marble. I was never able to beat this game when I rented it because of the weird diagonal controls.

The second Sonic game to hit the archive is Sonic Adventure, originally for Dreamcast and later ported to GameCube and PC as the Director's cut. From what I can tell, the changes shouldn't affect speed runs since I use the game's timer when available and manually time the adventure field and sub games that don't. I still label the three runs received for this as DX version though, just so it's clear. Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson sent in Single-segment runs of Sonic's and Tails's stories, coming in at 0:46:11 and 0:21:18. He also included a Super Sonic attempt ... but it was just awful. Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti decided to try a little harder and he got a time of 0:01:54 with one use of death as a shortcut.

Are you afraid of the ocean? How about bad video games? Then you'd better not watch the speed run of Jaws for NES by Adrian Feiertag. At least he seems to be making a good dose of fun at himself and the game during the comments of his 0:05:46 time to slay the killer shark.

Tom 'rdrunner' Votava sent in three NES runs he recorded in October 2003... as a test. More are sure to follow in the coming months. If you're a puzzle game freak like me, you'd probably get hooked on Adventures Of Lolo 2 and other games in the series. A speed run of a fixed set of puzzles might seem a bit strange at first, but memorizing the dozens of layouts and the right paths to get through in a speedy time of 0:29:14 is quite impressive. The other two runs are on Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse for NES. This game has four possible endings depending on who you team up with. Tom goes it alone and gets 0:32:57, then teams up with Alucard, the son of Dracula, and gets 0:29:47. The first two levels are the same but then the path splits, and Alucard's flying ability makes the ending levels, when the paths merge, more interesting too.

After Shawn Jones finished his eight-month 22% speed run, he had time to relax and work on easier runs. He didn't take long to whip up an improvement to a run of Resident Evil, the remake, for GameCube. He did a run as Jill last year in 1:29:43. This year it was time to get a good time for Chris, and he spanked the previous run by 20 minutes and 53 seconds to end up with 1:33:46. For having two less inventory spots and having to deal with numerous old keys, I didn't think Chris would end up only four minutes slower than Jill! By the way, the Jill run got uberized by Nate, since it was originally captured by Shawn but he included it in the mail with the Chris run. Now I just need Shawn to do some runs that get the good ending on this game ...

Brandon '19Duke84' Armstrong did a run of Silent Hill 2, but not of the main game, that's still held by Simon Berggren. Brandon's run is on "Born from a Wish", Maria's quest, on hard mode and gets a time of 0:06:32. This wasn't actually the first submission for Born from a Wish, I got an 0:08:02 from someone new, and when I sent it to Brandon to verify he said it was "kind of weak" and proceeded to improve it immediately. Then he took a month to optimize it and here we are.

Tim 'twoton' Symanczyk has laid claim to the record on another Grand Theft Auto series game: Vice City. Tim's run is seven segments more than the previous run by Andy 'NTG' Nelson, and 13 minutes faster, to get a time of 2:14:23. Be sure to enjoy all of the killing, car jacking and other mayhem that Tommy Vercetti causes. It's sure to be safe for audiences of all ages, as there are no sex scenes involved ... right?

Christian 'Rabbath' Rotthues sent in his first speed run, and it's of the PC version of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. He plays on normal skill and does one segment for each of the 20 missions. All of the levels have a summary screen at the end showing a time (his happen to be in German) except the last one, which I had to time manually and got 2:37. The total time of every mission summed up is 0:43:47.

David 'marshmallow' Gibbons recently did a run of Luigi's Mansion for Gamecube. Before I could post it though I had to do something I'd been meaning to do for some time: rewrite part of the rules. David has been a strong critic of my rule against "death warping", killing yourself as a way to teleport around. One of his first submissions to the site was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter where he jumped off a ledge at one point to avoid a 40-some second walk back to the area start. I didn't like the idea of character suicide so I penalized him by a minute. Since nobody has challeneged his run, it's not like that penalty actually meant anything though. He did it on a couple other runs too, and I've gone back and removed the penalties on the ones I remembered (he'll have to point out any more) and instead labeled them as having "death abuse". I've also labeled some other runs that previously had no penalty as using death abuse, such as Zelda 2, where they kill off poor Link to refill his magic.

Which brings me to save warping. I felt the two went together, so in addition to killing yourself to teleport around, I only wanted you to save in spots such that you'd re-appear in the same spot. Anything else can be especially confusing to people who don't know the game. In some games, such as Mario 64, it's actually impossible to do a save that isn't teleporting. I had a convoluted exception in the rules for this case, but that's gone now, because now, you can save whenever you want if the game allows it. Of course, I'll list the run as using "save warps" like David's Mansion run, which by the way is 11 segments and gets a time of 1:33:53.

So to sum it up: I updated the rules and FAQ pages to reflect the new death/save changes. You can now kill your game character and save and quit to teleport around as much as your fancy desires. But I'd still love to see runs where you don't do such things.

Back to Luigi's Mansion. There's a lot of potential categories in it now... Single-segment vs. segmented w/warps vs. segmented w/o warps, fresh game or "new game +" using the hidden mansion (also avoids the introduction to E. Gadd and the training), 100% of portrait ghosts/boos or just going for speed, A rank vs whatever. That's 24... But will anyone do any such things?

Speaking of Link, there's an improved run of his only black & white adventure: Link's Awakening. John 'Maur' De Sousa has been trying for a couple of weeks to get under an hour of a half ... but he failed, settling for 1:30:36. This is over fourteen minutes faster than the previous run by Adam Sweeney, with some minutes coming from a new kind of text skip using the save/quit screen, but no saving was involved.

There's two improvements up on the Metroid Prime page. First is a run by Shawn Jones, who took the same length of time to do his run as other previous runs have taken on this game: 8 months. When you're doing a 22% on hard mode, and you want to do it really fast, it takes a lot of retries and time away from the game to not go insane. Shawn ends up with a very impressive 1:28, 26 minutes faster than the previous run by some Anonymous Coward. Shawn is actually ~35 seconds faster at the ship save before Ridley compared to Robert Nobles's 22% on normal. The difference between normal and hard ought to be about three and a half minutes up to that point, so that's a lot of new minor tricks discovered in the last year to allow that to happen. Of course, Ridley & Prime take a lot more on hard without charge so the run ends up 10 minutes slower.

Next is a much shorter video, an improvement to the frigate escape. Paul 'Bartendorsparky' Evans broke the four and a half minute barrier, finishing with 0:04:30.05 time remaining. A few new dash jumps helps take this 0.78 seconds faster than the previous time by Nils Jutler.

Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman did runs of the ten levels of the PlayStation 2 game, Katamari Damacy, where everything is made of glue. Roll up people's junk into a giant ball to replace the missing stars, and when you get a big enough ball, the people themselves and their houses! Derek's total on all levels is 30 minutes and 41 seconds.

Daniel 'NintenDan' Zurad did a run of the GBA game Sonic Advance, the first Sonic-game run to get posted here. Many people have been thinking Sonic=speed, so why no speed runs? I guess it's just because in order to make a really good run, you have to do lots of tricks and never stop going super fast, making them very very hard. In SA, you can chose from four characters to play as, and Daniel uses the blue hedgehog himself, Sonic, and gets a total time of 0:16:18.50.

Newcomers to SDA, and even people who've been here a while, might think that the entire site is run by me. Maybe they haven't gone into the Quake section, so they see "by Radix" on every update and assume it's just me. But as anyone who's recorded stuff onto VHS in the last year knows, that's just not true. Nathan Jahnke is my faithful partner in demo archiving, taking many hours of his time to process runs that arrive on tape. He even decided to spend most of the money he earned at his summer job on more expensive equipment for better quality. In an effort to make it obvious how dedicated / crazy he is, he started a little blog, the 'word' that you either love or hate, to discuss his role. You'll probably encounter a lot of technical aspects of capturing and compression you may not understand, but you'll also catch glimpses of runs that are being processed and other tidbits. I haven't decided where to place a permanent link to it yet.

Just so this update isn't void of videos, I'll post this improvement that Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica did to one of the F-Zero X 64DD levels. Port town 4 in 0:01:26.100, 0.672 seconds faster than the previous one by some Japanese guy.

Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove took the massive undertaking of doing a 100% run of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Almost half of the time spent working on the run was simply planning out the very complex route to do all the necessary tasks. A total of four cycles are needed, two more than the minimum, since the All-Night Mask, Postman Hat, and the Chateau Romani bottle can't be collected in the same cycle. The time for the 29-segment run ends up at at 6:55, just under twice the time of the normal run.

Travis 'Sigma' Lee did a run of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell for PlayStation 2. His run was delayed posting for nearly two months because he forgot the number of segments he took. This is one of the main reasons why we now require a list of segment start/end points on VHS tapes mailed in. It didn't help that I decided to remove the loading screens for the timing, something I usually only do for PC games, just because the game is cross-platform on ps2/xbox/gcn and PC as well. Removing loading makes it "easier" to compare runs on other ports if anybody does one, but they'd still probably be tracked separately. Travis's run comes out to 2:32:56.

David 'marshmallow' Gibbons did a bunch of runs on the "deleted scenes" from Counter Strike: Condition Zero. 19 missions to do various tasks, coming out to a total time of 1:44:18. These took three months to post because of timing issues too... if you haven't figured it out, by the fact that 'needs timed' is always the largest part of the queue, timing things sucks!!! *grumbles about ever taking games without timers*

Kim 'Silent echo' Siafa finally did the honors of crushing the time on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes for the default any% run. The previous time was 2:11 by me, in a rather rushed run I did less than one month after the game's release. There's been a lot of new tricks discovered since then, like skipping the Sanctuary temple keys which was found just before I finished my run. Kim is also the first in the world (?) to skip the grapple beam, thanks to landing on a helpful drone in 'Grand Abyss'! Download his 1:43, 28 minutes faster than my old run, and see this less-appreciated metroid game get what was coming to it.

After a year, finally someone has done a run of Doom 3 and the near-constant posts on the forum saying "where's doom 3!" can cease. Did it take that long for computers to become powerful enough to record this beast at the same time as playing it? Or was it that it took that long for people to stop complaining about how dark the game is, and the inability to use the flashlight while shooting? Well, it doesn't really matter, since it is Joseph 'Apathy' Wilcox who finally did a run, playing on Marine skill and getting a time of 2:07:15. It's too bad the game doesn't have a timer like the original Doom, forcing me to time it manually, but it wasn't as bad as those KotOR runs I posted yesterday, which has a timer that unfairly includes the loading time!

Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields has run another RPG in the Phantasy Star series, the game that started it: Phantasy Star. Originally released for the Sega Master System, it got released for the GBA in a collection, and that's what Jonathan played. Another manually timed game, it comes out to 5:40.

There are two speed runs of the PC game Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic added today. One is by Jeff Richardson who went by 'Lord Revan', a name coming right from this game. The other is by Henrik 'MNeMiC' Larsson. What's the difference? Henrik's run is 3:14 and Jeff's run is 3:34, but Jeff's run is an "all dark" run where he only does evil choices and ends up with the dark-side ending. It's a little slower as a result. I'd write more but I feel like crap.

After Aleks Lukic did a run on the PAL version of Star Fox 64, Mike Damiani decided maybe he should try a more serious attempt too. He plays on normal, unlike Aleks who played on expert, but from what I can understand, there's not much difference between them for skilled players anyway. Mike's time turns out to be 0:27:29.

Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti did a run of Star Wars Rouge Squadron III: Rebel Strike for GameCube. After a two-month process of finding out just what kind of run he did and finding a few people to say it was ok, I can finally post his run. It's done as Wedge with Special weapons/upgrades and gets a time of 0:28:03, which is the sum of the times for each of the eight stages he does.

Mike Uyama continues his quest to run the Metal Slug series, doing a hard mode run of Metal Slug 4 for PlayStation 2. Worst in the series you say? Who cares, Mike says! He did his run in 0:23:18.

Wayne 'soteos' Frank took a journey through Kirby's first 3D adventure, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards for ... do I have to say? He collects all the crystal shards for a 100% completion, does a Single-segment and gets a time of 1:30:39. There's one death late in the run which Wayne says "costs maybe about a minute". He ran out of time to try improving because school is starting up... I think he just needs better time management. :P Then again, so do I, and I haven't been in school for 3 years.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door takes Mario's parallel universe 2-dimensional self on a journey to Rogueport, then off to seven lands to find Crystal Stars. It's quite a long game and I didn't think it'd go much below eight hours... James 'Brown Bomber' Bunkley proved me wrong though, using the 'Danger Mario' setup after chapter 6 to beat the remaining bosses very quickly and end up with a time of 7:11. If only the game let you skip cutscenes and long dialogs, it'd probably be an hour less. James's run contains a few minor mitakes, mostly from very long segments, and some things done for show (like stylish moves) that wasted a little bit of time and got on my nerves. Still, I'm not sure if there's 11+ minutes lost, so under 7 hours will be tough. If I had more time I'd try, but that is what I lack the most of these days. Oh, and let part 10/12 be a lesson to you on VHS recording. Don't use an old tape you've been recording TV shows on for a decade ... buy a new one!

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron did his second run of a Fire Emblem series game, doing the second game to see a U.S. release, The Sacred Stones for GBA. His run is in 25 segments, uses Ephraim's route and comes out to a time of 2:29:59. Given the original file names of his run, it's quite possible that I managed to rename them wrong and put something out of order. In fact I already did that and squashed one of the parts and had to reupload it.

Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica sent in an improvement of an F-Zero X 64DD track, Fire Field 2. He got a time of 0:01:23.985, 1.123 seconds faster than the previous time by 'Max'. This looks like the craziest track in the bunch to me.

It's time to take a journey to the mysterious off-limits place that is talked about so much in science fiction and conspiracies: Area 51. OK, not really, it's just that Kevin 'Mitsukai' Shropshire did a speed run in six segments of the Xbox game named that... There's definitely aliens around, and if you look closely you might spot one in the title shot. Kevin's run comes out to a time of 2:15:56.

Aleks 'SuperCoolAl' Lukic has done a better run of Star Fox 64, finding a better path than the one Mike Damiani used in his "joke run". Aleks gets a run that's about two minutes faster, but it's actually better than that. Aleks plays on the handicapped PAL version, running the typical ~83% slower. If you try to convert the time, you end up that Aleks's run is about 7.5 minutes better than Mike's. But such conversions aren't reliable due to load times and such, so they're not done. Aleks's run is listed as 0:33:16 with _eu_ in it to let you know that it's PAL. Mike's run still gets removed* though, since it's definitely slower. Plus... Aleks's run is on expert mode!

Some runs of Max Payne 1/2:

• In the first game, Daniel 'Shido' Lee improved pro1 once more to get a time of 0:00:14. It's mostly cutscenes & sideways rolling... this game's version of bunny hopping?
• In the sequel, Tomi Salo found a new shortcut jump on p3c2, "Return to Vlad's Restaurant", and got a time of 0:00:24.
• Stefan 'xeen' Breunig improved p3c5, "Return to Funhouse, as Mona", by 7 seconds to get a time of 0:00:57.

* You did know that nothing is really "removed" right? You can get all the old runs at the archive.org speed_runs collection. But, instead of the pretty site layout here, you'll have to deal with their whacky search engine and /details/ pages they like to randomly break.

Jose 'Lightweight' Crespo sent in an improved run of the GBA version of Yoshi's Island and got a time of 2:11:36. Although his run still contains some deaths, none of them are too bad and it is over eight minutes faster than Mychal's run. I'm sure this will see further improvements though.

David Kim did an 18-segment run of Pokémon Yellow for Game Boy, the third game in the series. He ended up with a time of 2:28 after beating up lots of pokés and leveling up the ones he captured. Since my only exposure to these crazy critters is SSBM, that's about all I can say.

The F-Zero X page has been updated with 12 new videos. They're of the tracks included with the 64DD expansion, which certainly very few people have played. The tracks look quite difficult to even stay on, so speeding through them is quite a feat.

Some miscellaneous smaller things:

• In Super Smash Bros. Melee Break the Targets, 'Doraki' sent in a self-improvement of his Fox time of 0.1 seconds to bring it down to 0:00:06.93.
• In Mario Kart 64 Steven Gutierrez improved Frappe Snowland shortcut by 1 frame (that's 0.01 seconds) to get 0:00:21.84. This was nearly a year ago and nobody gave me the video before...
• Jeffrey Gutierrez improved Yoshi Valley lap to 0:00:26.29, 0.08s faster than his previous.
• Myles Bukrim improved the YV lap with the crazy shorcut to 0:00:05.79, 0.03s faster than his previous.

Nate has just added eight new DVD offerings on the ordering page, go check them out! Some are recently posted runs and others are older runs that got recaptured by the uber VCR. Usually a run has to be under about an hour and 50 minutes to qualify for a DVD, but for "really good" runs on popular games, we can do a 2-disc run, and that's what we did for Peter Yeh's Majora's Mask. So if you don't feel like downloading the 6+ gigs to get High Quality, just fork over some dough instead. Other discs contain multiple runs.

And just in case you're getting paranoid, we never have any plans to make runs "pay only" - they'll always be downloadable for free. I just can't guarantee the download speeds. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a bunch of discs going through the postal service.

Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski ran through the 1987 NES game known as Rygar, starring a guy named Rygar, and gets a time of 0:30:30. Quoth the verifier: "Some parts even shocked me."

If you were confused by the recent Morrowind 7.5 minute run, check out the page again as Vladimir sent in an updated list of "comments" that's more like a run script with a few explanations than real comments ... but it's better than before.

Also, it turns out the runs of Circle of the Moon were timed slightly wrong. The end point wasn't correct, it should've been about 12 seconds earlier. The SS run is really 2:16:35 and the Magician run is 0:41:14. I don't feel like bothering to rename the files right now though, but I'll change them eventually.

Peter 'pyh189' Yeh did a much-improved run of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask in 18 segments. His run of 3:37 is 36 minutes faster than Mike Damiani's run from May. Epona is now skipped completely, but sight of her is still seen since he fights off the ghosts in the ranch for a third bottle.

Vladimir 'Knu' Semenov took Morrowind to a staggeringly low time now. Many people were impressed with Ryan Bennitt's Single-segment 0:14:26 run, so I'm sure you can appreciate how fast 0:07:30 is then. This run is in five segments because of some difficult fighting. The best part of the run (and about the only part I understood) was when he sells some stuff to a shop keeper, then clugs him over the head and steals it all back!

Wayne 'soteos' Frank came through on his word to do a run of Castlevania Circle of the Moon 'out of the box'; that is, the settings you have when you first play a game. I was surprised he did it as a Single-segment, especially given the random drops and very hard bosses in the game. He ends up spending some minutes mining for drops, but he warns you about them in the comments. The final time of his run is 2:16:35, which doesn't count a pause at 1:44:42 where he switched tapes. The server this was put on at archive.org seems to be having some issues, so you might have trouble downloading ... just try later.

Joseph '3nki' Hernandez sent in his first run recently, and it was an improvement to the existing run of Fable. Joseph's time is 1:51 in a Single-segment run, compared to 2:16 in 2 segments from Christian Haralter. Sounds like a good improvement to me. The verifier had this to say: "It's actually very good i probably couldn't [have] done better myself".

This update doesn't include a few other things that are ready or nearly-ready. And a bunch of other runs that were approaching the 'needs uploaded' phase will have to wait at least a week longer now ... thanks a fucking lot Verizon.

In case you're wondering what broke my 10 updates in 9 days streak, and why there's still four things in "Ready for update" after I post this short update, it's because I've been moving apartments in the last couple days. Saturday was the day to move the big stuff with help from my brother but I'm still writing this from the old apartment, laying on a towel & pillow on the floor, hurting my neck to look at my computer on the floor. Why? Because Verizon is stupid and can't figure out how to move someone's phone line correctly. I called them last Monday to do the moving and they said they'd have the new one on on Friday and the old one off on Sunday. I woke up Wednesday to a dead phone line; the idiots shut it off three days early and I had to call and complain at work to get it back on. Of course, then I started to move things and forgot to check the line at the new place until Friday evening, and they can't tell what's wrong without sending someone, on freaking Monday afternoon. I seriously doubt I will update tomorrow and you should feel happy you're getting this at all to let you know what's going on!

Cameron 'Zianchu' Marcotte did a Single-segment run of Mega Man X5 in less than half the time of Chris Kirk's run. But Chris's run remains up as a different category: Chris did all eight maverick stages, where Cameron only does one and then "gets lucky" with the weapon shooting the colony to go straight to the Sigma stages. I'm sure there were lots of resets involved. The result is a time of 0:16:00. The run is almost 30 minutes of watching material though; the timer doesn't include a bunch of stuff.

It's time for the site's first (non-Quake) speed run performed by two guys... a run of Chip 'n Dale. Yeah, just the NES game called Rescue Rangers, unfortunately no strippers are involved. The run was done by Magnus 'KennyMan666', from two updates before, and his friend Johan 'Cloud' Sturesson and they got a time of 0:14:00. This and the recent Duck Tales run make me yearn to download the cartoons of both from 15 years ago, since I watched them and it makes me want to rewatch a few. (Un)fortunately, I don't have enough disk space to even consider it. Maybe I should just go the legal route and buy them on DVD through the ad that you'll probably see on the page, which Nate pointed out to me right before the update. :P

Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore has finished up his runs of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter on Serious difficulty. The total time of all 12 levels is 1:03:31, but this is individual level runs, not a continuous game run, just so you're not confused. I believe Drew (and his fans) are eagerly awaiting the release of Serious Sam II, the third game of the series, to see what will happen with it.

Scott Kessler kept dreaming with Mario and working on Mario 2 because he knew that his last run could still be improved... but I can't quite believe that it went as low as 0:09:42, 43 seconds faster than his previous run. It's a shame that his near-perfect Wart fight was spoiled by a vegetable popping up underneath Luigi and pushing him up. Hopefully we'll see a full-game run of this soon, right Tommy? :)

I've updated the submit page to clarify (again) how to contact me when submitting a run. I'm not eyeing anyone in particular, because there's been so many incidents like this... but it's really annoying getting a message on AIM like "I did a run on game X" and then I have to ask "in what?" before I find out the time, and other info like segmented or SS. You should be telling me this stuff right away. Sorry if I seem rude, but it should be obvious I've gotten very busy and I have less time for trying to pull information out of people.

When Alan 'Siyko' Burnett heard about a run of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, he thought surely it was with the Sorceress class... but he was wrong, because David Gibbons's run was as an Assassin. So, Alan set out to do his own run as a Sorceress after making a list of pros and cons. The end result was a 13 segment run in 1:53:44, about four and a half minutes faster than the Assassin run. Diablo fans rejoice!

Adam 'Psyrell' Van't Hul got a little advice about his Richter run of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. With a few big route changes, the time was cut by two and a half minutes to get 0:07:14. Who would've thought that the dagger's item crash would come in useful?

Magnus von Goës Karlström, better known as 'KennyMan666' sent in some runs recently. First up is a run on a NES game you've probably never heard of, Ufouria, which was only released in Japan and Europe. The game looks interesting enough, it's a standard "find stuff in the world" type of game, so having a good route is essential for doing a 0:41:40 run. Next is a run on Yoshi's Story for Nintendo 64. Not much I can say about this game except that the time of his run is 0:23:01.

That's eight updates in the last week... I knew summer would be bad, but this is insane.

Mike 'TSA' Damiani has probably said a few things he regrets. Like "I am done with speed running Ocarina of Time" when he got the 5:04 time last year. But he did leave a loophole in the same comments with "Unless a major breakthrough by somebody is made, which I doubt will happen, this is the fastest single segment run I can do". If you complained about all the rolling present in the previous run, you can be glad to hear that there's a lot less in his new run, it is instead replaced with walking backwards! I'm not sure if that is classified as a "major breakthrough" but it's probably the biggest time saver off his previous run. The new run's time is 4:57, about seven and a half minutes faster. Again he says "I should retire now" in his comments... should we believe him this time?

If you find the download speeds from *.us.archive.org slow lately, sorry but there's nothing I can do about getting the new stuff to *.eu.archive.org, as they managed to run out of space there. However in this case, since it's the end of the month and Nate and I have some bandwidth to kill, you can get the normal quality of this run much faster if you have BitTorrent. Just use the torrent link provided, it should go very fast!

Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski sent in an improvement to his run of the NES classic Battletoads. His new run gets a time of 0:24:12, 1 minute and 47 seconds faster than the last one. Still a few bad deaths in there though, but since I know from experience how hard the game is, I'm not complaining. Marc's full game run, without using any warps, stands out as even more impressive as a result. The time for it is 0:36:41. Although doing the entire game sends you on a few more fixed-scrolling levels, you still have to do good on them or you'll die and lose time.

Adnan Kauser sent in a Single-segment run of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, on the same settings as his segmented run. He plays on European Extreme difficulty and gets a Fox Hound rank, and ends up with a time of 2:02:17. That's about 25 minutes slower than the segmented run, a large portion of which comes from actually having to fight "The End" boss instead of using the 'old age death' clock-advancing trick that's only possible in a segmented run. I hope you like long file names.

Philippe 'Wak' Brisson improved on his previous 100% run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. He was a lot luckier with the random heart pieces than his previous 2:07:45 run and along with some route changes, he came up with a 2:02:34. This run has the backwards sound problem of his previous, which had the left channel on both channels. This time it's the right channel on both channels. So, for things that occur on the left side of rooms, you'll only hear the effects really quiet. Better check those cables Philippe...

Tim Bright sent in his first run, and it's an improvement on Resident Evil 4. He improved Lee Valencia's Single-segment special weapons run by almost eight minutes and got a time of 1:59:07. This is only 14 seconds slower than the segmented run! It's also the first specials run that didn't include a sniper rifle, instead freeing Ashley from the wall braces with the rocket launcher ... can you say dangerous?

Steven 'Bartz' Brooks sent in runs on two more Genesis games, increasing the number on the list to six. Since the only Genesis game I ever played was Sonic, there's not much that I can comment on his Quackshot in 0:32:00 and Adventures of Batman & Robin in 0:56:23 except ... cool? Thanks to Mr. Uyama for timing these for me. :P

Ben 'Cygnus' Goldberg has sent in his second speed run, this time on the GameCube version of James Bond 007 in Agent Under Fire. Hopefully there are no differences in the ports of this game, which times every mission. Ben's Single-segment run on Operative, the easiest skill, gets a time of 0:40:40 when you add up all the mission times.

Tomi Salo decided to improve one of Daniel Lee's recent NYM runs of Max Payne. He did pro1, the first level, in 0:00:15, one second faster. It turns out I was wrong in my rambling about "they might not actually be faster"; that's only in Max Payne 2. In the first game, the timer counts down from 1 minute and if it reaches 0 you lose, so you kill people to add 8 seconds to the clock. The times for NYM (given at the start of the next level) are the difference between the final time displayed and the original 1 minute, plus all the time you were given for kills... so the time for kills is only to avoid reaching zero; it doesn't decrease your time.

Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry recently sent a tape with eight short runs on it. First there was six individual level runs of Metal Slug X for PlayStation on "Pin Point" mode. The times range from 0:01:17.66 up to 0:03:37.97 and the total is 0:14:20.50.

Next were two runs on Mega Man games that were arcade games released in 1995-96, The Power Battle and The Power Fighters, which were both included in Mega Man Anniversary Collection released last year. In Power Battle, he plays the 'Mega Man 1-2' stages which feature several classic robot masters from those games, and he gets a time of 0:02:19.40. In Power Fighters, he does the 'Rescue Roll' scenario and gets a time of 0:03:50.43. The character used in both runs is Protoman.

It took a long time before someone sent in a Mario 2 run, but then Tommy's run spawned some competition between a few players and Scott 'sdkess' Kessler came up with a 0:10:25 run just two days after I posted Tommy's run. Scott's time is 30 seconds faster than Tommy's. The main speed up comes from using Luigi in a few levels: his long & high jumps certainly come in useful in 6-2 for example.

Martell 'VecGun' Cheeks sent in his first speed run for the Genesis game Vectorman. It was delayed for a while when I waited for his comments... keep that in mind. When you send a run, think about comments and get them to me as soon as you can! Then when I post your 0:19:58 run you won't already be posting on the forum that you've improved it ...

It's been three and a half months since I added the 100th game to the list as Resident Evil 0 with a run I wasn't too proud of. The list is up to 142 games now and at least a dozen more new ones are in the huge queue. I finally managed to improve my run earlier this month. I could've had it online two weeks ago, but the quality would've been the usual crap my card produces. So, I mailed the tape to Nate and waited like everyone else. A few VHS problems came up, but it's still better than if I had captured it. The time came out to be an impressive 1:45:40, over 14 minutes faster than my previous run. The run is in 7 segments this time instead of 2. I still want to do a Single-segment run eventually.

Philippe 'Wak' Brisson made an improvement of level 5-3 from Yoshi's Island, "Danger - Icy Conditions Ahead". His time is 0:03:02, eight seconds faster than David's time from last year.

A few weeks ago I posted the first Super Mario Bros. 2 run, but because it was on the All-Stars version, nobody seemed to care. Tommy 'tmont' Montgomery has stepped in to do one on the original though, and got a time of 0:10:55. Unlike the all-stars run, this run focuses on using mushroom boy, Toad.

Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields did a run of .hack//Infection Part 1, the first in a series of RPGs for PlayStation 2. The game has a timer on the saves and it updates it when you're done, I'm told for continuing into the 2nd game. The time at the end is 3:15:17, which is actually one minute _longer_ than the total video length of all 14 segments. I guess the game counts a little fast. Actually I just realized it's more likely to be a victim of a VCR playing back slightly faster than it was recorded... but I don't know if the run was even on tape.

Wayne 'soteos' Frank did a run for the first GBA Castlevania game, Circle of the Moon. He did his run on 'Magician mode'. I do prefer that people do "out of the box" runs first, but several people on IRC convinced me that Magician mode is something different enough and not super-easy that it's OK to post it first... plus Wayne swears he'll do a normal run, so I'm holding him to it! His time was 0:41:14, which is real-time, not the game's timer. I've used it as an example before, but I don't like requiring people to pause a game to see a timer after beating a final boss... it's too unreliable. Of course, Wayne did that anyway but I'm not telling you what the game said for the time because I'm ignoring it.

Daniel 'Shido' Lee sent in a new batch of recordings for Max Payne in New York Minute mode. He improves every level to sometimes less than half of the previous times from Ben Fichter. This is the same "kill enemies to reduce time" thing as Max Payne 2's NYM, so the videos themselves aren't actually that much shorter than Ben's. For easy downloading, use the FTP link at the bottom of the MP page, sort files by date, and grab all the recent ones.

Michael 'saxman52' Metcalf did a run of Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza for PC. I know a game must be unpopular if there's zero topics at the message board for it at GameFAQs, but I was still able to find a willing verifier. It was just me taking four weeks to get around to timing Michael's run to 0:48:08 that delayed the posting.

Nate has been hard at work recapturing some old runs with the uber VCR. An example is Pikmin which was sent to me when it was done, but my capture card just isn't very good so I forwarded the tape. This and other runs will also be listed on the DVD page soon, so check back.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson made a few mistakes when he recorded his Single-segment run of Yoshi's Island. First, he played on the GBA version ... ok so that isn't a mistake, but man this is another example of a port gone bad. Some of the sound and music is horribly butchered, especially Yoshi fluttering. Of course, the port also contains a few unnecessary changes that affect speed, so runs on GBA have to be tracked separately from Super Nintendo.

The second mistake was Mychal's Game Boy Player settings. I've had this in the FAQ for months but some people just don't read it I guess. Do NOT set your GBP to "full" ... I hate Nintendo for even giving you the option! All it does is stretch and blur everything upwards to try to fill your TV. GBA is 160 lines, that's what it should be on a TV too! The filter should also be 'sharp' and stick with the black border to prevent it bleeding into the edges of the picture. Finally, playing with the GBP settings during idle time when you do a run does not make you cool. To sum up: it should look like the video was produced by a GBA that has a video out.

The third mistake was that he got a time of 2:19:49 instead of 2:14 because of a death in Tap-Tap The Red Nose's Fort. Do yourself a favor: when you get to 1:51:00 in the video just press a "skip 5 minutes" button in your media player of choice. Although it's closer to 4 minutes of 55 seconds but you get the idea. It made the run borderline-unpostable but the rest is really good ... he takes a few chances to save fractions of a second and sometimes it doesn't turn out so good though.

Mychal also did two individual level 100% runs. I've had a table of those up for the SNES version for quite some time - one of the levels is even by me. When it comes to the GBA version, it seems that some levels can be fairly compared for I.L. runs but others can't. Mychal did 1-1 in 0:01:16 and 1-2 in 0:01:18, both of which are 11 seconds faster than the previous runs by David Gibbons.

One more time: DO NOT SET YOUR GBP TO FULL!

Stefan van Dijke improved his run of Metroid Prime - PAL version, Single-segment. His new time is 1:23, 2 minutes faster than his previous run. About the only major improvement left in this run is to do the "Thardus jump" which is very high-risk and near the end. I flipped the order of 'eu' and 'SS' in the filename by accident but I think it's better this way ... but you don't care.

Anyway, this should have been in the last update but archive decided I was keeping files on the upload server too long and moved them so that it looked like they disappeared. After some emails exchanged they reappeared, but then the md5 checksum for the High Quality didn't match so I have to upload it again. I figured I'd update now with just the normal available since the download speeds lately are so slow, probably very few of you stick out the HQ anyway. (Available now)

Mike Uyama did the first run for Metal Slug, the first of the six game series. He played on 'mvs' difficulty, the highest one, and got a time of 0:16:47. If you become as confused as I was over the 'mission select' screen at the start, that's a way to start the game at any stage once you've beaten it, so to be a complete speed run he obviously just leaves it on the first one.

I received a new video for the Silence 2 track of F-Zero X. It's a time of 0:01:05.656 by 'muumu' and is 0.253 seconds faster than the previous one. ... OK so that was bad for 8 hours after this update was posted because I forgot to type "bin" into ftp (damn you microsoft) but now it's fine.

We had some nasty downtime from 10:45-18:30 yesterday (CET) due to unexplained hardware failure at the server ... my theory is that the CPU melted. At least no data loss, pfew!

Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk has improved his 100% run of Mega Man X8 for PlayStation 2. The new time of 2:36 is 26 minutes faster than his previous run. A couple of segments less, and no pauses that I had to subtract out this time! After he was done with that, he decided to do an inaugural run of Mega Man X5 for PlayStation, which has been described to me as "suck suck suck"... Of course, it doesn't seem that bad to me when I watched it, except for this Alia that doesn't shut the hell up. I've also been told that you can skip the standard 8 Maverick stages through some method I don't understand, but Chris beats all eight so his run is marked as "all 8 bosses beaten", like runs for NES Metroid. Chris's time is 0:34:24 but since the game only counts actual game play (apparently), the video length is about twice that.

David 'marshmallow' Gibbons went back and did the first Diablo after his successful run of the 2nd game and its expansion. After some harassment to make 320x240 versions and a list of loading screens, I finally timed his run out to 0:53:13.

Recently, Connor Fitzgerald was working hard on improving the marathon record through the entirety of the best PC game ever made, the one and only Quake! What the heck is a marathon? Well it's what the Quake-players call a Single-segment run ... which actually came first, so it'd be proper to say that Single-segment is what everyone else calls a marathon. Anyway, since lots of you out there no-doubt played Quake, but perhaps you were foolish enough to uninstall it, you can't play the game recordings of these runs, so we've made an avi version of Connor's new 0:13:46 time. It's available in both 640x480 and 320x240 versions to look the way Quake is supposed to look... 95% brown! Or if you're a color freak, you can get the "Eye Candy" version in large and small as well. For Connor's comments, go here, although if you're not a die-hard Quake player, you probably won't understand them. :-p Eventually I plan to have a Quake.html that lists the whole game records and link to quake/ the section for "full coverage".

Remember when Nate did the unthinkable to capture Adam Sweeney's runs? Well the uber VCR has brought back both runs from the depths of poor quality and into superb quality. So check out his Solstice 100% and Zombies Ate My Neighbors "10 victims saved" run again if you hated the quality before ... or for the first time!

Tim 'twoton' Symanczyk has improved the run of Grand Theft Auto III for PS2. His time is 1:43:40, a little over 2 minutes faster than the previous run by Andy Nelson with one extra segment. This is turning out to be a very popular game to speed through.

Mike 'TSA' Damiani took back one of the Zelda records he lost, spending just about one month trying A Link to the Past. He achieved his sub-1:40 goal with a 1:39:47 run. Definitely a lot of little shortcuts that add up to significant savings, like skipping the mirror shield and the blue & red armors. The lack of protection makes the Ganon fight a little slower from being cautious but it's certainly worth it.

Jared 'Ifrit' Nicholson did a run of the PlayStation game, Mega Man Legends, which propelled the story 3 millennia forward into a 3D world. I think it was also the first Mega Man game to include a timer, making my job easier since I had only had to look at the end to see Jared got a time of 1:08:25 and there's no disputing that. Unlike say, Mega Man 2 where Richard Ureta did a run last year, sent it to me, and my capture card barfed on it. After a few months, I sent it to Nate... and his VCR barfed on it. So finally, with his 'uber' VCR, we tried again, and the results are much better. No more ~5 seconds of lost footage or completely disappearing Mega Man. But this recapture does reveal the inaccuracy of manually timing games like this. The run times to three seconds faster on Nate's capture than on mine. I'm leaving the time the same though, I'm just mentioning it as an example for why I need a run that's "significantly" better than a previous run, which obviously depends on the length.

Freddy Andersson did a run of Duck Tales for NES, on the usual 5/6th speed PAL version. He finished in a time of 0:10:21 on difficult mode. Before you click to relive this 16 year old game, I'm afraid I have to warn about the quality of this one. The backgrounds tend to flash from color to black and white one or two times a second. The run is still watchable I think, but don't watch it while you're on drugs or something.

As usual, Nate updated the DVD page with the latest runs and some older ones too... such as the Mega Man 2 run with several other NES games thrown in.