First things first. You might remember Pete 'Thinkshooter' Howard's great Knights of the Old Republic run from a couple of months ago. Who could forget? Anyway, Pete recently finished work on the bloopers for the run, and he wanted me to help him get the word out. So there you go. The bloopers are pretty funny and will make you wonder just what is going on in this game.

Speaking of which, this speedrun will certainly also make you wonder what is going on, probably even if you've beaten the game before. Yes, it's the return of that popular game to run and break: Portal. This time it's acclaimed runner Maciej 'groobo' Maselewski's turn, and he follows through with a single-segment 0:13:06 (torrent, HQ torrent) that uses glitches to skip large chunks of the game at a time. Michael 'DemonStrate' Yanni's segmented run in 0:14:27 was not replaced for this reason. Maciej's skills are such that he was previously accused of cheating, so he shut them up real good by recording himself playing this time.

This next speedrun might have the same baffling effect as well, since it moves from start to finish so quickly and also doesn't look that much like normal play. Simon 'Sorcerer88' Schmid held the previous Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 record with a single-segment run in 0:06:23. Now after a route tweak and some little tricks, the record is held by, well, the same person. Simon's third iteration of the run, again single-segment, clocks in at 0:05:47, which is some very nice work indeed. This version is also available in high quality and in English, for those that care. And I know you do. Viva La Bam.

Wesley 'Molotov' Corron's previous run of Chrono Cross from over two years ago finished in 7:55:08. The best known time was in 7:16:01 by Kimura Masahiro, a Japanese fellow whose record was listed on Ultima Garden: a site that unfortunately does not provide any video. Wesley wasn't a fan of this discrepancy, so he set about to lower his time. He made it about halfway before sadly his hard drive containing all the segments crashed and he lost all motivation. Enter Spikevegeta and his $50 bounty for beating the 7:16:01. Now flashforward to today, and marvel at Wesley's new 6:42:11 (torrent). Keep in mind that this was done on the US version with its slower English text. Wesley was also kind enough to provide audio commentary and to redo the last segment with the good ending in 6:48:19.

The story of Daniel 'Kareshi' Brown's speedrun starts with Scott 'sdkess' Kessler, a man holding tremendous respect at SDA. Scott has submitted runs to us before, but one day back in 2005, he managed to beat the famously punishing Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts without taking a single hit. He didn't submit it since the "no damage" aspect was the top priority instead of speed, but he still labeled it a speedrun in 0:45:48 on Normal mode. Daniel, who is probably most famous for his GNG run on this site, thought he would be just the man to do SGNG right. Speedrunning the game is quite like playing for no damage, as one hit makes you lose the golden armor, which slows you down enough to be worthy of a reset. After months of practice and over a year of nonstop recording, the result is Daniel's magnum opus: 0:42:05 on Professional mode.

We have two new games today with "2" in the title. I know you must be struggling to contain your excitement over this fact.

The first of these games is Rayman 2: The Great Escape. By now, the Rabbids might be more well-known than Rayman himself; I wonder what that Ancel fellow thinks about that. Lloyd 'Manocheese' Palmer is known as the guy who did justice to Ocarina of Time, and his considerable 3D platforming prowess is put to good use in his 2:17:25 (torrent). This speedrun is even single-segment, which some observers deemed "insane," and comes complete with scintillating audio commentary! But wait, there's more! Rayman 2 has a couple of timed sublevels. Lloyd ran these too, so please enjoy Walk of Life in 0:01:29.59 and Walk of Power in 0:01:27.56. By the way, the Dreamcast version has some additional timed mini-games, if anyone catches my drift.

This next game was supposed to be in the last update, as some of you might have guessed, but a single-segment Wii run was canceled for reworking at the last minute. That's alright, because we still have André Göhlsch's individual-levels run of Manhunt 2. His run is on the PS2 version and takes a total time of 0:53:00 (torrent) to complete. André hails from Germany, which is known for its draconian stance against violent games. He found a leaked beta version and ran that, but we don't accept runs on unofficial versions, so André had to wait for the eventual censored Mature release. So finally he imported the game from the US and ran it in black and white — but don't worry, what you see is in color — on his PAL TV. Now that's dedication.

You may have noticed that last paragraph was slightly different from the normal description of individual levels. Since we require a full table of individual levels already, we've changed the paradigm from a set of unrelated runs to an individual-levels run, comprised of individual levels. One upshot of this is that we now have combined download pages and the ability to make a torrent for each individual-levels run. There should be no drawbacks to this change, so you should still be able to download individual levels from the table or watch them embedded in your browser. Let me know if you have any problems.

I was planning to juxtapose Nintendo with a violent banned game, but now I got nothing.

Well, I do still have Paper Mario. This speedrun is brought to you by Kyle 'batman9502' Duffy, who would like to make the claim that the first 9501 batmen were all imposters. Kyle has performed a massive improvement to the old run by Philippe 'Wak' Brisson in 52 segments. Kyle's run utilizes 53 segments for 3:38 (torrent), which is a whole hour and twenty-six minutes faster. Not to single him out since the run dates back to 2005, but whenever the topic would come up for which run on SDA was most improvable, Philippe's run was commonly mentioned.

Maybe the comparison could instead be made between Nintendo and a title many gamers would like to ban, violently. That game is Mega Man X7. Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen bans the any% run in 1:02:41 by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols to the speedrun afterlife with his 0:56:59. This run is low% on the European version in 11 segments, presented in glorious 3D Technicolor. Patrik includes a list of glitches as well as overall and level comments, so those of you like Patrik who prefer genuinely informative comments will surely appreciate these.

It's a masquerade ball at SDA and you're invited. Ours is tame and merely involves speedrunning, so you don't need a secret password like fidelio to get in.

The "best 2nd-cycle time" category for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is sort of a strange relic. The previous run by Peter 'Dragorn' Branam-Lefkove was done at a time when SDA had a much more laissez-faire attitude regarding play quality, video quality, and run objectives. Peter's run aimed for game time and was listed as such, and Daniel 'SoulCalibrII' Chamness had the same idea, so the result is a far lower 2:23 (torrent, HQ torrent). Daniel's run in 30 segments also doesn't actually finish the game since that involves waiting around until the end of the cycle anyway. We allowed his run because of the prior existence of the category.

Now from Majora's mask we move on to Carmilla's mask. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is considered by many to be both the greatest Castlevania game and the greatest PC Engine game. Unavailable in any form to most Westerners until recently, Rondo of Blood now has a run on SDA courtesy of Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe. His run in 0:40:10 uses Maria, who isn't nearly as broken as she is in the Saturn version of Symphony of the Night, but yeah, she's way better than Richter. Oddly enough, just like the Majora's Mask run, Nicholas's run doesn't conclude with killing the final boss. I don't know how many runs we have like this, but it can't be much more than a couple.

It's worth noting that Nicholas's run is 100%, which in this context means all stages, bosses, and prisoners. If you'd like to know how we define things, or if you're looking to make a low% or 100% run, perhaps this definitions thread will be useful to you.

We have some longer speedruns — many of them segmented — of popular games coming down the pipeline, conditions the National Weather Service warns are ripe for producing funnel clouds and torrents.

Our first item of concern is Ratchet & Clank. The third installment of the series is already listed on SDA in 2:22:38, and now it's joined by the original in roughly half the time. Please say hi to Robert 'RJWaters2' Ashbaugh, who brings the goods with this 1:11:56 (torrent, HQ torrent). This is actually the third version of Robert's run, which in its current form uses 16 segments and skips large portions of the game using glitches. I probably join some of you in wondering when the second game or any of the rest of the ever-expanding series will appear on SDA. Of course, if you have the skills, you don't have to wonder. You can make it happen.

Also keep a watch out for Metroid. Nate deferred on doing this part of the update, so you get to hear me tell the tale of how the itsy bitsy Andrew 'spidey-widey' Brockmann went up the waterspout. (Remember: you were warned earlier of this possibility by the NWS.) With his first run, Andrew has already achieved a feat that most speedrunners never do. His single-segment 0:28:42 (torrent) of Metroid Zero Mission was so dominant, despite some costly mistakes, that it actually obsoleted two runs by Luke 'transience' Yagnow: a single-segment run in 0:29:58 and a segmented run in 0:28:50. Ah, the sweet sound of three years of progress.

Brawl is back. Now it's time for Lukas 'Midori' Jacobsson to join the Super Smash Bros. Brawl page. His speedrun is on the popular category, 100-man brawl. Adam 'No1 Inparticular' Young's previous run was done with Pikachu, so those Pokémon haters in the audience might appreciate that Lukas uses Meta Knight instead. He finishes in 0:01:47.28, which is exactly 9.43 seconds faster. And that's how he became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.

Since both of the game titles in today's update yield a completely different 20th century and 21st century game with the exact same title, it's theoretically possible that you could be confused as to which incarnations are in the update. But naturally you can probably guess which is which.

There's been some good competition between several runners for the Sonic the Hedgehog record. Of course, this is the 1991 game, not the 2006 one, which was so poorly received that many of you might not even remember it exists scarcely two years later. Joe Stanski previously had the best time with 0:17:52, and now we welcome Charles Griffin with 0:15:05. As you might notice, this is a large improvement, and we have carretero, ChaosControl, and the work of many others to thank for this current achievement. Yes, at SDA we truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

I know people out there are anxious for a speedrun of the 2008 Ninja Gaiden II to come out, but while that's being worked on, I'm sure nobody will mind another great improvement to the NES Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, released in 1990. Josh 'LigerOfFortune' Styger's iron reign over all three NES Ninja Gaiden games was brief yet brutal. He has been toppled by the insurgent Jim 'vgmrsepitome' Hanson with a time of 0:11:21, eighteen seconds faster. Stay tuned to see who lands the next blow in the eternal battle between a liger of fortune and some kind of jumble of letters.

We haven't had an update with new games, a torrent, or multiple runs in a while, so let's mix it up and remedy all these points at once.

TimeShift is a first-person shooter where you can — wait for it! — shift time. It would then seem quite reasonable to expect that such mechanics might lend themselves to interesting uses in a speedrun. Robin 'Ekelbatzen' Schoenborn runs; you decide! All you have to do is download his 1:29:51 and see for yourself. The run's 24 segments have been fused into one file for your downloading convenience, or you could also grab the torrent.

It wasn't the first game with Wario in it, but Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land was the first one starring Mario's evil counterpart. Since then, Wario has gotten a whole host of games of his own, but now we have a run of his humble beginnings. Rob 'Mickey_Mage' Whitener is the runner, and 0:42:34 is his time. In addition to the normal drama from watching the actual game, there is added drama from seeing how large Wario's castle will be at the end.

Actually, it would be cool if this game was more like Ragnarok Battle Offline. Anyway, Chia-Hao 'JoChi' Chiang has for us today a third speedrun for Phantasy Star Online. It's on the GameCube version and plays as the Hunter for a final time of 2:23, done in five segments. It joins another run on the GameCube by Julian 'dexter' v. Bock as a Force, which is twenty minutes faster. But of course that's okay since they are different categories. I am a bit confused why Jonathan 'Brightstar' Fields's Dreamcast Hunter time in 3:17 from over four years ago is still up, as the original Dreamcast version is actually advantageous for running. Probably something to ask Mike when he gets back.

He's been mentioned recently as the sponsor of some speedrun bounties, but make no mistake: Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson is one of the top speedrunners in existence. No scandal here as he takes off a full seven seconds from his own prior Contra run, one that some people had deemed "perfect." Joe Stanski even declared it the greatest run on all of SDA. I think what this all means is that you should probably watch Freddy's 0:10:17. The scariest part is that there is still room for improvement, and Freddy is just the type of man with the dedication, skill, and questionable level of sanity to pull it off.

Jim 'vgmrsepitome' Hanson responded to my August 6 news update by asking, "What does a liger do with himself once his lifelong dream has been fulfilled?" The way I see it, the only greater achievement would be owning the record for all three NES Ninja Gaiden games at the same time, as Jim himself once did. Obviously, Josh 'LigerOfFortune' Styger agrees, because that is exactly what he has accomplished with his latest run of Ninja Gaiden in 0:12:53. This is fifteen seconds faster than Jim's run, and almost a full minute faster than Tommy 'tmont' Montgomery's initial run. You might feel sorry for Jim Hanson, whose speedruns are seemingly being assaulted on all sides, but I know he has some tricks up his sleeve. I must be prescient.

Three hundred dollars is quite a lot of cash to most of us, but for a fifteen-year-old like Sattik 'Tiki' Ghosh, it must seem like infinite money. Is it no wonder then, that straight off his effort for the Mega Man 3 bounty, Sattik would return to stake his claim on Freddy 'Frezy_man' Andersson's Mega Man 6 bounty? Sattik admits that this is not his best work, but his high standards mean that this 0:38:10 is still a very good run — it's thirteen seconds better than Jim 'vgmrsepitome' Hanson's previous run, after all. What may be Sattik's best work, however, are his comments, which are comprised as always with his trademark uncouth teenage exuberance.

Guardian Heroes is one of my favorite games, and Nicole is probably my favorite character in the game, so naturally I approve of today's speedrun. We have a new runner, and his name is Jose 'poon78' Llado. He delivers a run with Nicole on the Golden Silver path in 0:26:17 to go with Mandela 'spacedemonebu' Shabazz's Ginjirou run on the same path. Jose's run is six and a half minutes faster because, honestly, Nicole is broken with her barrier attack. The usage of this move is liberally interspersed with the not-as-broken "trip and fall down for no reason" move, resulting in entertaining times for all.

Since I don't think Mike really mentioned it himself anywhere, I should probably let you know that he went on vacation earlier today and won't be back until Monday the 25th. We have some runs coming down the pipeline, so it won't affect you if you're purely a watcher, but if you're looking to contact him, now you understand why he won't be responding.

Clocking in at a grand total of 40 seconds, today's update sets a record for the shortest SDA update ever. Well, don't feel too bad; I just updated yesterday after all, and more is on the way. Of course, since the game is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, it goes without saying that the runner is Joe Stanski. His 0:00:40 for Oil Ocean 2 is ten seconds faster than before, and it's all thanks to a new scrolling glitch that was disallowed prior to the March 29th rules updates. In fact, it was Stanski's anger over not being allowed to use this glitch that caused him to start an... interesting out-of-bounds (OOB) thread. The community stance eventually led to the current policy, so don't say we're not looking out for ya.

Startin' today and tomorrow's the new.

Many of our viewers might not be old enough to remember The Goonies, an extremely 80s kid-adventure movie. Those that do, however, probably thought they were safe over twenty years later from the tie-in single, The Goonies 'R' Good Enough. Nope, Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody is back with two speedruns of The Goonies II, and sure enough, the game immediately starts off with some NES-synthesized Cyndi Lauper. The rest of the game sounds like vintage Konami, maybe Wai Wai World, which you can hear as you watch the any% in 0:17:33 or the 100% in 0:24:08. Watch both runs and treat yourself to a cookie!

This update fulfills Josh 'LigerOfFortune' Styger's lifelong dream of getting an entire news post to himself. He has managed to shave an incredible 27 seconds off Jim 'vgmrsepitome' Hanson's previous run of Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, sending poor Jim home in tears. The record is now a clean 0:14:00. The run comments, which may or may not have been ghostwritten by Mr. Hanson, are a definite must-read. Will Josh reign over all three NES Ninja Gaiden games simultaneously, or will Jim reclaim some of what he has lost? Tune in next time for another exciting episode of Ninja Garden!

I'm sure many of you have settled into some sort of pattern in checking SDA once every several days, since we're in a good groove and don't have enough speedruns to update every day anyway. Well, consider your world shattered, as now you know we may strike at any time. Make sure to check back incessantly and the rest of this sentence is removed since we don't want AdSense to drop us! Okay, maybe the real explanation is that I got a day off, I'm out of town tomorrow, and I felt like updating. But who knows? Maybe if the feedback is positive and I feel up to it, there might be smaller, more frequent updates in the future.

Our Mario Kart 64 individual-levels table hails from ancient times. Vincent Tolhuis makes his appearance on the table and gives it a little shot in the arm with seven relatively new runs: Frappe Snowland, Mario Raceway, Wario Stadium, and Royal Raceway races, and Toad's Turnpike, Choco Mountain, and Royal Raceway laps. The victims are Steven Gutierrez, Myles Bukrim, and Ben Miller, and the total time of the table has been reduced by 4.39 seconds. Vincent actually recorded three additional IL improvements, but Nate had to reject them for video quality and mixed-in music. Alex Penev, Eric Habrich, and Steven Gutierrez are safe for now.

I would like to give a huge thanks to Benoit 'TJazZ' Boudreau for compiling a list of Vincent Tolhuis's improvements for us.

It's the long-awaited return of Tom 'rdrunner' Votava, who was previously seen in the news over a year ago. He has two runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project for us. First, he has an improvement of two minutes and fourteen seconds to Ray 'Croc-Doc' Cullen's run, although the number of deaths has climbed from three to seven. The deaths category now stands at 0:39:36. For those that hate to see turtles dying and other such acts of animal cruelty, there is now also an impressive new deathless category as Michaelangelo in 0:43:46. Tom Votava, your check from Joe Stanski is in the mail.

Pete 'Thinkshooter' Howard makes his debut with a new run for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. He takes down Henrik 'MNeMiC' Larsson's run, which was completed over three years ago. In the meantime, the level of precision and optimization in the universe has grown exponentially. Pete's run on the Light side (as the appropriately-named KDQ) is in 2:05:51 (torrent), over an hour and eight minutes faster. That's quite the improvement for a run of that length. The number of segments Pete utilizes is 48, but that's progress for you. Actually, science does have the answer: fusion into a compact four-part download.

We have an All-Star Game for you today, but sadly no Home-Run Contest to complete the theme. It's Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it's the All-Star mode, and it's the return of Peter 'petrie911' Montag. He plays as Jigglypuff and decisively claims home field advantage in just 0:03:36.83. Peter is quite thankful of the fact that All-Star mode contains a lot less randomness compared to the other modes. We thank him for his efforts and the designers for their considerateness. With the current state of the economy in the United States, undoubtedly the only asset that trickles down is kudos.

Recently, it seems that no update is complete without a tiger, a liger, or some other sort of feline. They drew straws and today it's Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols's turn. He's back with Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. (Konami's ace Mad Libs team apparently audibled away from Malediction of Teddy Bears at the last moment.) Alex adds any% and Boss Rush runs as Trevor to the existing any% as Hector by Damien 'Dragondarch' Moody. He accomplishes this in a 12-segment 1:43:35 for the any% and 0:11:59.05 for the Boss Rush. Alex composed his Boss Rush comments entirely in limerick form, so the least you could do is read them.

Some people have the impression that Radix has completely ridden off into the sunset, but he does offer suggestions from time to time, which I take to heart since I still have more respect for him than anyone else at SDA. A recent one was that runs should be listed with the number of hours, even if that's zero; otherwise, 5:00 could mean five hours or five minutes. Since there is no way to syntactically disambiguate such times, fixing this across the entire site took a whole lot of time and effort. But now when you see a time, you know that the number of hours always comes first.

Along with this change, I also took the time to rename game pages with names like mzm.html into clearer names like MetroidZeroMission.html. I put in the necessary redirects, but if you notice any mistakes with broken links or the new times or anything site-related, please let me know. If you're wondering what the purpose of all this refactoring is, let's just say that doing some work up front will only make life easier for me later. How much later depends on how much extra I feel like working in the next month.

Last time there was Vice City. This time: no City, all Vice. I'm putting Vice: Project Doom first today in a futile attempt to prevent it from being overshadowed by the other run. And that's too bad, since I consider it to be one of the top five games on the NES. Today, however, this highly underappreciated game receives a speedrun from Josh 'LigerOfFortune' Styger, a runner who only thinks he's underappreciated. Josh completes the game in 0:14:48 and thanks another Josh in his comments — truly, the circle of life.

One of the most notorious run categories on SDA has been Super Mario 64 16-star (low%). There has surely been enough clamor over the years for someone to improve Eddie 'kirbykarter' Taylor's 0:19:47 from over three years ago. It has even been accomplished before, but the video quality was so poor, it was rejected from SDA. All this is in the past now, as Myles 'ShadowOfMyles' Bukrim has a new run that is a full two minutes and sixteen seconds faster, for an amazing time of 0:17:31 (torrent, HQ torrent).

Nate came back from a trip to Montreal recently and went on an encoding rampage, so stay here for more speedrunning delights in the coming days.

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story might look and play like the illegitimate offspring of Tales of Phantasia and Golden Sun on the GBA, but honestly, that's sort of what it is. Some might even call it a shameless ripoff. Here at SDA, though, we don't ask questions, we merely play through games quickly. Daniel 'Cromarty' Enright does just that, finishing the game in 2:23 using 18 segments. Until the day we have runs for Drill Dozer, Gurumin, or Mr. Driller A, be sure to watch this run to whet your appetite for portable drilling action.

Following the success of his 9-hour 100% run, Daniel 'CannibalK9' Burns is back with more Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. His achievement this time is outpacing Tim 'twoton' Symanczyk's old console run by just over 21 minutes. Even more impressively, this 1:52:59 (torrent, HQ torrent) was done in only one segment, compared to the 21 segments from before. The news just keeps getting better, as Daniel has once again included entertaining and enlightening audio commentary in his videos. Someone get this man the keys to the city!

I'm a big fan of unique speedruns, and this one surely qualifies. Giancarlo André 'gia' Rivas De Amat has a run for us today of Pokémon Snap: that game where you finally get to shoot all kinds of various Pokémon... with a camera. Some of the less flexible-minded among us wondered if this game could even be run, but gia proves the doubters wrong with his 0:24:02. Giancarlo's fusion of science and art would certainly win him the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Pokémon Photography, if only such a thing existed.

Next we have the science of toads and their combative behaviors. Pablo 'DJ Mike Haggar' Bert dissects the old Battletoads runs by Marc J. 'Emptyeye' Dziezynski with cold precision. Let's welcome this new member of our speedrunning community, someone who likes to remix Final Fight for all I can tell. Pablo has improved the any% time by 0:03:59 to 0:20:13 and the 100% time by 0:02:24 to 0:34:17. Anyone looking for a challenge, try beating these runs; Pablo has vowed to defend his records to the death!

It's time for a special encore presentation from the Master of Mario. Not only are the Mario 1–3 records his, Andrew Gardikis has planted (lowered?) his flag on Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels: the game that tries to kill you with poisonous mushrooms, backward warps, and trampolines that blast you into orbit. Andrew blazes through the game in a mere 0:08:34 as Mario — what, were you expecting Luigi? Now that we've taken care of the old-school Mario for the time being, stay tuned for... ha, this is too much fun.

With all due respect to the, um, highly respected forum member omega4, Josh 'LigerOfFortune' Styger is the true ninja gardener. He has ended Jim 'vgmrsepitome' Hanson's reign of terror over the NES Ninja Gaiden trilogy with a huge upgrade to Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. His 0:11:39 is a full 30 seconds better than Jim's run. Josh has now also held records on all three games in the trilogy, albeit not all at once. Both Josh and Jim are competing to beat this latest time, so we'll be on the lookout for some serious ninja gardening in the future.

One of SDA's most versatile speedrunners is back. Tomi 'sarou' Salo has annihilated the previous run of Gun by 0:55:34. The new time is 1:18:46 and was achieved in 37 segments. Although Kevin 'Mitsukai' Shropshire did his run on console, and Tomi did his on PC, the improvement was so drastic that we obsoleted the old run anyway. Gun seems built to spite speedrunners, but Tomi managed to channel his rage into some furious shooting action. No word yet on whether this run features Tomi's signature body ramming and indecisive wiggling action.