Saturday, December 31, 2005 by Radix
Shut up Alia!
Kim 'Silent echo' Siafa has been working on another run of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. His first run was any% in 1:43, and now he's been working on a Single-segment version. A time of 1:57 sounds pretty good, only 14 minutes slower. There's only a few 'major' mistakes and most of them are about half way through so it's hard to reset over something at that point. It's nearly identical in route to the segmented run except that he has to get grapple, since skipping that is so hard. Still worth a watch, especially for people who prefer SS runs.
Thursday, December 29, 2005 by Radix
Do you know what an 'aria' is?
Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti improved one of the runs of Sonic Adventure DX. He improved Mychal Jefferson's Tails run by just under 3 minutes to reach a time of 0:18:19. Sacrificing a bit of time right at the start to get the Jet Anklet pays off in the end. Andres also did an E-102 Gamma run, but I haven't timed it yet.
Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell ran Protoss 4 "The Quest for Uraj" in 0:01:55 for Starcraft: Brood War, a cut of 52 seconds. The total Brood War time goes down to 3:41:53.
Thursday, December 22, 2005 by Radix
Seasons near the solstice
Andrew Gardikis did a run of the classic Super Mario Bros. without using any warp zones. He has two deaths in the run and says he'll improve it eventually, but until then, his 0:21:18 is still over 1.5 minutes faster than the Eu version time.
In other news, Nate's beast 'v5' arrived early.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005 by Radix
It's almost Christmas and I don't care
Tomi 'sarou' Salo branched away from Max Payne 2 in order to do a speed run of Resident Evil 4 for GameCube. He plays on the european version which has some differences that make it faster, most notably being able to skip the dynamite. Tomi's time comes to 1:51:03, 0:07:50 faster than the previous run. Since that's significantly more than the difference between the two versions, the old run disappears. If someone were to do a good run on the US version that's a little slower though, we'd have to post it as a second category. Unfortunately Tomi's video encoding skills are seriously lacking. The video quality is only about the same as Nate's low quality with nothing else available. Nate has lots of pricey equipment he's purchased over the last year in order to get great looking speed runs... and some people out there think they're doing us a favor by capturing things themselves. But as this run shows, they usually aren't.
Friday, December 16, 2005 by Nate
back to the future
due to cpu time constraints, i will not be able to recapture the run to remove the game boy player border from the right side of the picture until i receive the new sda beast sometime around the end of the year. it's harmless, though - you can see all the insane ridley stomping, kraid bashing, cheerio dodging, ted trouncing action clear as day! enjoy!
Monday, December 12, 2005 by Radix
No queue change here
Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica sent three improvements to the 64DD levels of F-Zero for N64. Devil's Forest 4 is now 0:01:37.302, 2.856 seconds better. Mute City 4 becomes 0:01:15.639, a 1.523s improvement. Port Town 4 drops to 0:01:23.461, 2.639s less. That drops the total for the expansion to 0:17:56.212.
René Kamp did Protoss 3 "Legacy of the Xel'Naga" in 0:08:54 for Starcraft: Brood War, an improvement of 0:02:07 bringing the total Brood War time down to 3:42:45.
Saturday, December 10, 2005 by Radix
Shake that big Kong butt
Philippe also did a run of the first Mega Man game for Game Boy, Dr. Wily's Revenge. This Single-segment run comes out to 0:21:02.
Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe did a run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time for Super Nintendo. There are four turtles to chose from, of course, and Nicholas played as Donatello and got a time of 0:21:33. Other turtles are said to be faster and I think a few people are working on them. This run has a few bad parts like a lot of deaths at bosses, but I've never been able to beat this game without dying a lot either.
Thursday, December 8, 2005 by Radix
Speed runs by an open fire
After Shaun 'MMAN' Friend did his Tomb Raider III run, he went backwards one game to Tomb Raider II for PC. His 18 segment run finishes in a time of 2:44:02, easily timed since this game actually has a timer.
Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody did a second run of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for Super Nintendo, although you never saw the first run. It was deemed crappy by one of the verifiers, so Damien scoured GameFAQs and learned a bunch of stuff, and came back with his second try, a 2:44:20 in 21 segments. That's eerily close to that TR2 run's time isn't it? This game also has a timer but it's only visible on the game's file select screen, so I ignore it and use my standard real-time measurement.
Jean-Philippe 'Ounaya' Gilbert has improved one of the oldest (non-Quake) runs on the site. Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman ran Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest in 2001, Single-segment 100%, with a time of 1:33. J-P has improved it by two minutes to 1:31. He plays the game in French since he's from Canada and as a result his comments have both English and French names for all the levels he refers to... fun stuff. It's a shame he has one death in the run, but so did Derek.
There's a swift chop of 16 minutes and 33 seconds for Starcraft in four new times, each with brand new strategies. Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell improved Zerg 8 "Eye for an Eye" in 0:03:50, 0:05:25 faster and Protoss 2 "Into the Flames" in 0:06:48, 0:02:44 faster. Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho improved Protoss 8 "The Trial of Tassadar" in 0:07:47, 0:05:09 faster and Protoss 10 "Eye of the Storm" in 0:05:51, 0:03:15 faster, you'll love the smell of napalm in the morning after watching this one. Overall, the total Starcraft time goes down from 3:54:24 to 3:37:51.
Monday, December 5, 2005 by Radix
You're invited to a boo party
Sunday, December 4, 2005 by Radix
Life in the Shadows
Two months before he did his popular Chrono Trigger run, David 'marshmallow' Gibbons did a run of the not-so-popular Nintendo 64 game Shadow Man. His run is in 20 segments and gets a time of 3:14. It's worth getting the first segment just to laugh at the bad voice acting in the opening story that goes on for at least five minutes. I didn't watch any of the run so that's the only part I can comment on.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005 by Radix and ballofsnow
The sequel of the game I almost played
Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho made a huge improvement of Zerg 7 "Drawing of the Web" for Starcraft: Brood War. This level has gone all the way down from 0:17:35 to 0:09:49 and now to 0:04:23. You want to see this run! On the pre-expansion side, Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell has improved five levels for Starcraft. They are Terran 1 "Wastelands" in 0:02:40, 9 seconds faster, Terran 6 "Norad II" in 0:05:18, 28 seconds faster, Terran 10 "The Hammer Falls" in 0:07:51, 0:01:48 faster, Zerg 1 "Among the Ruins" in 0:07:34, 0:01:02 faster, and Zerg 4 "Agent of the Swarm" in 0:06:48, 0:01:37 faster. Overall, the total Starcraft time goes down from 3:59:28 to 3:54:24, and Brood War down from 3:50:18 to 3:44:52.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 by Radix
Wood in the skin
Monday, November 21, 2005 by Radix
Lucky thirteenth category
David Gibbons wasn't done with Chrono Trigger after his recent 4:56 run. He used a save copy he'd made after part 29 to start a new run from, a "100%". Since an RPG like this can have varying defintions of 100%, we went with a simple one that's actually feasible: complete all optional side quests, so that Gaspar would tell you the only thing left to do is fight Lavos. His finish time comes out to 0:06:31 and he still nearly gets wiped out in the Lavos battle despite having a slightly higher level and better equipment. Also he never uses Crono after bringing him back, poor mute bastard.
Saturday, November 19, 2005 by Radix
Improved crystals
There are eight improved times on the Starcraft and SC: Brood War pages from René Kamp, Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell and Torfi 'Blublu' Gunnarsson. There is also one new level: the "Boot Camp" training mission in the Starcraft page, thanks to Qoix for pointing out this omission. Overall, the Starcraft total time went up by 0:02:14 to 3:59:28, and Brood War went down by 0:16:33 to 3:50:18. Thanks also to Philip for writing the preceding sentences and updating the pages at archive.org.
Thursday, November 17, 2005 by Radix
My bad fur season
Way back in May 2001, Derek 'SnapDragon' Kisman did a run of the Nintendo 64 game Conker's Bad Fur Day. Although he's had the run online for some time, he bugged me about posting it here for wider viewing and I finally got around to it. You'd better not click if you're under 18!
Ben Fichter recently sent in a run of Jak II for PlayStation 2, but unfortunately due to some faulty packaging, the second of four tapes disappeared in transit to Nate. So that Ben's effort wasn't completely wasted, we captured and compressed what we had anyway, but it can't go on SDA since such a significant amount of material is missing. It's put up at archive.org as an "incomplete run".
Monday, November 14, 2005 by Radix
First case of actual bunny hopping
The runs for the game are done by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols and both are Single-segment on normal skill. He uses Jazz and gets a time of 0:32:21 and then his red brother Spaz for a time of 0:30:00. Judging by the last bit in the Jazz comments, it seems this was truly a case of a rush against the clock!
Saturday, November 12, 2005 by Radix
Dante still isn't dead
René Kamp improved two more of the levels for Starcraft: Brood War. He did Protoss 01, Escape from Aiur in 0:02:42, two seconds faster, and Zerg 07, Drawing of the Web in 0:09:49, 0:07:46 faster.
Finally, just a note that Nate has stopped production of new video dvds.
Sunday, November 6, 2005 by Radix
Disturbingly fast
Wes 'Arrow' Fathauer sent in his first speed run, and it's of the Genesis game Dynamite Headdy. He finished in a time of 0:47:35. Mike Uyama says "WOW" about this one.
Stefan van Dijke is at it again, Metroid Prime that is. After his 1:09 segmented run, he decided to improve his Single-segment run and ended up with a time of 1:19, four minutes faster than his previous. He claims he's done, but who believes that?
After Joseph 'Apathy' Wilcox did his second run of Doom 3, he decided to try his hand at the expansion: Resurrection of Evil. Coming in at about half the time and only 12 segments (still one file), his run is 0:52:25 on marine skill again. Where's that nightmare skill run folks?
Wouter Jansen sent three more improvements to N64's GoldenEye. He improved Frigate on all three difficulty levels by 1 second each: 0:00:23 on Agent, 0:01:06 on Secret Agent, and 0:01:12 on 00 Agent. The previous Agent run was from December 2003 by Bryan Bosshardt and the others were from April/May 2005 by Dan Cervone.
Tuesday, November 1, 2005 by Radix
Something's got to give
There are three new videos for F-Zero X and I'll actually list them. Jimmy K. Thai did Fire Field in 0:00:52.731, 1.511s faster than Dave Phaneuf. Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica did Silence 3 in 0:01:34.242, 1.180s faster and Sand Ocean 3 in 0:01:38.985, 2.943s faster, both are self-improvements.
I recently added another item on the submit page for required items when a run is submitted (not that I'm taking much these days thanks to these assholes). In addition to comments, date run was finished, and runner's name, I also need a way to contact you! Too many times I've gotten runs, then a week or so goes by and I look at it and something is wrong, and I have no way to contact the runner unless I want to search through AIM logs to find him... and that's very annoying. Someone sent me a prince of persia sands of time run about two weeks ago... and I don't have any way to tell him, except this right here, that the sound in his run is badly off synch. Well it's got to stop, so I need contact information for everyone from now on.
Sunday, October 30, 2005 by Radix
Paradox City
Nope, still no link to the run, since he did it a third time and ended up getting less than five hours, only 4:56 in 34 segments. Now that's a speed run! If only everyone was so dedicated. Between his second and third runs, David did a New Game + run using a level 99 Crono. Since this run is rather boring, I wasn't going to post it before someone did a full game run. The game's timer can't be used here at all so it's real time all the way for 0:07:50.
Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols sent in the third run on Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters. He did the 'Recover the New Parts' scenario, played as Megaman, and got a time of 0:04:01.48. Although this is all three scenarios for the game now, I can't list a total time until we have runs on every scenario by every character.
Now it's time for two more runs from NES-loving Tom 'rdrunner' Votava. He did Strider in 0:35:10 and makes fun of the game's name. Sixteen months later, he ran Gauntlet, another Arcade->NES port. There are four characters to choose from, and he picks Elf, the fast one. It seems unlikely anyone will try this game with the others but you never know. Tom's time is 0:20:13.
This update brings the total games covered here at SDA to 202. I'll let you decide which game is #200. Remember when I added Resident Evil 0 as #100? That was April 6. The site has more than doubled in size in less than seven months! That's one new game every ~51 hours... no wonder I'm going insane.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005 by Radix
Sigh
Tuesday, October 25, 2005 by Radix
Everything's being erased
Another unknown game from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava is The Lone Ranger for NES. One of Tom's longest runs, it takes him 0:57:43 to finish this one.
Monday, October 24, 2005 by Radix
Out with the old
Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry recently sent a tape with three small runs on it. First is an improvement to the final stage of Metal Slug X for PlayStation. He gets a time of 0:03:30.05, 7.92 seconds faster than his previous run where he died at the boss. In Mega Man: The Power Battle for PS2/GCN/Xbox, Phil had previously done one of the three scenarios and now it's time for the other two. He does the Mega Man 3-6 stages in 0:02:18.33 and the Mega Man 7 stages in 0:01:46.47. That makes a total time of 0:06:25.20, a short game indeed.
But it's not the shortest run on the site, which the new Game list can easily prove. Just pick your desired system, or the entire list, then chose to sort by run time and viola, the list by time! If you view the full list sorted alphabetically, you can see that no games on the site start with N or O yet ... an odd coincidence or just no good games start with those letters? Thanks to Hans Brigman for writing the base perl script for the new game list, though I pretty much totally rewrote it, and to Astra Piper for doing some javascript for me. There's still a few things I need to clean up too, like having the release date for each port of a game listed... If you check the GBA list by release date, you'll see years in the 20th century in there, before GBA came out, because of the ports. I didn't want to delay the list anymore because of this. Hopefully everyone likes it, but feel free to bitch on the forum if you don't.
Thursday, October 20, 2005 by Radix
The secret is out
Tom 'rdrunner' Votava took on the role of Harrison Ford in two Indiana Jones games for NES. The Last Crusade is done in 0:03:35 and The Temple Of Doom in 0:05:13.
The new game list format is almost ready, I swear!
Saturday, October 15, 2005 by Radix
The forum might need Hangul support now...
Thursday, October 13, 2005 by Radix
The rest of the update
Just make sure you remember that timing games without timers, especially PC games, is at best, an inaccurate science. At worst, it's enough to drive me insane. Always take such times with an implied margin of error in mind. Andres's run on easy is 0:48:19, about six and a half minutes better than Mark. On hard he takes 1:01:10. This run probably isn't as interesting to watch since it was done earlier, and the harder skill makes it slower (obviously). Different skills are valid categories though (just look at all those Nightmare skill Quake demos we've got), so however fast you can go on higher difficulties is still a speed run.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 by Radix
I wish I could get a good night's sleep
This update was going to contain more, but I'm going to bed.
Monday, October 10, 2005 by Radix
Attack of the Wouters
There's also some updates to the table of individual level runs on GoldenEye. Some of these were done over a year ago, but I didn't receive the vids until a few months ago, and I was lazy to fully convert/encode them and do the rest of the work until Wouter's run meant they'd be paired. So here they are, all but one is a one second improvement:
Next there's a full complement of runs on Star Wars: Episode I Racer for Nintendo 64 / Dreamcast / PC by Wouter Jansen. But wait! This isn't the same Wouter Jansen as the GoldenEye runner above. They're probably even in different countries (I don't even know), and this Wouter will be listed as "Wouter M. Jansen" to differentiate them. Believe it or not, I didn't plan these two guys' runs to go into the same update until a couple days ago. In fact, thanks to Astra Piper for finally doing most of the work involved in getting these runs up. Anyway, Wouter did runs of all 25 tracks of the game, and the total comes to 1:27:33.762. Only five of the tracks have separate lap videos, the rest have the best lap time inside the full course video.
I've temporarily put up a torrent of all of these vids for easy downloading (although the FTP is another option). You might notice I've done that for several recent runs that have multiple files (mgs3, dmc3, etc) and I tend to leave them for 4-5 days or so, but this time I didn't have one single demo.pl link to put the torrent in so I'm mentioning it here! If you do go to demo.pl links, note that the High quality links aren't working yet. Archive.org decided to change their importing procedure over the weekend, and all the HQ files I'd already uploaded to the upload server are now sitting there and I can't get to them, and I'm forced to upload them again using the new method!
Saturday, October 8, 2005 by Radix
Have you eaten a reptile today?
Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody already had some runs on Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, but he decided it wasn't enough. He did 100% runs with both the default Leon character and the Joachim bonus character, although, as with most games, just what to call '100%' is a little foggy. With Leon there are two rather rare drops he didn't include, and includes all map areas since that's what the game is tracking with a %. He gets 1:50:19 with Leon and 1:22:15 with Joachim. That's six categories for this game that Damien holds ... in the Quake news they'd call that "total ownage".
Tom Votava must love short repetitive music because he sure ran a lot of NES games that have some. In Castlequest you need to journey around a puzzle-filled castle looking for keys in order to do the standard princess rescuing. Tom abuses death as a way to gain a little bit of time and ends up with 0:20:26.
There's a new time on Max Payne 2's p3c5 level, "Return to Funhouse, as Mona". Tomi Salo got a time of 0:00:41, 16 seconds faster than Stefan Breunig.
Friday, October 7, 2005 by Radix
Easy dying
Tom Votava's trip through the Deadly Towers NES game wasn't an easy one. He says the game is hard and just beating it is hard, and even wrote a FAQ for it at GameFAQs. The reviews there seem to think the game just sucks though, with lots of 1/10 scores and one review title being "Take Zelda, turn it into complete crap, and this is the result". It just goes to show that those people saying only old games are good are only remembering the old games that were good. Perhaps this will join the ranks of Chameleon Twist as "famously bad" games to run? Now that I've hyped the bad-ness I wonder how many people will get his 0:43:10 run just to look at it, hehe.
Wednesday, October 5, 2005 by Radix
Only nine more
Movie-based video games aren't known to be the best batch of games. I do believe I haven't added any runs on any previously, so Tom's run of Who Framed Roger Rabbit for NES is the first. It's a very short game once you know what you're doing and Tom finishes it in only 0:06:05. The music in this game is rather catchy, I think.
Tom's longest submission is his only one longer than one hour: Adventures Of Lolo III for NES. With twice the levels of its predecessors, Lolo 3 is quite a difficult game. The idea of memorizing all one hundred puzzles for a speed playthrough is daunting, but Tom manages to do it with only one major error. I do wonder if the endlessly repeating music made him go insane, or if he just muted it. Tom's time comes to 1:23:34.
Just so the update isn't all about Tom, I'll post an improvement of F-Zero X 64DD from Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica... again. He improved his Big Foot time by 2.213 seconds to get 0:01:27.046, which brings the total of all 64DD tracks down to 0:18:07.353. Most noticable in this run compared to his others is that the ghost cars from previous races are never seen again after only 20 seconds. Sometimes it takes him until the final lap to pass them all.
Monday, October 3, 2005 by Radix
The hard and the ugly
For a better game, but perhaps just as hard, we turn to one of Tom's two Super Nintendo submissions: Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, part of All-Stars. Mario and Luigi have different abilities in this game so there's two possible runs, times two for with warps and without warps, plus you can save and quit to segment it if you want, though that would certainly take away the impressiveness of any run. Tom's run uses Mario and lots of warp zones to get to the end of D-4 in a time of 0:18:05. No deaths along the way; I wonder if we'll ever see a warpless run without deaths?
Just so the update isn't all about Tom, I'll post an improvement of F-Zero X 64DD from Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica. He improved his Port Town 3 time by 1.567 seconds to get 0:01:34.670, which brings the total of all 64DD tracks down to 0:18:09.566.
Sunday, October 2, 2005 by Radix
Fifty hearts for Holy Water!
When Tom 'rdrunner' Votava ran Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse in October 2003, he did all four endings. Two of them got posted last month, and now it's time for the other two. With Syfa, the time comes out to 0:32:55, and it's not very different from the run without a partner. In fact, you might say "Hey, that's the exact same time, you must have made a mistake!". Indeed I did... when I noticed I got the same time I looked again, and I had typoed the end frame for the NoPartner run when I entered it into Excel (39874 as 39844) and therefore mis-timed it. I've renamed it to 0:32:57, which makes the Syfa run two seconds faster. Yay for ice power! With Grant, the run comes out the slowest of the four choices to 0:34:21, but every level beyond the first is different in this run thanks to Grant's suction-cup feet.
Tom also ran Castlevania II: Simon's Quest for NES, completing the Castlevania NES series at SDA. Not a very well-liked game, cv2 doesn't have as much action as the others and isn't linear but doesn't have much path choice. With towns only open during the day, parts of Tom's 0:49:58 run is simply killing things to wait for the sun to rise but I don't see that changing if anyone challenges his time.
Going even further back in time, Tom ran The Legend of Zelda for NES in July 2003. Tom's time of 0:34:04 is about 0:01:47 faster than the run from Mike 'TSA' Damiani I had up which was done in June 2004. The reason for the time-travel is that Tom's run wasn't available until right now!
Saturday, October 1, 2005 by Radix
Holy shit it's October
Joseph 'Apathy' Wilcox improved his run of Doom 3 by taking the standard speed run approach: don't kill stuff, just run by! There's also a new (only?) rocket jump shortcut in his new run. Thanks to a little research from 'Kibumbi', the timing for this game was altered a bit. It seems that even John Carmack can't figure out how to make a loading screen appear quickly, and during the black screen before it appears, it's apparently being ... loaded. That's right, the time to display the loading screen depends on your computer! This means the timing stops as soon as the fade to black is complete and resumes once the loading screen disappears, and this is noted on the page as it doesn't follow the standard otherwise. Joseph's new run tims to 1:40:10 using this method, but it's not 27 minutes faster than his previous "2:07" run. The time difference is about two minutes (for Joseph's computer) so it's more like 25 minutes better. Impressive either way!
The slew of runs from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava starts here. Only his run of Castlevania is ready right now, but it's easier to post them as they ready, even if I did want to hold off on the remaining Castlevania series games to go with this. Tom's time from April 2003 is 0:14:29. Tom's run does not contain a few enemy boosts from Wesley Dekkers's European version run, so even though a 5/6 multiplier would impley Tom's run is comparatively faster, it's best to not trust such conversions and judge for yourself which you think is better. Both could be improved with strategies from the other I think, but who will do it?