Speed Demos Archive: Quake news

I was drinking at "Chez Radix",
my favourite club
Telling anyone who'd listen
'bout the times I'd 'fragged Shub

When my head started spinning,
I couldn't think clear
I guess some sneaky mutha-fuckah
went and drugged my beer

I woke up in the toilet
with only my axe
Some monster stole my weapons
and I WANT THEM BACK

Now, I know it weren't a Zombie
coz the dress code says
No entry to "Chez Radix"
if you're the undead

But every other monster
living in this land
Is gonna meet me with my axe
in my hand

And the thieving scum will
come a cropper
when he comes face-to-face
with me and my chopper

Get Quake done Chopped at the QdQ website. (AVI versions)

Getting a demo update all to yourself is the rarest of rare priveleges. You have to do something pretty special to make us say "Fucking hell, this is even better than Ken's demo yesterday!"

But whenever a demo from Connor Fitzgerald arrives you get that tingly "I bet this is something special" feeling in your sack. Like when you see Horvath or Szalontai or Taipale in your inbox.

This is special even by Connor's standard, though. Improving the legendary The Ebon Fortress Easy 100% by Daniel Lindberg by two seconds to 1:19.

Watch this. No further words are needed.

Getting a demo update all to yourself is the rarest of rare priveleges. You have to do something pretty special to make us say "Fucking hell, let's post it right now!" and to be honest, who ever thought we'd see the day when Arturo Garcia Lasca was the one we were raving about.

Well, to be honest it's not that big of a surprise as the guy has always been good, and recently has been claiming id records like they're going out of fashion. Now he has taken a record that has stood for over six years despite the best efforts of some of the best runners in the history of everything, ever.

When Markus made the Easy Run of Castle of the Damned in 0:30 everyone thought it was beatable, but not by a human. They were right. It took Ken to make 0:29.

Arturo Garcia Lasca is well and truly on a roll. Recently he's been nabbing id records like a fucker. Now he's done a little Marv-o-rape and taken the Termination Central Easy 100% time down by one second to 1:09. Of course he then goes in to the usual "not very good"; "won't last long"; "a good player could beat it easily" shite that he always seems to think is necessary. STFU. It's excellent. :-)

The newest Finn on the block with a rabbit in his reindeer skin underpants is Jaakko Alakopsa, who has been making demos like a certified loony.

He did the sm82 Easy Run in 4:01 beating himself by 12 seconds.
Just to prove that he truly loves the map he rampaged through the Nightmare 100% (I say "rampaged" because I can't think of a word that means "spilled huge amounts of blood at a reasonably brisk pace") in a time of 12:49, new to the tables.
Just to prove that he loves to share the love, he teamed up with Gregory R. Payne to lag their way through the 2-Player Easy 100% in 4:27.
Then he ditched []Lardarse and went off on his own to fill the gap for the colony2 Easy 100% in 1:34. Looking good.
But the lonelyness soon got to him and it was time go join Mathias Thore and Thomas Stubgaard in the Dismal Oubliette for some 3-Player Easy 100% action. Some nice route planning and fierce running made this 1:44 seven seconds faster than Justin Fleck, Nolan Pflug and Evan Wagner, the so called "American Tree-Ho's".
And STILL he wasn't finished. There was a gap for the dam100 Easy 100% and, now that the map has been fixed so that you can get all kills (so go and download it again if you haven't done so already), he managed to get a respectable 2:13.

That left only the Nightmare 100% on dam100 without a demo. Unfortunately, NahkahiiR didn't quite have the balls to make it. Not that surpising because it is strictly a big-balls only demo. In fact, rumour has it that only Morfans sized stones are up to the job, so I gave it a try. Yes indeed, a lot of testicle work is needed to even get a 3:31 tablefiller.

I also improved my Nightmare 100% of aard100 by 23 seconds to 5:39, partly with the addition of the early RL grab, partly just being an all-round better demo.

"Barking" Basil de Vries went sm103_zwiffle crazy and "opened" a can of "whoop-ass" on m"w"h.

He improved the Easy 100% by 27 seconds to get 1:53. Survival here is not an option... but somehow he does.
Same for the Nightmare 100%, except slightly slower. 2:03 beating Michael by 36 seconds.
His final demo was not Hudson-Harvesting. It was Lenhardt-laundering, beating Jonathan's Nightmare Run by 5 seconds to 0:14.

Our final demo for today is from Dmitry Dementjev who has beaten the old, Old, OLD, OLD Ilkka Kurkela Easy Run on discord. in 0:42. Ilkka's run was good, but Dmitry's is teo sweconds faster. Is Dmitry turning into the new Ilkka? Well, I have heard it said that apart from the fact that he lacks Ilkka's wit, intelligence, charm, skill, good looks, ability and (it has to be said) sexual magnetism, they are almost identical.

Who's the man with the fastest boosts of them all? If you'd seen the last update, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was Rabbit-Running superstar Martin Selinus. However, a quick peek at this week's demos on aard100 will reveal, that it's actually Martin Selinus (all the difference is in the colour, y'see). He improved his very, very fast Easy Run by two seconds to a pant-wetting 0:25 and Tom's hoary old Nightmare Run by ten seconds to a bowel-loosening 0:26.

But old Marvin wasn't happy with that. He also improved his Easy Run through the The Realm of Black Magic by two seconds to bring us 3:43 of pure joy.

The other ID demo of the update is a surprisingly action packed 3-Player Easy Run of the Dismal Oubliette in 1:14 from Mathias Thore, Robert Maglic and Thomas Stubgaard, one second faster than Joe's SP time (it's still not very action packed -- just less dull than I expected :).

For the first time in a while, I have a few single player demos in this update. First I played the Easy 100% of sm103_zwiffle enough to luck out and get 2:20, fourteen seconds faster than before and then overcame my fear of the identically-monstered Nightmare 100% to record 2:39, a respectable 53 seconds faster than my demo in the last update. Finally, I was looking around frostbite and noticed a better way of doing the end than Jaakko and beat his demo by six seconds to get 1:30.

I set the demo over to NahkahiiR and he quickly sent in a 1:25 that was deemed invalid because he use a beta of QdQstats 1.8....

.

"What a what?" I hear you cry? "QdQstats 1.8?" Yes, Nolan "the daddy" Pflug has been testing a new revision of the legendary and venerable QdQstats with dead body removal for those packet overflowing maps and a host of bugfixes (mainly removal of unkillable monsters). Not long after Jaakko sent in his demo with the beta, Radix declared himself happy and put the final version up for download on the download page.

In other site related news, Nolan found and fixed the bug that meant you couldn't get the final kill in dam100.bsp and uploaded a new version of the map. This means that if you want to do a 100% you'll have to download the map again (Jaakko got bitten again by this but he still has plenty of demos in the update). If you're still having trouble getting all the kills, try getting some more health...

Now, back to demos. As I was saying, Jaakko quickly noticed how stupid it was to kill the death knights at the end of the frostbite with grenades, picked up the perforator and exited in 1:24. Then he realised that the grenade counter is actually a good idea and improved to 1:21 taking his total improvement over me to nine seconds. Oh well, at least no-one else is playing sm103_zwiffle much...

In between his Easy Run attempts, the unspellably-nicked one took on the Nightmare 100% of frostbite and exited in a justifiably cautious 8:14.

If you're tired of hearing about Mr. Alakopsa, don't worry, you only have one more demo to read about: he improved his own run of Rubicondom by 46 whole seconds to get 4:13.

I also have a coop demo this week: Paul Davies and I completed the 2-Player Easy 100% of Rubicondom in 5:00 which isn't really very good, but the decimals are 5:00.0, which has to be worth something.

Good grief, haven't I finished this update yet? No! There's still Tom Nguyen's klz100b2 Nightmare Run in 0:22 to tell you about. Now I have. Good night.

The new map demo splurge still continues, with twenty-one demos in this update. That's more demos than you could comfortably fit on a Canadian's creamy-white left buttock. Trust me. I checked. (Or was I dreaming....)

The majority of these demos were on aard100. Who would have thought that there could be so many routes? Because of this, I advise you to watch all these demos as they're not just "faster bunny" improvements, they're "Ha-ha! I bet you wish you'd tried that first" improvements.

First out of the trap was Dutch insanity tube Basil de Vries, who did the Easy Run in 0:37, beating Mathias by 2 seconds.
But hot on his heels came Martin Selinus who turned in a 0:36.
Next came a 0:34 from David Hocking. It takes a brave man to attack a Marv record, he's sure to fight back.
And fight back he did. With a 0:31, then a 0:29 and finally a 0:27. Marvin, we salute you! (Even though it's a 0:27.06)
The Nightmare Run was slightly less frantic, but still a good battle. It started with a 0:39 by Tom Nguyen, beating himself by 7 seconds.
Then carried on with a 0:38 by Basil de Vries.
But Sshplur hit back with a recapture of 0:36.
Those demos were good. But the best demo on the map this week was undoubtedly the Nightmare 100% by Richard "Hey, that's me!" Skidmore. Well, okay it's not that good, but at 6:02 it does beat Jaakko Alakopsa by 49 seconds.

heresp4 has been pretty slow moving up until now. And I'm not sure that an Easy 100% in 2:08 by Paul Davies really counts as "moving", but the demos nice. Anyone else want to try this piece of lovelyness? (The map, not Paul).

Michael Hudson uses my favourite tactic to tackle the 100% of sm103_zwiffle. Run through to the end collecting all the weaponry then run through again killing anything that's still alive. This gave him an Easy 100% time of 2:55 and a Nightmare 100% time of 3:32. Then, just before the deadline for this update, he sneaked in an Easy 100% improvement to 2:34. The monsters spend so much time fighting each other in this demo that he hardly needs to fire a shot!

Basil was not to be denied having at least one record in this update. He took on the Nightmare 100% of klz100b2, because everyone else was to scared to, and got 1:58. Fearsome stuff.

Oh, Wait. He also did the Nightmare Run in 0:27, beating Tom Nguyen by 3 seconds. So that's two records this update.

Fuck. And the colony2 Nightmare Run in 0:16. Three. I should have looked ahead a bit a couple of paragraphs ago.

Still on colony2, we have a brilliant Easy Run in 0:14, seven seconds faster than Jaakko, by Connor Fitzgerald. Connor's experience of jumping on top of old dogs certainly paid off here!

Arturo Garcia Lasca, made a couple of funked up demos. Also, just as an aside, he now owns more cars than braincells! (Five, in case you're interested.)

First was an improvement to the sm59_lev2 Easy 100% in 0:24, beating Basil by 2 seconds.
He wasn't the only one to think that the enforcers were a little slow to start blasting at Mandel in his dam100 Nightmare Run last update. He was the only one, however, to do a 0:16, one second faster.

And finally some Swede-on-Swede coop action from Martin "Pump" Selinus and Mathias "Dump" Thore. These two gentlemen took on the 2-Player Easy 100% of Termination Central and exited in the hugely impressive time of 0:39, two seconds faster than Martin and Sebastian.

That concludes this weeks demo-orgasm. If you haven't shot your bolt by now (or the female equivalent if you happen to be born with ovum) you probably never will.

Until next time...

But first an important notice: Joequake contains a bug which makes coop demos look odd. Until Jozsef fixes this bug (or something else happens...) we must ban its use as server for coop demos. Sorry about that. Please use winquake or glquake instead until the problem has been fixed. Also, it's been noted that SM82 doesn't load properly in winquake and glquake, playing on nightmare skill. You will have to use Joequake for that. Thus, there is currently no way to make a valid nightmare coop demo on that map!

We added a whole bunch of maps last week, and here's what's been happening on them over the weekend.

sm103_zwiffle:

ER
- Michael Hudson got the first tablefiller 0:18.
- Connor Fitzgerald shaved 5 seconds to get 0:13.
NR
- Jonathan Lenhardt did 0:19.
- Connor sent in a 0:13 run claiming it was recorded on skill 3 but since it actually was recorded on skill 0, we won't put it in the tables :P

aard100

ER
- Jaakko Alakopsa did 0:47.
- But I tried a quadded grenade verus a vore, succeded resonably, and got 0:39.
EH - Jaakko did the full 100% in 5:36.
NR - Tom Nguyen did this one in 0:46.
NH - Jaakko, in 6:51.
EH2 - Jaakko and Jonathan got together over a very fast internet connection and did a 4:08. Most of the time is saved thanks to teamplay rocket protection, rather than by the fact that they were two :)

colony2 has only seen one demo so far, but the one we have is impressive indeed. It's a 0:21 easy run by Jaakko, using an enforcer boost I did not see coming...

dam100:

ER
- Jaakko did 0:28, 0:24 and finally 0:21 using more and more refined techniques.
- But Jonathan got 0:20.
- In the end, Connor did the level in 0:15.
NR
- Jonathan did the first run in 0:22.
- But I sent in a 0:17 short after that.

frostbite

ER - Jaakko did 1:39 first, and then 1:36.
EH - Jaakko also did this one, in 2:33.

heresp4 got one run, from Thomas Bergendorff, and it's the easy variant. 0:50 is his finishing time.

klz100b2

ER - Arturo Garcia Lasca did this one in 0:22 first, and then 0:21.
EH
- Jonathan did the first try, and got 0:41.
- But Arturo got 0:35, and then 0:31.
NR - Tom tried this demo I thought would be impossible. But thanks to being smart, Tom finished the level in 0:30.

sm82

ER
- Gregory R. Payne did 5:26.
- But Jaakko improved that to 4:59.
EH - Gregory got 7:46, 7:02, 6:38 and finally 6:25.

That's it, for the extremely new levels. But we also have some demos on a level which is merely very new. It's sm59_lev2, the contest map. Basil de Vries went ahead and beat the easy 100% and nightmare 100% by one second each, getting 0:26 and 0:27 respectively. Sorry, Timo =)

The last demo for today is a 3-player easy 100% on a very, very old level, namely Termination Central. Martin Selinus, Thomas Stubgaard and I beat the old record by 3 seconds and got 0:32.

Yesterday's demo posting missed out on one demo that has been sitting in our inbox for the last, ohhhhhh, two years or so. It's the 2 Player Easy 100% of colony2 in 0:55 by Evan Wagner and Justin Fleck. What's that you say? Don't recognise that level? Well that's because we only added it to the archive a couple of hours ago.

In fact, we went a little mad and came up with a list of eight

colony2, The Culling Station by Mark Turner. Please call your demos col2_xxx.
heresp4, Beyond The Black Sun by Here. Please call your demos her4_xxx.
frostbite, Frostbite by Peter 'hrimfaxi' S�rensen. Please call your demos frbt_xxx.
aard100, The Secret Castle by Wouter 'Aardappel' van Oortmerssen. Please call your demos a100_xxx.
dam100, Minimal Devastation by John 'DaMaul' McCann. Please call your demos d100_xxx.
klz100b2, Shadows by Killazontherun. Please call your demos k100_xxx.
sm103_zwiffle, The Fall Of Quake by Zwiffle. Please call your demos 103z_xxx.
sm82, Rubicondom by Various Mappers. Please call your demos sm82_xxx.

All these maps has been re-VISed where necessary for transparent water support, and just because we love you, we have put all 8 new maps into one big .dz that you can grab from HERE.

If this isn't a reason to spend the whole weekend running I don't know what is!

Three ID demos, three not. The first ID demo is from the exceedingly modest but incredibly talented and handsome Mathias Thore, with his 0:57 Nightmare Run of the Wind Tunnels beating the useless and ugly Connor Fitzgerald by one second.

Mandel is also involved in the next demo, which is him and Martin Selinus beating Evan Wagner and Cameron Engles by one second on the Easy 100% of Gloom Keep to record a 0:30.

The last ID demo is Thomas and Mads-Peter Stubgaard postively spanking Nolan Pflug and Evan Wagner's Easy 100% of The Pain Maze, their time of 1:23 being no less than 9 seconds faster.

All the non-ID demos are from the same man on the same map, because Tom Nguyen isn't a man to just beat a record. He bludgeons it to death, cuts up the pieces and finally dances on its grave. Observe: he beats Amrik's coagula3 Nightmare Run by 4 seconds to 0:39. Then he twists the knife with a 0:38. But that was a .3, so the coup de grace of a 0:37 follows after a few days more of cursing shamblers, framerates, packet loss and mappers in general.

You might want to keep paying attention to SDA over the next day or so...

Soooo....the LotW is over! Congratulations to Peter "the Devil Himself" Horvath, Arturo "K�n" Garc�a Lasca and Timo Nieminen for their respective wins!

Here are the results as given by our dear recordbot:

ER
# 1: Peter Horvath in 5.27461
# 2: Arturo Garcia Lasca in 5.43648
# 3: Timo Nieminen in 5.54287
# 4: Martin Selinus in 5.78607
# 5: Dmitry Dementjev in 5.98831
# 6: Paul Davies in 6.23662

EH
# 1: Timo Nieminen in 27.47589
# 2: Martin Selinus in 28.67163
# 3: Paul Davies in 30.53366

NR
# 1: Arturo Garcia Lasca in 5.33629
# 2: Timo Nieminen in 5.59952
# 3: Martin Selinus in 6.12305
# 4: Paul Davies in 6.20224
# 5: Michael Hudson in 8.62993

NH
# 1: Timo Nieminen in 28.77805
# 2: Paul Davies in 35.34885

Peter and Ken got very close to that magic 4 second run. Their stunning performances hint that 4 seconds could actually be possible if you just figure out how to get an additional boost. So, if you think you can do what Peter and Ken couldn't...well the level is now in the archives, go for it.
Timo had a strong 100% showing, and he was together with Paul the only player to participate in all categories, well done Timo, well done Paul.

Thanks everyone for participating, this kind of LotW will take place again. Unfortunately I'm moving from this flat and will be internet-less for some time (gamingwise anyway)...so we'll see what happens.

The entire demo pack can be found here. It contains the demos from the results above as well as an egg demo from Dmitry. However I have no idea what the hell the actual egg is. So watch the demo and let me know what's so funny about it cos I have no idea. Is it a russian thing?

Hey guys, I'm sorry for the delay in getting this LotW on the road. I'm in the process of moving flats, and on top of that the harddrive on my gaming rig blew up. That made me lose a number of maps and demos, not to mention the holiday pics (nude ones of my girlfriend...) and the last four months of mp3-downloads. Sigh.

Enough whining, and let me get on with the LotW. Today the W stands for "Who can get a 5 second run" - I lost my demo in the harddrive crash. BUT I figured it would be boring to leave it like this since getting a 5 sec run wouldn't take you skilled runners very long...so I've decided to spice things up a bit. This edition of the LotW is partly a competition as well. I got some help from mad hacker MWH (the only one on SDA with brains bigger than a chicken), and he implemented a nifty feature in Recordbot. Recordbot, our bot on irc that keeps track of speedruns, reports emails etc, will keep track of the latest times in all categories on this LotW map. The times will be read from the demos, and so will have the same accuracy - 6.37720 secs for example. It'll keep going for just about week (we'll end the show on 19.00 CET, Tuesday the 22nd of November).

This means it won't be enough to just get a five second run (or xx secs 100%), you'll have to own everyone down to the decimals, just as in a normal competition. But, unlike a normal competition, the idea is that you should send in your demo as soon as you have beaten the current record! That way Recordbot, and everyone else, will be updated on the current record and you'll know what time to beat! I'm hoping this will make for a lot of activity on IRC. The map itself is very simple, there's only one route...in order to win you just have to get better boosts than everyone else. How many boosts can you fit in? One? Two? Maybe even three? Maybe someone can get the runs closer to four seconds than five?? I think the W now stands for "Who can get the closest to four seconds?"

Download the map here. Name your demos 59l2_xxx. That's an 'l' as in lodis there inbetween the 9 and the 2...
Demos must be recorded using QdQstats - or they will be ignored.

To find out what the latest, and fastest, times are (and who sent them in) you simply log onto irc, quakenet, channel #qdq and ask recordbot:
Recordbot: lotw <category> (where the category can be er, eh, nr, nh).
For example, Recordbot: lotw er for the easy run category.

Have fun guys!

Peter Horvath. Read the name again. Say it out loud. What kind of update has you saying "Peter Horvath" out loud before you've even been presented with the first demo? Hopefully, you'd think, it's one that includes a demo from Peter. And you'd be right.

The Elder God Shrine nightmare run is an interesting one. To an untrained eye, Markus's 0:37 run might appear to be optimal or very close to optimal. A highly trained professional will easily come to the same conclusion. However, for Peter Horvath, 0:37 is mediocre at best. With a trick you won't believe you just saw, Peter finishes the map in 0:33, FOUR seconds faster than Markus. Antoher ID record for Peter, and another level done for the ongoing QdQwaV II project. If this is what Peter does when he's 'going to be taking a few months rest from Quake' then I don't ever want to see him get back in action ;-)

Having recently finished a chopped demo on end for the Quake done Chopped project, Tom Nguyen suddenly found himself having fallen in a strange kind of love with the quake chopper weapon known as axe. Luckily, SDA is a big archive by now, with loads of different maps offering different kinds of action. One of them is bbelief7, which just happens to offer buttloads of a2s (axe to shambler) and a2v (axe to vore) action. Beating Nolan Pflug by 24 seconds using some intelligent telefragging, Tom finishes the nightmare 100% in 2:51.

I, and many other people, just love long, long nightmare 100% demos as made by Richard Skidmore. So his new 6:54 demo on mexx9d comes as a pleasant treat. However, don't be deceived by the time; this demo is a run! Still, a multi minute figt against a single, stupid monster at the end makes this demo worth every single second you spend watching it :)

Mathias Thore, or I, found the emptiness in my SDA inbox a little too tragic, and decided to find a few quickie ER's to beat. So I did coagula3 in 0:38 and dxm in 0:11, 2 and 1 seconds faster than Amrik respectively. Nice!

Thomas Bergendorff is currently recovering from a hard drive failure. Unable to keep from playing Quake, Thomas suddenly found himself sitting in front of another, much older computer, playing the game we all know and love. After a while he had improved the disturb easy 100% by 3 seconds, to the new, fresh 1:07. A double ogre grenade jump towards the end is just one of quite a few 'wow' moments.

In fact, this update has been all about 'wow'! To take you people back down to earth again, the last demo for today is a pingy coop on dmc1m2. Mathias Thore (Sweden), Robert Maglic (Sweden), and Michael Hudson (Britain) teamed up one Tuesday night and did the 3-player easy run in 0:15, two seconds faster than the single player demo.

Is all! Go run! Yeah bananas.

The Dismal Gibliette contest is over and the results are in. Congratulations to everyone who entered, but especially Timo and Martin (seeing as they won, and it is, you know, a contest and you're allowed to be elitist for them).

Stay tuned for the next exciting SDA event!

If you've recently beaten the record for the Easy 100% of the Dimension of the Doomed and of The Slipgate Complex, what is the obvious "next thing" to do? The Easy 100% of Castle of the Damned, maybe? The current record is a "Jozsef 2002" demo and very good... but Arturo Garcia Lasca's 0:48 is even better! One second better, in fact. It's clear that Ken is one Street Fighter character that knows how to use a shotgun. The next record in the ideal sequence is of course the Easy 100% of The Necropolis but we'll probably forgive him if he skips that one :)

The other impressive ID demo in this update is Azure Agony 2-Player Easy Run in 0:41 from Robert Maglic and Mathias Thore beating the old record from Simon Nordberg and Daniel Magnusson by just one second. I'm sure I heard things about a 0:40 but it hasn't materialized yet.

Bringing up the rear of this update is a rather badly planned 3-Player Easy 100% tablefiller on hellbrid in 2:22 from Mandel, Midas and me. We suspect that this can be improved (a) with better routes, (b) with better running, or (c) both.

I really hope the reason there has only been three demos in the last week is that you've all been working super hard on the contest. Or there will be trouble.

We've been promising you a contest for... ohhhhhh... ages. But where is it?

Guess what? It's HERE.

It's not like we've received a whole lot of demos this last week or anything. It's just that one of'em is particularly fine. The Slipgate Complex easy 100% stood unreachable for five and a half years unil suddenly one day this spring Timo Nieminen took it down a second. But much to everybody's surprise, Timo's record didn't stand very long, not even half a year, because Arturo García Lasca took it down another second this wednesday. The new record is 0:52, and the demo looks flawless to me.

Jonny Andersson did a very appreciated but short comeback, and sent us an easy 100% on evildead. Jonny got 1:12 which is 7 seconds faster than Fabian's old record.

I did two demos on obiwan3, namely the easy run in 0:43 which is a 2-second improvement over myself, and the easy 100% in 1:57, 12 seconds faster than Pif. I was aiming for TO on the level but the NH owned me.

Did I mention a contest? Mandel who?

Now, usually updates are written by a member of SDA. Ignoring this somewhat necessary requirement, here's an update, with comments too! Lazy buggers. Luckily for me, there were not too many demos, 9 in total, although one is a tad long...

As you all know, the ant Easy Run had been the target of a flurry of demos in September, the last 5 in fact by none other than Tom Nguyen. Steadily he had been chipping off the seconds, and has now perhaps closed the book with a very nice 1:46, with neat little tricks and monster co-operation taking off a further 4 seconds.

You'll also have noticed Laurent Mertens's obsession with Prodigy Special Edition; this pattern continues, with a new Easy and Nightmare marathon of the Run variety. Not respectively, his new times are 3:36 and 3:19. To provide a rather useless measure of progress, in total that's 44 seconds improvement, despite a little (understandable) nervousness late on, and exiting the first level on Nightmare with only 1 health. Also, I don't know about you, but... I would have at least once liked to see the skill change done properly. :)

Anyway, every other demo in this update is on the original bunch of levels made by those idiots at iD. To kick it off, here's a fantastic Nightmare Run on e4m2, by the man who proves the bunny is well and truly out of the bag. Scripting aside, none other than Robert Maglic takes the time down to 0:29, which you'd know if you were watching the QdQwav2 page like a hawk. I know I am.

In a fairly random position, here's the only coop demo of the update. What's wrong with you people? Stubby and Mandel improved some demo by an aging webmaster and an american laggot, ending up with an e4m3 NH2 in 3:43. This looks pretty darn optimal to me.

Not content at only one demo, Thomas Stubgaard decided to knock the obligatory one second from an older demo of his on e2m5, the Nightmare 100% of course. The new record is 1:59, destroying the significant-only-in-sixties 2 minute barrier.

Next come some rather nice marathons from Ken, who wasn't very happy with his Dimension of the Doomed Easy 100% from last week, and decided to improve it to a shiny 7:25. Again deciding it sucked, he knocked off yet another 4 seconds, producing this positively gleaming 7:21. Bravo, what say.

The last demo is rather special; for one, most records don't go near a 2 hour improvement in their lifespan. This one does, as the Fleck wrenches the very impressive id1 NH title back from Marlo Galinski's grasp, a carnage-filled 1:09:33. That's another 3:29 saved. I might just watch this again in a few minutes; it's that good.

The Other Demos section has received its fair share of stuff recently too. Check that out when it gets updated, probably in the year 2010.

What's that you say? Other demos? Besides the ones we already host at SDA? Yep, we've opened up a new section for demos that fit into other categories, such as Cheated, Naked, Careful, Bunny and Tricks/Eggs. You can find a more detailed explanation for each category here (scroll down to the bottom), but to put it in short, we've moved the Bunny Comparison page and the page previously known as Windlash (it hosted demos for the Cheated and Naked categories) to this new page, along with a brand new category called Careful. The Tricks/Eggs section is mostly just for the fun of it, we'll add more demos as we go along. We've decided only to host runs on the original id maps, except for a few custom maps which had already been added to the Windlash page. We're open to suggestions though, so if you have a brilliant idea for a map we should add, or you've made an outstanding demo on a non-id map for any of these new categories, we'll consider adding it, but ask us first before you send us your demos, m'kay!

You can browse through the different pages by clicking "other demos" in the main menu to the left.
Demos should be sent to our normal email address, bug reports and questions should go the same way.

Happy running!

Here we go with a nice, round half dozen demos. Giving you, the beloved viewer, nearly an hour and a half of top quality viewing! Why so much sheer pleasure from so few demos? Well...

When Optic recently took Marlo's record for the Nightmare 100% through The Whole Damned Game it was like a cattle-prod in the gonads for Marlo Galinski. He immediately set about about working on the recapture and, after incidentally improving the Elder World marathon along the way (see last week's update), he finally settled on a 73:02, just one second shy of five minutes faster. Watch and learn.

Justin Fleck took his Kurkela bashing stick to the shadow 100%s. First the Easy 100% in 2:50 beating Ilkka by 6 seconds, then the Nightmare 100% in 4:54 beating Ilkka by... wait for it... 70 seconds! That's not just Flecked, that's positively Pflugged!

Optic loses a record, Optic gains two records, now Optic loses another record. Last week saw a highly entertaining battle between the aforementioned Fleckmeister and Tom Nguyen fot the ant Nightmare Run. The record went backwards and forwards between them several times and when we last left them Justin had the prize. Much frustration then ensued for Sshplur until suddenly, out of the blue, all the monsters cooperated and he got a suprise 2:17, five seconds faster.

Laurent Mertens upped the aggression level in his pse Nightmare Run Marathon and it seems to have paid off. He finished in 4:08, a full thirty seconds faster than his last demo.

Only one coop this time, but the weekend is coming so we'll probably see some more hot marine-on-marine action in just a few days. To tide you over here's Martin Selinus and Mathias Thore doing the 2-Player Easy 100% of The Door To Chthon in 0:26, one second fasterthan Martin and Sebastian.

And finally, Radix has made one of his semi-regular updates to the All Demos Download. Not the All Demos Download you see at the top of demo updates, but the All Demos Download that contains ALL the regular demos that we've ever had, EVER! You can get it from here and then spend the next 250 hours or so just watching. (Although you'll probably need to take a toilet break at some point...)

That's all from me for today. Stay beefy.

Hey there runners and lurkers. I'm back, big time, with 22 demos on various maps! Don't you ever let me leave you like that again m'kay? It's certainly been a while since I wrote an update, so let's see if I remember how to do it... Hmm...

Before we get started with the demos I just have to tell you all to have a look at the QdQwavp2 project page because Peter Horvath sent in a demo today. It's on e2m4, and features one of the biggest why didn't I think of that-moments ever. Just watch in awe as Peter goes to fetch the rocket launcher 'the wrong way'... Go to the project page and check it out.

hellbrid.

Justin Fleck decided to show Jaakko Alakopsa how a real man^® does the easy run in 0:50, 11 seconds faster than Jaakko.
Jaakko Alakopsa replied with doing the nightmare run in 1:19, 8 seconds faster than Damian Kulot.
But Justin did it even faster, in only 0:59.
The one who drew the longest straw this time was Dmitry Dementjev. Following all the SDA rules and using a fair number of very difficult tricks, his 0:38 easy run turned out to be 12 seconds faster than Justin's.
Saddened by the loss of a precious SDA record, Justin teamed up with his coop mate Evan Wagner and did the 2-player easy run in 0:34,
and the 2-player nightmare run in 0:38.

ant

The nightmare run on this level has seen quite a fight this week, between a relatively new newbie and a terribly old oldtimer. Tom Nguyen started the fight by beating Justin's table filler by 32 seconds with this 2:33.
Justin didn't want to know anything about it, and instantly made this 2:30 demo, 3 seconds faster than Tom!
Tom replied with a 5 second improvement, 2:25...
...which Justin improved by another 3 seconds to 2:22.
That's the end of that. For this week at least.
Justin also improved his tablefiller nightmare 100% by 26 seconds to 5:45.

Justin Fleck

...also had time to fill some of the nastier holes the SDA tables have ever seen. First he took on the menk easy 100% and got a more than decent 9:09.
The nightmare run looks like an absolute bitch, but Justin did it in style and 1:37. Dare I say optimal? No I don't. But almost :)
Someone requested an ac demo, and got this 6:16 easy 100%.
The 100%s on czg100b reached new hights as Justin beat Richard's easy version by 8 seconds to 1:25,
and Richard's nightmare version by 5 seconds to 1:26. Swell!

Dmitry Dementjev applied a very powerful set of bunnies, tricks, and SDA rules on bnt and managed to beat Kay's easy run first by 1 second to 0:43 and then by an incredible other second to 0:42. Speedy!

I've been involved in a number of coop demos this weekend.

First together with Michael Hudson and Martin Selinus. We did a 3-player easy 100% on sm100_pulsar in 0:33. You have to love the way this demo ends (Chthon kills the last vore for you bums who are too lazy to watch the demo)!
Again with Martin but this time also with Robert Maglic. Shub-Niggurath's Pit got a 0:13 3-player easy run. There's some decent pings here, but we could do with even lower.
When Martin had to go to bed, me and Robert took in Thomas Stubgaard and did a 3-player easy 100% on The Door To Chthon in 0:22, beating an old demo by Ilkka Kurkela, Juho Larvi and Juho-Jussi Renvall by 3 seconds.
And finally, today me, Martin, Robert and Thomas did a splendid 4-player easy 100% on Azure Agony. It's blazingly fast. 0:57.

Now, go stretch your contest nerves, because we will soon have a surprise for you all. I almost promise!

Tuesday, September 27th by mwh

Even less commentary - 12:15 PM

We would so like to write stuff about these, but, well, we didn't. Sorry.

We have 30 demos for you today. Let's start with the ant demos:

Easy Run in 2:03, 1:55, 1:54 and 1:50, all by Tom Nguyen.
Easy 100% in 4:35 by Pif de Mestre and 3:50 by Justin Fleck.
ant Nightmare Run in 3:40 by Pif de Mestre and 3:05 by Justin Fleck.
Just the one Nightmare 100% in 6:11 by Justin Fleck.
2-Player Easy 100% in 2:44 by Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner.

People are still playing hellbrid:

Easy Run in 1:04 by Jaakko Alakopsa, beating Tom Nguyen by 2 seconds and then he improved it to to 1:01.
Easy 100% in 3:41 by Richard Skidmore, beating himself by 9 seconds.
Nightmare Run in 1:27 by Damian Kulot, beating Jaakko Alakopsa by 10 seconds.
2-Player Easy Run in 0:51 by Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner, tablefiller (SP time 1:04).
2-Player Nightmare Run in 0:58 by Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner, tablefiller (SP time 1:27).

And then some others:

could Easy Run in 0:56 by Justin Fleck, beating Thomas Bergendorff by 7 seconds.
could Easy 100% in 3:12 by Justin Fleck, beating Stefan Schwoon by 27 seconds (TO for the fleck).
the Wizard's Manse Nightmare 100% in 2:00 by Thomas Stubgaard, beating himself by 2 seconds. <- LOOK! ID RECORD!
elin 3-Player Nightmare 100% in 0:12 by Basil de Vries, Paul Davies and David Spickermann, tablefiller (2P time 0:15).
mcm01 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:08 by Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner, beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 8 seconds.
mexx9a Easy 100% in 2:12 by Thomas Bergendorff, beating Justin Fleck by 6 seconds.
mexx9b Easy 100% in 6:11 by Basil de Vries, beating Thomas Bergendorff by -105 seconds. <- He got all the kills, OK?
mexx10 Nightmare Run in 2:29 by Justin Fleck, beating Thomas Bergendorff by 11 seconds.
pse Nightmare Run in 4:56 by Laurent Mertens, beating Pif de Mestre by 65 seconds.
pse Nightmare Run in 4:38 by Laurent Mertens, beating himself by 18 seconds.
sm19_xenon Easy 100% in 2:07 by Paul Davies, beating Kimmo Polvivaara by 5 seconds.
sm19_xenon Easy 100% in 1:57 by Paul Davies, beating himself by 10 seconds.

The obsessive compulsive numerate types will have noticed that there are two demos left. These do get some commentary...

It may not be one of his most treasured records ("plz improve this crap!") but it's a Joe record and it's an ID record so we just have to salute Arturo Garcia Lasca and his Easy 100% marathon of the Dimension of the Doomed in 7:32, a ten second improvement. It's so good, we've even decided to let him back into #qdq.

Now, you'd have thought that Thomas Stubgaard's recent mauling of the The Elder World Nightmare 100% would stand for some time. But that'd be reckoning without Marlo Galinski who took 21 seconds off the Dane's time to get 21:27. Do you think Marlo's going to take the mighty All of ID1 NH back? I'm not going to bet against it (though if you're insane, you could take advantage of the fact that Marlo takes a less risky route in e4m4 than Thomas...).

Wednesday, September 21st by mwh

Running late... - 11:55 AM

Here at SDA, we like to make updates witty, interesting and usually fabulously rude. But sometimes there just isn't the manpower, and we have so many demos that a lack of wit is a poor reason to keep them from you... I haven't had time to describe all these demos, so you'll just have to watch them. Sucks to be you, eh?

There's still time for a little rudeness, though. Ask yourself a question: what are the skill settings we accept demos on on SDA? I hope your answers are "Easy and Nightmare". Do you see Normal on that list? No, you don't. Despite that, we received TWO demos this last week that were recorded on the verboten Normal skill. We're not really into the name and shame business at SDA so we're not going to name the guilty parties. It's a total coincidence that the first demos in this update are a pair of collaborations between Kimmo Polvivaara and Basil de Vries. They did the 2-Player Easy and Nightmare 100%s of sm64_zwiffle in 0:30 and 0:31, respectively.

Right, moving on swiftly. All the holes in the tables left by the helltunnel/warecrap/sm64_noarmor/100p_cthons map additions got filled in the last update but demos continued to come in:

hellbrid Easy Run in 1:13 by Damian Kulot, beating Jaakko Alakopsa by 1 second.
hellbrid Easy Run in 1:07 by Tom Nguyen, beating Damian Kulot by 6 seconds.
hellbrid Easy Run in 1:06 by Tom Nguyen, beating himself by 1 second.
hellbrid Easy 100% in 4:04 by Jaakko Alakopsa, beating himself by 11 seconds.
hellbrid Easy 100% in 3:50 by Richard Skidmore, beating Jaakko Alakopsa by 14 seconds.
warehaus Easy 100% in 1:42 by Laurent Mertens, beating Jim Leonard by 5 seconds.

Obviously there are a few demos on that newest of maps, ant. All Easy Runs, though:

3:19 by Gregory R. Payne (aka []Lardarse),
3:11 by David Spickermann (aka LLCoolDave),
2:40 by Dmitry Dementjev (aka Manslay),
2:14 by Tom Nguyen (aka sshplur).

If you're thinking of trying to improve these, note that we now have an ER in 2:03 and and EH in 4:35.

We also have demos on more vintage maps:

m_palace Nightmare 100% in 1:47 by Justin Fleck, beating Thomas Bergendorff by 10 seconds.
mexx10 Nightmare 100% in 4:47 by Justin Fleck, beating Thomas Bergendorff by 60 seconds.
dmc1m4 Nightmare 100% in 1:56 by Basil de Vries, beating Richard Skidmore by 28 seconds.
Prodigy Easy Run in 3:31 by Laurent Mertens, beating Jonathan Lenhardt by 24 seconds.

Some coops:

mexx9a 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:52 by Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner, tablefiller. For obscure reasons to do with Quake C it's not possible get all kills on the map when cooping (before the pedants complain).
the_gate 3-Player Easy 100% in 0:30 by Basil de Vries, Paul Davies and David Spickermann, tablefiller (SP time 0:44).
Possibly one of the worst (but also funniest) demos ever to be placed in the archives: gmsp3 3-Player Easy 100% in 7:15 by Basil de Vries, Paul Davies and Michael Hudson, tablefiller (SP time 8:58). Playing this map is almost like playing an episode of smaller maps but that hardly excuses the tomfoolery at the end of this demo...
In fact this demo was so bad that a three minutes and eighteen second improvement to 4:57 is still actually pretty terrible.

Talking of cooping episodes, Justin Fleck and Evan Lagner might be accused of planning something really quite special, for they have done the almost unbelievably bitchy job of the 2-Player Nightmare 100%s of The Realm of Black Magic and The Netherworld, escaping alive in 11:52 and 8:49 respectively.

In the Episode 3 marathon they actually beat the existing record for Termination Central by five seconds so they spent the little while necessary to make a ten second improvement to 0:55.

On a final note, I'd like to comment on the astonishing number of new players we've seen at SDA this year. This update alone contains demos by FOUR previously unseen players. And as new blood is one of the things that keeps us going, I'd like to thank:

Tom Nguyen
Julie Holm Nielsen
Paul Davies
Dmitry Dementjev
Abigail Skidmore
Drew DeVore
Jonathan Lenhardt
Jaakko Alakopsa
Jonathan Anderson
Jim Leonard
Laurent Mertens
Damian Kulot
David Spickermann
Gregory R. Payne

for their efforts... even if some of you did take a while to learn how to name your files right :)

Sunday, September 18th by lodis

LotW!!11one - 8:07 PM

First off I'd like to apologize for adding warehaus. Really, I don't know what got into me. It won't happen again. Probably.

Now that we have gotten that sorry business out of the way I'd like to present a new feature here on SDA. It's.....

LotW

So what does LotW stand for? L for "Level", o for "of", t for "the" and W for "Week" = "Level of the Week"? That would make three correct guesses and one wrong. I'm far too lazy to add one level every week. So what does the W stand for then? Well it's like this: W stands for Whatever/Whenever/Wherever (we're not talking about Morfans philosophy about sex partners, though he uses this exact phrase). It means I'll add a level regularly and I'll try to keep it in the spirit of it having a connection to W.
For example, if Stubby made a level it'd be "Level of the Wanker" and if Basil made a level it'd be "Level of the Weedhead". You get the idea.

So what does the W stand for today? Wind! Mwh figured that if we were to replace all the Id levels with newer levels (starting with using e1m1rmx to replace e1m1) then surely this map would replace e3m5, "the Wind Tunnels" - hence Level of the Wind.
What map I hear you say? This map: Antediluvian by John Fitzgibbons. Name your demos ant_xxx.

I hope you will like this new feature, if you have any objections, thoughts or just plain flattery, email me or find me in our channel on irc.

Tuesday, September 13th by Morfans

It's A Large One! - 11:05 PM

Phew. It's been a busy week here at Speedrunning Central. Our Inbox has taken a right hammering in the last few days. The deity of your choice bless you, everyone.

We shall start with the Fleckyest runner in SDA history: Justin Fleck. He took a wander around mexx9a and recaptured his Easy 100% record from Thomas Bergendorff with a 2:18, 5 seconds faster. Still a few seconds to be had here so maybe we'll see a fight back from the Bergmeister.

Arturo Garcia Lasca has had a good week's running, turning in three demos and he sent in a new profile and picture. So those that are curious can see just how ugly the twat is. Then watch these...

He did the chessp1 Easy 100% in 0:53, beating himself by 3 seconds. If you haven't seen this map before you might be wondering why he has a kill missing. Don't panic, he hasn't cheated, there's a deathknight that doesn't teleport in on Easy. Useless metal fucker.
Then he joined in the Bergie bashing by doing the drakopf Easy 100% in 0:18, 1 second fatser but still, he thinks, not optimal.
Having done the EH he upped the skill and did the drakopf Nightmare 100% in 0:21, also one second faster than Thomas.

While we're on the subject of profiles, we've had quite a batch of new players recently. So if you've sent us one demo or fifty demos it doesn't matter. We'd like to add your profile to our list.

Next a bunch of demos from a man for whom spelling is merely something that happens to other people, Basil de Vries.

He did the elin Nightmare 100% in 0:24 beating Weixing Ye by 1 second. Fast and furious!
Then the tfl Easy 100% in 3:27, improving Tim's old record by 22 seconds.
Then on to a total whore of a map, tyrcoag. First he beat my Easy 100% tablefiller by 24 seconds to get 3:00.
Then he filled the oldest gap in the tables, the tyrcoag Nightmare Run, with a very impressive 1:30.

The new maps had some good action this week, with every vacant slot being filled! Good work everyone, now Mr Bergendorff can fulfill the promise he made a while ago to... do something.

It has a bridge and the wind tunnel bug is as annoying as hell. It can only be hellbrid.

The first attempt at the Easy 100% was from Michael Hudson and clocked in at 5:26. A definite tablefiller.
He realised just how appallingly bad the demo was and quickly improved it to 4:40, beating himself by 46 seconds. Much nicer.
But a 4:15 by Jaakko Alakopsa was the demo that took the record away from this update. Worthy!
Jaakko Alakopsa also attacked his Easy Run and improved his time to 1:19.
And if you think his real name is hard to spell, his nick is WORSE! NahkahiiR consolidated his hold on the record with a final improvement to 1:14.
The first ever Nightmare Run was a tablefillin' 1:58 by Michael Hudson.
NahkahiiR waded in with a 1:55.
And then a 1:37.
To close down the final gap on the level I knocked out a Nightmare 100% in 5:27.

What this update nees is a bit of base map. Which means, you've guessed it, warehaus.

The Easy Run has been taken below the minute mark by Basil who improved Jonathan's time by 12 seconds to 0:59.
Jim Leonard, better known (to those that follow that sort of thing) as DooM speedrunning legend Xit Vono, took control of the Easy 100% with a 1:47, beating Paul Davies by 2 seconds.
Jonathan Anderson took a stab at the Nightmare Run, waving a 2:33 in everyone's face.
But Jim has got the measure of this map and a 1:21 showed who's the new runner daddy.
Same story for the Nightmare 100%: Jonathan got a 3:49.
Then Xit Vono got a 2:12.

Getting towards the end now, we have a sm100_pulsar Nightmare 100% tablefiller in 0:46 by Paul Davies. No comment since I haven't seen the demo yet. :-)

And a sm64_zwiffle Nightmare 100% tablefiller in 0:52 by Basil de Vries. Or this one.

Why choose between a Fleck and a Wag when you can have both? Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner have graced us wth 3 coops.

They did the evilwrld 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:03, beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 10 seconds.
And the ikspq1 2-Player Easy 100% in 0:51, the same time as Ilkka and Janne. So why is this a record? Well, it would have been nice if the Finns had got all the kills, and even nicer if someone had noticed sooner than 5 years after it was posted. :-)
They also did the rettear 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:17, beating Luc de Mestre and Pif de Mestre by 12 seconds.

I'm knackered. Haven't done an update that big in ages. MMMMMmmmmm. Feels goooood.

And finally, I noticed that the last two updates I wrote have provoked comments from cuddly Canadian muffin Jube on the PlanetQuake news page along the lines of "Morfans in no swearing shocker!". Well, I have to say I didn't realise my language was usually that colourful. But, just for her, next time i can promise you a tirade of utter filth. Regular readers under the age of 18 should NOT attend...

Thursday, September 8th by Morfans

Evan 'Elp Us, We've Been Flecked! - 1:30 PM

Time once again for us all to dance the SDA Fandango. Sometimes called the Quake Quickstep or the Rocket Rumba. Probably. Being white and hetrosexual I am, of course, a terrible dancer. The only one I'm any good at is the Mattress Mamba.

Those with a keen eye will have noticed that the Episode 4 - The Elder World section of Justin Fleck's heroic Marathon through the whole of Quake clocked in at 25:11, which just happens to be five seconds faster than Marlo's time. So he ripped the demos out of the .pak, wrote a new .txt and voila! Another Id record! This would normally be a cause for major celebration, but a certain mad Dane has been working on a much risker, and thus faster, run for some time. So within hours of Optic getting the record he lost it again to Thomas Stubgaard and his absolutely mental 21:48. Jeepers!

Lodis would like to issue a public apology for ever thinking that warehaus was a runnable map. He has promised to make amends soon, in some way not yet disclosed, but in the mean time several people have had a crack at the Easy Run...

First to navigate the tortuous corridors was newcomer Jonathan Anderson. His first ever SDA run took him just 1:45. Welcome to the family, you'll never leave...
The next person to navigate the narrow dorways was Paul Davies, who took the time down to 1:20.
But it was The Navigator, Jonathan Lenhardt, who won the day with three quick improvements. Starting with 1:14, followed by 1:12 and finishing up with 1:11.

Next up a couple of demos on the Chthon infested sm100_pulsar.

Arturo Garcia Lasca did the Easy Run in 0:11 by beating Tom Nguyen by 1 second. Just one second over Connor's Nightmare Run time.
Paul Davies made a nice improvement to his Easy 100% time, beating himself by 4 seconds to 0:43.

Then there is the small matter of sm57_czg. A tough little bastard of a map that has attracted some tough little bastards to make runs on it.

Raving lunatic Basil de Vries has recently returned to us, and is now knocking out demos as fast as his little trackball will allow. He did the Easy 100% in 1:07, beating Timo by 2 seconds.
Then he rocked Nightmare 100% in 1:23 by beating LagDotCom by 28 seconds. Slaughter!
Which brings us to the first of many coops this week from everyone's favourite American Duo, Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner. Slapping Pif and Luc's Easy 100% was their target. The result? 0:48, ten seconds faster.

Anyone that's ever tried it will know that the gmsp3 Nightmare Run is one mutha of a frustrating run. Two unprotected GJs in a room full of monsters is only the start of your pain. Mathias "I want my internet connection back!" Thore braved the perils to beat Pif's record by eight seconds to 1:14.

Most of the the rest of the update features a lot of Fleck, a lot of Wag. You love it! They did the...

commctr 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:05, beating Daniel and Carl by 6 seconds. Just too damned smooth for the Udders.
bbsecret 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:11, beating Pif and Luc by 11 seconds. That's a lot of ones for your money.
polygon2 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:23 a 17 second improvement to Pif and Luc's previous demo.
elektra 2-Player Easy 100% in 0:42, beating Johan and Carl by 2 seconds.
terra3 2-Player Easy 100% in 0:55 improving, once again, Pif and Luc's time by a bowel shattering 14 seconds.
m_palace 2-Player Easy 100% in 0:53, this time improving Luc and Pif by the narrowest of narrow margins. One little second.

Our last demo is an improvement to a recent Mad Coop. Basil de Vries, Paul Davies and Michael Hudson thought there was still room for improvement in the 3-Player Nightmare 100% of The Installation that Mandel, Midas and Stubby did a few months ago. They were right. A one second improvement to 0:54 was the result.

Finally, on a less pleasant note, we have had to pull Dmitry's hellbrid Easy Run due to certain irregularities. Which means that Jaakko Alakopsa once again holds the record with his 1:29. Go go Jaakko!

Thursday, September 1st by mwh

We need Mandel back online! - 2:00 PM

It's traditional for the first demo update after a 'new maps' update to be dominated by demos on, well, the new maps. It's also traditional for it to happen less than a week after the maps get and to continue in the tradition breaking, this update isn't dominated by demos on new maps.

In fact we have not ONE, not TWO but

THREE

ID demos for your delictation (the reason for the preposterous size of that "THREE" will become clear in due course).

That said, I'm now going to confuse and annoy by describing the demos we have received on the new maps.

Exploiting their cunning French wit, Pif and Luc de Mestre predicted that msrj would soon be in the tables and recorded a pair of nice 2 player 100%s just after the contest ended; the times for Easy and Nightmare were 0:27 and 0:40 respectively.

The most popular new map was the "OMG it's a knave speedmap!!!1!!", also known as sm100_pulsar:

The first to get the ogres to behave was Paul Davies, double jumping his way out in 0:16.
Unfortunately for Paul, Tom Nguyen is a more experienced ogre-taunter, and he recorded 0:13.
Then we got a demo from a NEW PLAYER, Jaakko Alakopsa. Sadly for him, it was also a sm100_pulsar Easy Run in 0:13, so it wasn't a record. It's in the (very) big dzip, though.
Just to rub it in, sshplur improved his demo by another second to 0:12.
The Nightmare Run, is just the same, but gnarlier, right? Tom certainly seemed to think so, being of the opinion that 0:21 was a time worth sending in.
Connor Fitzgerald (who else?) had other ideas and sent in an astonishingly slick 0:10.
Tom then sent in a belated two second improvement to his earlier demo with text that claimed (bizarrely) to be a tablefiller and (accurately) that it was improvable by 9 seconds. It's in the big dzip too.
Paul Davies shook off the beating of his Easy Run and killed everything but the chthons in 0:47 to fill the Easy 100% spot.

sm64_zwiffle was also the subject of quite a few demos, but all but one were by the same man...

Robert Maglic opened the scoring with 0:09 for the Easy Run.
This was swiftly improved by Robert Maglic to 0:08.
And Robert Maglic wasn't far behind with 0:07.
The Nightmare Run started and finished with Robert Maglic and his 0:08.
Robert Maglic, oops, sorry, Thomas Bergendorff snatched the Easy 100% in a pretty decent looking 0:49.

Well, you've read enough now to deserve an ID demo. The story of this demo could be summarised as "don't talk to Aussies", or to be more specific, "don't let Connor Fitzgerald find out what ID demo you're working on". Y'see Mandel had been working for a while on the Easy Run of the Grisly Grotto, held for many years by the legendary Markus Taipale at 24 seconds. He'd even got 24.0 a few times (one is in the big dzip). Then somehow Connor got wind of this and before you could say "Cheryl's chilly cheap chip shop sells Cheryl's cheap chips" three times fast, his 0:23 had landed in the SDA mailbox. Now, Connor's demo is 23.8 and his ogre-grenade jump is quite a lot quicker than Mandel's, so with Connor's jump and Mandel's bunnying, you might be able to get... 23.3 or so. Still I'm sure some madmen will be after a 22 second demo. Oh, MUST DOWNLOAD, but you knew that already.

Back to the new maps for a bit! hellbrid and warehaus were rather less popular than the others, mustering only two demos each.

The second demo Jaakko Alakopsa sent up to us was a hellbrid Easy Run in 1:29 was actually a record...
... for a few minutes. Dmitry Dementjev got rather confused by the map, for example not being able to find the silver key, and compensated by coming up with trick after trick to record a remarkable (demo removed).
warehaus possibly isn't the best map for runs[1], but the 100%s might provide some amusement. On the easy side of the 100% fence, Paul Davies was entertained for 1:54 ...
... and then 1:49.

Time for another ID demo! Time for another ID Easy Run, in fact. Did you know that the second longest ID Easy Run record is Jozsef Szalontai running the Wind Tunnels in just 57 seconds? I hope not, because it's Mathias Thore running the Wind Tunnels in 0:56, making up for the e1m4 frustration with a little use of cl_maxfps.

OK, so we've seen lots of demos on new maps, and the two not so far have beaten rubbish people like Markus and Joe. In fact this Joe character must be really rubbish because Mathias Thore beat another of his demos, this time the Easy Run of mexx8b by 1 second to get 0:18.

Who else isn't very good? Peter Horvath, that's who! Arturo Garcia Lasca beat his Easy Run of pb1 by the standard one second to get 0:33. Ken also improved his Nightmare Run of the same map to the same time, 0:33 being a two second improvement.

That's it, right?

Oh, no, there's another trifling little matter. An ID demo. The biggest ID demo of them all. The only demo that's ever been held at a time of over three hours. The demo everyone expected Stubby to take one day. Well, he hasn't recorded the All of Quake Nightmare 100% -- Justin Fleck has! Beating Marlo by eight minutes and forty seven seconds, he finds every secret and kills every monster in the most difficult skill of the original quake levels in the new record time of 78:01.

Now you know why the big dzip and the 'three' were so big.

[1] In fact, lodis recently exclaimed:

<lolfu> why the hell did I add warehaus?
<lolfu> what an annoying piece of crap map

Thursday, August 26th by lodis

Incredible exciting title regarding a certain bodily part of mine - 4:00 PM

I'm too tired to write an even remotely funny update, but I still wanted to get this done, and I'm off into the countryside tomorrow. If I wait any longer I'll be crucified by mwh, while Mandel will be tickling my feet. Stubby will be watching, wanking and having a beer, and Morfans will be chuckling like father Christmas on acid.

Now, I expect to see a shitload of cool demos on Sunday evening when I get back home. Failure to comply will mean...uhm. Well, I can't do fuck all since I don't know where you live, but I will add your emailaddresses to all major spammers!

Over to the maps:
First off we add the contest map, Manslay's Rocketjumping. Name your demos msrj_xxx. Of course, the contest had demos for all categories, but if you're not up for beating those (the ER, for example, might be a bit hard) you could always coop!
Next we pay homage to a mapper who's done quite a few good maps already, for example Menkalinan. He's russian (as far as I know, his name sounds proper russian), he is...Andrew 'PuLSaR' Sayenko. So how do we pay homage to someone here at TEAM SDA? Well, funnily enough it's pretty close to what I told you what would happen to me if I wouldn't do this update..yes, crucifixion. As we speak Stubby is leading a few select members of the speedrunning community over to PuLSaRs house and they're armed and dangerous. Oh, and we add two of his maps to SDA, but that's not as important.
The first map is The HELLBridge -=Pulsar=-, name your demos hbr_xxx. The second russki map is Evile Configurations, name your demos 100p_xxx.
The next map is a nice base-style map, a bit tight for runs, but fun for 100%s. It's Warehouse, no, not the one that's already here. Name your demos wrh_xxx.
The last map today, and there's been quite a few, is a short one for the optimizers out there! It's T'were Death Poetry, name your demos s64z_xxx. Who will claim the optimized record?

Go run, have fun, send in demos, make me happy. Bye.

Thursday, August 26th by mwh

Short! - 12:30 PM

Mandel made some AVIs for RUN DMC!

Tuesday, August 24th by mwh

Abusing the Elderly (and the French) - 7:30 PM

It's always a bit embarrassing when demos marked "optimal" in the tables get beaten. There's a rumour that Thomas Stubgaard's Nightmare 100% of the The Elder God Shrine was marked optimal (probably by Morfans) but this can't have been true as he improved it by 2 seconds to 3:49. As has been explained before on these pages, the odd small mistake here and there doesn't matter so long as the fiend kills are crisp, and crisp they certainly are!

As if nominating beatable demos as unbeatable wasn't bad enough, Morfans is an even bigger loser in this update:

To get the ball rolling, Justin Fleck beat his p_se_1 Easy 100% by five seconds to get 2:03.
Then the old man's Nightmare 100% on the same map got owned by 12 seconds to give 2:28.
Moving to newer maps, Optic heaved 44 seconds off Morfy's terra4 Nightmare 100% to record 3:08.
Getting 2:46 for the terra6 Nightmare 100% means he'd beaten -- you guess it -- Morfans by 38 seconds.
I'd grudgingly admit the last two beaten demos were quick tablefillers but for some reason I've decided to be horrible to Morfans in this update, so I won't.
Getting in on the Skidmore-bashing Kimmo Polvivaara and Michael Hudson beat the husband-and-wife 2-Player Easy 100% of sm19_xenon by a measly 5 seconds to get 1:47. We love lava-bathing fiends, really we do.
Kimmo dealt with the last Skidmore ex-tablefiller of the update, beating Richard's dis_cr8z Nightmare 100% by 18 seconds to get 1:57.

If you're not going to beat the oldest known speedrunner, who are you going to beat? Well, you could always aim for another Brit, and Kimmo targeted Paul Davies's 100%s of the afore-mentioned sm19_xenon getting 2:12 for the Easy (just 1 second faster than Paul) and 2:09 for the Nightmare (a 3 second improvement).

Another answer is "no-one" and Paul Davies and I demonstrated this approach by tackling the Easy 100% of the Deathmatch Classics episode and getting a scrappy but fun 5:12.

The next alternative is to beat yourself. For example, if you're Tom Nguyen you could improve your misery Nightmare 100% by 1 second to get 0:32. Or if you're me and LagDotCom you could improve your new dmc marathon by 22 seconds to get 4:50.

Finally, if you're not going to fill a hole, beat Morfans or indulge in a self-improvement, you might as well beat something French. Moving from east to west, we have:

Dmitry Dementjev beating Pif by 35 seconds for the sm24_aard Nightmare Run to get 0:54.
Kimmo Polvivaara and Paul Davies beating Pif et Luc by 8 seconds for the terra2 2-Player Easy 100% to get 0:48.
Jonathan Lenhardt beating Pif by 47 seconds for the pse Easy Run to get 3:55.
Justin Fleck beating Luc by a couple of minutes for the could Nightmare 100% to get 5:13.
Justin Fleck beating Pif by 25 seconds for the could Nightmare Run to get 1:27.
And finally, Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner beating Pif et Luc by 10 seconds for the terra6 2-Player Easy 100% to get 1:02.

Finally, if all other victims fail, there's always Fern. For the final (twentieth!) demo of the update, Optic continues his resurgence with a 107 second improvement of Chris Ploran's rpgsp1 Nightmare 100% getting 4:28.

My final paragraph should contain something about new maps, new contests and normal SDA attitudes to timeliness.

Tuesday, August 16th by Morfans

Marathons and Mad Coops! - 8:09 PM

Oh yes indeed. It does my cruel, shrivelled, black heart good to see that Mad Coops are back in fashion. If you've never taken part in one then FOR SHAME! If you'd like to, just head on over to #qdq and see if anyone feels like a game. Chances are at the moment someone will. Oh, and it always helps if you've given some thought to a map or route that you'd like to try. There's nothing worse than 4 people connecting up and then sitting there going "Right, what shall we do?". "Ummmm. Don't know..."

But before we get to the coops we shall have a bit of a watch of the one man demos, starting with some lovely, lovely marathons.

After making his SDA debut in the recent contest Jonathan Lenhardt has caught the running bug. Which is good news all round as he definitely has some skills worth displying. He took on the tricky terra Nightmare Run, previously unclaimed but now standing at 4:24.

More marathons follow: French Style! Both feature a Nightmare Run through pse.

Pif de Mestre braved the insanity to somehow survive all five levels and exit in 6:01.
Then he went back to the start and dragged Luc de Mestre through with him to get a 2-Player time of just 3:41.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with the map elden1. It's not been exactly one of the most active maps in recent years, with Fabian Kollakowski taking TO of the level back in 1999. Connor Fitzgerald decided that the Easy Run could do with bringing into this century and gave some Aussie shine to the grenade jump, saving one second to 0:13.

Our old friend Arturo Garcia Lasca is still improving his old records. Seems like it's one long round of self abuse for young Ken.

First the lostwrld Easy Run in 0:38, beating himself by 1 second. Very nice indeed.
And also a one second improvement to the zippie_sda Nightmare Run to take the time down to an excellent 0:15.

Coop wars are rare enough these days. So it's nice to see a bit of good, old fashioned battling over the r1m2 2-Player Easy Run

Michael Hudson and Paul Davies start things off by beating Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre by 1 second to get 1:27.
Pif and Luc immediately fought back with another one second improvement to 1:26.
But were convinced that the British pair would try to take it again, so they shaved off another second to 1:25 to try to make it a bit safer.

Next we have a couple more Pif and Luc coops for you...

They did the chain3 2-Player Nightmare Run tablefiller in 0:52 (SP time 1:31).
And a 2-Player Nightmare 100% through armorgod in 3:26 (SP time 3:53).

Two newest-school power-bunny devils improving two old-new school power-bunny demons on critters. Robert Maglic and Mathias Thore improved both of Ilkka Kurkela and Aleksander Osipov's runs by one second to 0:14. That's 0:14 on Easy and 0:14 on Nightmare. And so the world moves on.

Finally, we shall finish off with two of the aforementioned Mad Coops. Kimmo Polvivaara, Paul Davies and Michael Hudson did the terra2 3-Player Easy 100% in 0:47 filling a rather nasty gaping hole (2P time 0:56). Good work, Anglo-Finnish death squad.

But that's no where near mad enough. More players!! Mathias Thore, Paul Davies, Robert Maglic, Thomas Stubgaard and Michael Hudson did a 5-Player Easy 100% of the Ebon Fortress in 0:49 (3P time 0:54). Way to go, ummm, Dangle-wedes!

Monday, August 8th by mwh

Oh Yes! It's The Demos! - 9:08 PM

We start with some mistakes. In early July, Mandel claimed a couple of records, one with Midas, and duly sent the demos in to the list where they were promptly forgotten. So, in lovingly handcrafted fashion, I am happy to report the following:

terra4 Nightmare Run in 0:15 by Mathias Thore, beating himself by 1 second.
dmc1m1 2-Player Easy Run in 0:15 by Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic, tablefiller (SP time 0:16).

On the theme of mistakes, we notice that it's over a year since the last demo from Justin Fleck, and not speedrunning for a year is surely the worst kind of mistake. Luckily for both him and us, he's back! Craftily choosing his oldest standing records as targets, Optic cranked out:

A slightly rusty hip2m4 Easy 100% in 1:43 beating himself by 3 seconds.
A mildly tarnished black3 Nightmare Run in 1:18 beating himself by 4 seconds.
And a positively gleaming coopmine Nightmare Run in 1:33 beating himself by 5 seconds.

Only one more single player demo this time: after the worrying mangled escape Easy 100% of last week, Arturo Garcia Lasca sent in a reassuringly wholesome 1 second improvement -- that's 0:59, fact fans!

What comes after 1 player demos? Two player demos, of course! Ten of them, in fact.

We start with the mandatory summer 100% tablefillers from Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre -- six demos, not as neatly paired as when I first thought to put them in a table like this:

Level Easy Nightmare
terra4 1:40
polygon2 1:40 2:58
trr 1:18
earth 1:28 1:42

Level	Easy	Nightmare
terra4	1:40
polygon2	1:40	2:58
trr		1:18
earth	1:28	1:42

They also recorded a couple of demos on that strangest of maps, p_se_xxx. Strange because it's easier to record a 100% than a run... They started out with the 2-Player Easy Run, squeaking home in 1:09, 11 seconds faster than the single player ER, but only 1 second faster than the EH (what!?). Then they relaxed into the Easy 100% category, beating R&R by a healthy six seconds to record 1:09 again.

The numerate will have noted that we have two two player demos left. These turn out to be Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic squeaking the long way rules on The Door To Chthon Nightmare Run in 0:24 and Mathias Thore (again) and Michael Hudson (not again) grappling through the r1m6 Easy Run in 1:07, just a couple of seconds faster than Robert Axelsson's single player time.

Right, what comes after two player demos? Three player demos, of course.

Well, we don't have any of them, but what would come after three player demos, if we had any? Four player demos! ID four player demos, even. Over a couple of idle but well connected days, the Coop '05 team of Mathias Thore, Robert Maglic, Paul Davies and Thomas Stubgaard attacked the first episode of quake to get:

Castle of the Damned 4-Player Nightmare 100% in 0:39, a tablefiller,
Gloom Keep 4-Player Easy 100% in 0:22, beating a SpeedCon 2000 demo by three seconds, and
Gloom Keep 4-Player Nightmare 100% in 0:43, another tablefiller.

What comes after four player demos? A five player demo? Surely not! We haven't had any of them since 2002! Ignoring this historical precedent, I joined the above bunch of reprobates to do the 5-Player Easy 100% of Gloom Keep in 0:21, beating an assortment of Swedes (and the still oven-hot four player demo) by 1 second.

With the coop time I've been putting in recently, you'd think I'd just acquired a broadband connection or something...

Monday, August 8th by Morfans

Oh Yes! It's The Results! - 2:40 PM

We asked you to Boost Like A Man and you didn't let us down. A great pile of demos from new and old players alike with an average boost index of 27.3!!.[1]

A big congratulations to our winners Robert Maglic, who boosted so fast that even the Devil Himself performing an INSANE trick couldn't catch him up, and Connor Fitzgerald, who is simply too good to be real.

An enormous thank-you to everyone who took the time to send us an entry. Given the huge response to this we will have another contest for you in the next couple of weeks. (Promise!)

Go to the contest page for a full list of results and the demo downloads. As a special treat for you all Mandel even made an .avi of all four winning entries! (See here, here, here and here if you don't believe me.)

[1] Okay, so that was just some random number I made up to add a touch of pseudo-science to the proceedings.

Monday, August 1st by Mandel

The one and only big WOW update - 2:08 PM

Jozsef Szalontai is known to most as an SDA oldtimer, JoeQuake coder, and QdQ producer. Many people also consider him king of quake, bunny and trick categories; a Hungarian bunny machine. And it's true. Jozsef sure has all it takes to improve an easy run on the Ebon Fortress, for example by one second. Look at this 0:39 demo to actually see him do it! This time it's not just a "Jozsef 2005" demo with no explanation of where the saved time comes from. It's a new, cool and difficult trick. And a great egg demo. WOW.

Even Connor Fitzgerald laughed at himself when he recently beat the long-standing 14:02 Selinus classic run through all of Quake. How could he be such a chicken and play the game on easy skill? Was it a mistake? Or only practice for greater things to come? Yes. To remedy the embarassment of the easy run, Connor pulled the console down, changed to the skill for true men (nightmare, 3), and recorded a run through All of Quake in 19:50, 4 minutes and 3 seconds faster than Will Marsh's previous record. Think about this time a little while. Remember the time of the original QdQ? It was 19:49... Nobody just goes and beats that in one go. Not even Connor! But still, it's "pretty" close. WOW.

That's it for singleplayer ID demos. And now for something a little bit different. Arturo García Lasca had a look at some of his own old demos and decided that they were just too crappy for today's standards. Therefore, he improved them!

The church easy run first. A one second improvement gives 0:54.
Then, the church easy 100%. One second better than himself again, getting 1:04.
And last, escape easy 100% in 1:00, 3 seconds faster than the old record. Now, this demo is a little weird, since it lacks some pickup texts as well as a qdqstats message. But qdqstats is optional at SDA, and Ken is an honest runner. The normal "equalling an odd record means beating it" rules apply here, but nobody wants to do that? Right?
WOW

Next up is Thomas Bergendorff. Receiving more than enough trout slaps from Thomas Stubgaard for not making enough demos was enough to make him quickly go make some. And WOW.

Pif's old nightmare 100% on sm56_czg saw a 58 second improvement, to 1:24.
Hostile finally got a nightmare run, in 1:45. 42 seconds slower than the easy run. and maybe just a little less Horvath-y, but still a respectable tablefiller which isn't poor in any way.
The difficult disturb easy run was improved by one second to 0:40. And I thought Lodis's old demo was unbeatable...
The epoch nightmare 100% was done in 2:56, 29 seconds faster than Richard Skidmore, and much less scary.

Some of the other teamSDAers have a habit of telling certain people they make too few demos. In other, unrelated news, here's a new demo from Robert Maglic. It's his first single player 100% demo, and it's a nightmare one! Fc is the map, and 1:34 is the time. That's two seconds faster than Fabian Kollakowski. Woah!

I also teamed up with Midas and did a coop demo or two:

We did a 0:59 two-player easy 100%...
...and a 0:59 two-player nightmare 100% on fc. These demos were made only to claim coop team total ownage of fc ;)
Two super shotgun boosts was all it took to do the sm57_czg two player easy run in 0:07.
The two player nightmare run was done in exactly the same time.

A new coop team of genuine prude British manners presents itself with a r2m6 two-player easy run in 1:49. Michael Hudson and Richard Skidmore are the gentlemen behind it, and it's 18 seconds faster than Pif and Luc. I sure hope this coop team will find some time to do some more demos soon :)

Mattias Öman and Joakim Sarkkinen did a demo on cult, a two-player nightmare run in 0:16, one second faster than Justin Fleck and Evan Wagner.

This is the last demo, m'kay? In a short timespan between being busy and being busy, Thomas Stubgaard had the time to hook up with me and do the the Palace of Hate two-player nightmare 100% in 2:14, beating Richard Skidmore and Thomas Stubgaard by 47 seconds.

Wow! How about that? A bunch of quality ID demos, another bunch of fine demos on various maps, and some nice coops! Me like.

Remember the contest, people! Go HERE and run your little shorts off. Then, join us at #qdq and brag about your times. Less than one week to go before deadline. Seeya!

Friday, July 22nd by Morfans

Lazy, but that's how it goes... - 7:40 PM

Another fairly brisk week here, with demos coming in from ALL of your favourite runners. Obviously I'm assuming here that your favourite runners are the ones in the list below, otherwise you're in for a bit of a disappointment...

Starting off with everyone's favourite former big-mouthed git, Arturo Garcia Lasca, doing what he does frequently and best. That is to say, beating himself.

He did the Nightmare Run of darkages in 0:28, beating himself by 1 second.
He also improved his own hellctle Easy Run by two seconds to exit in 1:17. I believe the Nightmare Run needs improving too, someone...
Now that he was back in the flow of speedrunning, he improved all the records on flo (which were his anyway).
- First the Easy Run in 0:45, two seconds faster than himself. The time saving? Just a couple of years more experience. :-)
- Same improvement to the Nightmare Run. 0:45
- The Easy 100% is basically just a load of zombie slapping in a maze with a few other monsters thrown in for good measure. But it's nice to see a three second improvement to slapping and a time of 0:57.
- Finally, a 0:57 Nightmare 100%. Four seconds faster and finally equal to the Easy time.

In deference to Mandel's wishes I will present the demos he did this week, some on his own, some with Midas, it the automatically generated, no human text style.

terra5 Nightmare Run in 0:21 by Mathias Thore, beating himself by 1 second.
fc 2-Player Nightmare Run in 0:15 by Robert Maglic and Mathias Thore, beating Evan Wagner and Justin Fleck by 1 second.
fc 2-Player Easy Run in 0:15 by Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic, beating Peter Horvath and Attila Molnar by 1 second.
zippie_sda 2-Player Nightmare Run in 0:10 by Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic, beating Jamie Lee Kwen and Jozsef Szalontai by 4 seconds.

Hot-diggity-damn! That was so easy! Y'know, I think I'm going to do the same with Pif and Luc's coop demos. I don't mean this as any disrespect as these two are still showing signs of improvement every time a batch of demos arrive BUT I had a heavy night last night and a hectic day at work so by this time in the afternoon I'm afraid I just don't give a fucking fuck any more. Sorry about the swearing. Actually, no I'm not. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. What's that you say? Young, impressionable people might be reading this? Well fuck 'em. And fuck you too! :-)

Here are the demos. Enjoy them.

ouver 2-Player Easy 100% in 0:47 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, beating themselves by 3 seconds.
ouver 2-Player Nightmare 100% in 1:40 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, tablefiller (SP time 1:57).
village 2-Player Easy 100% in 2:13 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, tablefiller (SP time 3:01).
sgodrun2 2-Player Easy 100% in 3:12 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, tablefiller (SP time 3:27).
sgodrun2 2-Player Easy 100% in 2:41 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, beating themselves by 31 seconds.
sgodrun2 2-Player Nightmare 100% in 3:46 by Pif de Mestre and Luc de Mestre, tablefiller (SP time 4:33).

Well, I could just end the update here, but that would be plain crazy. If I did I couldn't tell you about our new contest. Read about it HERE, strap yourself into your best running codpiece, grab your rocket launcher and go Boost Like A Man(slay)!

Have a good weekend.

Wednesday, July 13th by mwh

Summer's here! - 1:10 PM

It's hot here in northern Europe. Too hot to run around outside, certainly. Too hot to go to school, as well. Fortunately for us lot, it's not too hot to sit in front of a computer and waggle your pointing device around furiously, and this furious waggling has produced a veritable summer bounty of demos.

One place it's very clear that school is out is Chez de Mestre. Each by the now famous Pif et Luc team, and each a tablefiller, this week produced:

hellbase: Easy 100% in 1:38, Nightmare 100% in 1:36.
jjspq1: Easy 100% in 2:14, Nightmare 100% in 2:17.
scoop: Easy 100% in 1:41, Nightmare 100% in 2:16.
imp1sp2: Easy 100% in 1:43, Nightmare 100% in 2:41.
ouver: Easy 100% in 0:50, Nightmare Run (woah!) in 1:00.

You think that's it for coops? Think again!

It's an ID 2-Player Nightmare Run. It must be Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic, right? It is, the demo is on The Pain Maze and the time is 0:20, one second faster than some Finns no-one's ever heard of.
Next up is an ID 3-Player Nightmare Run. Who might Mandel and Midas have drafted in? Thomas Stubgaard, it turns out, and they got out of The Vaults of Zin in just 0:16 (after some slightly excessive shambler-boosting – watch the eggs!).
ID 4-Player Easy 100%! Mandel and Midas and Stubgaard and ... Paul Davies of course! The Pain Maze (again), 1:05. There's a picture of Mandel in the .dz. I don't know why. I don't want to know why. At least he's not naked.
The final ID coop is a 2-Player Nightmare 100% from Mathias Thore and Thomas Stubgaard, spanking The Tower of Despair in no more than 1:06, five seconds faster than Pif and Luc.

That must be it for coops, surely? No, apparently it's too hot to play WoW too, and here-again-gone-again-here-again-gone-again-here-again some-time SDA staffer Evan Wagner and his “special friend” Cameron Engles cooled down by blasting through the 2-Player Easy 100% of catacomb in 0:34.

Now that really is it for coops. I think.

Talking of here-again-gone-again-... we have some demos from the Caribbean for the first time in a while, with Arturo Garcia Lasca improving both his 100%s on tod by one second to 0:28 (easy) and, uh, 0:28 (nightmare). Skill settings? What are they for again, mappers?

Who is the man with too much talent but not enough single-player demos on SDA? Well, the stock answer to this used to be Mandel but he's fought this charge off some time ago, and to make sure he sent us:

The fc Easy Run done the honest way in 0:16 (beating the Devil Himself by 1 second),
the fc Easy 100% in 1:32 (beating Fab by 4 seconds), and
the terra5 Easy Run in 0:20 (beating himself by 1 second).

No, the man with the erroneous talent : SP SDA demos ratio is of course Robert Maglic. Making things a little better, Midas got to the fc Nightmare Run before Mandel, beating Peter by the predictable 1 second to get 0:16.

There are more demos in the SDA mail box already and some of them are even not coops, but ... enough!

Saturday, July 2nd by Mandel

Coopwabunga - 7:08 PM

Summer surely is a fine season to sit on chairs made of wood and play Quake. Right? Right?? Of course. We've received what to me looks like 29 demos over a very short period of time! Most of them are coop demos.

But some aren't. Thomas Stubgaard is a fragile axeman from Denmark. You've probably seen the name before. He's the guy with all those id nightmare 100% records here on SDA. But nightmare 100% isn't Thomas's only skill here in life. He can also yodel, drink lemonade, and do id easy 100% records! The demo that has gotten a well deserved touch up this time is Chambers of Torment. New time is 2:05, and it's at least a couple of seconds faster than Daniel's old 2:08 demo. Dunno how many exactly but it's several.

Now, the recently added speedmaps. Pif de Mestre applied his arsenal on the monsters on sm56_czg, and managed to kill'em all on the worst difficulty in just 2:22 beating nobody's old record.

Paul Davies went berserk on sm57_czg and, much to his own surprise, ended up with a 1:51 nightmare 100% demo. It should come as a surprise for everybody that Paul is the first one ever to do a nightmare 100% on this level. This beats nobody's old record!

Another set of maps is the terra maps. You all know them. Mathias Thore, or as I like to call him, I, did the terra4 nightmare run in 0:16, one second faster than Kimmo. All thanks to some monster infighting.

Which smoothly brings us over to coop's corner. Coop demos on terra4 have been arriving like crazy this weekend:

Me, Lag.Com and Robert Maglic first did the 3-player nightmare run in 0:06. We're talking triple telefrag here.
Midas and Me then went on and did the 2-player easy run in 0:04. It took a while.
As a nice end to the terra4 saga, we also did the 2-player nightmare run in 0:07...
...and a 2-player easy run in 0:08. But not on terra4. This last one was terra1.
The full team consisting of Me, Midas, Stubby, and Lag.Com also did a demo on The Elder God Shrine. With shotguns, grenades and quads at hand we did a 4-player easy 100% in 0:43, an incredible three seconds faster than the 3-player easy 100% on the same level :)

What can top a Swedish-Danish-British coop craze? Nothing. Except maybe a French coop craze. Pif and Luc de Mestre are back in town:

Speedmaps first. My notes say that the boys did sm19_xenon 2-Player Nightmare 100% in 1:58...
...and that they then did the exact same demo again. My notes are wrong. It was a perfectly normal one time submission :)
sm24_aard next. The 2-Player easy 100% was first done in 2:39 and then in 2:17...
...while the 2-Player nightmare 100% was done in 2:30.
sm56_czg next. Remember the 1:04 2-player easy 100% demo the Skidmore family did last week? It's been trashed already, by the de Mestres. Twice! First, by 16 seconds to 0:48, and then by 2 more seconds to 0:46.
While they were at it, they also did the 2-Player Nightmare 100%, first in 0:58 and then in 0:50.
Last but so not least, sm57_czg. The elastic duo did a 0:58 2-Player Easy 100%...
...as well as a 1:07 2-Player Nightmare 100%.
Next up, gor1. The boys gave it the usual treatment, with a 1:54 2-Player Easy 100% and a 2:24 2-Player Nightmare 100%.
Same thing, different map: hunter. A 2:08 2-Player Easy 100% and a 2:28 2-Player Nightmare 100%.
doome1m7. Guess what! 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:56 and 2-Player Nightmare 100% in 2:43!
blister is next. As a little twist, I'll present the demos in reversed skill order. The 2-Player Nightmare 100% was done in 0:51 and the 2-Player Easy 100% was done in the exact same time.
blister2 comes after blister in the crazy place known as SDA. Less crazy is the treatment, a 2-Player Easy 100% in 1:26 and a 2-Player Nightmare 100% in the exact same time!

'Sup with the coop mania? I don't know. But it's fun. And it's gonna continue! So until next time, keep it together!

Wednesday, June 29th by Morfans

Too Many Tricks... - 5:40 PM

Since single amazing demo updates are becoming all the rage around here (well, we had one last week...) it seemed only fair to give the little piece of magic we received from Connor Fitzgerald the same treatment. If you're wondering why he's been so quiet lately it's because he has been going for a record with a higher failure rate than your average run. If you think doing a heroically fast run on an id level is nearly impossible, try doing twenty-seven of them on the trot. If you happen to be a running god there's a slim chance that you might just find that you've done and Easy Run through All of Quake in just 13:46. That's sixteen seconds faster than Martin's long standing record for the time it takes from when you enter Quake's realm, to when you pop the jelly.

I don't think anyone would begrudge this demo a Must Download.

Tuesday, June 28th by Mandel

The ripping news - 12:15 PM

Hey you. Long time. We've been busy doing a late spring cleaning here at SDA, and so this update has had to wait. Not that we've actually cleaned anything though... The actual cause for the delay is... Umm... Aw.

Let's rip this update open and get started with the demos already. Pouring out first are a couple of coops from me and Robert 'I live in a bubble' Maglic[1]. It's getting harder to find good coop runs doable with a bit of ping, but after looking through the tables for a while we found that dmc1m5 has excellent coop route planability. We did the two player easy run in 0:16 and the two player nightmare run in 0:15.

The day after that we (yup, Mandel and Midas) just couldn't find anything sensible to do. 2run5 two player easy run in 0:38 just happened by pure accident. It's much like the two player easy 100%, only this time the monsters are left alive.

Next demo to pour out of this update's ripped-open stomach is the sm56_czg easy 100%. You all remember how Paul 'I own me' Davies has owned himself again and again the past couple of weeks on this level. Now guess what! He's done it again. Owning himself by 18 seconds, the new time is 1:28.

Unfortunately Paul doesn't have exclusive rights to owning himself anymore. With this 1:08, Drew 'I own you' DeVore claimed ownership of Paul. Have fun boys. Oh and it's interesting to see a runner who hasn't touched a computer since Skillz test #4 play Quake so well don't you think?

What kind of demos do you think are going to get produced when you take Richard 'Tell me what I'm doing wrong' Skidmore and Abigail 'Tell me what I'm doing right' Skidmore, lock them up in a farmhouse somewhere in Scotland, hook up two computers with quake installed, and tell them to play together? I'll tell you something, my friends, they ain't going to be boring... Being a married couple, this 1:52 two player easy 100% on sm19_xenon is the first ever married couple coop demo on SDA! Congratulations.

Well then. I spent quite some time with a couple of nightmare runs on my own. It all started when mwh found a discrepancy in the tables for mexx2. The easy run is 0:09 and believed optimal, run by Daniel Hansson back in 2001. The nightmare run was 0:10, run by Ilkka Kurkela, and not believed optimal. So I had a long concentrated look at it, found a good way to play the shambler, and made this 0:09 nightmare run. Now it's believed optimal!

Above and beyond that, I found yet another discrepancy in the tables for dmc1m2. An extremely annoying boost from a grunt to the key is the key to this 0:17 nightmare run. How patient is it possible to be? Apparently very patient.

That would have been the last demo in this update if there hadn't been for this one last demo. Morfans and MMoD had a go on sm56_czg and the two player easy 100%. Crushing Drew by four seconds, their two player time is a full four seconds faster than the single player time, which logically makes it 1:04. Dunno about you lot, but this is one coop team I wish to see more demos from in the future. =)

That's all y'all.

[1] Sorry ;)

Thursday, June 16th by Stubby

Dining With The Devil - 4:23 PM

Yo choirfellas and dudettes! I'm sure you didn't expect good ol' Stubby to get back into demo updating, especially since I haven't made an update in like...AGES! But I was forced (read: asked politely to do this one demo update) by someone that goes of the nickname "the devil himself", so what could I do but to obey!? I'm sure quite a few of you are familiar with this certain nickname, so it probably doesn't come as a surprise that Peter Horvath totally fucked over Jozsef Szalontai's Easy Run of The Crypt of Decay with a 9 second improvement to get 0:22! I won't give you any spoilers, you just have to watch the demo for yourselves to enjoy it the most. Oh, and the text file that comes with the demo is a worthy candidate to "most memorable text file ever"! :-)

So, one question remains: Who's gonna re-do the Nightmare Run with this new �ber leet trick?! Certainly it's the fastest route, but will the horde of monster make it impossible to do? Only time will tell...

Friday, June 10th by Mandel

The scary update - 3:03 PM

Whoever thought the 'new' maps were all optimised and 'done' already, put a hand in the air. Now turn your head up and look at the sky. If it's blue, you're ok. If it's flesh colored and has fingers, you've got a problem. Demos on the new maps have been pouring in incessantly, and it's fabulous.

But I'm gonna start this update with demos on some of the not new maps in the archive. It's nothing fearful, there's only two this time. They're both very, very good, sweet and excellent demos. I made them :)

25 seconds or less is the preferred length of a demo if I am to try and beat it. Anybody can understand that Ilkka's old 24s nightmare run on armorgod is a good candidate. I beat it by one second, which means my time is 0:23.
To further support my 25 second theory I did a long, long demo, a marathon run through terra on easy skill. 17 seconds faster than Kimmo, thanks to some better strategies on the last two maps. Finishing time is 2:17.

But enough with that. What's new with the new maps? First there's that new sm19_xenon. Any new demos on that new map? Yeah:

David Hocking improved his own easy run by 5 seconds, doing some crazy quad boosts and bunnies. New time is 0:44.
The nightmare run also saw a 4 second improvement, to 0:45. Snoop is the runner behind this new demo as well.

sm24_aard:

Pif de Mestre wast he first sda soldier daring enough to make a nightmare 100% on this stupid labyrinth of monster madness, and he did it in 3:14.
Pif still had some delicious courage to spare, so he also did the easy 100% in 3:12.
Shortly after that, Paul Davies sent a 3:17 easy 100% demo...
and even shorter after that, when he learnt about Pif's demo, a 2:52. That's the current record.
Pif's old easy run was improved 28 seconds by SDA semi newcomer Dmitry Dementjev, to a whooping 0:54.

sm56_czg:

When I did the 0:05 easy run last week I thought the nightmare run would be much harder, and that it would be a while before anyone would try it. Well, I was wrong. Manslay did a little different start, performed a little modified midsection, showed another way to exit, and got this sweet 0:05 nightmare run. Optimal? Oh yeah. Also, a second faster than Valeriy.
Our norwegian fellow Kay "optimize this" Berntsen also got 0:05 but unfortunately sent it in too late.
The easy 100% was performed in 1:42, a demo that shows LagDotCom owning himself by 4 seconds.

If you can count and reason logically you know that the next map will be sm57_czg. If you can't count and reason logically, listen to this: the next map will be sm57_czg. I don't even need to make an unordered list here because there's only one demo. It's from Timo Nieminen, the Finn who recently rediscovered his mojo and improved the e1m1 easy 100% by one second to a splashing 0:53. This improvement is 19 times better, because it improves the easy 100% on the map by just that many seconds over Pif's old demo, to 1:09.

That's all. Or, wait a minute... Have a look at the bunny comparison page if you like that kind of thing. It seems the sound barrier on e4m5 has been broken again! And that's still not all! Also have a peek at these newcomer profiles, from Paul and Dmitry. At least one of the boys have been brave enough to include a photo! Which reminds me, if you ever sent a demo to SDA that made it to the tables but STILL don't have a profile, write one NOW and sent it to us! You know our address. Don't say you don't.

Now look at the sky again. If it is still flesh colored and has fingers, you can take your hand down now. Have another look at the sky. If it's still flesh colored and has fingers, check the name on your mail box. You might be Charles Manson. And you might not even know it! Boo!

Friday, June 3rd by Morfans

The Powerful, Purple Pleasure Pump. - 5:00 PM

As is reasonably traditional here after a new map splurge, we have a ton of outrageous demos for you but before we get to them we're going to look at demos not on new maps first. Why? Two reasons. Firstly because it's slightly annoying. Secondly, to stop people getting so burnt out watching cool demos on new maps that they ignore the "old" stuff. I'm not sure that this ever actually happens but because a couple of the "old" ones are by me I'm not taking the chance. WATCH MY DEMOS! I NEED YOUR LOVE!!

The first one I did was a table filler Nightmare 100% on the new-ish dis_cr8z. People were saying (i.e. whining like big girls blouses) that ammo was just too tight on Nightmare. Pah! There's tons of the bloody stuff. That's what quads were invented for! Got 2:15. S'okay.

Tom Nguyen has been working hard on improving his fmb100 Easy 100%. Much trick and tactic discussion was done with various people in #qdq and the result is a really great looking 3:54, nine seconds faster than before. Yeah!

One great and one greater demo now from Mathias Thore. He used a quad-boing-with-a-slightly-flattened-trajectory to improve Robert's Nightmare Run of pb2 by one second to 0:20, and then shaved another second off to get 0:19. Fly, little Swede, fly!

Rogue-running, utility-writing TeamSDA goat-purger Michael Hudson has once again improved his Easy Run of r2m6. "Just" better running gained him another two seconds to 2:23.

And finally back to me again, taking another record from the oldest demos list with a Nightmare 100% of epoch in 3:25, seven seconds faster than Thomas. I really pwn!

Right then. New maps. First we look at sm56_czg.

I am so very, very pleased to say that the first demo on this map was done by hard-as-nails Russian Deathknight Valeriy Burmistrov. For those of you who haven't been around here that long Valeriy was a mad optimising machine who always, somehow, managed to take another second off of any short demo. Here he made 0:06 for the Easy Run before Carl, Kay or Tom could send their demos in.
Except that it turns out that this was NOT the optimum time. Mandel amazed us all this morning by sending in a 0:05 with a little bit of speed preservation and a different ending!
But he doesn't think the can do it as fast on Nightmare due to the different position of the ogre so maybe Valeriy's 0:06 IS optimum?
Pif de Mestre was the first person to have a stab at the Easy 100% and turned in a brisk 2:14.
But Paul Davies wasn't far behind with a brisker 1:46.

Pif was also the only person so far to fight his way through the mayhem of sm24_aard. He did the Easy Run in 1:27, tidied it up to 1:22 and then finished the day by making a 1:29 Nightmare Run.

Moving on to sm57_czg, we find that...

Valeriy got 0:10 for the Runs on both EASY and NIGHTMARE. But he didn't think it was optimum.
He was right. Mandel got 0:09 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE. He did think they were optimum.
He was wrong. Connor fitzgerald got 0:08 on NIGHTMARE. But didn't do EASY.
Pif then got 1:28 on EASY, which is obviously a fair bit slower than the others but that's not suprising since it's a 100%.

Our last new map, sm19_xenon, has proved a real hit with idiots that like stupid levels of carnage and quad rocket boosting. Which is just about all of us, I think...

Pif started the proceedings with a knight mashing, high flying 1:10.
He then dragged Luc away from his pr0n surfing for long enough to knock out a two player Easy Run in 0:57.
Lucky for them they made that demo when they did because a few hours later David Hocking went blast crazy, getting 0:51 and then 0:49.
And it was Snoop all the way on the Nightmare Run with a 1:01, then a 0:49 to equal his Easy time.
LagDotCom had some Easy 100% fun with a 2:23 and then a 2:13.
Luc murdered his way through the Nightmare 100% in 2:57.
But LagDotCom has a little more boost experience and took the time to 2:23 then 2:12.

Them's yer demoz. Still lodez-a-holez and rume for emproovemunt. Goe RUUUUNNNNNNN.

Tuesday, May 31st by Lodis

CZG vs Mayhem - 10:37 PM

When I post an update you know it's about maps. But today I'd like to take some time to talk to you about the birds and the bees. You know....SEX. I think it's time we discussed that important topic for a while. There's probably quite a few of you who are still virgins. Stubby, for example, just recently discovered what it's like to have sex with a member of the opposite sex, so he's no longer a virgin. Mandel however is, and he's not alone.

So, what the hell am I on about really. Well...maps...sort of anyway. I know some of you have been thinking what it'd be like to have sex with your favourite mapper (I've received several emails regarding this - not to mention any names, Daniel Hansson. Woops, did I just do that?). To help Daniel understand what it'd be like to have sex with our favourite mapper Christian 'CZG' Grawert I've decided to add two maps of his. They kind of describe what it's like to have sex with him (don't ask me how I know that, it's a sda secret initiation thingy). They're both pretty, sweet, small, tight - but not too hard to get through, and you leave the maps with a smile on your lips.

The first map is GAMESPOT ARE CUNTS! (name the demos s56c_xxx) and the second is Like A Rhinestone Hitler (name the demos s57c_xxx).

Now, what if you were to have sex with Mad Viking Stuuuubgaard, what would that be like? Well, I've decided to add two maps that I feel describe what that's like (again, don't ask anyone in the SDA crew, it's that Team SDA inititation thingy...though Nolan says it's something Stubby came up just before getting Morfans to join). The maps are violent, complete mayhem. In parts of the maps you're so shocked you end up with one of your senses blocked (also known as PACKET OVERFLOW), and you'll be twitching from the start until the end. Your clothes will be drenched in sweat and you know you'll have nightmares for the next few weeks. In short: rape.

The first map is LEVEL OF EVIL FIRE AND DEATH AND HELL!!!!!111 (name the demos s19x_xxx) and the second is Screeeeeetch!!! (name the demos s24a_xxx).

Now that's 16 holes to fill (in the tables, you pervert). Go run.

Friday, May 20th by Mandel

Run DMC! - 12:48 PM

As mwh kindly mentioned at the end of the last update, the reason I haven't submitted any new demos for the last couple of weeks is because I've been busy getting our latest little project ready for release. :-)

I don't think there's a single person who frequents this site that doesn't love the DeathMatch Classics episode, so it is with great pleasure that I point you all HERE to take a little look at what the combined "talents" of Connor, Kay, Lodis, mwh, Morfans and myself can produce if we put our minds to it.

Monday, May 16th by mwh

New maps and old maps and one in between! - 4:22 PM

Holes in tables don't tend to last long here at the Speed Demos Archive. Mappers try, making maps constructed mostly of annoyingly narrow corridors and (on Nightmare) stuffing them full of the nastiest monsters quake can throw at you – and then people like non-Scottish insane fuck Richard Skidmore come along and lay waste to each and every one. The target on this occasion was the heresp1 Nightmare 100% and the time 1:50.

Speaking of the last batch of maps, Thomas Bergendorff has improved both his Nightmare Run and David Hocking's Nightmare 100% of ouver to a pleasing 1:08 and a tight 1:57 respectively.

That's it for new-to-SDA maps in this update. While we have some demos on the very oldest maps to come, our historical journey stops briefly at commctr where we see that Carl Tholin has beaten Thomas Bergendorff's Easy 100% by 10 seconds to get 1:49.

Going further back in time we come to the hall of speedrunning horrors that is The Corridors of Time, a.k.a Episode 2 of the Dissolution of Eternity expansion pack. With a few exceptions, the only runners to brave this area have been noted maniacs Nolan 'Balls of Steel' Pflug and Justin 'More Demos than Most Countries' Fleck. It's hard to say if I am going to mount a serious challenge to their dominance, but I've started with the Easy Run of the 'only slightly cramped' r2m6, first beating Nolan by 1 second to 2:28 and then proceeding to a rather tidier 2:25.

Now you can't go much further back in Quake time than the ID maps. Some people have never gone much further forward, either: the only times Thomas Stubgaard has made a demo on a non-ID map is when he's typed the map name in wrong by mistake. There were no such slips this weekend past, possibly because he had his brother, the bafflingly-surnamed Mads-Peter Stubgaard, around to help him type.

He warmed up for Mads-Peter's arrival by swearing about Azure Agony on #qdq for three days solid. Then he started playing the map and relatively quickly beat his old Nightmare 100% by four seconds to get 3:23. The aiming in this demo is something to behold: he fires the shotgun something like 170 times and misses his target only three times. MUST DOWNLOAD, onna stick.

Then the weekend began, closely followed by the Mads-Peter & Thomas coops and I have no option but to break out the <li> tags:

First to go was the Nightmare 100% of, you guessed, Azure Agony. Astonishingly, this 2:18 is the first record for this slot – but it is no mere table-filler. In fact it is the second MUST DOWNLOAD for e4m7 in the update.
Then the brothers practised their cuss-words on another 'only slightly cramped' level, filling the Nightmare Run slot of The Haunted Halls with this 0:52. Now, this record isn't as slick as the previous, but it was no push over – the fact that it's only a four second improvement of Thomas's single-player run just reflects how suicidally reckless the older Stubgaard is.
The only remaining ID Nightmare 100% slot was that of The Pain Maze, which fell in 1:57. Nice thunderbolt boost!
Finally, they decided that their old Easy 100% of The Haunted Halls wasn't good enough for 2005 and swiftly swept six seconds from the time to reach 1:05.
Well, that wasn't quite "finally" because they spent a while improving another demo – having forgotten that it had been beaten more soundly by some cunning Chinese devils with a better route two and a bit years ago. I think we can all join in the mighty hollering of DOH!

There's something faintly unusual about this update. We have demos from Me, Lodis, Stubgaard and Morfans. In fact the only active SDA-Quake staffer without a demo this time is Mandel. Has he just been frittering his time away, or does he have a surprise for us? I think we'll find out, soon.

Tuesday, May 10th by Morfans

Oh Sweet Satan! He's Done It! - 6:21 PM

No mindless talk to start the update today. Timo Nieminen has gone and improved possibly the most "god I can't wait to see that improved" demo in recent years. Fabian's Easy 100% of The Slipgate Complex. A new single player record on probably THE most prestigious map. And he did it in 0:53. The man is now a legend, no doubt at all. MUST DOWNLOAD

Okay, deep breaths. Calm down. Now for all the rest of this weeks brilliance.

Demos for the new maps are still coming in thick and fast. Since it's alphabetically the first of the new maps, we'll start once again with dis_cr8z.

Mathias Thore ripped the Nightmare Run record from Kimmo by one second with a very nice 0:17.
But Kimmo Polvivaara was not to be denied. He became the first person to perform the slope jump to the top floor on Nightmare and ended up with a neat 0:14.
Then for an encore improved his own Easy 100% by another three seconds to 1:03.
And finally teamed up with Paul Davies to do the two player Easy 100% in 0:50.

After the heresp1 that infected people last week things have quietened down a little.

Tom Nguyen improved his Easy 100% by five seconds to 1:03. He then went on to improve this to 1:02 and 0:59, but by that time...
...Thomas Bergendorff had already made a suitably impressive 0:51.
Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic improved Pif and Luc's easy Run by six seconds to 0:11 not simply by being very fast but because they are very fast. I hope you all appreciate the semantic difference.

The dark, voidy wierdness of ouver gave rise to some serious spanking in the last few days...

Both LagDotCom and SnooP tried to improve Kimmo's Nightmare Run tablefiller with a 1:46 and a 1:35 respectively, but they should have remembered to check the topic in #qdq because this 1:12 by Lodis was clearly on display. :-)
The Easy 100% saw a lot of action, starting with Paul improving Pif's record by four seconds to 1:02.
Laggers then sent us a 1:01 which we had to reject as "fucking stupid" since he used some dodgy coop play in single player by accident. A valuable lesson for us all here: if you've been cooping and then go back to single player make sure that everything is set back properly. To be on the safe side exit Quake and start again.
Not that it would have really mattered anyway, since Kimmo has definitely cleaned all the rust from his skillz and owned the record with a 0:59...
...then a 0:53...
...and finally settled on a 0:51.
Time for David Hocking to remind us why he's known as "That Australian guy, You know? David Hocking?". Maybe not the most dramatic of nicknames but there you go. He tackled the fiendish (and voreish and shamblish) Nightmare 100%, which was sorely in need of some table filling, in the messy time of 3:09.
But he felt a bit embarrassed about that so he made a much better 2:43 soon after.

Finally we have demos on the magnificent menk.

Pif de Mestre couldn't resist having a stab at the Easy Run and even with a couple of shortcuts managed to end up with the longest current Easy Run record in the archive with this 5:27. Not the longest Easy Run ever, of course, but still very, very long...
...and very, very short lived because Connor Fitzgerald is a sodding nutter! I'm not going to say how he does it, and I advise you to watch the demo before reading the text file so you don't ruin the suprise for yourself, but he exited in 1:06.
And he did the Nightmare 100% in 11:31. Don't be fooled by the long time. It rocks!

Been a few weeks since I sent in a demo. I'm quite pleased with this one, though. It's the Easy 100% of gmsp3 in 8:58, one hundred and two(!) seconds faster than Basil. A new route and a bunch of tricks. :-)

Mandel and Midas had themselves an evening of coop fun. Here's what they achieved...

They did the misery runs in 0:07 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE.
And the Nightmare Run of terra5 in 0:15, three seconds faster than Pif and Luc.
And the Nightmare Run of undrwrld in 0:57, five seconds faster than some Udders.

And finally a cool Mad Coop of The Palace of Hate in 0:55 by Kimmo, Mandel, Stubby and Laggy. Great fun!

Sorry for the total rush at the end, everyone wants this posted now so they can see Timo's demo. :-)

Friday, April 29th by Morfans

Swallowing Down The New Map Demos. - 3:53 PM

Ah. The "new maps" routine. Post the maps, wait a day, update a whole pile of demos. It's a winning formula and one that I hope never changes. We've got old runners, new runners, good runners and gooderer runners. Makes me phallically firm just thinking about it.

SDA: It's a love thang!

Naturally, we will have to keep you in suspense just a little while longer by first looking at the demos on not-new-maps maps.

Here at SDA we tend to look askance at any claim of things being officially official. However, it's official that Kay Berntsen is the official worlds fastest bunnyhopper. When he smacks the bunny to something it stays smacked. He took on the Easy Run of dmc1m4 and exited in 0:19 one second faster than his previous time using wind power to allow him to bunny to the exit even faster than himself.

This next demo is beautiful. I want to cry. Connor Fitzgerald beat Carl's Easy Run of czg03 by five seconds to get 0:57. I will say no more.

Next comes proof that if you hang around in #qdq for long enough you will eventually stop talking about making a coop demo and actually do it. Kimmo Polvivaara and Paul Davies spent a fun couple of minutes messing about on terra2 and turned in a 0:35 Easy Run. They then spent a fun couple of hours trying to get 0:34 but although they came close, the endeavour ended in bitter, dismal, embarrassing failure. Still, I'm sure they'll do it soon. :-)

Now for the new maps, starting with dis_cr8z

The first Easy Run demo arrived in double quick time after the maps were posted with a 0:19 from Pif de Mestre.
That fell soon after to a 0:16 from "I don't make anywhere near enough demos" bunny sensation Robert Maglic.
Who took that down to 0:15 a few hours later.
But even that was not safe from the crazy tricking of "Player of the Year" Connor Fitzgerald who found a way to get to the exit in just 0:12.
Paul "LagDotCom" Davies did the Nightmare Run in 0:20 to claim his first ever SDA single player record!
It stood for just long enough for his new coop partner, Kimmo, to destroy it with an 0:18.
Kimmo also went wild on the Easy 100% getting 1:20, then 1:11 and finally a 1:06 that he is pretty happy with.

heresp1 caused some controversy with its freaky grenade hiding grass and even freakier pipe bug.

The Easy Run went to Connor with a 0:16.
And the Nightmare Run stood at 0:19 with a classy run from Mathias Thore.
Until Connor found a cool way to exploit the by now well known pipe bug and got 0:05. Yes. That says 0:05.
Tom Nguyen decided to opening the Easy 100% batting with a nice 1:08. Pretty much the intended route but still impressive.
Exploiting the pipe, coop style, was too much of a temptation for Pif and Luc de Mestre. They got 0:17 on Easy and 0:18 on Nightmare before any of the above demos were made.

Now for the delights of ouver...

The Easy Run start with a quick 0:47 from Pif.
Before Mandel steamed in with a 0:38
That record was short lived, though because both Kimmo and Thomas Bergendorff sent in a 0:36, with Bergie's arriving just before Archi's so he takes the glory.
But Kimmo probably won't be too upset because so far he's been the only one with the balls to survive a Nightmare Run. You might notice that this is slightly slower than the Easy Run. If you've tried surviving on Nightmare on this map you'll know why. Suddenly 1:47 won't seem all that slow after all...

No demos yet on the huge, sprawling Menkallywenkally. Well I say no demos, it's a matter of public record that a certain Australian did a couple of demos on the map when it first came out but as yet he hasn't sent them in to us...

It's nearly the weekend, the sun is shining. Time to sit indoors and play Quake! HURRAH!

Wednesday, April 27th by lodis

imagine this was a funny title by morfans instead of this crap, that would rock - 07:27 PM

LagDotCom hasn't got a single player record. In fact, he has no record whatsoever (he's probably got some weird record...like the most strangled gorillas in a day, but we're talking quake here). So I thought I'd give him a hand by adding a few new maps so he can get runs done on them before you lot.

I'll spare you from any more drivel. Here are the new maps.

Menkalinan. Name your demos menk_xxx. Download here. Huge fucker.
Dismembered Crates. Name your demos d8z_xxx. Download here. Smaller.
Ouverture. Name your demos ouv_xxx. Download here.
-Hyperevolt-. Name your demos her1_xxx. Download here. Annoying grass there, but otherwise fun.

Now go run. And personally I'd like to cheer on mr LagDotCom...YAY, GO! And I'd like to mention that Julie prefers me over Stubby. Bye.

Wednesday, April 20th by Mandelore

Force me through a fine mesh screen... I'll do it for my planet - 10:27 PM

So. Time for another update ey? It is, damnit.

First up. In case you haven't noticed, let me tell you that we changed the menu a little a while ago. If you just heard yourself saying "Oh, I hadn't noticed", maybe it's time you got yourself one of those braille add-ons for your computer monitor? Either way. It's mostly simply a reorganized version of the old menu, but there's also one new page. You'll find it under "Miscellaneous", and it's called Downloads. On this page you'll find some nifty quake related things you might need, for example a file with a collection of all current single player ID records on SDA. Have a look if you haven't already. Or have a feel if you're using braille. Whatever floats your boat is fine with me.

Demos! First one is a masterpiece. Area51 is the setting, never ending udder Carl Tholin is the executor. Beating Daniel Lindberg's old record by 5 seconds, Carl takes the easy 100% time down to 1:12. There really isn't much to say about this demo, because it simply is too damn good all the way from start to end. And, as if the easy 100% wasn't enough, Carl went even further and did the nightmare 100% on the same level a few days later. 11 seconds faster than Thomas Bergendorff, the new time is 2:08. Going to try the runs as well, Carl?

There is only one easy run this time, but it's a long one so that's fine. Connor Fitzgerald finally found a way to get a copy of the lovely rogue mission pack shipped to the deepest bush in the outskirts of nowhere in Australia. Shortly after that he managed this 7 second improvement over Thomas Bergendorff on r2m5, getting the time down to 1:10. Look at the slope used for slope jumping off... It barely qualifies as a slope at all! And here's a little note to those of you who like LIT files and colored lighting; you can get LIT files for rogue from here. Looks pretty... colorful!

The misery contest last week saw quite a number of demos, and not only one 8 second easy run. The first one to send us an 0:08 nightmare run after we actually opened the level for demo submission was Robert Maglic. Nice demo, and it's three seconds faster than the old record by Julie from last week. Anyone thinks this can be done in 0:07? Robert does. I don't... Time will tell!

Next demo on misery is a nightmare 100% from Tom Nguyen. This 0:33 is a good demo indeed, and somewhere close to optimal along the route of choice. But as those of you who already tried misery know, this map serves an absolute plethora of routes! Included in the dz are two egg demos showing a very mortal place and two ways to go...

The french coop duo that is Pif and Luc de Mestre also had a go on misery! They did the two player easy 100% one full second faster than Connor! The more cunning reader has already concluded that the time is a pant-droppingly fast 0:27. Following what to me looks like a totally different set of routes, they also did the two player nightmare 100% in 0:27. How both route sets could lead to 0:27 is beyond me, as is the reason for the change. Nobody expects the French inquisition!

Tom was also surprised when his leisure playing on fmb100 which he also happened to be recording suddenly ended up being faster than his own SDA record! 4 seconds faster to be precise, so the new record time is 4:03. Includes a rare 'two dogs with one shot of the double shotgun' moment, and some route refinery all along. Can this be done under four minutes? Tom will tell!

Kimmo Polvivaara absolutely loves terra5, and terra5 absolutely loves Kimmo Polvivaara. And really, how could two such extraordinary things not love eachother? They're both perfect specimens of their respective species, one human being and one quake map .bsp file. The mutual love is reflected in this new shiny nightmare 100% in 1:50 that Kimmo did, 9 seconds faster than last time. That's 8%. And then some!

Phew, I'm exhausted. Lucky for me, I have nothing left to say.

Tuesday, April 12th by Mandel

Me! And teamSDA. And my banjo. And the rest of you I suppose. - 8:26 PM

Hello everybody. Small update today, with only a few but GOOD demos! Booyah!

But first, the Misery Loves Company contest is over! A great contest with 27 competing demos on a number of different routes for both the run and 100% category. Lots of newcomers, some regulars, and some returning oldtimers! The winners, who now also will be added to the tables, were me with this 0:08 easy run and Connor Fitzgerald with this 0:28 easy 100%. We now add misery to sda and open the archive for submissions on the nightmare categories as well as improvements to the easy ones if you dare. So go on! Run your little hearts out!

Now then. Who made demos? I did! And Connor. And Marlo, Jonny, Mattias, and Christian.

Whoops, I deliberately forgot a name in the list above. It's SDA first timer Julie Holm Nielsen. Let's call her a 'friend' of the Danish speedchopping sensation Thomas Stubgaard. What demo did she do? The nightmare run of misery of course. Blasting her way through the level with the rocket launcher, she managed to take the time down to 0:11. Welcome to SDA, Julie! Instantly, the thought of some synchronized axe swinging in some mad, multi-minute NH marathon strikes me as something I really, really would like to see from you and Thomas! Please?

One of the better maps in the archive certainly has to be gmsp3. Jonny Andersson was really bored one night and decided to try the easy run. And sure enough, he managed to beat Basil's old demo by two seconds with this 0:39. Excellent running, and sweet, sweet decimals! Congrats PB :) The wonderful thing with this demo is that as a direct reaction to it, Morfans and Stubgaard immediately promised to do the EH and NH respectively.[1]

Marlo Galinski has an awesome aim, and a liking for the terra levels. The easy 100% on terra3 is already too damn good, so Marlo turned his attention to terra4 instead. Yup, finally this annoying hole in the table has been filled. But this demo is certainly not a "table filler", no no no. It's damn good. Very damn good. Finishing in 1:51, this demo is a high paced gib fest. Gather the family and have a look!

Little more than a month ago I made the easy run on r2m7. I was hoping someone else would take the challenge and do the NR, but nope. So, at long last, I did it. The new time is 0:54, 3 seconds faster than Nolan's demo from 2000.

Weee-ho! There's two more demos. They're coopies. They're not french. They're high quality fine looking Swedish demos from the duo that is Mattias Öman and Christian Tornberg. With their well-known frenecy they attacked the bfinal 2-player 100%'s. The easy 100% was finished in just 0:30, two seconds faster than Valeriy and Vlad Burmistrov, and the nightmare 100% was finished in the very similar 0:30, one second faster than their own old demo. Hurrah.

That's it! We need more demos. Make'em. And when you have made them, send them to us. You know the address. Bye!

[1] Ok so maybe they didn't... But I wish they had!

Sunday, April 10th by Morfans

Make My Life A Misery. - 5:30 PM

Before we get to the demos I'd like to cunningly drop in a quick reminder that the Misery Loves Company contest ends at midnight TONIGHT (Sunday) CET. Or there abouts. Timezones being what they are I won't complain if they arrive a few minutes late. In general the rule is that as long as the demo is in my inbox by the time I check my mail for the first time after the deadline the demo will be accepted.

Today, we have for you a feast of coop mayhem, but not a single French demo in sight! This week the de Mestres have taken a short rest to give you a chance to enjoy the fruits of a recent mini-Udderfest. Daniel Hansson, Jonny Andersson and Daniel Anderson had a sudden, violent burst of enthusiasm and kicked out a whole load of high class coop improvements...

Daniel and ASH came up with the only Id level demo of the night, a very impressive Easy 100% of The Nameless City. They both made a couple of small mistakes but managed to finish their routes at the same time (which is always the most important thing in coop play. It looks so wasteful to have one player waiting around at the end) of 1:46, a beautiful twenty seconds faster than Pif and Luc.
All the rest of the two player action came from Daniel and PB, starting with an Easy 100% of mortal in 0:40, ten seconds better than P&L.
Daniel and PB then moved on to the confusing and ugly hunter where they made a quick tablefiller Eary Run in 0:45 (0:51).
Time for Daniel and PB to get all religous on the jesus runs. They did the Easy run in 0:15, one second faster than P&L, and a much more aggressive approach to the Nightmare Run gave them 0:17, a full eight seconds faster than the slightly cautious P&L.
I'm sick of typing their fucking names now. The same two moved on to hc and did...
- The Easy Run in 0:30, two seconds faster than P&L.
- The Nightmare Run in 0:32, one second faster than P&L.
- The Easy 100% in 0:35, four seconds faster than P&L.
- And the Nightmare 100% in 0:48, seven seconds faster than P&L.
Same two. fire. Easy 100%. 0:44. Seven seconds better than P&L. Shit Map. Good demos.
Next was a trip to the gibplex, the infamous "one kill missing" map...
- They made a pretty reasonable job of the Easy 100%, exiting in 0:43, three seconds faster than P&L.
- And a slightly better job of the Nightmare 100% with this 0:41, one second faster than P&L.
- Finally it was time for ASH to do some work and the result was a cool 0:34 Easy 100%.
The three powered into the obiwan3 runs, getting 0:21 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE.
They managed to preserve their speed BETWEEN maps with a quite remarkable bunny display, and made a mockery of a3, completing the runs in 0:18 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE.
Finally, the three amigos took a turn around the two forts that comprise 2run5...
- They romped the three player Nightmare Run in 0:29, four seconds faster than P,L&A. Of course, given the layout of the map it meant Hansson did all the work and the other two just sat there.
- And finally the Easy 100% in 0:26, seven seconds faster than P,L&A. Probably slightly more for the others to do but since Hansson was the only one to remember to save his demo we'll never know for sure.

Love to you all. Really.

Friday, April 1st by mwh

Nolans nolans nolans - 4:00 PM

As we're sure you remember the Nolans 2004 ceremony to celebrate the finest speedrunning of last year is THIS SUNDAY at 21:00 CET in our very special #nolans channel on Quakenet. Be there, or we'll send the smallest Skidmore[1] round to crap on your carpet!

Now, until a few days ago (nolans) there was a problem with the Easy 100% records on dmc1m2 and dmc1m3: as fine as Jonny's 0:37 and Robert's 0:20 demos were (nolans), they weren't by the Most Improved Player of 2002, Thomas Bergendorff! Fortunately (nolans) he's set that straight, getting 0:35 for dmc1m2 and 0:19 for dmc1m3 (nolans).

Richard 'Best Mad-Coop, 2002' Skidmore's "Marlo bashing for the weekend" (nolans) target was the Nightmare 100% of coopmine, which he improved (nolans) by 9 seconds to 2:20. Read the text file for a salutary (nolans) tale!

Weixing 'Rookie of the Year, 2002' Ye has been taking an almost Plachetta-like (nolans) or even Hansson-style approach to the 100% (nolans) records of em1 of late; his latest one second improvement takes him to 0:46 and (nolans) apparently "finally what [he] wanted". Is this kind of satisfaction allowable? We know you can always go faster, but patience (nolans) has an end...

Finally some coops (but not from the de Mestres: what's going on there? (nolans) Too much Hexen 2?):

First (nolans) off Robert 'Rookie Nominee, 2004' Maglic assisted Mathias 'Another Rookie Nominee, 2004' Thore along the scenic route through Hell's Atrium in the just-qualifying time (nolans) of 0:52.
Then the same duo took on the still-odd-looking-to-me normal gravity variant (nolans) of Ziggurat Vertigo, beating the Normandy brothers by four seconds to get 0:30 for the (nolans) Easy 100%.
Despite this taking four solid hours, they were hungry for (nolans) more. Thomas 'Eleven Nolans' Stubgaard helped them get (nolans) 1:04 for the three-player Easy 100% of the Palace of Hate, seven (nolans) seconds better than the previous record (coincidentally, seven seconds was approximately Stubby's ping (nolans) for the old record).

If you haven't got the (nolans) message yet, read this.

See you Sunday (NOLANS)!

[1] Strange but true: This is actually, Richard, a.k.a. Morfans. Yes, he is smaller than his one-month old daughter. You don't want to see what he can do to a carpet.

Wednesday, March 23rd by Morfans

Mmmmmmmm... - 3:04 PM

Looks like we've got a fair bit to get through in this update, so let's get started.

I don't wish to sound vindictive or anything but I really love seein Markus records getting beaten. Not because I have any kind of grudge against the man himself but because in order to beat a Markus demo you generally have to do something spectacular. How often in the last few years have you heard someone say "I'm going to beat a Markus record by smoother play and faster bunnying"? (Except once that I can think of by Joe and Markus recaptured days later). But anyway, you just know any Markus beating demo will have a cool new trick in it. So sit back and watch Martin Selinus own The Elder God Shrine Easy Run in 0:36, one second faster.

I said that I'd improve the Nightmare 100% of frcastl2 that I did last week by another second to 0:35, and I did. But i might just as well not have bothered because Arturo Garcia Lasca saw how poor it was and improved it by three more seconds to 0:32. My one solice is that he didn't watch the EH and so he copied my "fail to fall down the last stairs" slow route and so didn't quite equal Connor's 0:31 Easy 100%. Shame. :-P

I'm glad to say that Marlo Galinski's demo last time has not proved to be a one off. He went map++ to terra2 and ripped Connor's Easy 100% cornhole two seconds wider with a "oh yes, I remember why this guy was the 100% master" 1:01.

Anyone that regularly hangs out in #qdq will know that Pif de Mestre has never been happy with his Nightmare Run tablefiller of sadlark7. For the last few weeks he's been going on about how bad it is up to eleven times a day. The only way to end this agony (ours, not his) was for him to improve it TWICE, first to 1:56, thirteen seconds faster, then to 1:34 which is a whole different class of better run. :-)

Legendary goat sucker Jonny Andersson has also reared his ugly head again to amaze us with a rather good improvement to the cbfspq1 Easy 100%. He jumped, twisted and boosted his way to a 0:27, three seconds faster than his previous time. MORE!

Pif et Luc : Luc et Pif. You Just never know which way the de Mestre brothers will jump next.

mexx7 is, in my very humble opinion, the least impressive of all the Mexx levels. But the guys made a Nightmare 100% on it anyway and pulled in a time of 4:17 (4:53).
mexx10, on the other hand, was a fitting end to the epic Mexx experience and "les coureurs franais" would seen to agree as they turned out 3 nice demos.
- Usually they content themselves with filling gaps in the coop tables but sometimes they take up the challenge of beating existing records. Does the fact that they improved Evan and Justin's Easy Run twice, first by four seconds to 1:19 and then by another two to 1:17, mean that the French are greater in all aspects than the Americans? Frankly, there's no way I'm going to answer a question like that on this site.
- To celebrate taking a fleckwag record they did a Nightmare Run tablefiller in 2:21 (2:40).
The weird-arsed world of nesp16 was their next stop and a fun filled Easy 100% that saw them exit in 3:02 (3:27).
To finish off they started what might turn out to be an attck on the Zerstorrer levels. The obvious place to start was zer1m1 and the empty Nightmare Run slot which was filled in just 0:38.

On to other news, we have another "hobby run" in the QdQ style, but with a difference. Mathias "Mandel" Thore, Martin "Marvin" Selinus and Robert "Midas" Maglic have produced an Easy Skill run through the whole game, but without using any shortcuts. This means that they ran the Id intended route for each level, pressing every button and using every key (and, incidentally, no secrets at all), to make a hugely entertaining presentation that they are proud to call The ID Run. Sounds slow? Don't you believe it!

To finish off I am pleased to announce that after months of delay (due to laziness) we have another contest! It's called Misery Loves Company and... well, that's it. Go to the contest page, download the map, read the rules and GET RUNNING!

Could life get any sweeter?

Monday, March 14th by Radix

Just my luck - 6:38 PM

This is just a note that all incoming emails are probably bouncing. I tried to update the mail server but it has gone horribly wrong. I sure hope I can fix it soon. :(

9:15 PM: Everything should be working again. If you sent in a demo and received a bounce about definite failure to deliver, you'll need to resend. If you only received a notice about delayed delivery, don't resend as it should arrive. If you didn't send a demo... you suck!

Thursday, March 10th by Morfans

Vote Or Die! - 7:03 PM

Ah, what a joy to see. The number of demos has picked up a little, the voting for the Nolans 2004 has begun, Stubby has finally indulged in sexual activity in the presence of a woman who isn't made up of pixels and I'm writing an update. The world is moving in the right direction!

It's not for nothing that Carl Tholin is known as "The Rotweiller". Once he sinks his teeth into a level he won't let go until the level is dead (or he gets bored). Last week we saw him take the Easy 100% Marathon through ikspq, now he has ripped apart both Nightmare Marathons...

First was a mad destruction of Basil's Nightmare 100%. There's ton's of good, hardcore play here including exiting levels with 2 health, blowing spawns up from too close, some really bad grenade throwing and the grand finale game of hunt the grunt. :-) It's a shame the last thing wasted about thirteen seconds otherwise this 20:12 would have just sneaked into the 19:xx "worship my prowess" category.
Basil also used to have the Nightmare Run record. Due to the insanity of these maps on Nightmare he was understandably cautious and killed a lot of the monsters in his path rather than trying to run around them multiple times. Carl took a much more aggressive approach, but still had to kill lots of stuff in this 7:45, saving almost five minutes. You can almost smell the nervousness at the end as he runs for the exit with nearly no health left and no way of knowing if there are any grunts left alive in the shadows. Outstanding viewing.

Weixing Ye was not happy with his recent improvement on em1, so like the fighter he is he did something about it. It's the same dull grunt shooting at the start, reasonably entertaining shambler quad SNGing in the middle and insane quad-RL-teleport-fiend-blasting-and-luring-plus-rocket-boostery that we've come to know and love. He managed 0:48 for the Easy 100%, three seconds faster, and 0:47 for the Nightmare 100%, two seconds faster than before.

Sometimes time, or the lack of it, can be, in the words of William Shakespeare, "an righte fuckinge barstard". I thought I'd make a demo this weekend, so a quick look down the Oldest Records table showed that Marlo's 0:37 frcastl2 Nightmare 100% was desperately in need of an improvement. But I had to stop at 0:36, only one second faster, when I'd already had about 50 0:35s with a missing kill or two. Ah well, this weekend for sure...

Speaking of Marlo, guess who this next demo's by? The clue is in the name "Marlo". Give up? It's Marlo Galinski of course! Once again he has come back to give us the benefit of his legendary running experience and has turned in a terra1 Easy 100% that's powerful enough to make a Bergendorff blush being, as it is, five seconds faster than Thomas's record at 1:36. Welcome back!

Next comes an absolute belter from Mathias Thore. The Easy Run on r2m7 has stood for nearly five years, and with good reason. It was a great Nolan demo. But the latest generation of psycho-bunnys can hit speeds never before seen and with the additon of a few extra multi-rocket boosts he improved the record by four seconds to 0:52. Brilliant (apart from the candle shooting). Now someone do the Nightmare Run. :-)

And finally, Tom Nguyen has finally managed to make a fmb100 Easy 100% that he can live with. This 4:07 is actually pretty smooth and shows a big improvement not only in time (forty-eight seconds) but also in playing style. Now, I'm not usually one to laugh at rookie mistakes, but another thing that might help his playing style is noticing that option in the menu that says "Always Run" which will free up one of his fingers from having to hold down the "run" key all through his runs... ;-)

That's your lot. You'll notice that there are no coop demos this time. I truly believe that this is an attempt to attack the credibility of mwh over his "can you remember the last demo update that didn't feature Pif and Luc?" Now we know that the answer was "Yes, it's the next one..."

And on that temporal anomaly, GOODBYE!

Tuesday, March 8th by Mandel

The Nolans 2004 - 8:08 PM

Here's what's cool about the future: The Nolans 2004! A date is set for the ceremony: Sunday, April 3rd 2005, 21:00 CET.

Everyone should have a look at the nominated demos from 2004, select their favourites, and then

GO VOTE HERE

Voting closes Sunday, March 27th 2005, 23:59:59 CET, which means little less than three weeks from now. Don't wait too long with casting your votes though, or you're bound to forget :)

I'm gonna end this short update with the following statement:

Markus Taipale. You are very welcome to join the Nolans 2004 ceremony. In fact, you are so welcome to join it, that Stubby would sacrifice certain vital parts of his body if that would make it any more likely to happen =) If you read this, please make everybody very happy and drop in at the Nolans 2004.

End of statement. End of update.

Friday, March 4th by mwh

Another day here at the Search and Destroy Agency - 6:36 PM

We start with a pile of demos that narrowly missed being in the last update, arriving as they did a mere 72 hours before the update went live... When Mr Mathias 'Almond' Thore says something about going to visit his parents for the weekend, you know some coops are coming.

First, he roped in Mr. Robert 'Maglidas' Midaaglic to perform the NEEDED double telefrag on the Nightmare Run of terra4 and take the time down to 0:09. What about a triple-telefragged NR3, then?
Showing exactly enough imagination to advance a level and change skills, they then rattled through the Easy Run of terra5 in 0:15, two seconds faster than the de Mestres.
Then the Drunk Dane, Mr Thomas Stubgaard was found lying in a gutter and propped upright to take on the Three Player Nightmare 100% of e2m1. They managed 0:55, 29 seconds faster than the single player time, but only three seconds faster than the NH2. Mutterings of "We'll do it better one day" have been heard already.
Thomas returned to his gutter to sleep off his hangover and M&M took the time to take 1 second off Pif et Luc's Easy Run of mortal, meaning they finished in 0:21.

A marathon is always fun. A marathon through a scandalously underrun episode is even better. And if it's by Carl 'The Owner' Tholin, well the universe might explode in happiness. Risking all the above, Carl sent us his Easy 100% of the ikspq levels which took just 9:51. Try not to enjoy it too much!

Relative SDA newcomer Tom Nguyen has worked out that you're less likely to have your records frustratingly broken mere hours after -- or, worse, before -- you send in your record if you work on slightly older maps. Mike Woodham's fmb100, to pick a random example. Tom amazingly made the same random choice as me and improved Morfans' Easy 100% by 4 seconds to 4:55. Unlike the possible improvements to the e2m1 NH3, we KNOW he's done better times than this but as he's still improving his time every day, you'll have to wait to see them...

It's not every week that we get demos from Weixing Ye. And that's a shame, because they tend to be rather good, performing such worthy feats as improving his own Easy 100% record of em1 by one second to 0:51 or improving Daniel Hansson's Easy 100% of royalwar by 5 seconds to 1:09.

Now. There's something missing from this update. Something that hasn't been missing from an update since September 30th last year. A demo from the prolific de Mestre brothers[1], that's what. Has there been a hiccough in the demo stream? No. Of course not. I just wanted a way to introduce their six latest demos.

Necros's 'At the Gates of Midian' "map" (there are two in the pak) was the main target. They first battled their way through the Nightmare 100% of n3sp03 in 6:14, or 4.83% faster than the crazy Dane.
Then they improved their Easy 100% of the same map by ten seconds to 3:45.
Next in line, rather predictably, was n3sp03_2, a.k.a. "the bit that would have crashed quake had it been part of the main map" which was 100%ed Easily in the shambler-splattering time of 0:57...
...and Nigtmarishly in the marginally inferior time of 0:59. Luc managed to avoid an excessively hot early bath this time, though...
Giving the infamous Canadian sadist a break, they moved on to mexx7, doing that which we choose to call the "Easy 100%" in 3:33.
Finally, possibly reminded of fmb100's awesomeness by sshplur's efforts, they did its Easy 100% in 3:53.

Join us next time for some new maps and a contest! Definitely, absolutely certainly, this may be a lie.

[1]If, at this point, you're thinking "what about the update on feb 11 where Stubby announced the Qd100Qwav preview" or "what about the one in January where Radix announced the move", you can piss right off. Yes, you. Out the door. Don't come back.

Tuesday, March 1st by Morfans

Why Would Life Go On? - 2:22 PM

It's been a quiet couple of weeks here with days going by with no new demos arriving causing much sobbing among the more emotionally unstable member of TeamSDA.

We've had a fantastic new Id Nightmare 100% from Thomas Stubgaard who has improved his own record in the Vaults of Zin by one second to 1:20. Now obviously this demo is fast, bloody and brutal, but it also features one of my all time favourite tricks which demonstrates very nicely just how totally mental Stubby is. You give the shambler in the pit some quad grief, but not enough to kill it. Then you chuck a grenade on the floor, jump through the teleport and bunny like mad for the exit. If you've timed this perfectly the grenade will explode, killing the shambler and triggering the final shambler in just as you're flying past his spawn point giving you a beautifully messy telefrag. Of course, if you haven't timed it perfectly you have to start all over agin, but that's life in the fast lane!

Thomas Bergendorff officially loves terra5. The proof is the fact that he's taken his Easy 100% time and tidied it up a bit and improved the time needed to fry Chthon's fiery arse to just 1:05 . Smooth, but smoother could be done and that one minute barrier is tantalisingly close...

And all the rest of the update is a big, fat splodge of Pif de Mestre, Luc de Mestre and the occasional bit of assistance from Andre de Mestre as they make a huge table-filler push to the magic DEMO 8000.

It's just as well that a3 is such a good map, because they did so many demos on it that it would have made me heartily fucking sick if it wasn't. :-) THEY DID THE...
- Easy Run in 0:41 and then 0:31 (0:53).
- Nightmare Run in 0:39 and then 0:37 (0:56).
- Easy 100% in 2:25 (2:40).
- Nightmare 100% in 2:26 (2:41).
- Three player Easy Run in 0:26.
- Three player Nightmare Run in 0:27.
Next they had a go at the 100%s on terra1, quickly managing to get 1:19 on both EASY (1:14) and NIGHTMARE (1:46).
More annoying grunts and dogs and stuff on terra2 where they made a big twenty-two second improvement to their Nightmare 100% down to 1:26. Well, since Bergie had improved the SP time to 1:34 in the last update they didn't really have any choice... :-)
Their 100% demos on tohnsay caused a tirade of filth, bile, invective and IRC based hate from mwh about "maps with crappy spaceships in them". Pretty good demos, though. They got 2:02 (2:30) on Easy and 2:26 (2:52).
They also did both 100%s on em1, but the surprising thing is that one of the demos, the Easy 100%, is an improvement to someone elses time! They improved Daniel and Par's record by one second to 0:44, and followed that up with a 0:45 Nightmare 100%.
Next came the Easy 100% of bbsecret in the trouser-droppingly fast time of 1:22, a full FOUR seconds faster than the single player time!!
They stopped off for a while on could, RPG's "It Could Have Been A Good Map". Or something like that. They did the Easy 100% in 2:32 (3:39) and the Nightmare 100% in 4:19 (7:16).
And finally they fought their way through Necros's "Right in the middle of my garden gate", otherwise known as n3sp03. Seems like they had some trouble getting all the kills on the Easy 100% so they settled for a 3:55 (4:11).

So there we are. 8000 demos and counting. Only 992000 more demos to go until we reach the magic DEMO 1000000 so everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY get making some demos!

*Growl*

Sunday, February 13th by Mandel

Gib me plenty - 3:28 PM

Hey ho. It's updatering time. And maybe even past it, but what are you gonna do. Don't you dare thinking we're a bunch of lazy bastards who never do anything... We are a bunch of lazy bastards, but we do lots of stuff =)

13 demos this time, 9 of'em on terra maps, demos from Anders, Bergie, Carl, Connor, Kimmo, Luc, Pif, and even myself, how can you possibly go wrong!

Easy runs!

Only not too many and not too bad is good enough for me. Here's the first Connor Fitzgerald demo of today: terra6 in 0:25, 3 seconds faster than Kay. I honestly don't know what the major speedups are because it looks like the same route as Kay's. But it's fast I tell you that. If you want to try a difficult trick just read what Connor has to say in his text file...

Easy 100%!

Thomas Bergendorff spent "just a few" of his precious study hours on Quake, and made this 1:41 on terra1. Some solid gibbage all along, new route and all, and a devastating 37 seconds faster than Pif. In fact there seems to be only two gibbs in the entire demo but who am I to judge. Solid.
Connor prepared his way through terra2 with a wave of nails. Following a new route he did the map in 1:03, 12 seconds faster than Kimmo. Gibcount: 2.
Carl Tholin tried his gibbing powers on terra3 and managed to beat Kay's old record by 3 seconds, getting 1:11. The nature of this map and quality of running and grenade throwing makes it impossible for a 100% idiot like me to count the gibs, but trust me, there are many. If a gibfest is your cup of tea, then this demo is tea time WITH Danish cookies.
Kimmo Polvivaara continued his quest to leave his mark on terra5. A quadded grenade jump from one place to another together with those autogibbing fiends let Kimmo make this 1:15, 7 seconds faster than last time...
...but! Bergie must have had yet another exam to study for because he did the same map in 1:08, another 7 seconds faster than Kimmo! There's some excellent thinking in Thomas's route, check it out.

Nightmare runs!

The only terra nightmare run for today is a terra2 one in 0:40.99 by Anders Nordensten. 2 seconds faster than Kimmo, and a demo that gives Anders TRO[1] on the map. You gotta love the way he fools the first fiend!
Mathias Thore (that's me!) heard a rumor that there still were some old nightmare runs in the tables by the Flecker which probably could do with an update. So I took a look in the oldest records table and found bbsecret! The old record didn't even have bunnies, so I simply added a few and got 1:24, 6 seconds faster than Justin. Looking good if I may say so myself, but apparently there's a better route somewhere in there...
After looking a bit more in the oldest records table I also found undrwrld, and made this 1:18 demo, a mere 3 seconds faster than Justin. A shaky demo, and you can tell by the looks of it that I had a bitch of a time making it.

Nightmare 100%!

Bergie. terra1. Stick a small gun in this guy's hands and watch him gib away. With this 1:46 demo Thomas shows who's the boss. 41 seconds faster than Pif. I think I spotted 6 gibs in this one!
Bergie again, but this time terra2. If you do what Kimmo did but 23 seconds faster and using a different route you might just get your demo done in 1:34. Thomas did. Whoever placed both a grenade launcher and a quad damage on this map must have done it just to make it impossible for me to count gibs. Dumb.

Coop's corner!

I'm glad to report two new coop demos from our trustworthy french mafia coop brothers Pif and Luc de Mestre. This time they found spring2 and made both an easy 0:04
and a nightmare 0:04 demo. Call it tablefillers if you must, I still doubt there's a whole lot to be done in terms of improving these two runs. Nice going.

That's it.

[1] Total Run Ownage, a lesser title than TO and something I invented just now. But it's a good title.

Friday, February 11th by Stubby

Quake done 100% Quick with a Vengeance - Episode 1 Preview - 5:11 PM

Greetings people! The title says it all really... Qd100Qwav-Ep1 is fresh out of the oven! It's been cooking for the past 4 years or so (yeah, we're lazy, we suck, and we can't cook!). This release is only meant to serve as a preview for what's to come. Most of the demos are from 2002 or so, but we figured we might as well release something before we spent another 4 years trying to improve the same damn maps. This also means we've openend up the project for the general public, so go make your contribution today before someone else does it!

/me bunnies to the liquor store...

Tuesday, February 2nd by Morfans

How Swede to be a speedrunner - 6:21 PM

Before we start on the demos here's a little bit of amusement. Megazoid is staging a contest over on Quake Terminus where you just need to answer 10 simple questions about Quake to be in with a chance of winning some crappy old CDs! Head over there, google the answers and then, when you win, pretend that you never received your prize and swear and rant about Megazoid on every forum you can find! :-)

And now: demos...

An id record is always cool. An id marathon is, to some people's way of thinking, even cooler. When someone, for example David Hocking, takes their first id record and it's a Nightmare Run marathon through Dimension of the Doomed in under three minutes (2:59 to be precise) saving a huge twenty-three seconds over Sergi's time the temperature approached absolute zero. Bloody amazing stuff. Watch this. I COMMAND YOU TO WATCH THIS!

On to the terra maps, starting predictably with terra1.

Since up until just before the last update no one had made any Nightmare 100%s on these maps I ran through then and quickly blasted out a demo on each one hoping to prod a few people into beating them. Pure tablefiller, very few tricks. 2:30 was the time I settled for.
*PROD* Pif de Mestre came screaming through with a three second improvement to 2:27.

Next we come, unsurprisingly, to terra2.

Kimmo Polivivaara is in a new-map-record-destroying mood and begins with a fourteen second improvement to Pif's Easy 100% to a 0:38 demo.
My tablefiller here was a poxy 2:26 that was a bit of a fiasco at the end (and very embarrassing at the lift).
*PROD* Kimmo destroyed it by twenty nine seconds to take the time down to 1:57.
*DOUBLE PROD* Pif and Luc de Mestre take up the challenge of the NH2 and shotgun their way to the end in just 1:48 leaving many dead behind them. Many many dead. God I love the dead.

Since Carl had already done the NH on terra3 and all the other demos on it are so cool anyway there's nothing to add in this update.

terra4 is a total whore-hole on Nightmare...

...which is probably why my Nightmare 100% in 3:52 is still the record.
But plucky goose abusers Pif and Luc also braved the map in a Nightmare Run stylee and only just beat Kimmo's single player time to get 0:16. This run NEEDS a double telefrag! :-)

A good set of demos on terra5 proves conclusively that it's the greatest map ever made for any game ever. And that's official!

Tom Nguyen continued to work on the Easy 100%, taking another two seconds off his time to get 1:29.
But Kimmo is not in the mood to let other people have records. And so he added a little flash to the run and got a 1:22, seven seconds faster.
I was actually quite pleased with my 2:28 tablefiller.
But Kimmo doesn't wait for Chthon to explodipate everything and then go rock hopping, he just exits saving a good ten seconds. The other nineteen seconds improvement in this 1:59 is a little trick we call "better running".
Pif and Luc had already done a bunch of nice runs on this map (see last update for details) but they adopted a new tactic this week: watch, think, practise, run, dive face first into the lava.
- This gave them a three second improvement to their Easy Run to 0:17.
- And a three second improvement to their Nightmare Run to 0:18.
- How could they resist doing a Nightmare 100% tablefiller? They couldn't! Jumping vore's and monsters rising out of the ground and a self destructing Chthon are just too tempting to miss and the result? The result was a 1:37.

Finally we end up on what feels to me like e1m6's bigger, nastier brother: terra6.

David's Nightmare Run came in for a seven second spanking from Thomas Bergendorff who blasted his way through the "gang of vore" to exit in 0:36.
Back to me for a final Nightmare 100% tablefiller which see much death compressed into just 3:24.

A whole bunch of coops to finish off with. No prizes for guessing that it's Pif and Luc who are providing the entertainment.

Better get funky down in the crypt.
- The appropriate level of funk gave tham a funky 1:09 for the Easy 100%.
- And 1:16 for the Nightmare 100%.
rit2 is titled "Escape from the castle". Bollocks. It should be called "Kill everything in the castle and find all the secrets before exiting in...
- ...1:33 on Easy and...
- ...1:40 on Nightmare."
It's a funny old level, trinity. But I like it. As do the de Mestres as they get in to classic coop "split up then kill" mode for a very good...
- ...1:17 on Easy and...
- ...1:19 on Nightmare. Same number of monsters on Nightmare so why the two second difference? Must be a French thing...
There's also the same number of monsters on the small and very fast whippet. So again why is there a two second difference between...
- ...0:19 on Easy and...
- ...0:19 on Nightmare? ANSWER: There isn't! :-)

Which gives us a grand total of 7968 demos in the archive! Looks like the countdown to DEMO 8000 has begun! Send demos! Send often! Then YOU may be the lucky person to win the big star prize!!!

And if you believe that...

Tuesday, January 25th by Mandel

How sweet to be a speedrunner - 9:25 AM

Oh how sweet to be a speedrunner these days. A new shiny URL, nice fellow runners and a lovley team doing everything they can to keep the general audience happy behind the scenes.

It's almost unbelievable with all the improvements Radix has made while he was at it... Direct download links (no more waiting in line at fileplanet), converting this page to CSS, updating all links to point to the new address, providing a fast server, less intrusive ads, etc etc. Heck, he even mirrored the old SDA board for our enjoyment, it's available here. Let's hear it for Radix shall we! Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

What does Radix and the rest of teamSDA ask in return? Well, nothing really... Just keep those demos coming will ya! From now on, just as you've been told already, send all your demos to

our new e-mail address

Alright boys, time to get started with listing the demos. There are a million terra demos today as well, so don't be surprised if I appear a little brief. But first things first. There is one new demo which isn't a terra demo: this 0:16 nightmare 100% on dm4sp. The runner is Weixing Ye and I have to say that it's fast indeed. One second faster than the old record, and it has a triple intermission kill. Very fast.

Now, let's go on with the Terra demos shall we?

terra1 - Schumann resonance

Pif de Mestre is the only one who has played this map since the last update. He made this 2:18 easy 100% tablefiller. For the first minute and a half, the only weapon available is the small shotgun, at least along Pif's route. Maybe there is another?

terra2 - Dead on arrival

There has been a hard battle on this map, and it's been fought for the easy run record. Long time no see runner Anders Nordensten challanged Kimmo's run ownage by making this 0:39 demo.
Kimmo Polivivaara took the challange and made this 0:38 demo.
But again with Anders! He said he would make a 0:37, and indeed he did. This is the current record.
Over to you, Kimmo? Anders? Kimmo? Anders?
Pif also made this tablefillerish 1:29 easy 100%.

terra3 - Shotgun Experiment

Kay Berntsen started by getting 0:10 for the nightmare run, same time as his easy run and two seconds faster than Carl.
Carl Tholin made an easy 100% in 1:37 to compensate for the lost nightmare run.
To compensate further, Carl also made this 1:58 nightmare 100%.
Two days later, when the tears had stopped running down Carl's bearded cheeks he improved the easy 100% by 12 seconds to 1:25. A highly enjoyable demo.
BUT! Kay is a cruel cruel player, a fast fast bunnier and an odd odd fellow in general. Despite his own claims that he can't aim, shoot and kill, this 1:14 easy 100% is undeniably 11 seconds faster than Carl's demo. it uses a little different strategy in the exit area.
Kay also used the same strategy to make this 1:40 nightmare 100%, 18 seconds faster than Carl.
Carl?
Pif and Luc de Mestre made the two player easy 100% in 1:09, an unbelievable 5 seconds faster than the single player record :)

Oh and really, people. If you use the grenade counter, do remove it from the demo before you send it in. demtool -g mydemo.dem will remove the grenade counter from mydemo.dem and make a show everybody can enjoy. Please!

terra4 - Latent Quarter

There's nothing.

terra5 - Shotgun experiment 2

If you thought there were few demos on terra4, wait til you see the amount of demos on terra5. The easy run was improved by Mathias Thore (that's me), first by one second to 0:22,
and then by another second to 0:21. The main trick here is the e4m1-ish twist in the beginning, which is about as hard to do as the e4m1 one, and just as annoying.
I also improved the nightmare run by two seconds to 0:22 with the same twist.
The fight for the easy 100% record has been hard and exciting. Pif made the first demo, 1:42.
SDA newcomer Tom Nguyen replied by doing it in 1:36, 6 seconds faster. Congratulations on your first actual SDA record :)
Pif fought back and got 1:34.
But then Tom added a bunch of new tricks, for example a grenade jump to the megahealth secret, and took the time down by one second to 1:33.
Pif simply couldn't be bothered by newish tricksish, and made 1:32 along the 'old' route :)
The well-known coop team that is Pif and Luc then teamed up and made the two player easy run in 0:20,
the two player nightmare run in 0:21,
and the two player easy 100% in 1:15.

terra6 - Torture department

As far as easy runs go, David Hocking has been busy again. But unfortunately the aftereffects of not keeping oneself informed about the other runners become very obvious yet again; Neither his 0:39 or his 0:32 easy run are records,
because Kay had already made this 0:28. Don't miss this demo. It's got a quadded grenade jump.
You're welcome to join in on the discussion over at #qdq on Quakenet. Here you'll always be kept up to date with the latest times on the new maps.
In other, better news, this 0:43 seconds nightmare run by David IS a record! Congratulations on your first SDA record in many, many months :)
Kay "I can't shoot" took an early weekend and made this 1:43 easy 100%,
which can only be topped by a Pif and Luc coop easy 100% in 1:12.

All that is left now is this 2:34 easy run through all of Terra by Kimmo. 34 seconds faster than Pif, and a hell of a run!

Alright. That's it for this time as far as quake demos goes. Catch you next time!

Monday, January 24th by Radix

The new home - 12:54 AM

Welcome to the new home of over 7000 Quake speed runs on hundreds of maps. I bought the domain back in September with the intent of moving off planetquake a lot sooner, but as with all big projects, it was delayed. I still don't have all the work done, but everything is moved, just a few of the more obscure pages need link and email changes done. Everyone please change your address books, don't mail demos to sda@pq any more, but instead to the new address. We won't be providing any mailto: links anymore to prevent spam harvesting of the new addresses, but I think you guys can figure it out:

our new e-mail address

The quake demos are now direct download links, no demo.pl for them anymore. You'll need to re-login to the forum because it changed domain. Instead of GameSpy's flash ads that sometimes cover the whole page, there will just be some simple ads from google at the top of the page. Instead of the pennies from these ads going to GameSpy, they go to Nate and me to help pay for stuff.

Although I haven't done any Quake demos myself in many months, I still watch all of the ones that get posted and keep an eye on the section, fixing mistakes in the updates that the others make... I hope no Quake players get offended that the Quake section is now the "minor" part of the site, but as the site started with Quake, it obviously wouldn't be here today without it. I hope you'll provide everyone with may more thousands of demos for our enjoyment.

Friday, January 21st by Mandel

The 7 million demos maps - 9:45 AM

I know, I know. We're had updates both Tuesday AND Thursday this week! But really, is it possible to have too many SDA updates? I'd have to say no, with the one exception being if Evan for some reason would decide to start posting rich full updates every 10 minutes... That'd be odd.

We added new maps on tuesday to the sweet archive that is SDA, and apparently they must be fun to run, because you have. And you have indeed. You chose a moment when you knew I wouldn't be fully online, and within two days you made no less than 31 demos on the new maps! Amazing! If we manage to keep up this tempo the rest of the year, 2005 will be very special :-P

Enough with the rambling already. The first demo of today is actually an id record! Who is it this time? Connor? Peter? Joe? Jürg? All good guesses, but all wrong. No way Thomas Stubgaard would accept just barely breaking the two minute mark on The Wind Tunnels nightmare 100%. So, yet again he equipped himself with the axe, a small shotty, a lighting gun and the tiniest of rocket launchers, and plowed through the tunnels just a little faster than last time getting 1:57. You gotta love it.

There is one more non-new-map-demo, and it's a coop by the brothers Pif, Luc and Andre de Mestre. This 0:12 second 3 player nightmare run through bbelief3 features a fun '2 players boost the third player with their small shotguns' trick as well as some genuine, French conversation! You gotta love it.

Now, on to the new episode we go. Terra. Terra is its name. Let's start from the top and work our way from terra1 to terra6:

terra1 - Schumann resonance

First one to try the runs was Kimmo Polvivaara. With some experienced bunnies he got 0:10 on both easy...
...and nightmare.
The next demo, a 17 seconds easy run was a fun surprise! Unfortunately this isn't a record, but the interesting thing about this demo is the runner. It was made by David 'Snoop' Hocking. Maybe a few of the newest newbies don't know who this is? Let me tell you, this guy singlehandedly made an easy run through quake in 2002 named Snoop Shafts Shub, beating the old rabbit run by almost a minute. Until recently this was the fastest non-qdq run through quake known to man.
But then along came Kay Berntsen. Kay can bunny a little faster than Archi, which he proved by doing both the easy...
and nightmare runs in the scary time 0:09. Looking good, very good. Optimal?

terra2 - Dead on arrival

The running started with Pif making this 0:42 easy run.
But then Kimmo stepped in and made first 0:41...
...and then 0:40 only 15 minutes later.
Kimmo continued and made this 0:42 nightmare run.
Pif and Luc also tried the 2 player easy 100% on this map, and first got 1:01...
...and a little later, by using the quad a little better, 0:56

terra3 - Shotgun Experiment

A short map as it turns out! A grenade boost over the raising spears which block the exit gave Kimmo a 0:14 easy run,
and a 0:14 nightmare run.
Carl Tholin improved the easy run by one second to 0:13, using the exact same route but the smooth Carl-bunnies we have learnt to love.
Martin Selinus is currently unemployed and therefore has lots of time for running! Using only one grenade and speed-preserving bunnies over the exit spears let him finish the map in 0:12!
Carl used another funny grenade jump and got 0:12 for the nightmare run.
But Kimmo, Carl and Martin all missed the opportunity to ride the death knight magic thingies, a trick that Kay used to do this 0:10 easy run. This demo is fast. Look at it.

Now we're half way through the maps! Hang in there, fans.

terra4 - Latent Quarter

Kay made the first demo, an easy run in 0:06. Yes, you read it right. 6 seconds. It's incredible how large parts of this map that can be skipped through use of a bunny. 5 might still be possible but is anyone going to try?
The nightmare run has to be a bit longer because there is more to kill before you can exit. Kimmo gave it a go and got 0:17 after a while. Looks good to me.

terra5 - Shotgun experiment 2

Kimmo did the easy run in 0:23,
and the nightmare run in 0:24. These good times are possible because the trigger that is used to exit the map is in place all the time even if the pathway you normally would use to walk to it isn't. Just falling down towards the lava in a *special* place will make you hit it.
Pif and Luc made a 2 player nightmare run in 0:23,
which they improved to 0:22 after a short while.
They also made the 2 player easy run in 0:21.
A guy named Tom Nguyen, perhaps better known to some as sshplur in the SDA forum, made his demo debut by sending in some easy runs on this map to us! Excellent running, but because of an unfortunate route choice these demos aren't records. Still, it's sweet to see a newbie runner making demos... Make more will ya!

terra6 - Torture department

Pif was first to try the easy run, and filled the table hole with this 0:54.
But Thomas Bergendorff picked up a secret quad and used a better route to get this 0:33, 21 seconds faster than Pif. When Thomas tries, Thomas succeeds.

The very last demo of today is this 3:08 easy run through all of Terra. Pif made it, and now you watch it. Pretty funny marathon actually!

You watched it, you can't un-watch it. Stay tuned for the next SDA update!

Thursday, January 20th by Morfans

Bergie And Connor Sitting In A Tree... - 9:07 AM

I bet you all came here today expecting to see a phat pile of new demos on CeeZy's new maps, and if you wait until the end of the update you might just get them. But first...

We're going to look at a medium sized pile of amazing new demos from Connor Fitzgerald...

...right after we take a look at what the mighty Carl Tholin has been doing on cappuccino_v2.

He took a damned big bite out of Luc's Easy 100% with a thirty second improvement to 2:27. Truly Carl is Mr Slick Love.
Since I still haven't sent in my Nightmare 100% it was left to Carl to fill the gap with this 5:18. Since it's faster AND better than my demo it's probably for the best...

Now here's Connor Fitzgerald taking one more second off his Easy 100% of dnspq1 to take... I mean, here's Arturo Garcia Lasca taking one more second off his Easy 100% of dnspq1 to take the time down to 0:32. Good to see the old grunt back in action.

Coop teams come and coop temas go, but the amazingly prolific French duo of Connor Fitzgerald just don't know when to stop! Consider these two 100%s on nesp10...

Bugger. I did of course mean Pif and Luc de Mestre, and they just managed to sneak under the Bergster's excellent single player Easy 100% time 1:19.
The much more monster-centric Nightmare 100% took a real pasting as they showed the effect teamwork can have on the bad guys with this 2:20.

Okay. Joke over. Connor for real this time. Connor and the DeathMatch Classics levels go together like Fred and Ginger, like cheese and pickle, like beer and more beer, like my cock and your face. In short, he owns. Not content with taking thirteen seconds off of Sidd's Easy Run (Aussie Sidd, not Finnish Sidd) to 1:16 he also did the following bits of Bergendorff bashing...

dmc1m1 Nightmare 100% in 0:24, two seconds faster than Thomas.
dmc1m2 Easy Run in 0:17, one second faster than Thomas.
dmc1m3 Nightmare Run in 0:10, one second faster than Thomas.
All three are probably optimum and are probably Must Download. Oh, so's the marathon.

Back to Pif and Luc as we sprint to the finish with a septet of tablefilling coops...

disgrace? No, they're actually quite good!
- The Easy Run fell to a 0:41 "filleur de tableau" as it undoubtably wouldn't be called in France.
- And the Nightmare Run collapsed under the onslaught of their wrath in just 0:45.
- 0:58
When I saw they'd made an Easy 100% called hous_115 I thought "Oh good, a demo on houstrps". But it's not. It's on "House Of Desolution" or deso as it's otherwise known. My mistake. I enjoyed the demo after I'd got over the confusion.
After seeing how Mandel and Midas owned the runs of theledge the other week they figured that they would do the same to the 100%s. Screaming around the level like a couple of banshee muthafukkahz meant that they could get the killing done in just 0:32 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE.
And finally the lovely pb1. Following on from their recent Easy 100% success on the level they made a very similar, and yet rather different 1:58 Nightmare 100%.

Now for the demos on the new maps...

Not really. :-P

Tuesday, January 18th by Lodis

I hate that Connor! - 3:34 PM

What the title says...you'll realise why as soon as you see the next demo update.[1]

Dunno when that'll be exactly, but expect this news post to light a fire under someone's ass. Figuratively meant, though it would be funny if someone actually did it. Imagine lighting a fire under Mandel? With his gastro-intestinal gases (i.e. farts) he'd explode in no time.

As usual when I get off my lazy ass to update SDA it's about maps. Some people have been nagging me to add maps...well I decided to ignore the maps we had planned to add and just add some other maps. I'm sure the other guys agree on these maps (in fact, I've asked, I just thought I'd sound cooler if it seemed I was all reckless and acting like a rebel).

So what maps am I on about? Well one of my all-time favourite mappers CZG has released a pack of no less than six maps! And they rock. You can download the pack here. The maps are called terra1.bsp - terra6.bsp. Name your demos tr1_xxx.dem - tr6_xxx.dem. You get the idea.

I'm sure Mandel will make watervis'd versions as soon as he appear from offlinity (i.e. porking pigs on the family farm).

On another note there will be a contest soon. I found an excellent map to have it on and then I pestered Morfans until he agreed to do a contest [2]. Look for that to start shortly (or what do you say Morfy?).

[1] I don't actually hate Connor. He's an excellent runner and a terribly nice guy. He's still a prick though :)

[2] Notice how I always manage to do very little work myself? It's a skill I've honed over the years. Highly recommended.

Monday, January 10th by Mandel

Beating the crap out of old stuff - 2:15 PM

Hello friends, followers, female adversaries, foes and scumbags.

Christmas is over and what did we get? One (1) christmas greeting mail. Only one... But alright, it's all good. We still know you luurve us just as much as we do you. Thanks anyway to the one decent speedrunner out there who DID send a christmas greeting to teamSDA, you know who you are! :)

2005 looks like it could be a splendid year for speedrunning! It's only the 10th of January, and there are already 7 new id demos for you all. Granted, most of them are coops, but still, they are id coops!

There is however 1 id demo which isn't a coop! Thomas Stubgaard got inspired last week when myself and Midas let him join in on the 3 player nightmare run on The Wind Tunnels. Being a Dane means not being easily disturbed by falling corpses. Equipped only with an axe, a small shotty, a lighting gun and the tiniest of rocket launchers he made all monsters kneel before him and all secrets reveal themselves on nightmare skill in just 1:59, 1 second faster than the old record.

Arturo García Lasca is the man behind the second and last demo of today which isn't a coop. Without any apparent problems he managed to take back his record on dnspq1! This 0:33 easy 100% is two seconds faster than the excellenterer demo Thomas Bergendorff did last week, and of course a lot more excellelenterer!

Now on to the coop demo section! Knowing how much you all long and yearn for some id coop action, Mandel (that's me) and Stubgaard teamed up, some times together with a third player, and made the following kickarse demos:

e1m4 2 player nightmare 100% in 1:47, 18 seconds faster than the old demo by Nolan and Stubgaard. The main trick here is a much better route. The idea to take the silver key in the very beginning was the trick that finally, after a few long months of trying, made this possible. Spot the newbie who couldn't collect his nails like he was supposed to :) But in the end, this is THE FIRST ID DEMO OF THE YEAR!
e3m5 2 player nightmare 100% in 1:36, 5 seconds faster than the old demo by Nolan and Justin. This turned out quite alright if I may say so!
e3m5 3 player nightmare 100% in 1:22 together with Thomas Bergendorff. Fortunately, Lodis has a stupidly fast Internet connection with means good pings for both myself and Stubgaard.
e4m5 3 player easy 100% in 0:56 together with Lodis. The good pings made us want to do another demo together, and this came to mind. Lodis really is the main man in this demo, just look at him! And spot the newbie :)
e4m7 3 player easy run in 0:40 together with Robert Maglic. Again, not a very fun run for the Dane but he didn't seem to mind! Midas was the initiator for this demo, and made up the routes. Nice.
e2m5 2 player nightmare 100% in 1:41, 20 seconds faster than the old demo by Nolan and Stubgaard. I don't really know where those 20 seconds are earned... Possibly by blocking the cage instead of riding it? This demo was rather annoying to do because the monsters are fierce and the quake guy is soft and tender.

Cooping is fun and Pif and Luc de Mestre know it. 12 demos made in 3 playing days spanning 9 calendar days is nothing unusual from the de Mestre stronghold. Enjoy the full list:

They managed to make the FIRST DEMO OF THE YEAR, namely this cappuccino_v2 2 player easy 100% in 1:57, 4 seconds faster than 2004!
They then went on to a map which I don't think I have ever seen before (and for a good reason), mbb7, and made the easy 100% in 0:49...
...and the nightmare 100% in 0:51.
Another map with many different looking areas that don't seem to cling together in any logical fashion is badland1. A boat, some houses, a church, an ocean of lava, 2 secrets and 38 monsters is what you have to overcome in order to make an easy 100% in 1:17...
...and a nightmare 100% in 1:30. Difference is that there are 20 more monsters on nightmare, and they are a lot angrier!
A map I like because of its demo name abbreviation (mrt or Mr. T as I like to read it) is, as a few of you already guessed, mortal. Pif and Luc began with a two player easy run in 0:23...
...and a two player nightmare run in 0:24.
Following the regular de Mestre routine we're all so used to by now, they quickly improved the runs to 0:22 on both easy and nightmare.
To avoid any holes in the 2 player tables for mrt they also made this 0:50 easy 100%...
...and this 0:58 nightmare 100%.
The last de Mestre demo is this 1:30 fast and slick easy 100% on pb1. A fine way to end a weekend of quake cooping!

That's it. 20 demos. Helluva good time. Gimmie more. See you later. teamSDA luurves you. A lot.

Thursday, January 6th by Morfans

Fuck Me! It's 2005! - 8:34 PM

Well happy new year! A bit late for such a statement you might think, and perhaps you'd be right. But please understand that this update was originally written on 1st January. So why wasn't it posted then? I'll tell you. I'll tell you not because I'm making excuses or want your sympathy but because I know you're all a bunch of evil bastards that like to laugh at other people's misfortune.

Basically, I wrote a big, long update with the usual new years thank-you list to every one that supported this site with their outstanding demos and encouragement. It contained the usual smut, inuendo and name calling and ended on a catchy tag line. Then we had a storm which knackered my modem (and at least two of my neighbours' modems as well). How could such a thing happen in this day and age? Well, to quote a local telecoms engineer "Surge protectors? No, no, no. We don't need them. Only puffs use surge protectors on their phone lines!".

Oh well. I thought. I'll be back down South in a couple of days (for those of you who don't know I work away from home) and I'll post it then. So I copied it to two different floppies, not wanting to waste a CD on such a tiny file, but guess what? Neither of them work. So now you'll have to put up with this short update and I'll salvage the rest when I get back.

Still plenty of action to be had on the caffeine fueled cappuccino_v2.

Kay Berntsen has entered the Easy Run fray with a pretty stunning 0:57. Not optimum yet but when a record gets Rrrrrripped it tends to stay ripped for a while.
Luc de Mestre continues to grow in skill and confidence. He has also picked up the habit of sending in every improvement he makes to a record which, although it can be nice to see how a run evolves over time, always makes Radix grind his teeth in despair. So here's the Easy 100% in 3:26, 3:12, 3:10, 3:03 and finally 2:57.
Having mastered the EH he thought it only fitting to drag Pif de Mestre onto the map for a bash at the EH2. It made a nice change to see Luc doing most of the work and Pif playing catch-up and led to a time of 2:09 which soon became 2:01 (which should have been 1:5x but they muffed up a telefrag). It also comes with an amusing egg demo that shows the perils of messing with a fiend and his jumppad... :-)
Still no Nightmare 100% since my table filler was also on the damaged floppies. Why the hell am I still using floppies in this day and age??!!???!!

The nearest thing SDA has to a gold plated, street fighting love machine is, of course Thomas Bergendorff. Due to his excessive lifesytle he found himself sick and bored over the holidays and so, once he'd had enough of "beating" himself, he decided to beat a couple of Ken's records on dnspq1.

He began with Ken's excellent Easy 100% and made it even excellenterer with a two second improvement to 0:35.
Then came a big seven second improvement to the Nightmare 100% to 0:55. This is still improvable in they way that any wildly difficult Lowdis demo with a couple of minor mistakes in it is improvable...

Now on to the coops, with a good mix of runs from three different coop pairings and a mad Dane jumping in at the end...

First, Robert and Rickard Axelsson have taken the time to recapture a few of their old records from the French duo.

Both of the ballshft runs were Axelfied by one second to 0:12 on both EASY and NIGHTMARE. Still no 100% coops on this map I notice...
They also recaptured their 2 player Nightmare 100% of jzblue_1 from Pif and Luc by two seconds to 0:24. Don't worry if you can't find Rickard's demo in the .dz, Rickard can't find it either. :-/

Next up we return to the crazy world of Pif and Luc for a load of demos which if stacked one on top of the other would be taller than that big metal tower thing in Paris whose's name escapes me at the moment. Maybe I should have said the Arc de Triomphe instead...

A very long map with no shortcuts? Could it be a return to avatar? Indeed it could and in what is probably the longest single level coop Easy Run they final reached the exit in 4:14. Then in 3:58, but it would have been quicker if they hadn't forgotten who was suppossed to be getting one of the runes. :-)
Since they have to visit everywhere several times anyway there wasn't much route changing needed to do the Easy 100% in 4:35.
Next they did the Nightmare 100% of 2run5 in 1:08, just 4 seconds faster than Basil's SP time.
Which put them in the mood for another old contest map, forrit
- They filled the empty Easy 100% slot in 0:27.
- And the Nightmare 100% first in 0:35 and then in 0:33.
czg_moon is a good Easy 100% "split up and kill" map, so I'm sure you can guess what the guys did... Naturally they did it twice, first in 1:46 then in 1:45.
evilwrld blah blah blah don't like the map blah blah Nightmare 100% blah blah (pretty good demo actually) blah blah 1:12 blah blah. [1]
And finally an Easy 100% on a map I really do like, ebony1. Plenty of acrobatics far too close to lava but lots of lovely killing too and all in the princely time of 0:53.

Our final coop duo are the frighteningly fast duo of Mathias Thore and Robert Maglic.

They crucifuct both of R&R's theledge runs by three seconds getting an amazing 0:10 on EASY and NIGHTMARE. This is even one second faster than R&R&P&E's 4P ER!
They then did something quite frightening in the Wind Tunnels. A four second improvement to R&R's Nightmare Run to 0:35. Very, very fast indeed. In fact, I'm going to give it a Must Download.
Then just to show that not only are they great runners but they are also kind to dumb animals they let Thomas Stubgaard join in and do the simple bit in the 3P version of the above run and the Danish Destroyer exited in 0:27, equalling the Easy Run. Suggested "easy listening" to accompany this demo can be found here.

That's every demo from 2004 posted. Now all we need to do is Keep It Alive In 2K5.

[1] Blah blah blah :-P