Those unfamiliar with the remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube may not realise that it's possible to unlock an "invisible mode", where zombies and other enemies are not visible to the player. Radix has always maintained that this mode should not be treated as a separate category, partly because if you're doing a run on this game you ought to know where all the zombies are anyway, but mostly because he believed it to be less fun to watch than a conventional playthrough.

David 'DavizZz' Stierle has circumvented this restriction, however, by executing an invisible mode run on a category that currently has no visible mode equivalent - a Hard mode run on the European version (which plays at, yes, you guessed it, five-sixths speed). David's time was a four-segment 1:36:26, although the game slows the timer down to five-sixths speed as well, so the actual runtime of the videos is more like two hours. If all this weren't complicated enough, it appears that switching the PAL version of this game to 60 Hz (PAL-60) mode actually causes it to run at full NTSC speed, so if we ever get a PAL-60 run there would be a strong case for allowing it to compete directly with its NTSC cousins, unless anyone makes us aware of a major gameplay difference between the NTSC and PAL versions of this title.

We also received an attempt at Nintendo 64 Castlevania, again played on the European version. This single-segment run as Reinhardt by Baptiste Hornecker was faster than the incumbent 1:13:35 by David 'marshmallow' Gibbons. This time there were no indications from verifiers that the PAL version is slower, and this run is faster than the old effort whether this is true or not. Baptiste's time is 1:04:15.

Rounding off today's single-segment Eurofest is Jack '#endgame' Kelly, who has beaten the European version of new addition Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap in 0:55:46. This run seems to be one of those that was as much an exercise in hacking as in running - Jack had to tweak his Master System to produce composite video output and made use of game disassemblies to discover item stats - a man after my own heart !

It seems that Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson is never out of the news for very long. Freddy has roared through film tie-in The Lion King for the SNES in 0:16:53 on Difficult mode.

Three shadowy forms at the peak of physical and mental acuity lurk in the darkness. To the untrained eye, these individuals are completely invisible; to the layman, they do not exist. These warriors are the assassins; they are ninjas. They are the men with no names.

Oh, all right then. Their names are Tommy Montgomery, Jim Hanson and Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson. They are definitely ninjas, though, having added all three of the original NES Ninja Gaiden games to SDA's game list.

Tommy sliced up Ninja Gaiden; his combination of stealth and speed earned him a time of 0:13:49. Jim's victim was Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, and his unseen acrobatics culminated in a reckoning of 0:12:45. Freddy, meanwhile, garotted Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, in 0:16:08. All three men then slipped away into the night, the only traces of their mission a few throwing stars left on the ground and six blood soaked normal quality BitTorrent links.

Wes 'Arrow' Fathauer has grooved through Genesis sequel ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron using 8 segments in 1:30:06. You can get this run via BitTorrent in normal quality DivX and H.264 versions. These and other qualities are as always also available via HTTP in the usual place.

It is difficult to understand why NES film tie-in Jaws has attracted the attention of speed runners to the degree it has, but mine is not to question why. Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown has harpooned himself a significant 50 second improvement to his old run; his new time is a man-eating 0:03:58.

I have completely exhausted my reservoir of entertaining ways to announce that Joe Stanski has improved more Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog 2 levels, so I'm not even going to try to be creative about it this time.

• Aquatic Ruin Zone, Act 1: improved by 1 second to 0:00:21;
• Mystic Cave Zone, Act 2: improved by 1 second to 0:00:42;
• Oil Ocean Zone, Act 2: improved by 4 seconds to 0:00:50;
• Metropolis Zone, Act 3: improved by a whopping 15 seconds to 0:01:24;
• Wing Fortress Zone: improved by 4 seconds to 0:01:50.

These revisions, adding up to 25 seconds, have allowed Stanski to achieve his goal of pulling the summed individual-level time below the 17-minute mark; the total now stands at 0:16:58.

Freddy Andersson's incumbent Mega Man X single-segment low% run was the latest victim in a spate of speedicide attacks blighting innocent players the world over. The perpetrator was Sattik Ghosh, who maliciously hacked nine seconds from Freddy's old run with a blunt D-pad. Sattik's new time is 0:34:42. I've made torrents of the normal quality DivX and H.264 versions again.

Shaun Friend submitted a run on the Tomb Raider 2 assault course a few weeks back. Shaun has produced a re-run with the same final time, 0:01:03.9. You may wonder why we're posting this if the time is unchanged; the reason is that this attempt exhibits better video quality, and nobody complains about that. Well, except for me, of course, because it means I have to do more work. Shaun's also revamped his comments, so you might like to check those out.

Correction time again: The Hydro Thunder runs in the previous update suffered from a track time being incorrectly entered into the game page and my spreadsheet. The Lost Island time read 0:01:38.68; it should have been 0:01:31.68, and the total for all tracks should therefore have been 0:21:43.41. Oops !

It would seem that Mychal 'trihex' Jefferson has a thing about Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, as he continues to bombard us with improvements to individual levels on this game. Today's update features eight upgrades (or perhaps that should be downgrades ?) to Mychal's existing 100% times.

• 1-1 (Make Eggs, Throw Eggs): improved by 2 seconds to 0:00:51;
• 1-3 (The Cave Of Chomp Rock): improved by 1 second to 0:01:12;
• 1-6 (Shy-Guys On Stilts): improved by 6 seconds to 0:01:53;
• 1-8 (Salvo The Slime's Castle): improved by 4 seconds to 0:02:24;
• 2-3 (What's Gusty Taste Like?): improved by 5 seconds to 0:01:39;
• 4-1 (GO! GO! MARIO!!): improved by 3 seconds to 0:01:51;
• 4-2 (The Cave Of The Lakitus): improved by 2 seconds to 0:01:44;
• and 4-3 (Don't Look Back!): improved by 2 seconds to 0:01:51.

Can't be bothered downloading all the files separately ? No problem, just grab either of the normal quality DivX AVI or normal quality H.264 MPEG-4 BitTorrent-distributed versions (which contain the improved levels only). These revisions comprise a gain of 25 seconds across all the levels; the new 100% individual-level total now stands at 02:12:59.

Zebediah Danvers steps up to the plate next with a new addition to SDA's game list: Dreamcast boat racer Hydro Thunder. As is the norm with racing games, these levels are all listed individually as well. I won't go through the tracks here, but I will tell you that the summed time is 0:21:50.41, and that there are DivX and H.264 torrents of these runs, too.

And finally, Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski has strutted through The Magic of Scheherazade for the NES, single-segment, in 1:20:00. Again, there are DivX and H.264 torrent distributions available.

SDA listed runs on Half-Life and on its expansion pack, Opposing Force, but Jerry 'laughing_gas' Yu was dissatisfied with the lack of a run on the second expansion, Half-Life: Blue Shift. 'laughing_gas' wasted no time in putting right this situation with this hard mode 0:32:18 crowbar-a-thon which was played on the Steam version and used 27 segments.

Tom Votava has improved his own run of Donkey Kong 64. His improvement of 10 minutes is only 3.6% off the old time, and in fact is so similar to the previous run that he even recycled most of his comments! The new time of 4:26 is worth checking if you skipped the 4:36 run, or if you really love this game. There's a torrent of the normal quality divx.

This update features a clutch of classic titles - although one of them is a classic for all the wrong reasons ...

Kicking us off is Andrew Gardikis. You may recognise Andrew as the gentleman who did a 0:21:18 all levels (no warps) completion of NES Super Mario Bros. - well, he has now improved this time to 0:19:57. Improvements on popular old games like these are always hard to achieve, so this has to be worth a download. There are two Bittorrent-distributed versions of this run - normal quality DivX AVI and normal quality H.264 MPEG-4 - as well as the other qualities which are in the usual place.

The rest of this news update is all about one Joe Stanski. Not so long ago I wondered aloud as to whether Joe would be able to go any faster in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The melodic crunching of Genesis controllers being destroyed heralds the arrival of an improvement to Stanski's own single-segment completion of this game - 0:18:54 is the new time, over a minute more rapid than his old 0:20:02. You can get the normal qualities of this one via Bittorrent in DivX and H.264 flavours also. It seems this man isn't finished with the individual-level table yet, either:

• Casino Night Zone, Act 2: improved by 2 seconds to 0:00:59;
• Hill Top Zone, Act 1: improved by 4 seconds to 0:00:39.

Stanski doesn't just play Sonic 2, though - he's also achieved several rather bizarre milestones with his next contribution. First of all, he's attempted a run on what is apparently widely considered to be the worst Genesis game ever made - Dark Castle. I am blissfully ignorant of how this release plays, but one verifier had the following to say about it:

The sound and video are terrible, but that's the game's fault. It looks and sounds like Dark Castle, and there are no hiccups at all throughout.

When a game is new at SDA, I run a script on one of our hosts which clips a set of JPEG pictures from the videos of the run for use on the game pages. My script also grabs the first one minute and thirty seconds of video and remultiplexes it into an AVI container so I can hopefully find a shot of the game's title screen, and both video and pictures are zipped up into a single file for me to download. I was somewhat surprised to discover that this time the 90 second video chunk I'd pulled in actually contained the entire speed run. Therefore Joe Stanski's other claim to fame here is that his completion of this title is the shortest full-game run on SDA, clocking in at 0:01:19.

Adam 'Introverder' Titowicz returns with a double effort on the PC version of the game he seems to know the best: Silent Hill 2. 'Introverder' has historically bombarded us with runs on the Maria's quest subgame, but this time he produces two runs on the main game instead - one single-segment, one segmented. Adam's 11-segment run works out at 0:45:37; the single-segment is (as one would expect) a touch slower: 0:47:54. The video of the single-segment run has been split into four parts, but it passed the verification procedure regardless.

The first game in today's update is new-school nintendo game, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. For once the run wasn't by the usual Fire Emblem runner, Wesley 'Molotov' Corron, instead a newcomer, Stephen 'SMK' Kiazyk, luck-manipulated and menu-scrolled to achieve his 2:30:01.

The second game in today's update is Metroid, the old-school classic that had exploring and item collecting before they were mainstream. Chris Knight decided he could improve the previous two-boss run and shaved almost four minutes, getting a 0:24:06.

It's been on the horizon for a little while, but Nate has finally announced that from the first of January 2008 he will no longer be accepting runs on VHS tape. Although use of DVD recorders has been encouraged and preferred for submissions for some time now, this makes the death of VHS at SDA official. We hope that this will lead to an across-the-board improvement in video quality and lower latency in getting runs up on the site. Nate is offering some degree of flexibility as far as this deadline is concerned (VHS runs that are nearing completion at the start of 2008 will probably still be accepted), but you should read his spiel on the forum for full details.

Scott Kessler's long-standing NES Super Mario Bros. 2 record falls today to Chris Knight. Chris has beaten 'sdkess' by 23 seconds, thereby achieving a new time of 0:09:19. Our torrent-of-torrents continues with both normal quality DivX AVI and normal quality H.264 MPEG-4 versions available peer-sharing style. Don't forget to seed !

Five runs this morning - all of them on European versions of NES games - and all available in normal quality DivX AVI via Bittorrent (all qualities including high quality and embeddable Flash versions are of course available delivered using that archaic HTTP thing in the usual place).

Kristian Emanuelsen must really love NES Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Kristian had two single-segment runs on the European version posted by Radix back in December and has now improved both of these. The "with Up+A warping and death abuse" time has been slashed by over four minutes to 1:06:17, and the "new game+ with Up+A warping and death abuse" figure improves by almost two minutes to 0:44:52.

The other three productions we have for you today are of a highly ornithic nature - two on Duck Tales and the other on Duck Tales 2. These runs were all performed by the ever-dependable Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson. Freddy has improved his old Difficult skill Duck Tales run by 26 seconds to 0:09:55 and bolstered this performance with an additional effort on the Easy mode of the same title in a slightly quicker 0:09:35. If you read Freddy's comments for the Duck Tales 2 run you will not only discover that his 0:11:40 was done on Easy mode but also learn a sobering personal motivation for its completion.

Finally, those torrents:

• Zelda II 1:06:17;
• Zelda II New Game+ 0:44:52;
• Duck Tales, Difficult skill 0:09:55;
• Duck Tales, Easy skill 0:09:35;
• Duck Tales 2 0:11:40.

There has been overwhelming demand (er, two requests) for an SDA news feed, and so today sees the launch of such a feed in Atom 1.0 format. Please feel free to subscribe and let us know of any problems you may encounter.

Hot on the heels of the any% I posted back in January comes another Mega Man X5 run by Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen - a 100% this time in 0:34:12, over three times as long as the pure speed run. Patrik's segment count was 21, so to ease downloading we've made two torrents: normal quality DivX AVI and normal quality H.264 MPEG-4.

PC Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business was an expansion pack for the original Tomb Raider, and another submission from Aleš 'Ewil' Horák adds it to the game list - 'Ewil' has sped through in a mere 0:23:21 using 7 segments.

Martell 'VecGun' Cheeks was unhappy with the old Genesis Vectorman run and set about beating it, which, as you have probably guessed by now, he did - the new time is 0:14:16.

Next up is an attempt at bizarre NES platformer Little Nemo: The Dream Master by Ryan Kusnery. Ryan's time was 0:30:50.

Puntastically named NES sidescroller Rush 'n Attack provides today's final speed run. Jim Hanson's effort at this game clocks in at 0:09:53.

One final matter - that of a correction. It was pointed out on the forum that the Xbox Jade Empire run by 'garotte' we posted back in October had been incorrectly timed; we took our sweet time fixing it, but re-timing manually yielded us a new figure of 2:57:06. Apologies, as always, for the goof.

I completed Deus Ex: Invisible War a few years ago, and if you had tried to tell me at that time that the whole thing could be done in less than half an hour I would have wasted no time in phoning the authorities. Perhaps Peter 'Tagio' Snyder is himself bioaugmented, for he has conquered this PC game on Realistic difficulty in a scarcely believable 0:26:49 using 59 segments.

The next game to be shot down in flames will be the SNES Super Mario All Stars version of Super Mario Bros. 2. An existing single-segment run on the US version of this has been beaten by one minute and seventeen seconds with René 'dEr_RiNkE' Rinke the player responsible. This new run has been executed on the European version of the game, and the time is 0:11:17.

My original draft of this update contained all sorts of puerile jokes about Nintendo's choice of name for their latest console but in the end I decided through clenched teeth to let the opportunity to vent my anger over this ill-advised piece of marketing slide. Yep, we've just got our first Wii run on Trauma Center: Second Opinion from Adam 'Lucid Faia' Sweeney who plays on hard mode and achieves 1:49:07, single-segment. According to his comments, Adam's play style incorporates "basically the worst surgery ever, but done at lightning speed" - I feel a promising future in public healthcare beckons.

Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe is back with an improvement to his own SNES ActRaiser Professional mode run. 'Sir VG' knocks 0:01:53 off the previous attempt and achieves 0:29:31; this run, like its predecessor, abuses death to save time.

Aleš 'Ewil' Horák was decidedly unhappy with the quality of the Postal² run that we published back in mid-December and was convinced that it would be possible to beat it. The old time has in fact been brutally decapitated by 16 minutes bringing the run under the one hour threshold, and the icing on the cake is that this has been done on a higher difficulty level - Insane-o (that's the skill level, not my assessment of Aleš's performance). Anyway, the new run is a 0:49:46 in 17 segments - the previous run only used 8 - but nevertheless, a great job.

We already list a run on N64 Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon - Ulf 'HidoiMidoriRyuu' Strömberg bolsters this with a completion of the "Consecutive Fighting! Large Boss" mode of this game, which seems to be a "Boss Rush" mode of sorts. The time for this is 0:10:20 - this run was done all the way back in May.

Shaun 'MMAN' Friend holds the record for Tomb Raider 2 right now and he's opened up another category on this game - the Assault Course navigated in a quickfire 0:01:03.9.

This update brings the number of runs in the queue under 20 !

Given that my nose is streaming like a tap as I type this, it seems appropriate to publish a triple single-segment treatment of Dr. Mario 64. Kari 'Essentia' Johnson has run this title's Classic mode in 0:38:50, its Story mode in 0:16:53, and the Story mode once more, this time on Hard difficulty in 0:24:27. So, Dr. Mario, can you help me get rid of this stupid cold ?

Ari 'Rapu' Taitto wanted sub-1:30 when he began work on a run of critically acclaimed PS2 title Shadow of the Colossus. Ari battled for half a year and ultimately failed to reach this target but came pretty close with 1:34:30 across 16 segments.

The "purest" category on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (single-segment, no "up+A warping" and no death abuse) is the object of an improvement today. Tommy Montgomery's old 1:18:17 has fallen foul of Chip 'Breakdown' Vogel who stormed through in 1:17:15, 0:01:02 faster. There's apparently a mistake near the end that costs round about 20 seconds, but even Radix admits that this is a very hard category and there are no accidental deaths this time, so congratulations to Chip.

Time for a Mega Man double. Ben 'Cauldrath' Hanes's old five-segment run on Mega Man X5 has been beaten by Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen, who used one more segment than Ben. Patrik's time is 0:10:12, 0:01:42 faster. We have also opened up a page for the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, the first entry on which is a single-segment GameCube run on Mega Man 3 by Daniel Chamness: 0:37:20 is the time.

And finally, Mathew Thompson has contributed a set of individual-level runs on PC Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. His level times sum to 1:16:34; this swift and stealthy feat was performed on Expert difficulty.

A run is already listed here at SDA for the PC version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell - now there's a run by Oskar 'Yautja Elder' Lundquist on the GameCube version too. Oskar's attempt was performed in 38 segments and works out at 1:21:45. This is somewhat quicker than the PC run, but it falls into a separate category owing to porting inconsistencies and the fact that the two runs were executed on different difficulty settings.

A double bill of death abuse completes this update. Chip 'Breakdown' Vogel leads the single-segment charge through NES platform/RPG hybrid Faxanadu in 0:36:24 with death abuse, and the irrepressible Joe Stanski has done something similar with Pixar tie-in Toy Story for the Genesis in 0:22:33, once again abusing death in the process.

Don't forget that you can embed the streaming Flash versions of all of today's releases in your websites and blogs !

i am proud to announce today that one of the most respected sonic speed runners in the world (no, not joe stanski this time!), mike mckenzie, has produced for us not one, not two, but three single-segment runs on our favorite classic sonic games. we are going today from having only a page for sonic 2 to having pages for all three of the classic games.

mike has taken down sonic 1 in 0:18:09, sonic 3 & knuckles as sonic in 0:49:37 and the same game as knuckles in 0:36:55.

it's important to note that these runs were done on the pal (otherwise known as "european", even though mike himself is decidedly australian!) version of sonic mega collection, which unfortunately preserves the incorrect, 5/6th playing speed of the games when running at 50 hz. however, because the timer itself is also slowed down, if you ignore the fact that playing the game in slow motion makes it easier, you could easily compare these times to times acquired while playing the game at the proper speed. for this reason, i am not too concerned about the only sonic 1 and sonic 3 & knuckles runs on the site running at 5/6th speed (the music sure sounds strange in sonic 1, though!).

i am also proud to introduce today our third major content mirror, another dreamhost account (you knew that google ad money was going somewhere!). though dreamhost's additional plan signup process is fraught with problems, i have not found any more accommodating host for the money. therefore, the sonic-like sda2.dreamhosters.com mirror will join the slow us archive.org mirror in bringing you today's sonic content. enjoy!

More Master System fun this morning from Tom 'Konnan' van Mol, again using a European version. Tom has achieved 0:36:24 on platforming puzzler Mickey Mouse: Land of Illusion.

There exists already a Grand Theft Auto 3 run at SDA, 1:43:40 by Tim Symanczyk on the PlayStation 2 version. Andre 'l2ebel' Bodmer looks for his own piece of the black-market pie now by achieving 1:22:31 in 3 segments. Hopefully we won't see turf wars between these two Godfathers though; Andre's run is on the PC version of the game, and we're treating console and PC runs as separate categories - so go easy on the gang warfare, guys.

Nate screwed up my GTA-themed news post by unexpectedly moving a NES Contra run into Ready to Update. Hence any complaints revolving around lack of witticisms as I announce that the existing low % record holder Ray 'Croc Doc' Cullen has knocked five seconds off the old any % run by Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson thereby achieving 0:10:50 and owning the page outright should be directed to Jahnke Towers. Congratulations to Ray on achieving an improvement on a popular and hotly-contested title.

The second addition to the Master System lineup emerged sooner than I thought it would - Wonder Boy in Monster Land ripped through by Tom 'Konnan' van Mol in 0:21:27. This was executed on the European version.

Vectorman 2 is today's second game, a Genesis title played via the GameCube Sonic Gems Collection. 0:13:24 was Mike McKenzie's time; this was again done on the European version.

Hemmo 'Heme' Hyttinen produces a lovely round time for our third feature: single-segment 0:30:00 on PS2 Tony Hawk's Underground 2. This too was performed on the European version, but with this being a modern release we don't believe this has any effect on game speed.

Adam 'Introverder' Titowicz has improved his own time on PC Silent Hill 2 Hard mode Maria's Quest by 6 seconds to 0:06:23.

Joe Stanski claimed to have retired from Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog 2 speed running, but that didn't last long. Back with a vengeance, he has booted out Nate and Philippe 'Suzaku' Henry's two remaining levels from the individual-level table, whilst at the same time improving five of his own times. As such, the entire Sonic 2 page from top to bottom now belongs to the unstoppable Stanski.

Will this be the last time I have to do this ? How much faster can Stanski go ?

• Emerald Hill Zone, Act 1: improved by 0:00:01 to 0:00:19;
• Emerald Hill Zone, Act 2: improved by 0:00:01 to 0:00:37;
• Chemical Plant Zone, Act 1: improved by 0:00:01 to 0:00:22;
• Aquatic Ruin Zone, Act 1: improved by 0:00:01 to 0:00:22;
• Mystic Cave Zone, Act 2: improved by 0:00:02 to 0:00:43;
• Oil Ocean Zone, Act 1: improved by 0:00:06 to 0:00:33; and
• Metropolis Zone, Act 1: improved by 0:00:05 to 0:01:01.

These crazy revisions cleave 17 seconds from the individual-level total, which now stands at a rather improbable 0:17:29. Congratulations to Joe.

As I write this, the Sega Master System category at SDA contains one game, and that's not even a Master System run - it's a run of a GBA port of a Master System original. There are therefore no Master System runs at SDA right now. This morning, I will fix this situation.

Alex Kidd in Miracle World was an ahead-of-its-time classic when released as a cartridge - so much so that it was subsequently built into the Master System hardware itself. A run of it is long overdue, so it is with great pleasure that I announce this 0:17:33 by Tom 'Konnan' van Mol on the European version of the game. More Master System runs, please !

Following on neatly from the Diddy Kong Racing runs published a few days ago comes this contribution from Mike McKenzie. Mike has improved the Cheato's cheats category of Nintendo 64 Banjo Tooie with a single-segment 0:53:18 performance which lays waste to the older 0:56:25 by Adam Vierra from April 2006.

And to finish up, PlayStation release Spyro: Year of the Dragon is added to the game list with a 12-segment, 100% effort (although the game claims it to be 117%) forged by the capable hands of Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns. Again, this was done on the European revision of the game and clocks in at 4:39.

I have often heard Nate rave about Xbox Ninja Gaiden, so this update should please him in two ways: Firstly, he'll be overjoyed to see some runs of it go up; secondly, it will give him the opportunity to recover 17 gig of space on his RAID ...

Josh Mangini is the man behind the hood for tonight's assassinations, both of which are on the updated "Director's Cut" version of this title: Ninja Gaiden Black. This 27-segment 1:41:08 is a big improvement over his original, unposted attempt which bore a time of 1:53:29. In fact, Josh was close to being able to beat his original segmented time without using saves: He has also donated a single-segment attempt in 1:55:05. It's always gratifying to see players going the extra mile to push their times down further.

The venerable Radix informs me that today's update pushes total SDA video content firmly past the one terabyte mark. Of course I'd much prefer 1024 to the power four to be referred to as a "tebibyte", so if there are no SDA updates for a little while it's because I got into a fight with Radix about it and he broke my fingers. Anyway, thanks and congratulations to all the runners who have helped us achieve this wonderful milestone - long may it continue !

The runner responsible for pushing us over the edge is Stefan Mahrla, who adds a pair of runs on the European version of N64 Diddy Kong Racing to the run on Blast Corps we posted on the 29th of last month. Firstly there's a single-segment 100% in 2:37:24. This run includes the last trophy race and unlocks the Drumstick character which qualifies it for 100% status. Secondly we have a "new game +" style production using the "TT" (clock) character, again a single-segment, but this time without the 100% extras; the time is a slightly quicker 2:21:44.

One thing you learn after spending a while in the speed run game is that everyone has a slightly different opinion on how runs ought to be played and categorised. This update should please those diehards who hold the deep and unshakeable belief that single-segment is the only way to go ...

We already list runs on Kirby 64 and Kirby Super Star and to these we now add a single-segment effort at Kirby & the Amazing Mirror for the Game Boy Advance. Emmitt Robert Kraft is the protagonist this time with this 0:42:14.

Honours are even on the PS2 Devil May Cry page right now with two runners sharing the limelight at two categories apiece. Michael 'sternn' McEnroe evens the score today by opening a fourth category on this game - a run as the Legendary Dark Knight on 'Dante Must Die !' skill. 1:17:43 is the final time with 'sternn' once again producing a dual-audio version of his run that features a spoken commentary track. This has only been done for the high quality edition of the run this time, and the usual disclaimers apply - Matroska is not officially supported by SDA, you can get the .mkv from archive, and any problem you may have with this file is exactly that - your problem. For a little more information on getting the dual-audio version to play, please scroll down to the rant with which I announced Michael's previous run on November 20th. The single audio avi/mp4 versions are of course available in the usual place. Enjoy !

Mike 'TSA' Damiani's old single-segment 4:57 run on Nintendo 64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time from summer 2005 has been consumed by the ravenous Mauri 'Kazooie' Mustonen. Not only has Mauri managed to achieve a single-segment 4:46, eleven minutes faster, but it has been done on the intrinsically slower European version of the game - a compelling achievement. If you're intimately familiar with OoT you may see some areas that can be done faster through the abuse of more severe glitches, but some of these are forbidden by SDA rules, and others would cause a separate category. Oh, and we've made a torrent of the normal quality DivX AVI of this run for your peer-sharing pleasure.

The Valkyrie Profile games appear to be in the ascendancy ... in the time I've been doing SDA updates we've seen two quickfire runs on the original and now they are joined by a 29-segment assault upon the PS2 sequel, Valkyrie Profile 2 by Alex 'Alkaiser77' Eng. 2:45:57 is the time - verifiers opined that the platforming in this run wasn't so great, but also that it seemed well planned and featured good boss fights, so we decided to keep it.

There were supposed to be more items in today's update, but sadly I have been comprehensively thwarted by archive.org.

PC Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords joins the game list today with a 58-segment production by Carlos Wolfe. A lot of effort went into timing this run: Mike had to use in excess of 200 cutoff points to end up with a final reckoning of 3:39. We have created a "dark" category for this run since the player takes the dark side path exclusively ... everyone knows the dark side of the Force is cooler anyway.

Completing today's update are David T. 'Megafrost' Kraft and his dash through Blaster Master. David made short work of this NES classic in 0:44:09.