Players' lists, course charts & activity stats update, on September 27, 2009, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since September 20. (Yahoo groups post #14137 to #14159). 5 players were active during the past week, amounting to a combined total score gain of +0,529.
PAL...
#31 Florian Chollet got 7 PR's and improved his score to
6,179 (+0,076)
NTSC...
#5 Sami Çetin got 4 PR's and improved his score to 8,571
(+0,174), passing 1 player
#29 Nicholas Harvey got 4 PR's and improved his score to
6,380 (+0,046), passing 1 player
#41 Chris Morton got 9 PR's and improved his
score to 5,670 (+0,108), passing 1 player
#65 Matt Stankey got 10 PR's and improved his score to
4,136 (+0,125),
passing 1 player
NTSC News, on September 22, 2009, by Dan Hoernemann
Welcome everybody to the first NTSC update since sometime in May. It's been a
whopping four months since I've written one of these, so I just want to give you
a little glimpse of what my life is like right now. I am 35 years old, I am
divorced, and I live in a van down by the river... In all seriousness, I'm back
in school and generally bored as hell during class. But hopefully it's worth it.
As for SMK, I haven't played for about a year now (excluding one day of that fun
weekend a month ago) and I honestly don't foresee myself playing anytime soon.
Not because I've lost my love for the game, but because I've just lost my touch.
Well, all that depressing talk aside, let's go for the news.
I will lead off with Chris Morton, who just so
happens to be the MVK of August, or July, maybe September. Point is, he's been
on a pretty good tear throughout the summer and this is recognition for it. I'm
gonna point out his times on the two longest courses, BC2 and MC4. His 5-lap
times have now reached the 1'44 range and almost 1'41 on the track that
resembles a person's intestines. For two of the shorter tracks, he reached a
nice barrier on MC1, with an 11"97 lap there. He's also getting close to
sub-minute status on CI1 (1'00"10). The TT domination will continue for Chris in
the weeks to come, I'm sure.
Old vet Dean Barnhart returned for a solid week of
action. Dean focused mainly on improving some lap times, but also tossed in some
complete races. These included GV1 1'05"05, VL1 58"58, and VL2 56"73. It's a
shame that last one wasn't 56"56, but you can't win 'em all. A couple of the
laps that stick out to me are DP2 17"98 and DP3 16"95. What can I say? I'm a
softy for the barrier-breakers.
Now for two of the newest additions to our wonderful site:
Devin Hickey and Matt Stankey. Devin joined
the site in August and went on an absolute tear in the following weeks. He
improved every single record on Flower Cup and all his f-laps on Star in one
week! The next week he showed off what talent and potential he really has with
times like GV1 1'04"57/12"40 and BC2 1'46"80. Overall, Devin has improved from
last to 64th. As for Matt, he joined just a week ago and has made more moderate
improvements in comparison with Devin. Matt's 1'05"63/12"60 on KB2 cracks the
Elite Standard, as does his 58"52 on VL2. Oddly enough, Matt's best times are on
tracks that I despise the most, HA! Both these players will climb quickly if
they choose to put in the time. Look out top-30!
Lastly is Nicholas Harvey, the site's constant
pr-er for the past 6 months, it seems. (Is pr-er an acceptable term? Ahh, forget
it.) This week, Nick drove some incredible times which reached the Legend status!!
One of the NASCAR events lead him to a 1'30"56/17"66 on BC3. Earlier I wrote
about some of my most despised tracks, but Nick's next pr comes from the one I
find the most infuriating. Ghost Valley 2... 1'01"22 and an amazing 11"79! That
platform is the main reason I stopped playing, ugh.
Hey hey! Not too shabby of an update, if I may say so myself. I figured there'd
be a little rust in my writing, but it didn't turn out so bad. In closing, I'd
like to add that the NTSC activity has been fairly equivalent or even better
than PAL in the last few weeks. That's a feat I don't think has been
accomplished since I've been writing. Well done, folks.
PAL news of August on September 21, 2009, by Karel van Duijvenboden
Another late update, this time I'm covering the news of August, the month of the annual SMK multiplayer Championships in France. As in previous years it was another big success, with Florent defending his title and going toe to toe with Sami till the very end. In the words of Terrence Thiron Fenner: Congratulations to all karters! Of course the karters from the States also had their meeting in August, at Joe Bernier's magnificent place in Chicago, but you already read all about that in Dan's update of August the 25th.
On to the actual activity then I guess...Two Frenchies popped in with just one PR during the month; these are Florian Chollet submitting a 10"49 flap at KB1 with some solid water-sliding and Guillaume Leviach with a pretty good 52"05 on VL2, which was done without advanced strategies such as island-jumps and NTSC-jumps, or so I was told.
Then we had this year's regular customer, Freek van der Steen. He increased his activity a little again and gained quite a few new records. He started out with a mission on what is probably the course he dislikes most profoundly: MC3. His goal was to sub 1'35 and after some painful sessions he just about managed just that with a 1'34"96. After that personal victory he enjoyed some more successes on the VL's, breaking both the one minute barriers on the way (VL1 went from +1 minute to 57"65 in one go!!). Some additional PR's followed on CI1, GV2, BC3 and DP3 and all these combined resulted into Freek passing Norwegian gaming legend Marius Hukkelċs for #44 on PAL!
The most prominent karter this month was quite clearly Samuel Gomez though. I guess he wanted to be ready for that CDM event as he PR-ed like there was no tomorrow. Did it result in August's MVK? I don't see why not! Actually I should say some of his stat improvements transferred over from July, as he uses Simon as an indirect emailing channel (for whatever reason) to reach us...and seeing that Simon was deprived of net accress for a bit, we received a string of Samuel's emails upon Simon's return. Anyway, I digress. Samuel improved over half of his timessheet, note that he's usually a slow improver, and made some pretty big advances on tracks like GV2, GV3 and BC3 in particular. He nailed that sub 1'20 with the aid of platform-jumps at GV3 and is nearing his first sub minute time at VL1. What else is there to say? Keep on karting Guevara!
Finally, as a quick note, Aron Langerak was more active in August than the average pulsar, however after him repeatedly ignoring my requests to submit some non-LB MC2 times, it looks like he won't be added to the site for a while. His July MVK still stands though. :p
Players' lists & course charts update, on September 20, 2009, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since September 13. (Yahoo groups post #14119 to #14136). 4 players were active during the past week, amounting to a combined total score gain of +0,245.
PAL...
#11 William Jonas got 1 WR and improved his score to
7,719 (+0,014)
NTSC...
#30 Nicholas Harvey got 7 PR's and improved his score to
6,334 (+0,041), passing 1 player
#42 Chris Morton got 8 PR's and improved his
score to 5,562 (+0,106), passing 2 players
#66 Matt Stankey got 8 PR's and improved his score to
4,011 (+0,083),
passing 1 player
Players' lists & course charts update, on September 13, 2009, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since September 6. (Yahoo groups post #14100 to #14119). 4 players were active during the past week, amounting to a combined total score gain of +0,402.
This is quite an exciting week with 2 NTSC players joining the Non-NBT fun!
First up is Matt Stankey, from Wisconsin! Matt has been on the players' site since 2006 but recently decided to pick up the controller again. With all of his times being run Non-NBT already, he asked if he could join the site. He joins the players' list in 67th position and a 3,928 score, not too far behind another fresh recruit, Devin Hickey. Most of Matt's PR's are in the Master range, though he's starting to collect a couple of Elites as well, including a nice 17"71 RR F-lap. Welcome to the site Matt!
The second player to join does not need a presentation, and in fact I'll probably get dissed if I don't refer to Him with a capital H. He is the almighty Sami Çetin, finally (!) submitting a full list of NTSC Non-NBT PR's many months (if not years) after doing it NBT style! Many of Sami's joining PR's look very achieved for a start, some being no less than near-WR material. Although there's no doubt about Sami's innate Non-NBT skills in both versions of the game (some old schnocks like me may remember that he was training NTSC on the emulator at least as far back as 2001), I would bet that, with the possible exception of GV3, his times do not bear a 1-try smell. In fact, looking at the big picture, we count no less than 20 out of 40 PR's ranked between 3rd and 5th position! They include MC2 1'13"77, MC3 1'29"60 / 17"77, a very neat pair of barrier-breaking RR times (1'24"95 / 16"84) and perhaps more surprisingly times that are within WR realm on DP3 (1'17"80 / 15"42), a track that is every PAL player's nightmare (but not Sami's) when played on NTSC. So... with such favourable assets Sami makes his way into the NTSC list in... *drumrolls* ...6th overall position, and a 8,398 score! 0,100 ahead stands Martin Morissette and another 0,200 stands Karel van Duijvenboden. It is interesting to note that the NTSC top 5 is essentially made of semi-active players or people still lurking around somewhere in the community. It is my informed opinion that Sami can create havoc for everyone in there if he wants to, so watch out for possible comebacks!
PAL...
#26 Pierre Coste got 4 PR's and improved his score to
6,525 (+0,121), passing 3 players
#31 Florian Chollet got 9 PR's and improved his score to
6,103 (+0,103), passing 3 players
#39 Geoffrey Ewbank got 1 PR and improved his score to
5,794 (+0,002)
NTSC...
#44 Chris Morton got 12 PR's and improved his
score to 5,456 (+0,176), passing 1 player
Players' lists & course charts update, on September 6, 2009, by Simon Laflamme
The PAL and NTSC players' lists have been updated to reflect players' improvements since August 30. (Yahoo groups post #14074 to #14099). 3 players were active during the past week, amounting to a combined total score gain of +0,307.
PAL...
No activity this week...
NTSC...
#44 Chris Morton got 6 PR's and improved his score to
5,280 (+0,100)
#50 Dean Barnhart got 9 PR's and improved his score to
4,995 (+0,075), passing 1 player
#63 Devin Hickey got 14 PR's and improved his score to
4,167 (+0,132), passing 1 player