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| 23 May 2009: "Can Staff Roll WR be beaten with TAS?" |
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| Movement At the top, #1 Thomas Bolton struck with a PR on DH 3lap, taking the WR with a 1'10"657, Myth C on the PRB rankings. This cut his PRB AF just slightly, as his lead over Ben continues to grow. #2 Ben Stoneman was also active though, moving his AF down closer to sub 3. Ben hit three PRs, F8C 1'14"377 +24"512, and CCB flap 27"355. With some pending PRs, Ben should have that sub 3 AF lined up for him for next week. If Ben wants to start closing the gap on Thomas, he is going to have to start hitting WRs again. Also inside the top 10, #9 Abel Marques cut a small portion of his AF, just 0.0782, and is moving dangerously close to his next target, #8 Michele Magnaterra. Abel tried to take back the UK record on WP 3lap, but fell short with a still nice time of 1'59"642. He also played a lot of CCB this week, producing times off 1'24"949 and 27"351. However, Abel's most important time this week was on YF 3lap, where he improved his own WR with a great 46"344. Another active UKer was #12 Matthew Ord, who cut 0.3594 AF and narrowly jumped one spot up over Marshall. Matthew hit some nice FS times, where he acheived dual Gods with 1'39"926 and 32"638. Matthew's next targets will be now to pass #11 Milan Pacino for #2 UK, as well as reach Myth B overall, currently sitting on 2.6719 ARR. Back at it again, we have #40 Robert Lee making a 1.0781 AF cut to move up one spot into the top 40. Robert busted out a bunch of new myth times, which included his first top 10 time with a 20"878 Myth C MMF flap! Hopefully there are many more PRs where that came from. As Robert continues to hit more myths, his ARR is quickly approaching Titan B overall. Maybe he can pull it off to end the month? It would be nice to see him do so, as well as pulling out a crazy enough week to clinch a fourth straight POM as well?! Having himself a nice outing was #62 Armando Cobian, coming up with a 2.8594 AF cut, but unfortunately passing nobody due to being stuck in an AF graveyard. Armando did at least close the gap to less than one point to the next player, which happens to be former champion Miguel Rodriguez. For the rest of the top 100, #70 Marcus Whitley cut 1.6093 AF, which was just enough to keep away #71 Timothee Le Borgne, who had a 6.3750 AF cut. Timothee was able to become Hero A overall with his massive 27 PRs this week, while Marcus had already reached that mark earlier. Movement outside the top 100 included #104 Mickael Smolen -7.6720, #111 Florian Valandina -6.3590, #118 Thomasson Bastien Koopafou -1.7660, #232 Daniel Pabst -4.0620, #291 Jose Karica -17.7660 (Advanced D to Advanced C), #318 Alexis Le Borgne -36.1570 (Advanced E to Advanced D), #335 Jean-Francois Schepers -9.1400, #351 Tom Mannings -4.9060, #415 Hong-Xian Yeh -1.4840, #506 Zack Weber -2.5940, #592 Andy Carter -12.3570 (Newbie to Beginner E) and #605 April Thompson -2.1400. New Records - by Etch There were 2 WR's improved (blue) and one non-prb time (pink). Starting in the middle of the week, Thomas took BDash's second to last WR, knocking the DH 3lap WR down a little bit to a 1'10"657. We are still using Standard YS here so there is a good chance the WR could drop more in the future. More recently, Abel decided to improve on his own YF 3lap WR, taking it down "024 to a 46"344. There was some exciting pixel grinding done in his run which really shows the kind of talent and luck you need to finish a nice time there. Earlier in the week, a mysterious video appeared on the internets featuring a Japanese player by the name of Bjork. Throughout kart history, we have seen our share of track specialists and one trick wonders. At this stage in the game, no one really expected random people to show up and destroy a WR. It wasn't so much getting it that was surprising but which one it was. Probably the hardest feat in this game is nailing the rail sc on RR. Only a handful of people have successfully hit it with the pipe sc. Names like Josh Habben, Giulio Centrone, センジュ, and Marshall LeVett usually come to mind since they have held the WR there before. We knew it was possible to land the rail sc without a shroom which technically made it possible to complete both sc's each lap. Only センジュ and Marshall have done it this way which allowed them to sub 35 on the flap. The question to whether we would see anyone get the rail and pipe sc each lap on RR in the future seemed an impossibility. To this day, Giulio and Marshall were the only ones known to finish a 4/6 run. The sheer difficulty and lack of decent players on RR made it look like it would never happen. That all changed though when Bjork revealed a replay of his ghost going 6/6 on RR! Could this be the guy センジュ predicted? He said last year, "I believe someone (except me) must be able to pull off rail SC all 3 laps." One must think, with so little serious competition there it can't be that impossible for someone to pull it off, right? Given the random appearance of Bjork and his video, it made a lot of people doubt the credibility of such a claim especially on the advent of TAS capabilities for the DS. There is no good way to prove or disprove such a time so we are left wondering to believe it or not. At any rate, it looks no different from any other mkds video out there making the verification of WR times quite difficult now. To our surprise, he mentioned he went sub 1'50 first just a couple months after Marshall's current WR there. This would make him the first to complete 5/6 sc's with 1'49"744 last September and first to complete 6/6 sc's with 1'46"524 this May! WR destruction of this magnitude so late in the game seems unlikely but we have seen lots of weird stuff before. Has the true pinnacle of RR finally been reached? This will definitely go down in mkds folklore for legendary times. For Non-PRB, Abel took his own YF 3lap WR down to 46"344. Awards Continuing last week's success, he moved further up the chart while improving nearly half his timesheet, as well as becoming Hero A overall. For more of the same, Timothee Le Borgne wins the POW for the third week of May! ~Kmacc |
