12/03/2009: "Advent"

Another x days, another update! Due to our updater(s) being overworked and under-appreciated, this update is just til sometime midday on Nov 29th. Gv2 is practically untouched.
New Players
Welcome to:
Dexter "Morgan" Howe, Jordan "Heaven's above" Gottlieb, Lorenzo "Names reversed" Robb, David "Do no" Harmes, JC "Initials work better" Salamida, Fatih "Have faith in anagrams" Kor, Lorenzo "Not Robb" McFarlane
It's good to know that people are still steadily finding this site via the power of the intertubes.

New Records (Like old records but totally faster)
Nick Meade beat the old Maple Treeway crs time of 2'18"713 with a time of: 2'18"541
Alex Shoal beat the old Bowser's Castle crs time of 2'12"743 with a time of: 2'12"517
Jamie Disley beat the old Bowser's Castle lap time of 0'43"190 with a time of: 0'43"095
David McPartland beat the old GBA Bowser's Castle 3 crs time of 1'59"783 with a time of: 1'59"742
Jamie Disley beat the old SNES Mario Circuit 3 crs time of 1'18"543 with a time of: 1'18"498
Jaws Jawesome beat the old DS Peach Gardens crs time of 2'00"525 with a time of: 2'00"421
James Richards beat the old N64 Bowser's Castle lap time of 0'49"323 with a time of: 0'49"060

Movement
A lot of players moved this week. Practically all of them. Some even played some Mariokart Wii, although they were mostly stationary doing that. Some of those PR'd and some of those PR'd impressively enough to leapfrog people on the site.
The top 20 PR'd 106 times between them. 14 of those belonged to #2 Nick Meade, who bested David's 7 to close the gap in AF slightly. It also put a small amount of daylight between himself and Shaun who slips to 3rd. #5 James Richards maintained the same AF he had in the previous update, and whilst doing that managed to pass both Alvin and Alex who succombed to natural AF-drift.
#11 Cole Gilbert is now so close to #10 that he could theoretically break the top 10 without doing anything, but that eventually leads to dropping out of the top 100 after a long enough time period and isn't to be advised. #14 Mark Schmidt had a good week with a two place hop, whilst #16 Jamie Disley does a great job leaping from #20 this week. #19 Joe Sebeny rounds out the top 20 in non-literal fashion, by moving up two spots from #21

Outside the top 20, where the bad players lie, we have some nice movement too. They're not really bad, they're just misunderstood. #23 Mike Zarro for instance, whose surname would be so much cooler if it was Zorro, cut 8 AF points with 22 PRs, and passed 2 people, and left a "Z" in his wake. Someone actually in his wake is #24 James Farlour. James was #24 before this update, and still #24 after it. Given the Zorro effect, you'd expect him to be lower, but he also made 22 PRs and passed LC expert Pierrepont. 2 players who aren't LC experts, #26 Andy Lundeen and #27 Markus Hobelsberger shuffled quietly past Fabien Jacques when he wasn't looking.
#30 Stacy Needham who is one of the few people we can be sure didn't lie about his name, jumped 5 spots this week. That's more than anyone above him, and less than a few below, but we don't speak about them.

Speaking of players below Stacy, #37 Dustin Enders made a nice 21 PR move to put him into striking distance of quite a number of players. #40 Joshua Leutz and #41 Eric Hacksell get an honourable mention for having nice scrabble last names, and rising up slightly on the AF list. #44 Pierre Dofine is our highest addition to the AF list this update, appearing in a very respectable spot. Rounding out the top 50 Sebeny-style is #49 David Long. He breaks the top 50 with a 4 place move, and will spend the next update trying to fix it before anyone notices.

In the dreaded wastelands below the top 50, where angels fear to tread, #54 Michael Tunzi blasts 26 PRs, and passes 9 players. These players may or not be dead. It is a wasteland afterall. One player who isn't dead, is #67 Greg Coffino. With a name like that he should constantly be on a caffeine high. This may explain his even 10 place jump, or it may in fact be unrelated. Either way, it's pretty impressive. More impressive still is #74 Salvatore Bellusci whose 13 PRs actually lost him AF points. It's hard to imagine that, but the AF-drift treadmill was set to "eek" this week. Another thing that's hard to imagine is women's champion #78 Sophie Steiner. We all know that females can't play Kart, yet here she is climbing the top 100 list. Hopefully she can pass her secret on to other girls, and we can have more female karters highly ranked in future. #88 Joseph Knighton, who may be a real knight beat 7 players in a joust but still has many more to go through before the King will allow him to marry his daughter. Rounding out the top 100 in classic style is #99 Yannick Wiesner. 14 PRs was enough to get him past 5 players to cement his status as a top 100 player.

The rest. What can we say about everyone below the wasteland in the pit of despair that is the 100+ ranks. I'm sure it smells. 3 players holding their noses and trying to escape up a makeshift rope are #104 Agustin Berrios, who made short work of 36 players, #108 CousCous who adopted a fake name (and who wouldn't in the pit), and slaughtered 37 players, and #116 Nicholas Harvey, who made more PRs than almost anyone with 34 this week.

Last but not least, (least are the players who don't have 64 times submitted, and there's a metric ton of those), are #124 Zack Weber and #226 Clay McElveen. Both deserve honourable mentions for improving a full half of their PRs, despite the bad smell in the pit of despair.

That's it for this week!