joe stanski, sda's new rising star, has ripped apart virtually all of my individual-level times in sonic the hedgehog 2. after appearing in the sda forum about six weeks ago he quickly surpassed all of us who would have hoped to have competed with him. there are too many new times to list here, and there are even more still to come ... sonic 2's individual-level total is down 55 seconds today alone -- and why are you still here reading this!? check out the massacred table now!!

Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove has been working for many months on an improved Single-segment 100% run of Super Mario 64. By complete coincidence, the run is now ready to post during the same week as the 10-year anniversary of the release of Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 itself in North America. So, celebrate one of Mario's birthdays by watching Peter's very impressive 2:09:40 run, available in six different flavors. (two via torrents)

Thanks again to mikwuyma for helping me post some really old but not forgotten runs. This time it's Trespasser for PC, based in the Jurassic Park universe. Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti completed it in 0:47:30. Near the end there's a strange moment that seems like mysterious teleporting... but according to a fan page that Andres links to, it's apparently a legitimately put in secret in the game.

Queue.html watchers would have noticed 1 run in 'ready to update' before this update... but it's really three. I just counted it as one because they're all on the same game: the eternal source of speed runs: Metroid Prime. Besmir 'Zoid' Sheqi sent in the following:

- Single-segment 100% in 1:34, two minutes faster than his previous.
- Hard-mode any% in 1:15 in 18 segments, 9 minutes faster than Benjamin Feng.
- Hard-mode 100% in 1:37 in 22 segments. This is a new category - it's 9 minutes slower than normal 100% segmented and matches the time of my original 100% on normal.

Tom 'rdrunner' Votava sent in his first run on a Nintendo 64 game: he stomped on the recently posted run of Donkey Kong 64. Tom got a time of 4:36, vs 5:04 that Joe Wiewel had, but Tom's run is Single-segment and Joe's wasn't. Not that segmented really got anyone much in this game anyway.

Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols did a run of Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero for Nintendo 64 / PlayStation. His eight segment run, completed back in 2005, finished in approximately 0:50:32.

There are three new speed runs on some Mega Man X games... the worst of the lot. X5, X6, and X7. I haven't personally played them, but I hear they suck. The runs on each game are by three different people - it wasn't one person conquering all of the suckiness.
X5 is 0:11:54 by Ben 'Cauldrath' Hanes in 5 segments, over 4 minutes faster than the SS.
X6 is 0:31:00 by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk, nearly 7 minutes faster than his previous run.
X7 is 1:02:41 by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols, new to the site.

For non Mega Man, read this bit written by mikwuyma:
Mark 'Allantois' Freyenberger did a run of Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2. Don't know the game, well not many people do, which why it took over a year for this run to be posted. However, the run isn't nearly as long, being a 28-segment run with a time of 0:43:18.

Total number of hours Radix put in for his job for the two weeks spanning August 27 - September 9: 127.

Ben 'Mkt2015' Fichter sent in a run on Jak II for PlayStation 2 again. You may remember that on 2005-11-17 I posted news about his first run, which had a significant portion missing due to a tape vanishing in transit (lesson learned: package your tapes well). Rather than redo the exact same run, Ben did the game on a different mode, the unlockable "Hero Mode". Normally at SDA we require a "default" run first, but due to Ben's unfortunate luck, we'll let this one slide. You can find his 56 segment 4:42 run on the game page. That's 33 minutes faster than the default run he did w/the missing parts (link to that in his comments BTW). There was a couple encoding problems with this run the verifiers told us about... I'm not honestly sure if we got them all straightened out. There's so many runs in the queue, and I've put in 60 hours for my job in the last week, so I don't exactly have much time for the site. If there's still problems I'm sure people will be nice enough to complain about them on the forum.

in case you haven't been following events in the forum, i'm here to tell you that a large number of requests for flash encoding have been fulfilled as of tonight. click on that crazy link in the previous sentence if you want to find out exactly what is available now as embedded flash. keep in mind that you're free (and encouraged) to copy the html code offered on these flash.pl pages and use it in your myspace, blog, website or whatever to help spread the gospel of sda!

also joining the party tonight are three completely reprocessed runs of old. richard ureta's super mario bros. 3 in 0:11:11 and mega man 2 in 0:30:39 as well as andrew 'ajbolt89' bolton's latest hard low% run in metroid zero mission (finishing with a time of 0:45:42) have all been recaptured and reencoded using my latest methods. x264 ftw!

for my next trick, i will release the speed demos archive knowledge base! this wiki-based, genius-powered answer center is my latest attempt to keep the documentation around here somewhat more up-to-date. note, though, that i still recommend you send your dvd/vhs/whatever to me for processing (rather than wading through all the stuff in the knowledge base and feeling stupid because you can't get it right).

Francis 'F-Man' LeBlanc has submitted his first run. It's an improvement to the run as Sonic in Sonic Adventure for Dreamcast/GCN/PC. Francis's run is 0:34:33; compare to the previous 0:46:11 by Mychal Jefferson and draw your own conclusions.

Peter 'Kibumbi' Knutsson has finished his nearly year old project to run Doom 3 on nightmare skill. The final result of his struggle is a 38-segment run coming to a time of 1:25:11, about 5.5 minutes faster than the previous run on Marine skill!

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has improved his run of Mario & Luigi for GBA. His new run is 29 segments (compare to 55 of the old) and clocks in at 3:26. That's one hour faster than his old one, which just goes to show you that his previous run really sucked!

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe has saved Earth from alien invasion in the PlayStation version of the classic game Space Invaders. He plays on normal difficulty and gets 0:39:51, and then again on expert and gets 0:51:59. In keeping with the theme of the last update, this item is named wrong at archive because I'm an idiot. Not that the item page actually exists yet at archive since I had no time to create it. Updating everything in two places sucks.

Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson sent in a bunch more individual level 100%s on Yoshi's Island. I'm too lazy and tired to list the levels, but the total improvement was 8 minutes 42 seconds if I didn't fuck up the HTML.

Mandela Shabazz submitted a run on a game called 'Shinobi'. According to GameFAQs, there are eight games named that. Mandela's run is on the 2002 PlayStation 2 edition and gets a time of 0:38:29.

Just a note to the queue watchers: I've dropped four runs from the queue that have been in there for over 6 months with no interest, or some other problems associated with them.

There's a run of everyone's favorite Sonic character - Big the Cat - added to the Sonic Adventure page. Andres 'Mad Andy' Montalbetti completes the fat purple cat's story in 0:09:03.

There's a new run on Rescue Rangers for NES by Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson. His run clocks in at 0:10:57, which is faster by an impossible-to-know-for-sure-due-to-idiot-PAL-programmers-amount-of-time than the previous 2 player run.

Tonight, two new runs on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link for NES. Tommy Montgomery improved the "New Game +" run, previously by Marc J. Dziezynski. The new run is still full of Up+A warping and death abuse, and improves the previous by about 5 minutes. The other is a run "like the game was meant to be": starting from scratch, and no use of that second controller, and no killing poor old Link (on purpose) to refill magic. That run clocks in about 5¾ minutes longer than the from scratch run which does use those things (by Scott Kessler).

A new game has been added to the front of the game list ... if you're sorting alphabetically. The game is ActRaiser for Super Nintendo. Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe did runs on both the default setting and professional (which is less than half the time, due to not being the entire thing, I guess).

Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson has improved the run on NES Contra, getting 30 seconds faster than the previous record.

News updates will probably not be as wordy from now on; apparently nobody reads the news anymore aside from the people on IRC who correct my mistakes.

There are two new-ish games added to the list: Strife for PC and .hack//Infection Part 1 for PS2. There are two runs on Strife, both Single-segment, leading to different endings (good and bad I guess). Dot Hack had a run before, but I had to delist it when it was discovered that a large part was missing. If only I kept track of who verified the original run, I could fire them! The new run not only contains all parts, it's 47 minutes faster. No torrents today, but everything is at dreamhost for a speedy download.

With .hack you'll also find flash links. Nate decided that if other sites are going to copy our content and upload it as the horrible format known as flash (usually with no credit to the runner), why not just do it ourselves and make them realize there's no need to copy it anymore. So if you're a happy windows XP user too clueless to install DivX or use VLC or something, go with the crappy flash!

Joe Wiewel recently took on the burden of speed running a game with a horrible save system. A game that auto saves on every pickup you collect, yet still has a "save" in the menu (it doesn't actually do anything). A game that doesn't let you copy your save file from one slot to another. The game in question is Donkey Kong 64 for N64. As a result of this horrible save setup, it's not possible to do a proper segmented run of this game. You can only retry the first segment... after that if you make a mistake, either start all the way over or just take it. Joe gave the run a few tries and ended up with an 11 segment run (which relies on save warping... the only benefit of segmenting a run of this game at all) in a time of 5:04.

There's a new run posted to the Resident Evil for GameCube page... well, it's not really new. The run was made over 2 years ago and the runner, Trevor Seguin, has decided to submit it for unknown reasons. Hey, I'm not complaining, I always like it when people decide to share their runs, even if they're old! The run in question is sort of a new game plus type of thing, he has the rocket launcher unlocked. From that you probably think 'oh so he just gibs every zombie', but no, he still does A LOT of dodging. The total time for this Single-segment run as Jill is 1:24:35, a little over 5 minutes faster than the run without RL.

I have made a slight change to the submit page in the contacting me section. I have added a note saying to NOT send me offline ICQ messages. They are very annoying. Today there was like six of them for me when I signed on. I usually just close the windows and forget about them. If I'm not online, do us both a favor and send me an email so I have this thing called a record and an index of what was said.

Here are the things that should've been in the last update when I complained about archive having issues. Tomi Salo improved eight of his individual level runs on Max Payne 2 for PC. I'm feeling lazy so you don't get a list of what levels were improved by what and to what with links, because they're easy to find on the page. Anything with a year of 2006 is new! Jose 'PiccoloCube' Karica has improved one of his times on F-Zero X 64DD: Sand Ocean 3 is now 0:01:33.098, nearly 6 seconds faster than his previous time.

Another obscure game from Tom 'rdrunner' Votava has reached the top of the queue: The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES, another one of those really hard NES games. Tom finishes it without dying in 0:24:28.

On another note, just after nate moved and before new speed runs started arriving, he recaptured some older runs into the newer divx+mp4 flavors, with a few more to follow. The first two were done due to poor color balance treatment in the past. If you didn't like the quality of Brandon Armstrong's Silent Hill 2 or my Luigi's Mansion runs the first time, check them out again!

Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody has sent in three more runs of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Two of the runs are new categories, one is an improvement, all are on hard mode. In fact, this game doesn't actually have a 'default' run, on normal skill as Soma. I didn't know at the time I first posted the game that hard was only available after beating it once, so I'd appreciate it if someone could do such a run. The improved run is playing as Julius, speeding through and beating the game in 0:08:44, about a minute and a half faster than the previous run. Before that run, Damien did a 'new game +' run as Soma, where you start with anything you have from a previous playthrough, but still at level 1. This finishes in 0:19:57. Finally, he did another Julius run, but this one is 100%... not 100% map completion - that's not even possible with Juilus, but simply beating all of the bosses. This finishes in 0:16:46.

There'd be some things in this paragraph if item checkout wasn't broken at archive.org today. As a result, I can't add files to existing items at the moment.

Starcraft: Brood War gets a punch to the face with four new runs from Alex 'Aresake' Eustis and Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell with combined savings of 0:11:13. Alex ran Zerg 1 "Vile Disruption" in 0:01:40, 0:01:31 faster. Philip ran Zerg 2 "Reign of Fire" in 0:03:05, 0:05:39 faster. Back to Alex with Zerg 3 "The Kel-Morian Combine" in 0:10:43, 0:01:14 faster and Zerg 4 "The Liberation of Korhal" in 0:10:54, 0:02:49 faster. The total Brood War time goes down from 3:28:56 to 3:17:43.

Starcraft gets a slap on the wrist compared to Brood War with three new runs. Philip 'ballofsnow' Cornell ran Terran 3 "Desperate Alliance" in 0:20:11, 4 seconds faster, Zerg 5 "The Amerigo" in 0:03:44, 21 seconds faster and Protoss 5 "Choosing Sides" in 0:00:43, 4 seconds faster. The total Starcraft time goes down from 3:29:08 to 3:28:39.

Try finding your speed run in this.