Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Players' Page

Survivor starts today ^_^

Alex @ Tuesday, February 22nd [link]

Movement

There were a couple of PRs from both our top two players this week, so they're still in the action. Jonathan Steel both lost and gained a WR or two. No change to his ARR, unfortunately, where DKM is probably haunting him in his nightmares. Marius Mollenhauer made a lot of top-5 times with his 11 PRs, many of them in the same courses that Plebani and Segas were PRing in, so he didn't quite get any WRs. But his ARR fell another 0.09 points to a low 0.21 crazy

#3 Yannick Plebani had around 10 PRs of his own, pulling yet further away from #4 Vincent van der Fluit. His AF is under 5.0 now, but still trailing Marius by a long way.

#5 Raphael Segas surged past Stefan van Dijke with 12 PRs. He is now tied in ARR with Vincent, but a little bit behind him in AF. He also made Titan A with his new PRs!

Another swapping of positions was between #7 Paul Maes and #8 Paul Tanney, and they ALSO have equal ARRs. Tanney says that would like to compete in a few other kart games for a little while. Fortunately for him, he will probably stay inside the top 10 for some time to come, since the three players immediately after him are inactive.

#18 Julien Boisiaud hade four times as many PRs this week as last week, and skipped ahead of #19 Paul Regeffe. Julien is about to pass Alex Penev too razz

A bit lower down, #33 Trystan Pugh passed five people with his nice AF cut of 4.5 pts. This is the third week that he's doing crazy PRing, and he's got a great shot for POM. His pace has slowed down a lot though, with ONLY 12 PRs for the week (tsk tsk, get to work Trystan!). I've removed the link to Trystan's rivalry against Jeff and Ian, since he's completely dominated it (something like 31/32 wins).

Not far behind Trystan is #43 Koen Mensisk, who had an equally productive week. Unfortunately, the players in Koen's vicinity are not very active, and he'll have to climb even further up before he can get into some interesting battles.

A potentially interesting battle could be between #61 Jonas Pettersson, #64 Matt Hofstad, #68 Rickard Lindell and #69 Kieran Jessell. These guys were all active this week and improved almost the same amount (around -3pts) except Kieran who dropped a chunky 8.3 points. If they remain active and don't run off like a certain Pobre ( plain

), they would make a nice rivalry.. Rickard and Kieran are already a rivalry, though.

Let's not forget #73 Mike Hartjens, who is only a couple of positions behind this group of 4. He's one of our newest members, and so we expect him to do big improvements at first, but Mike's still going really strong and he's already in the top 75. This week Mike made 27 PRs, which resulted in -17 points from his AF, and by next week he could join the group above. Mike is just one place behind celebrity Michael Jongerius.

Speaking of Dutch celebrities, #88 Steven Zwartjes ... well, we know he's capable of big things. He joined quite recently and is still sort of starting off. This week's 11 PRs lowered his AF by 11 points, and he passed ex-champ Bart Savelkouls in the process. One down, eleven to go.

#98 Jeffrey Henraat made it into the top 100. He did enough to pass #102 Arnaud Palierne to get there. His 10 PRs this week have given him the lead in his rivalry against Arnaud (and Nathan and Arno)!

#109 Dave Phaneuf made a return to MKDD, after 5 months absence! He improved his AF by -7 pts, and made up 11 places. He's pretty close to the top 100, so hopefully he'll keep playing.

Big numbers for Frenchman #135 Florient Marechal. He joined last week, and has probably found out about some of the videos and strategies. Looks like he's made great use of them, too, because he improved his AF from 217 to 142 (75 points, or around 71 positions)! This places him above some familiar names such as Charles Tasserit and Cooper Lovera.

Records

Oh, oh, wow, a lot of records this week. Most of them from a few Frenchman who are starting to get active again.

First was Yannick Plebani. He beat Yohan Foog's Sherbet records... both of them shocked

Yannick improved the 3lap by 0.2 to 1'15"043 and lap by just 0.03 to 24"152. Raphael Segas missed out on the course record by 0.1 the next day, but snuck ahead of Yohan into second place there.

Raphael improved another four records. Perhaps his best course, Wario Colosseum, went down to 1'59"102 and 58"927 crying

He has a 0.9 lead over Stefan van Dijke in the course time, and 0.45 over Jonathan Steel in the lap! He also improved Mushroom Bridge lap to 26"104! Yannick and Marius Mollenhauer both improved their scores here a few days later, and got within 0.05 of Raphael's time.

The last new record from Raphael was Mushroom City's 1'36"349. This beats Vincent van der Fluit by less than 0.01 rolls eyes

A couple of days ago, Yannick took another record. It was first Marius who tried to pass Jonathan in DDD 3lap, and got 1'31"97, just missing out. Two days later, Raphael got 1'31"65, but Yannick had the final say with 1'31"523.

Jonathan Steel has been losing a few records lately, but he reclaimed one on Baby Park. Both Jonathan and Vincent had recent battles here with thier 4-MT strategy, and Vincent had taken the record for a while. Steel bounced back with 1'05"012... so close to an insane new barrier! He also beat his own lap record - 8"622.

Last but not least, Paul Regeffe once again beat Marius Mollenhauer on Bowser's Castle. Marius memorably broke 2'19 last week with 2'18"994, and this week Paul reclaimed his old first place with 2'18"919.

Players

One new player this week:

Jean-Christophe Lacastaignerate from France (Expert D, ~126)

Movies

This section always takes too long to do, and I have an essay I should be writing rolls eyes

Make sure you check the New Videos topic in the message board (and Paco's site, as usual)!

Yawn

Alex @ Tuesday, February 15th [link]

Hi everyone,

We've had some downtime this week, but hopefully things are resolved for now. There was also a problem with the news updating that I didn't have a clue about, but Mark "CEO" Jones graced us all with his presence and fixed it.

If you had read the message board last week, I've managed to make some skeleton rivalry pages here. There's three current rivalries linked off that page, so you can see what it's like. The idea is that you can build your own by fiddling with the numbers (three to five players accepted). I can link new ones on the page, if someone comes up with an interesting one. The only major downfall at the moment is that it's a bit tricky to personalise the pages with pertinent commentary, but hopefully we'll get around this in the near future.

For the rivalries themselves, Nathan Cromwell and Trystan Pugh are leading in their respective fixes for now, but the middle one is very close and exciting.

I have a whole bunch of assignments going on this week so I'll keep this update short.

Movement

#9 Paul Maes moves into the top 10 with 13 PRs this week, and made Titan B. He took off a big 2.96 points off his AF to pass David Schiering, Olivier Lavenant and Stefan Baczynsky. Paul is now 0.4 AF points away from #8 David Grard, who has recently slipped behind Paul Tanney.

#12 Jean Lecureux also passed Stefan Baczynsky this week, and is at present the highest rated karter without a green tick.

#38 Trystan Pugh continues his 39-hour days of non-stop karting. He improved around half of his PRs, for a -9 point drop (4 positions). This makes him Hero B, but he'll need an equally strong performance this week to reach Hero A.

#47 Koen Mensink sent in a crazy submission of 24 PRs for the week. He says that he got them all in 2 days, which would make him a candidate for the "craziest guy of the month" title, which Trystan Pugh is leading at the moment. Koen's new times helped him improve 13.6 points (14 places). His ARR is right on the border of Hero C and D, so he needs one more PR to push him over.

#95 Steven Zwartjes finally made an official submission, even though he had told us some weeks ago that he planned to join. "Mr Holland" debuted in around 106th place, but made a couple of PRs resulting in a -17.9 AF difference for the week, to nudge him into the top 100. If he's planning to become the top Dutch player, he's has his work cut out for him, because there's another thirteen ahead of him!

#103 Nathan Cromwell is quite close to getting into the double-digit ranks himself. He needs to pass Liam Benson, Lane Slabaugh, Arnaud Palierne and Jeffrey Henraat to get there, and judging by this week's performance (-16.9 in AF), it's in the bag.

#133 Ivo van der Stap is fighting strong, improving more than 20 PRs. Unfortunately, there isn't very much activity in the ranks immediately above or below him, so we'll need to wait until next week perhaps, before we can see an interesting battle.

On the other hand, half a screen lower down we have #159 Sam Hoar and #161 Charlemagne Colok. They both had big cuts, of -22 and -34 respectively. They both passed a whole ton of players (each AF point is around one position) to get here. Sam leads 19-13 in head-to-head battles and by a couple of seconds in total times, but Charlemagne had the larger improvement for the week. They're both quite active, with Sam PRing consistently each week, and Charlemagne has made several submissions with around 20 new PRs each this week. Will Sam stay on top?

#182 Ian Parkhouse is well into the top 200 now, improving another 13 positions. Last week he was a bit on the edge, because new players could have joined and pushed him down one place. It just so happens that Vincent Bal is one of these new players. He's at #194 for now, but much like Steven Zwartjes, debuted another fifteen odd places lower down. We always can expect the newest players to make big improvements, so let's see how Vincent does...

Some other players who have caught my eye: Gregor Fran, Mike Hartjens, Marcus Mathews, Ivo van der Stap and Scott Fowler. Keep it up.

New Records

Quite a lot of records were made this week, and not necessarily from the names you'd expect.

Marius Moritz Mollenhauer found some time to play from his busy SM64 schedule. Both he and Paul Regeffe had some heated battles in Bowser's Castle, with the WR swapping hands on several occasions. Marius is the victor for now, and he also broke a new barrier with 2'18"994! Paul managed 2'19"020, but not enough for to keep the record in his name.

Vincent van der Fluit showed great potential with his Mushroom City score last week. This week he improved it yet again, and landed a new record with 1'36"358.

The rest of the new records belong to France (and also the tiny Tennessee town of Knoxseillaise). Paul Regeffe may have lost the bigger one by a whisker, but there's still some consolation in the smaller one. His Bowser's Castle lap of 45"443 leads Raphael Segas by almost 0.1 seconds.

Recently re-enlisted Emmanuel Debenest seems to have mastered the Dino Dino Jungle shortcut without the boost, and has laid claim to another of Jonathan Steel's records. This time a 1'43"376, which is a chunky 0.4 faster.

Things started off with Rodolphe Gouet taking the Daisy Cruiser standard a tiny bit lower. His 1'38"368 beat Jonathan Steel by just four hundredths of a second.

Yannick Plebani ran 0.12 faster than Jonathan in Mario Circuit, with 1'28"599. Jonathan has dominated this chart for the past four months. And last but not least, Yohan Foog stole one from Yannick in - you guessed it - Sherbet Land. Since he already holds the lap, his new course time of 1'15"246 means that he now holds both SL records.

New Players

Welcome to...

Steven Zwartjes from the Netherlands (Expert B, 95th)
Vincent Bal from the Netherlands (Advanced C, ~199)
Niels Boerstam from the Netherlands (Beginner A, ~339)
Phil Standen from the UK (Intermediate D, 291st)
Florient Marechal from France (Advanced C, 206th)

New Movies

Coming soon..

Hmm, actually that was not all that short at all confused

Comments

Mark @ Tuesday, February 15th [link]

Due to a current unpatched security vulnerability in greymatter I have disabled comments on the main page. Any comments you have can be directed at the messageboard. If this issue is fixed then I will turn the comment feature back on.

Back up

Alex @ Saturday, February 12th [link]

The database is back up for now. Let's see how things work...

Lost + Desperate Housewives + OC = fun season of TV

Alex @ Tuesday, February 8th [link]

Movement

There was some activity from our top two players this week, but unfortunately both Jonathan Steel and Marius Mollenhauer lost more ground in AF than they managed to make up. On the other hand, #3 Yannick Plebani and #4 Vincent van der Fluit ended the week on a positive note. Vincent is no doubt playing catch-up to Plebani, who passed Stefan van Dijke for the bronze position last month. Yannick had an awesome week, with 7 PRs that resulted in a 0.8 cut from his AF, and his ARR went to 0.96! Vince managed a 0.15 cut, so the gap between him and Yannick has widened a little. Yannick is as far behind Marius as he is ahead of Vince (about 1.5 AF points), so both Yannick and Vince have a difficult task ahead of them if they want to catch up to their next rival up the ladder.

#29 Leo Gourmelen had two weeks worth of some strong performances (-4.6 AF) that pushed him passed fellow Frenchman Xavier Valentin and USA-based Yohan Foog. Xavier was quite active in January, and we might hear again from him sometime soon? Yohan has been PRing almost daily the past week, but being a net courier, he also travels a lot (I didn't know Tennesse had so many Knoxes) and we haven't heard from him a few days. But these three guys could make an interesting rivalry, if Leo posted PRs less chunkily to make it more interesting and less frustrating for the other two :)

Actually, #35 Cedric Willo is right up with these guys. He's only three places behind Yohan (and six behind Leo), but he's also been PRing on a daily basis. His AF dropped 4.4 points, which means he passed Tristan Eyma.

The story of the week is #42 Trystan Pugh. He's been inactive from time trials for quite some time now, and while he does post to Yahoogroups, it's usually PRs on behalf of his friends. That changed when he posted a new set of 32 times, that he got in one day. If you've looked at the charts this week, you'll know why Trystan is raising a few eyebrows - a 53.4 drop in AF, and 3.2 drop in ARR. His new ARR score of 7.12 makes him Hero C (well, hey, he just jumped three ranks). As for the AF, he cut it by more than half, which turns out to be around 53 positions if you do the math. Rumour has it that he's been playing multiplayer for 39 hours a day lately, so when he finally got the obviously-very-clever idea of returning to time trials, he beat all his PRs in the blink of an eye. He managed to pass his friend and Welsh-rival Ian Smyth by a good margin with these, but his other friend, Kyle Clayton, is #25 and Titan D, and quite a ways harder to reach.

Not far behind where Trystan stands, is #46 Alejandro Hernandez. He achieved two commendable goals this week. He made up ten places with his -6.4 AF cut to break into the top 50, and also got his first Titan time (a 1'20"9 in MB) :) Alejandro passed a whole bunch of famous gamers with his improvements - Simon Laflamme, Lars Nouwen and Matt Flees.

Continuing on from last week, both #85 Piet den Dulk and #86 Gregor Fran passed Bart Savelkouls this week. Piet is still keeping his lead over Gregor, but by only 0.6 points. And last week's newcomer Mike Hartjens had another terrific week catching, moving thirteen places up to #92 with a -15.6 AF cut. By next week, he might reach them...

#116 Nathan Cromwell improved half of his records this week, to catch up to #115 Misja Fockens again. Misja joined last week at 121 and knocked Nathan (and even else below) down one place. Nathan made up almost ten places this week to be only one point less than Misja in AF, but they both have identical ARRs.

#155 Ivo van der Stap chopped off a third of his AF in his first week on the site, improving 53 positions and 57 AF points. Some of the other more recent players, such as #189 Sam Hoar, #199 Ian Parkhouse, #228 Niels Duijvesteijn are also moving along just fine (-16, -30 and -20 in AF, respectively).

New Records

A small handful of WRs this week..

The first was from Vincent van der Fluit. He's one of those few crazy people who can stand playing Baby Park. With his advanced 4-MTs-per-straight strategy he lowered the WR to 1'05"088! Two days later, Jonathan Steel tries his luck at regaining this record, but missed out by 0.01. Getting awfully close to the 1'05 barrier now :O

Vince made a second, with a Mushroom City lap of 31"499. This beats Jonathan's 31"556, set almost two months ago. A very nice (and fortunate) barrier for Vince.

Looks like Marius Mollenhauer just hit the BC course WR, with 2'19"300. Only moments ago, Paul Regeffe was the holder with "307, which he raced about 6 days ago. The top 3 times in BC are just 0.02 apart, but Marius says he missed an MT in his run :crazy:

New Players

Less new players than last week, but from some more exotic locations this time (mmm, Brazil ;))...

Enzio Fruijtier from Netherlands (Beginner A, 308th)
Martin Wenzel from Germany (Advanced A, ~149)
Raphael Prata from Brazil (Intermediate C, 284th)

Martin is missing times for three tracks, which are holding him back on the very edge of Advanced and Expert. He'll be around Expert A or Expert B if he gets some times for those. Martin is Stefan Wenzel's (#57) brother, too! Enzio and Raphael have a full set of times, and will probably improve a lot if they get stuck into watching a few videos.

New Movies

Paco's site has a few updates this week - Vincent van der Fluit 1'05'15 BP, and also 1'36'4 31'59 MCT.
A happy and sad Matthew Hofstad, wearing phallic costumes and just generally breaking things (because we all know that BC can drive you batty).
Proof vids from Paul Maes (direct links, .mov format) 1'32'2 DDD, 28'6 DDD, 22'27 PB.
Rodolphe Gouet 1'16'1 LC here.
David Schiering RR 2'58'2, MB 26'16, WC 2'00'9 here.

Cutest skit = Poke Poke

Alex @ Tuesday, February 1st [link]

Movement

After a brief sting of inactivity, #2 Marius Mollenhauer made a return to karting. He dropped back a nice 0.4 points in AF, and an even nicer 0.15 in ARR (he's now on 0.3125).

The two people around him - Jonathan Steel and Yannick Plebani - made a few improvements (and WRs) but did not end up improving their AF.

Not so for #4 and #5, where Vincent van der Fluit passed Stefan van Dijke to become the top Dutch player. Stefan has held that title for so long, that maybe he feels it's ok to let Vince have some glory for a while :) Vincent's ARR improvement of 0.31 points bumped him to Titan A!

Paul Tanney continues to make PRs, as he's done regularly since the birth of this site. This week, his improvements pushed him back ahead of David Grard for #7. Payback for David passing him many months ago!

#13 Paul Maes and #14 Jean Lecureux made some good improvements too. Paul is a whole point ahead of Jean in AF, but their ARRs are almost identical. Jean should play some DKM to get a bit closer to Paul. Jean also passed Alex Penev this week.

#17 Emmanuel Debenest is improving quickly. Almost too quickly. With 16 PRs, he made a -4.7 drop in AF this week, which represents 10 places. This puts him in the top 20, and also Titan D (from Hero B, skipping Hero A!). DDJ is his best track, and he's promising a movie soon.

#29 Xavier Valentin has started to post his PRs more regularly, and he's flying. For this week, he made it into the top 30, by passing John Anderson. Not far behind Xavier are #31 Yohan Foog and #32 Leo Gourmelen. Both improved by 3.5 points this week. Xavier and Yohan made Hero A, but Leo is still Hero B. But he's close.

#55 Alejandro Hernandez had a good week, with 10 PRs. He's very close to the 9 minute barrier in total times, and can make it into the top 50 with another few PRs. But a bigger challenge for Alejando will be Jeffrey Gutierrez, who is right behind him at 56th place. Jeffrey is continuing his awesome PRing pace for yet another week in a row. This week the Pobre smashed 17 points from his AF. For the past four weeks he's improved between 12 and 20 points in AF each week. He will be in the top 50 in no time!

There is a small rivalry going on a little bit lower in the chart, between Kristopher Will, Kieran Jessell and Rickard Lindell. These three had virtually identically AFs last week. Kieran and Rickard made about 10 PRs each, and both improved 2 points in AF. Kristopher did a bit better, with 19 PRs and 5 points off his AF. So for now, Kristopher is ahead on #73, with Kieran and Rickard on #74 and #75. All three of these guys passed former greats Geoff Patterson and Scott Rogoff with their playing.

We've got a lot of Dutch talent, and some of the larger improvements this week were from them. #86 Piet den Dulk is about to pass ex-champ Bart Savelkouls for 85th place (although a fresh Gregor Fran is cruising right now, just one position behind Piet, and might give him some trouble). #104 Arno Bats and #107 Jeffrey Henraat were also active. Especially Jeffrey, who improved two-thirds of his records to move up almost 20 positions. Unfortunately, both players were overshadowed by newcomer Mark Hartjens (also Dutch), who squeezed into #103 (one place ahead of Arno!) with his new set of PRs. All three of these players should be able to make it into the top 100 with just a little bit extra effort ;)

#121 Misja Fockens is also a newcomer, and also Dutch. Misja is one position behind Andrew Vallely (who was a candidate for POY), so there's some potential here for another top 100 Dutch player.

#174 Thomas Thunnissen and #208 Ivo van der Stap are the last of the Dutch wave of newcomers. They both had great weeks (-16 and -45 in AF, though Ivo's huge improvement is still not quite at Thomas's level). I think we might be seeing a lot more of these guys in the next few weeks.

#203 Sam Hoar did indeed finish the month strongly. Last week he moved up 27 places with -32 AF, but this week it was 43 places and -46 AF. He's hardly slowing down, is he? I don't know if he can keep up such pace for very long, but more power to him :cool:

Sam isn't the only UK player to have a ridiculously high improvement. #220 Ian Parkhouse was up there with him. Ian's dropped 37 points and 45 places, and went from Intermediate B straight to Advance D. In the AF ladder, Ian is one place ahead of Karel van Duijvenboden, who was the record holder in RR lap when I started getting interested in this game (14 months ago).

This was a really busy week, and many other players did very well. I don't have something to say about everyone, but the following players also caught my attention: David Lalo, Yoann Seznec, Kyle Clayton, Ian Smyth, Gregor Fran, Nathan Cromwell, Alex Gibbons, Daniel Whittingham, Scott Fowler. So, um.. keep it up! :P

New Records

Jonathan Steel continued his Peach Beach defense this week. He lowered his course time by 0.2, to 1'08"614. This is more than half a second faster than his closest rival, David Grard, but we know that Jon Prentice has potential for even lower.

Prentice will surely be a little bit annoyed to be beaten in a record he set only last week, but Jonathan also improved his lap by 0.02, to a low low 22"059. This beats Prentice's lap by two thousandths of a second (at 50 frames a second, that's about one tenth of a frame!).

Jonathan also took some fresh air up in the mountains. He beat Yannick Plebani's mark on DKM, set two weeks ago, by 0.1 with a 1'45"470.

Not so bad for Yannick, though, who instead got himself a record in Sherbet Land with 1'15"275, which is 0.13 ahead of Yohan Foog.

As for Yohan, he landed himself the lap record - 24"185. It's not very surprising, as SL is his best course. He edged Jonathan Steel's lap by just 0.004. Two days later, Marius Mollenhauer missed out on this record by 0.001!

New Players

Gee, there's a lot of new players?! Welcome to...

Misja Fockens from the Netherlands (Expert D, 121st)
Jascha Keller from Germany (Expert B, 83rd) ... hmm, same town as Marius Mollenhauer?
Mike Hartjens from the Netherlands (Expert C, 103rd)
Ivo van der Stap from the Netherlands (Advanced D, 208th)
Niels Duijvesteijn from the Netherlands (Intermediate A, 243rd)
Luke Thorpe from the UK (Newbie, ~456)
Momo Goedertz from Luxembourg (Beginner B, ~354)
Stefan Gustafsson from Sweden (Advanced C, 200th)
Curtis E Bear from Australia (Intermediate C, 268th)

Almost all are from Europe... :)

New Movies

Jonathan Steel made six new videos, most of them are 1st places. Get them here (the ones dated Jan 29th).
Stefan van Dijke MCR 1'29'0 28'3, DC 1'39'0 32'1 here.
Paul Tanney, PB 22'18, MCT 31'67, BP 1'05'45, MCR 28'33 here
Rene Bauer BP 1'05'9, DDJ 1'45'2, MB 1'20'8, MCT 1'37'9, PB 1'09'954, DKM 1'47'3 here.
Some new David Schiering videos here.
Yohan Foog's SL 1'15'4 here. You can find his SL 24'18 at Paco's (read ,lower down).
Gragor Fran has his own new site with vids. They are very pretty, too.
Julien Boisiaud DDJ 1'46'9, BP 1'05'7 here, and a 9'285 lap on Baby Park direct link (60Hz).

Once more, there's some new really fast movies on Paco's site. Hey Francois, you should add a "date added" column to your vids so that we can see which are the newest ones :)