Tim Bright has finally finished a run that I've been begging people to do for what seems like two years, but it can't be that long because the game has only been out 17 months. The game is Resident Evil 4 for GameCube, and the run is one from scratch, without infinite weapons! The only submission on this category so far had been a 3+ hour run done merely so I would post infinite weapon runs. After several rants on the forum and many months, Tim finished his run in the amazing time of 2:06:24. That's less than 2/3rds of the previous time and only 7 minutes 17 seconds more than the infinite run, although that one is SS vs the 19 segments of this run (one per chapter).

In other news, Alex 'aresake' Eustis cuts down the total Starcraft time from 3:31:57 to 3:29:08 with two more runs. They are Protoss 1 "First Strike" in 0:03:17, 0:00:52 faster, and Protoss 3 "Higher Ground" in 0:09:09, 0:01:57 faster.

Freddy Andersson improved the existing 100% run of Mega Man X after acquiring an NTSC Super Nintendo and recording equipment... not an easy task in Sweden. His improved run clocks in at 0:39:41, compare to the previous 0:41:36 by Mike Uyama and you'll know that it's bound to be a great run!

Trevor Seguin did a run of the original Mega Man... a game that took me at least 20 game overs to beat when I got the anniversary collection. A game that was voted by some site I can't remember as having the worst video game box-art of all time! All that and Trevor beats it in 0:23:58.

Note that the second kind of normal quality has changed yet again. Due to massive peer-pressure, nate has succumbed away from the trusty avi format to some weird mp4 thing that you might not be able to play in your favorite player. If you don't want to change, you can stick with the divx normal quality like me!

It's time for another case of old runs made new! Vincent Catalaa took the lmp recordings of the best runs of Final Doom for PC and converted them to multi-flavored avi files. Final Doom consists of two episodes which are practically whole games, and are run individually. The records from February 2002 are both by Drew 'stx-Vile' DeVore, who got 0:55:34 on 'Evilution' and 0:41:11 on 'Plutonia'. Both runs are Single-segment through the respective episode and on Ultra-Violence skill.

In other news, shareware Quake turned ten years old yesterday, and to celebrate, QdQ released an avi version of Quake done double Quick lite, a two player run through the one-and-only Quake on easy skill in a time of 0:09:55.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson improved on his run of Quake 4. Playing on the lowest skill, Private, he finishes in around 2:02:35. I didn't quite time this the same as the last run, which was marked 2:09:54. In that run I didn't stop timing until after Peter typed in a save game name and hit the save button to start saving... rather silly. This time I stopped timing as soon as he goes into the menu and added half-a-second. I wanted to have that as the standard "save penalty" on games where you can quick save, although I haven't always consistently added it... oh well. So anyway, the conclusion is that this run isn't actually 0:07:19 faster than the old run... maybe 5 and half to 6 minutes though. This is why I strive to have "consistent" timing rules so that future runs of a game are always timed the same, but sometimes I mess it up.

There are two new runs on the game Ico for PlayStation 2, now notable as the game with the shortest name in the list. The two runs are both by Kevin 'Enhasa' Juang and he does both a Single-segment run and a run in 4 segments, with less than six minutes between them; pretty impressive for a run almost two hours long.

Another run from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava gets posted, and it's only his second run on Super Nintendo instead of NES. His run is on Zombies Ate My Neighbors. The previous run on the game, by Adam Sweeney, finished with the max of 10 victims alive at the end, but Tom's new run saves all possible victims in every stage along the way in order to have a 100% run. Tom's time ends up at 2:17:16. This is actually a few seconds slower than Adam's run but I removed his because of the 100% vs non thing, the time difference was so small for a 2+ hour run, it's esentially the same.

Freddy Andersson did a run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game for NES. His time on the European version comes out to be 0:46:32. Enjoy the beating up of numerous faceless foot soliders and the usual Turtles' enemies like Baxter, Krang and Shredder. Special thanks go to Michael Pölzl in Austria for sending nate the new stereo PAL VCR. The quality is much better now, but it's too bad this had to be a NES game so it's only in mono anyway.

Last year, Rolf Karp did a speed run on System Shock 2 for PC. Today I'm finally posting his 0:36:11 run. The run is supposedly in 27 segments but there's no way to prove it because of the crappy recording program used to capture the gameplay not recording the game's menu screens. This is why the run starts right in the game and just ends with no ending cutscenes.

Jared 'Ifrit' Nicholson sent in a run on Mega Man 8 about two months ago. We didn't post it... only nate and I saw it I think. Nate pointed out a few things to improve and Jared started to redo the run before I had a chance to time the original run. He told us to not bother posting it and eventually he got an improved run and sent that, which actually got timed (though not by me...) to 0:58:20.

Tom 'rdrunner' Votava sent in another batch of runs on obscure NES games. The first to actually be verified is The Guardian Legend, which he ran Single-segment in 1:03:12.

Mike Uyama sent in a run on another Metal Slug series game, number 5. Again he plays on hard mode and still doesn't die, and achieves a time of 0:25:38.

Alex 'aresake' Eustis continues to knock minutes off of Starcraft: Brood War with two more runs. He ran Protoss 2 "Dunes of Shakuras" in 0:10:41, beating David 'marshmallow' Gibbons's run from exactly a year ago by 0:01:32, and Protoss 3 "Legacy of the Xel'Naga" in 0:06:48, beating René Kamp's run by 0:02:06. The total Brood War time goes down from 3:32:34 to 3:28:56.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson sent in 18 improvements to the individual level 100% runs on Yoshi's Island for Super Nintendo. The runs either improve his previous runs or first-time runs from the original set done by David Gibbons. Here's the required dotted list style update:

• 1-1, "Make Eggs, Throw Eggs" in 0:00:53, previously 0:00:58.
• 1-2, "Watch Out Below!" in 0:00:56, previously 0:01:04.
• 1-3, "The Cave Of Chomp Rock" in 0:01:13, previously 0:01:20.
• 1-4, "Burt The Bashful's Fort" in 0:02:17, previously 0:02:32.
• 1-6, "Shy-Guys On Stilts" in 0:01:59, previously 0:02:07.
• 1-8, "Salvo The Slime's Castle" in 0:02:28, previously 0:02:38.
• 1-E, "Poochy Ain't Stupid" in 0:01:03, previously 0:01:49.
• 2-3, "What's Gusty Taste Like?" in 0:01:44, previously 0:02:04.
• 2-4, "Bigger Boo's Fort" in 0:02:58, previously 0:03:21.
• 2-5, "Watch Out For Lakitu" in 0:01:58, previously 0:02:14.
• 2-6, "The Cave Of The Mystery Maze" in 0:01:58, previously 0:02:14.
• 2-7, "Lakitu's Wall" in 0:02:43, previously 0:03:08.
• 2-8, "The Potted Ghost's Castle" in 0:04:25, previously 0:04:56.
• 3-1, "Welcome To Monkey World!" in 0:01:18, previously 0:01:27.
• 3-2, "Jungle Rhythm..." in 0:01:11, previously 0:01:21.
• 3-3, "Nep-Enuts' Domain" in 0:03:12, previously 0:03:33.
• 3-4, "Prince Froggy's Fort" in 0:04:16, previously 0:05:01.
• 3-5, "Jammin' Through The Trees" in 0:01:16, previously 0:01:23.

The total improvement is 5 minutes 22 seconds. I should note that some of the times I got are one second off from the times Mychal lists in his comments... I didn't bother editing them.

Adam 'Coolboyman' Vierra did a run of Banjo-Tooie but it's not at all like the first run on this game. He made full use of a large, talking red book known as Cheato. I wouldn't allow this run until someone had done a full game run without it, just because it's so "cheesy". Sure, it's part of the game, and therefore it's not like a gameshark type of cheat, but it still makes the game so easy I wanted a normal run first. Adam's run involves just running around collecting notes to learn the bare minimum moves to make it to the end of the game and beat it in 0:56:25.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did a run of the RPG Mega Man X: Command Mission for PlayStation 2. This 20 segment run comes to a time of 5:46, a little over six hours of video.

Alex Nichols also sent in new runs on all three stages of Mega Man: The Power Battle from the Anniversary Collection. He improved the previous runs by Philippe Henry by between 16 and 38 seconds to bring the game's total down to 0:05:08.94.

Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown did a run of the always-loved Jaws for NES. Daniel's run clocks out to 0:04:48, just two seconds shy of a full minute improvement from the first run by Adrian Feiertag. That's quite a lot of improvement for one of the shortest runs on the site!

Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho did a run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one of those notoriously difficult NES games. Blake did his run with only one death... which was on purpose to save a little time, so I label his 0:19:32 as 'with death abuse'. Considering the amount of damage he takes when plowing through enemies, it should perhaps be called 'with complete turtle abuse' instead.

These two runs come in six possible versions instead of nate's usual four. Due to a lot of heated discussion on the forum lately, he has started encoding things in an H.264 codec. If you don't already have something that can play them, you can try VLC player. For now at least, normal and low quality versions will still be available in DivX.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron did a very long run, now the longest on the site. Some people will once again wonder why I have a "7 hour" limit in the rules if I let people do longer runs, but I always said it was never intended to be a hard limit, only so people wouldn't take <random huge ass rpg here> and do a 20-50 hour "run" and try to submit it. Wesley's run is on Chrono Cross for PlayStation, indeed a pretty large rpg. It took him great effort to take a run down from the 12-13 hour range to finish his 50-segment run in 7:55:08. There are actually two endings to this game (a lot less than its predecessor) and Wesley does both by having two part 50s since that's the only change needed. The good ending gets 7:59:15, just under 8 hours. I'm very glad this game has a timer that's updated at the end, although including seconds in such long RPGs seems a little silly, but I might as well include it since the game does!

Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns did a run of Thief: Deadly Shadows for PC on Expert mode, getting an approximated time of 1:31:15. Due to the nature of buggy PC recording programs, loading screens and some other things are missing, causing some segments to abruptly end... and a resulting blurring of the timing. Daniel says his run is "100% loot" but only in the missions, not the city, since 'there is no way to tell what I have got so it can be safely ignored'. I'm not sure about that but I left it as _100p_ anyway.

I kept forgetting to mention it, but 'LonelyBob' on the forum has announced his creation of a speed run contest with $100 of his own money as the prize. All you have to do is do a speed run of Resident Evil: Code Veronica in a Single-segment sometime by the end of July and submit it to the site. The "best" run wins. Unfortunately due to the game being cross-platform and loading times counting in the game's timer, judging just which run is best if we receive lots of entries could prove difficult. But that shouldn't stop you from trying.

Alex Eustis did a run of Final Fantasy V, originally a Japan-only Super Nintendo game, later released for PlayStation. Alex's 25 segment run comes out to 3:26 on the game timer, but apparently this game's timer acts a bit differently than previous FFs which included everything. The real time of all the videos is 5 hours and 5 minutes, so the time must not be including menus or cutscenes or something.

On a personal note, I've moved 98% of my stuff out of the hell-hole apartment I had the unfortunate mistake of moving into last August. Of course, I'm still typing this from that place right now because my computer is there, since Verizon takes a week to hook up a DSL connection.

There's a new run category on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes by Kim 'Silent echo' Siafa. Kim did a Single-segment run on hard mode to go alongside his SS run on normal. The time is 2:24, 27 minutes slower than normal. In case you didn't know, on hard mode all of the enemies have twice the health, resulting in longer boss fights and needing to get more ammo and energy. The run's biggest downfall is not skipping the Dark Suit, but since it's hard mode, doing that is pretty darn difficult so it's not that bad.

Tom 'marth1' Radovich has helped expand the list of obscure NES games on the list. He sent in a run on the game Felix the Cat, one of many NES games released after the Super Nintendo was available. His run through the game clocks at 0:26:03.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody submitted an inaugural run of the Castlevania game from last year's holiday releases: Curse of Darkness for PS2. His 14 segment run comes out to a time of 2:21:02.

Freddy Andersson improved his run of the European version of Mega Man 3 for NES. Almost exactly one year after his previous run he improved the time by three minutes on the dot. The new time of 0:45:08 is quite good. It's a shame the worst mistake in the run was on the final boss. Freddy wrote a book on his comments for this run... I like to see that.

Besmir 'Zoid' Sheqi has reclaimed his record for Metroid Prime's Single-segment 100% run from Ted 'Ding Chavez' Broyles. His new time of 1:36 is two minutes faster than the previous by Ted and notable for being faster than the first posted segmented run on the game by yours truly. Similar to the above, it's a shame that the last boss's randomness added at least one minute to the time of this run.

Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell has completed a 20 segment run of God of War for PlayStation 2. With four available difficulty levels, Philip picks the hardest one, aptly named "God" difficulty. This game has a timer, but it's only visible on loading and saving a file. To make things easier for me we'll require any runs of this game (including Single-segment) to end at the final save point. There's nothing much to the game after that, just a few seconds of walking up and sitting in a chair... any other games end by sitting in a chair? The game's timer doesn't count all the many unskippable cutscenes, so the run's time of 2:16:23 is a little over an hour less than the total length of all of the videos.

Another whole game run from Doom 2's Compet-N site has been turned into avi files for those without Doom installed to enjoy. The run is a 2-player coop run on Ultra Violence skill done by Radek Pecka and Vincent Catalaa a year ago. The time is 0:22:27; compare with 0:26:09 for the best single-player UV run by Radek. Be sure to watch both Radek's and Vincent's point of view.

Adam 'Zhegan' Steidl submitted a run of Silent Hill 3 for PlayStation 2. He did it Single-segment on the easiest skill in a time of 0:45:49. Commence complaining about how dark this video is in 3..2..1..now!

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson improved four of the 100%s of individual levels on Yoshi's Island for Super Nintendo: 4-1, GO! GO! MARIO!!, in 0:02:00, 11 seconds faster. 4-2, The Cave Of The Lakitus, in 0:01:53, 17 s faster. 4-3, Don't Look Back!, in 0:02:06, 20 s faster. 4-4, Marching Milde's Fort, in 0:04:53, 32 s faster.

That's just the beginning of the Yoshi's Island runs in this update. Mike 'grndino' Arnold has been working for a few months on low% runs of every level, including the six new levels on the GBA version. Nearly every level ends with him getting hit on purpose and then waiting out Mario's crying until he has a score of zero and crossing the goal with that, the lowest possible score. Some levels have unavoidable red coins or flowers, while other levels have no enemies with which to take a hit near the end, so not every level is 0%. The levels have mostly different strategies from the 100%s (aside from 'go fast'), so they're worth checking out. Unfortunately I didn't have time to set up a torrent link, so you'll have to use the archive ftp link for easier downloading.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson did a 100% run with some death abuse of the cel-shaded PlayStation 2 game Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. The run comes in at a hefty 41 segments which Mychal says is why he got it done so quickly. The time comes out to 2:55.

Mike Uyama has made a mockery of the previous runs on Turtles in Time. Not only did he beat the previous Raphael run by almost two minutes, but he played on Hard skill instead of Normal. He didn't suffer a single death. He also put me to shame for ever posting that first run. Since I own the game and have played it dozens of times, I thought the first run was a good start. Maybe it's because I never played as Raphael or always played the game 2-player with non-gamers, but I didn't realize just how fast some parts could be done until I watched Mike's 0:22:31.

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody decided to do a speed run of the original Metroid for reasons he can't fathom. His goal was to improve the 100% run, and after a few runs he almost sent in, he finally got one he really liked. The time of his run is 0:52:23, 4 minutes and 17 seconds faster than the previous run.

I have finally posted all of the individual level speed runs of We ♥ Katamari. The combined effort of Wes 'Arrow' Fathauer, John 'Dr. Thinker' Masteller, Tom 'slowbro' Batchelor and Aaron 'khfan1' Surette churned out all of the levels in a total of 0:41:21 on the game's timer. Correction: Turns out the wrong ALAP2 video was posted initially. A 0:01:11 is now available on the game's page. If you got (or still want to use) the torrents you'll have to download that one separately.

After 13 months in the making, a new speed run through Half-Life 2 was recently finished. This team effort run came up with a lot of new tricks, shortcuts and jaw-dropping stunts to drop the time. The previous run was by David Gibbons and had a time of 2:14:58. The new run is 1:36:57, 38 minutes faster, and also on a hard instead of normal difficulty.

It's been eight years to this month since Blizzard released the phenomenal game of Starcraft, and it's still going strong. Alex 'aresake' Eustis has submitted two more runs for our viewing pleasure. They are Protoss 9 "Shadow Hunters" in 0:06:20 for Starcraft, nearly half the time of the old run, and Protoss 8 "Countdown" in 0:13:23 for Starcraft: Brood War, 0:03:16 faster. The total Starcraft time goes down from 3:37:51 to 3:31:57 and the total Brood War time goes down from 3:35:50 to 3:32:34.