As some of you may remember, back when Mick made this same style of topic a year ago, I decided to play alongside him with one goal in mind, to beat him. I submitted my times to the start and was initially ranked around 600th as a benchmark. During the first month I made good progress, passing approximately 250 players and almost achieving a pair of Hero times before unfortunately my Wii died, and I had not played the game since. But I'm back now, and I'm more motivated than ever to get into the top 90.

Now you might be wondering, why top 90? Top 100 not good enough? Or is it because Mick happens to be between 90th and 100th? The answer is the first one. I feel like being ranked barely inside the top 100 isn't very nice compared to having a bit of leeway to work with. Plus I've always liked the number 90 and I have no idea why, it's also my MK64 rank but that will likely drop soon. If I pass Mick with this 2014 run so be it. But I'd rather feel comfortable inside the top 100 before moving on and with a game like this I think 90's a good place to start.

So anyway, I might stream sometimes, once my overall playing gets better and I need to start proving myself. As for AF/ARR goals, I don't have any at the moment. They might develop as I play, but for now, I'm just going to play, work on my weak times, and do the best that I'm able to do.

With that said, here are my stats as of right now:

Goal: Top 90

Rank: 367

Average Finish: 391.2188

ARR: 18.4688 (Expert D)

Worst Time (rank): Peach Beach 1'13"976, #496, Advanced B
                               Peach Beach lap 0'23"863, #496, Advanced B

Worst Time (ARR): Luigi Circuit lap 0'26"473, #494, Advanced C

Best Time (rank): Wario Colossseum lap 1'02"046, #184, Expert A

Best Time (ARR): Wario Colosseum 2'05"378, #188, Expert A
                            Wario Colosseum lap 1'02"046, #184, Expert A

Total Times:
3lap 28'21"960
1lap 9'24"226

Current Progress (will update this one alongside the site updates):

Rank: 281

Average Finish: 294.1250

ARR: 16.7188 (Expert C)

Worst Time (rank): Mushroom Bridge lap 0'27"944, #398, Expert D

Worst Time (ARR): 10 Expert D times

Best Time (rank): Wario Colossseum 2'04"076, #133, Hero C

Best Time (ARR): Wario Colosseum 2'04"076, #133, Hero C
                            Wario Colosseum lap 1'01"656, #149, Hero C

Total Times:
3lap 27'53"066
1lap 9'12"401

First update. 13 PR's driven:

Peach Beach (both)

Dry Dry Desert (both)

Daisy Cruiser (both)

Yoshi Circuit (both)

DK Mountain (both)

Bowser's Castle (lap)

Rainbow Road (both)

I still have unsubmitted PR's because I wasn't sure what I had already submitted and didn't want Alex to deal with duplicates. Those will be updated next week along with any more improvements I get in the meantime. I might set a short term goal of all times top 400 or all times Expert, or maybe both.

EDIT: Oh and I know my PB PR's suck but I don't understand this course or LC at all.

I believe they were 1'13"946 for the 3lap (yeah I know, that 001 miss), and 23"760 for the 1lap. For some reason I can't seem to beat these times. My 3lap improvement gained exactly 1 place and was already my worst ranked time.

Updated. There hasn't been a news posted yet but my times were updated so close enough.

Some major improvements this time. I improved everything besides both DDD's and RR's, which I improved last update. Therefore I now have 32/32 new times from 2014. In addition, WC now has 2 Hero C times, and my 3rd best is ranked at Expert B, quite a substantial difference. I have 0 Advanced times left on my time sheet and all of my times are ranked in the top 400.

Me being able to not improve Peach Beach turned out to be because of a pretty hilarious scenario. I didn't realize you were supposed to use 2 shrooms in succession so I kept using 0 1 1. Lesson learned, cut 1.6 seconds from that alone.

Improvements will slow down from here, but I'm happy to have all top 400's and no Advanced times, which was a short term goal of mine.

Top 300 in fact. However my worst ranked time is now in the top 400.

I have college semester coming up, so I don't really have much free time anymore. However I'm still going to try to make some progress along the way with whatever spare time I got.

This week presented 6 PR's. I improved both on MaC, DDJ, and RR. RR especially had nice cuts that put me on the brink of top 200 and both 3lap and lap were Expert A. My BP lap also went from 9"154 to 9"156, because I submitted a typo on accident. But it didn't lose me any positions. 7 AF cut overall, nothing fabulous but I'll take it.

College semester is over, I got the summer to play.

I improved both my BP times (got sub 9 on the lap, about time), and improve YC 3lap by over a second.  This resulted in a cut of over 6 AF, but since it's been 4 months since my last PR I only gained one spot from my last update (slipped back a bit in the meantime). I'm going to go back to updating this thing weekly just to give me something to do. I hadn't forgotten about this topic, just didn't have really any time to play this game. Updating original post.