Mario Kart: Double Dash!! Players' Page

Argh, I don't like ToS comboing

Alex @ Friday, January 21st [link]

Movement

Just about each week we inherit a new French player from the French MKDD site. This week it is Jean Lecureux. He's 50Hz, he's French, and that means that he's really good. Actually he's in the top 20 overall, ranked Titan D (almost C), and has a couple of really great scores - Sherbet Land and Peach Beach. He jumps into #15, surrounded by fellow countrymen Rodolphe Gouet, Paul Maes and Paul Regeffe, and also Alex Penev. As a result, most people slip down one position because of his introduction.

As for Rodolphe, he had a good week with 7 PRs, which saw him briefly pass Paul Maes. In the last moments of the week, Paul made some improvements and jumped back ahead of Rodolphe. He also passed Alex Penev and is now #13 on the ladder, behind Bart Janssen-Bouwmeester.

Veteran karter Luke Mulders has made a great return. He almost halved his AF score, from 35 to 20, and moved back up to #19. He has been playing for some weeks, and had a PR for every track. If you recall, when Luke was in top form, he was at the very top of the charts. Will he continue his comeback?

#20 Rene Bauer has had a very good week himself. Well, unfortunately for him, Jean and Luke passed him so he didn't make it into the top 20, but he did get twenty-odd PRs, that made for a very big -8.4 cut in his AF score. He improved by 8 places! Rene, as well as Sylvin Regal and Luke Mulders, all made Titan D with their improvements.

Ian Smyth is ahcking away at his scores, making about three or four PRs every day. His tally for the week is up to 20 PRs! That represents an improvement almost as large as Rene's. He jumped 10 placed to #53 and his AF fell -8.1 points. He should be top 50 in a few days ;)

#71 Jeffrey Gutierrez continues his consistency. Every week he ends up improving his AF by around ten points. No exception this week, for which he has a -12.4 cut (12 places). Jeffrey made Expert A with these, but you can be sure he'll keep going. I think that at the moment he's tossing between whether he wants to be champ in mk64 or mkdd, or both :cool:

Just behind Jeff are few other familiar names. #76 Kieran Jessell is about to overtake Bryan Bosshardt and Scott Rogoff, if he keeps it up. He's on the brink of becoming Expert A himself. Just need a few more PRs..

Kristopher Will and Rickard Lindell both did some catching up on Kieran this week. They both had AF cuts of about -6 points, which was just enough to pass former great Bart Savelkouls. Kristopher is only one place behind Kieran at #77, and Rickard is two places behind him, at #79. Rickard wants to be the top Swedish player, but Jonas Petterson is still 12 positions higher up :rolleyes:

#190 Arno Bats had 24 PRs this week. I think that about says it all, really. Well done :P Well, OK, I'll also mention that his AF improvement was 18.7 points (19 places). Arno should be in the top 100 in no time at all..

Fellow Dutchman Jeffrey Henraat just couldn't keep up with Arno. They were both at the same place last week, but Arno jumped ahead by too much. Jeffrey still had a good week of PRing, with daily submissions. He made 19 new times, to improve 3 places to #125.

#134 Nathan Cromwell had the second largest numerical improvement in AF for this week, of -28.5 points (26 places). In the process, he was promoted from Advanced to Expert D. I just had a look at two of his vids and it looks legit (he was listening to some weird music, though :hehe: ). How about a WS vid, Nathan?

The largest numerical drop belonged to #246 Sam Hoar, of -30.8 (27 places). In the past 10 days he's improved all 32 times, so we can expect a strong finish for this month from him.

New Records

Two records this week, both in Peach Beach.

Jon Prentice made a brief surge in kart once more and got himself another incredible lap record, a 22"061. He says his best laps add to a low 1'08. Jonathan Steel took a defensive step and improved his course time a little, in a hope to keep it out of reach for now - a 1'08"839. He also improved his lap to within 0.02 of Jon's, but it was not enough to reclaim the record.

New Players

Lots of new players for this week! Hello to...

Barbara Warnaca (Beginner C, 323rd)
Scott Fowler from the USA (Intermediate D, 284th)
Jean Lecureux from France (Titan D, 16th!)
Ian Parkhouse from the UK (Intermediate B, 256th)
Thomas Thunnissen from the Netherlands (Advanced C, 186th)
Ryan Harrison from the USA (Beginner D, ~373)

New Movies

Emmanuel Debenest, BP 1'06'0 here.
Rodolphe Gouet, also BP 4MT 1'05'5, and DDD 1'32'7 here.
Yohan Foog SL 1'15'5, PB 1'09'6 and YC 1'42'6 here.
Julien Boisiaud RR 2'59'6 (and also a 1'35 WS SC) here.
Kristopher Will PB 1'11'8 here.
Nathan Cromwell 1'56'6 DKM, 1'14'2 PB, 1'21'9 LC, 1'40'5 DDD here.

Also... Francois Chu is refurbishing his video site, and has most disk to burn. He has some new videos and a new look. Check it out!

Sheena has a bikini outfit.. hahahahehehe

Alex @ Saturday, January 15th [link]

POQ
Jonathan Steel won the POQ with a comfortable margin. Vince van der Fluit, Andrew Vallely, David Schiering and Kristopher Will also received support, but Jonathan was a convincing winner, with more votes than Vince and Andrew combined. There were 73 votes in total.

POY
Undecided yet. There are two players who are pretty close (just a couple of votes separating them) at the top. Perhaps you can guess who they are? :laugh:

Movement

Some bad news - following Stephen Meakings' shoes, Joey Sandler has asked for his times to be removed for the moment. Word has it that he may return one day and compete again. Maybe he'll be playing in secret, like someone else that left? :doze:

On the brighter side, a couple of PRs from Jonathan Steel this week show us that he's still alive and well. His ARR dropped a little bit because of his new DKM lap, and is now 0.09 :crazy:

#4 Stefan van Dijke and #3 Yannick Plebani were both improving as well. Stefan scored 4 PRs and a WR, but Yannick increased his lead by scoring 19 PRs (and a WR)! Even though this is a huge collection for his level, they were mostly small PRs and did not gain him very many positions, so his AF fell only by 0.25, and Yannick is still within Stefan's reach. Both players are Titan A in ARR (1.40 for Stefan and 1.46 for Yannick). It's still very close between them.

#12 Bart Janssen-Bouwmeester is back in action. He made up some ground in AF this week (-0.7pts), but didn't pass anyone. His next goal would be Stefan Baczynsky, and after that Olivier Lavenant for the top 10.

The French once again don't disappoint, with many of their representatives hacking away at anyone in their way - #14 Paul Maes, #16 Rodolphe Gouet and #18 Julien Boisiaud, #20 Sylvin Rigal and #24 Yoann Seznec. Rodolphe and Yoann both had AF improvements of -4.2 this week, which passed 5 and 3 players respectively. Paul Maes has a small lead on fellow countrymen #15 Paul Regeffe and Rodolphe, and is not far from catching Alex Penev. Julien scored his first WR this week (temporarily). He made up one position by overtaking Prashant Bhoja in the AF charts, but lost one for Rodolphe passing him. He's showing a lot of promise, though. And he reached Titan D last week.

#30 Xavier Valentin had a massive update a few weeks ago, and this week he had another impressive cut of -6.7 in AF to jump by 7 positions. He's in the middle of a group of five Frenchmen for now :)

#55 Koen Mensisk submitted 11 PRs after nearly a month of inactivity (holidaying, perhaps). Those 11 PRs went quite a long way to improving his stats. In AF he jumped 11 positions with his -9.2 cut, and in ARR he's just two standards away from Hero.

#61 Ian Smyth and #66 Matthew Hofstad were two players who did not fall victim to Koen, because they were behind him already. Koen pulled ahead of them for now, but they both made modest cuts themselves: -4.9 for Ian and -5.8 for Matt.

In the same region as Ian and Matt, there has been a return from veteran, Eliter, staff-member and all-round good-guy Derek Clark. He's one of a few people I would not have expected to make a return, but he's back. And apparently his scores are going to tumble, because he beat his Daisy Cruiser course time by over a second within a few minutes.. DC was probably his best track back in the day, and one of the very first MKDD videos I saw when I starting out. Derek is right on Matt's heels, and since they both have potential, I can't say who will be ahead of whom by next month.

#81 Jeffrey Gutierrez is still going strong. This week he moved up 14 places, with a drop of 17.3 pts. This is slightly less than last week, but still a good pace. I think he'll reach the top 50 within three weeks. Whether or not he catched Marius within three weeks is unknown, but we'll try for top 50 first ;)

There were several ridiculous improvements this week, and as you'd expect they came from the newer players. #98 Arnaud Palierne dropped 15 points (18 positions) to sneak into the top 100. #109 Marcus Mathews had a -36.4 AF turnover for the week, which is about 36 positions! #137 Dave le Clair and #147 Alex Gibbons both cut 11 pts, and a bit further back, #253 Alexandra Haemmerling improved by 52 pts (52 positions) and #271 Sam Hoar cut 45.2 pts (44 places)! Yeah, big numbers :O

The following people also had decent improvements: Kieran Jessell, Kristopher Will, Oskar Joutsijoki, Gregor Fran and Charlemagne Colok.

New Records

No WRs last week, but we have some this week!
To start us off, Stefan van Dijke played his best course once more, and beat his own record by just 0.01 - Rainbow Road 2'56"609!

Stefan's rival for the Bronze, Yannick Plebani added his name to the WR list with a 1'45"547, which is as good as Guillaume Bertrand's suspicious time from long long ago.

There was more action on DKM, with Julien Boisaiud beating Jonathan Steel's lap with a 34'16 this week, and he even missed an MT! Jonathan replied by taking back the record with 34"039, very close to the barrier.

Jonathan also improved his Daisy Cruiser lap by 0.05 to 31"951, and he beat Prashant Bhoja's Luigi Circuit time by less than 0.01 - 1'15"835.

New Players

Welcome to...
Tijmen Tio from the Netherlands (Beginner B, 349th)
Michael Jensen from New Zealand (Advanced C, 195th)
Kenn Smith from France (Expert B, ~83rd)
Harold Stanley from Canada (Advanced A, 134th)
Mikael Bastiani from France (Advanced A, 142nd)
Yohan Foog from the USA (Hero C, ~42nd, he's from the French site and very good at SL and YC!)

New Movies

Julien Boisiaud DKM 34'16, 1'46'2, BP 8'64 here
Olivier Lavenant DKM 34'4 here.

Tales of Symphonia is so darn pretty drool

Alex @ Saturday, January 8th [link]

Movement

A close battle for #3 is under way. Yannick Plebani has once again run off with the French title from Raphael Segas, even though Raphael was ahead of him last week. In the process, Yannick made 9 PRs which helped him pass Stefan van Dijke in AF! There is very little between them, actually... in AF, it's 6.59 vs 6.75 in favour of Yannick. In the ARR, Stefan made Titan A (the third person to reach it) with 1.46, and Yannick is on 1.53, still Titan B. As you can see, it's pretty close between these two. Stefan made three PRs this week as well (like 31'6 on MCT), so he's active and able to fight back. Yannick leads 18-14 in head-to-head matchups, but Stefan is more than 4 seconds ahead in overall total times. Hard to say if one is really better than the other :confused:

Speaking of France-Netherlands battles, Stefan's partner-in-crime Vincent van der Fluit passed David Grard for #6. It appears unlikely that the inactive Grard will pass him back, so the Netherlands can win if Stefan gets busy.

But don't think that the French are taking this lying down. They've got several new players who are very highly ranked, and may even be future champions. Many of these players are already well-established karters at the French MKDD site, so they know great strategies and they have a thirst for competition.

Firstly, there's Sylvin Rigal. He joins the site at #20, ahead of Rob Ziegler and Rodolphe Gouet. Sylvin's best time is 8"656 Baby Park, which is 4th! His Special Cup times are pretty strong (mostly top-20s), so this guy can make it into the top if he works on his Mushroom and Flower cups a little.

Then there's Yoann Seznec. He debuts in 28th spot, just behind buddies Francois and Tanguy. He also has great Special Cup times but weaker Mushroom Cup. He's Hero B, but not far from Hero A. Just behind him is #30 Tristan Eyma, who has been here for some months already. This week he submitted his times from last month, and made some really big improvements in the stats. His 60Hz AF went from 28 to 14, and his overall AF fell from 56 to 23, improving 26 positions. Emmanuel Debest has resubmitted his scores once again, placing him in 36th place. And Pierre Checa enters at 51st place, behind Stefan Wenzel. Pierre's best score is a 32'38 lap in DC, which is 15th.

Because of the 4 new players mentioned above, almost everyone inactive and outside the top 5 lost 4 points in AF! But despite this automatic -4pts AF disadvantage, some players are still having good-enough weeks to come out with an overall improvement. Xavier Valentin (also French, by the way) dropped 3.6 points to get to #39th (it would have been 7.6 if not for the new guys). #64 Christian Kuklock likewise dropped 7.3 and improved by 11 places. Arnaud Gandillet is just one position ahead of Christian, but only mitigated the affects of the new French wave, so had a 2 point decrease in AF.

#80 Rickard Lindell and #88 Damien Mateo successfully made up the lost ground in AF score and broke even for the week.

On the other hand, #97 Jeffrey Gutierrez, #130 Arno Bats and #147 Michael Rosnitschek are kicking some butt. Jeffrey improved his AF by 19.2 pts (26 places), Arno by 18.0 (22 places) and Mark by 15.1 (23 places).

A bit lower down are #158 Alex Gibbons and #159 Nathan Cromwell, who are pretty much even. Their AFs are very close, both are Adv B in ARR, and they are both relatively new players with room for improvement and experience. In contrast, #161 Joel Lunde from Sweden is two places behind them and has been a member since 2003, but made a small comback this week and improved 19 places.

#215 Mark Chitty had the lastest numerical AF drop this week, of -48.8 points. His AF score is now 227, improving 49 places. Mark is also one of the newest guys here, so we can expect him to keep going strong.

All the way back to the top now, and #14 Joey Sandler is still continuing his dream run towards the top 10. His improvements are big enough to warrant separate message board topics with people calling him a cheater and conspiracy theories galore, but assuming he's the real deal, it's an easy POW decision for the week. His AF was #33 last week with 34.5 and is now 16, which is about... too many places. He also made Titan D (and is not far off Titan C, either).

New Records

It looks like there are no new overall records this week :confused: :plain:! Maybe next week, then :)

New Players

Welcome to...

Yoann Seznec from France (28th!, Hero B)
Pierre Checa from France (51st, Hero D)
Sam Hoar from the UK (314th, Beginner B)
Sylvin Rigal from France (20th!, Hero A)
Emmanuel Debenest from France (~36, Hero C)
Dave le Clair from Wales (144th, Advanced A)
Marcus Mathews from Canada (146th, Advanced A)
Alexandra Haemmerling from Germany (303rd, Beginner A, Kristopher Will's sister)

Emmanuel has been with us before. If I remember correctly, he was removed after a proof call, but I'm happy to see him return. There is a small chance he may be frozen. I also saw Pierre Checa's DC flap movie and have placed him as video proof already.

New Movies

Paul Tanney DDD 28'57, MB 26'18, DC 32'07 here.
Liam Benson MB 27'29 here.
Julien Boisiaud LC 24'9, YC 1'43'7 33'5, DKM 1'46'7, WC 2'03'0 1'00'8, RR 2'59'9 59'5 here.
Olivier Lavenant WS SC 1'34'5, WS 1'40'8, LC 1'17'0 here.
Any others? Tell me and I'll append them here.

Last proof call officially over

Derek @ Thursday, January 6th [link]

The last proof call is over, and I must say it was a noted success. A few shady individuals fled, and a few medium-ranked players failed to respond... but other than that, cooperation was impressive. A couple guys have just been frozen (an option for guys that appear to be honest but fail to meet proof deadlines). Any frozen player can update new times at any point should they first provide proof. Vincent van der Fluit should be validated shortly, and other than that, everyone called out has been taken care of. In a few months, we'll make another sweep over the upper portions of the rankings ladder, so for you upstart n00bs, be prepared -- people are noticing the absence of a checkmark next to your name, and I'm guessing they don't like it... *hehe*

Thanks to the fellow staffers for receiving and validating tapes/memory cards, as well as aiding in the orchestration of the entire process. Now let's take over the internet with this thing in 2005.

Clark out.

Polls

Alex @ Wednesday, January 5th [link]

Hi everyone,

There's a Player of the Quarter and Player of the Year polls out! You have about a week to cast your votes, for both polls.

The POQ (Oct-Nov-Dec '04) is the usual stuff about you having a look at some statistics and making a comparison. This one can go right down to the wire, so make sure you vote! You can find it here.

The POY is not about comparing stats. Just some blurbs about the favourites. If you are a newer player, you can learn a bit of history here. Many of you may already have made up your minds about who you will vote for, so hopefully it's one of those that has been included. You can find the poll here.

For the POY, the votes will not be the final decision for the award, but will heavily influence it. The staff members will decide the award, using the votes are a basis ;D

Happy New Year

Alex @ Saturday, January 1st [link]

It's 2005, which means most of you are probably recovering from hangovers.

Movement

Jonathan Steel's ARR is down to a low, low 0.125 after his new laps in YC and SL (and two more PRs, which didn't affect his ARR). The only standards remaining are DK Mountain, where he is TB for both.

#3 Stefan van Dijke has finished Metroiding and made four PRs last week. Not enough to trigger any significant changes in his rank? Not true! He's just sooo close to Titan A now, with a 1.59 ARR. With Raphael Segas not far behind, SvD might make a comeback any day now...

Big update from Frenchman Xavier Valentin. He moved up a potential 80 positions by sending an up-to-date PR list. Xavier is not listed in the AF chart because he is missing WS times, but he would be near 40th place when he gets some scores for those (even though a few of his Special Cup scores are ranked 100+). Xavier is, however, listed in the ARR chart. He's made Hero D with his new scores, improving his ARR from 12.9 to 8.4.

Jeffrey 'Pobre' Gutierrez, of MK64-fame, joined the MKDD site quite a while ago. But he's more recently got a Gamecube of his own, and can play MKDD more frequently now. Despite being young and having a big mouth, his goal is to Pobre smash whoever gets in his way. He did just that this week, moving up 40 positions to #126, with one of the largest improvements of the week. He also reached Expert D, but he probably won't hang around this neighbourhood for very long.. expect big improvements next week :D

Nathan Cromwell is keeping busy as well, on the message board and on the controller. He's down to #165 this week, dropping 33 points in AF, and 52 positions in the process. #14 Paul Regeffe had just as large (percentage-wise) improvements as Nathan. His ARR went from 4.7 to 3.9, making him Titan D. Paul should pass #13 Alex Penev with a few more PRs, and then set his aims for #12 Bart Janssen-Bouwmeester. Bart made 6 PRs this week, but didn't gain any ranks. On the brighter side, the gap between him and #11 Stefan Baczynsky has become much smaller due to activity from some of the players above.

Vincent van der Fluit was one of those particular active players above. With 17 unique PRs to close off a great month, Vincent is now #7 in AF. The gap between him, #8 Paul Tanney and #9 David Schiering is very small, though. Actually, Vincent and Paul are both tied in ARR with 2.53, very close to Titan B!
With David Schiering active as well, Vincent might find himself fighting off people behind him before he can pass David Grard for #6. Vincent also recently started bugging people to try doing 4 MTs per straight in Baby Park, and his strategy seems to give a slight edge in lap times, making sub 9.3 laps possible.

Michael Rosnitschek chopped off 3.6 ARR points and almost 80 positions in the ARR chart to make it into the top 200. He's only been part of the site for a week or two, and is still missing some scores preventing him from getting onto the AF chart.

#113 Arnaud Palierne dropped a cool 20 points and 23 positions in AF, passing veterans such as Chris Rayola and Charles Tasserit. Along with Paul Regeffe and Xavier Valentin, Arnaud's improvements was one of the five largest of the week... these French guys always improve together, don't they? Speaking of the French, Raphael Segas and Yannick Plebani are tied for 4th place! Both are on 7.406 in their AF, even though Raphael is slightly ahead of Yannick in ARR (1.75 vs 1.84). So the French Championship is once more up in the air :D Raphael had four times as many PRs as Yannick, so Raphael appears more active.

There's a new kid on the block, and his name is Joey Sandler. Not too much is known about him yet (Hz, town, age), except that he's Hero B, somewhere in the UK, #33 in AF, frequents the message board as 'Mario', and has some awesome potential. He seems quite young, from reading his messages. His best-ranking time is a 1'29"3 in Mario Circuit, which is 7th. We might be hearing a lot more about this guy soon...

These guys all improved their AF by 5% or more, which is always nice: James Leare, Andrew Vallely, Christopher Kelley, Arno Bats, Julien Boisiaud, Brock Courville, Arnaud Gandillet, Piet den Dulk. Keep it up!

Eeek! Chelsea/Liverpool starts in 2 minutes. So, if you'll excuse me.. *runs off*

New Records

Vincent van der Fluit and Jonathan Steel have been practicing Baby Park lately. They exchanged the record several times over. Jonathan Steel ended up on top with a 1'05"127, pushing close to the 1'05 barrier! Vincent's is "193, just 0.07 behind.

Jonathan also improved two lap times slightly - Sherbet Land to 24"189 (0.05 ahead of Cedric Willo) and Yoshi Circuit to 32"745 (0.09 ahead of Yannick Plebani). Both of these laps meet the current God standards (only just!).

Vincent van der Fluit edged Marius Mollenhauer on Waluigi Stadium, with 1'39"729. Just like Marius' time was a 0.01 victory over Jonathan, Vincent's is also a 0.01 victory over Marius. For such a tricky course, these top three times are awfully close. :confused:

Raphael Segas did some damage in Special Cup. In Bowser's Castle, he took one from Marius with 2'19"321 for the course time, and one from Jonathan with 45"531 on the lap. He also stole another of Jonathan's laps - a WR that he has held before anyway - in Dino Dino Jungle with 33"455. :crazy:

New Players

Alex Gibbons from the UK (Advanced C, 170th)
Joey Sandler from the UK (Hero B, 33rd!)
Kasper Voorndonk from the Netherlands (Expert A, 63rd)
Sebastien Kalina from France (Advanced A, ~139th)

New Movies

Olivier Lavenant BP 8"67, DC 1'39"6, MCR 28"4 here.
Julien Boisiaud MCT 1'37"9 32"0, SL 1'16"7 24"7, MCR 1'30"2 28"4, DC 1'39"8 here.
Stefan van Dijke made a new video page for himself and updated a few new movies.
Jonathan Steel DC 1'38"4 32"0, MCR 28"1 here.