30th March - New FB1 Video Still a little quiet on the score front recently but I do have a couple of bits of news. I uploaded a new video for FB1 replacing the old effort with a slightly better score. Also spent a few minutes doing a new link banner for anyone good enough to link to us. New Site Records from GSK - 29th March This was acctually posted on the forums a while ago but due to a huge oversight on my part I neglected to pass on the news. GSK Has broken 500k on Soft Museum, a huge achivement. He only just sqeaked over with 500 040 but I have been waiting for someone to break this for a while now. GSK is dominating the SM table holding every record by a comfortable margin. His latest effert was aided by a new SR of 100760 on SM1 and 52010 on SM3. I wonder what he will set his sites on next? Tabitha - 28th March I did a little more work on my FB times with two new PRs on Mares 1 (107170) and 2 (89850). The top three scores for FB1 are now within 600 points of each other which is pretty damn close. Tabitha - 27th March A slightly quiet weekend by the looks of things. I continue to work on my FBT score with a couple of small increases. My FB4 finally got bettered after probably 6 months and just scraped over 47k to 47080, this is without opening the link ball a single time. I am just about getting the hang of the course two link ball and managed to get 87350. Still a way to go before I get near the 700k mark. My potential is now just over the 650 000 mark so I just need to squeeze another 25 000 out of the level and it should be there! Tabitha, Miles - 24th March Miles tacks on another SR with a 15710 on TS4. I wonder how high the Total dream score for TS is going to get? over 180k? I did a little more work as well, a 114 on Gillwing, a couple of PRs on various Frozen Bell took me Total Mare score aver the 1,800,000 mark and I added about 100 000 points to my Frzen Bell Total Dream Score. An invitation to new players. I have noticed that we seem to be getting a fair number of hits every day and judging by the bandwith being used alot of you are watching the videos which is fantastic news. This is exactly what we are hoping for. I have noticed that not so many new people are submitting scores recently. I appreciate some of the scores might seem a little daunting way up there over the 600 000 and now 700 000 mark but they are all achiveable with a little practice. The SA.net forums are a very friendly place and all the active members are sure to help new players improve. Everyone with a Site Record here started out baffled by the high scores they saw at first. We would like the community grow and to improve our site records still further and we think some competition would help that a lot. You are all positively encouraged to join the forums and add your scores to the fastest growing (any only?) NiGHTS high score site on the internet! March 23rd - Site update Added more information to the Submission page detailaing why we only accept Mare 1 Link vids. Modified the MYsql code slightly so players with a score of zero in any given categories are not displayed in the tables. I made a thread explaining a couple of things about submitting videos/scores. I prettied up the vids Miles sent in with some little thumbnails and removed Gulpo vid as it is more or less identical to the existing one. Also made a few various other tweaks here and there. GSK, Tabitha - March 22nd GSK does his customary only posting with site records and edges past lances SMT record by about 5000 points with a 485266. a 500k SMT is only a matter of time now I think. He opened competition on the mare 1 link tables and took Miles' example on Gillwing to improve his own score to the current record of 115. I add my own set of Mare 1 link scores. -Edit- Also added Lances Mare 1 link scores. 22nd March - Bossvids an glitches (and bears oh my!) Miles is currently dominating the boss charts current holding or equalling every record. He put down a several video using a webcam so they are slightly lower quality and lacking in sound but they are incredibly slick and well done. - Edit - This glitch was pointed out by EVL not Kraken, I am totally sorry about that. Apparently this is a known glitch in the NiGHTS community but I wasn't aware of it until EVL pointed it out in this forum post. Its very simple to pull off. Just get to the idea palace after the maren in any given level steal the idea from Elliot or Claris while the camera is on the maren not the kid. This glich puts nights into a wierd sitting position which lasts until you either drilldash or enter the ideya palace. I performed the glitch on FB1 but it is possible on any level where you can reach the kids fast enough. Miles recorded an alternate version of the glitch on SV1. He also observed that "up" is the direction the camera was pointing when the focus changes to the maren. This makes it a little easier to control the kids on the way to the palace. 20th March - Site updates A little more work on the site. Just caretaking really. The top banner is now slightly different, tweaked for size and compression. Two of the pages have gone from the top menu. The credits page is now merged with the about page. The score submission page has been updated to cover various glitches and bugs as well as a few things we have learned during running the site. The facility for submitting scores via email has been removed as nobody used it and the announcement in the submission forum has been altered slightly. The Score submission page deals with the rules of submission, basically what is and isnt acceptable. The announcement is about how to format your scores when submitting them. I think that having all the information organised in this way makes a little more sense as well as being tidier. Anyone who has any better ideas this little shuffle is positively encouraged to post in the SA.net forum. 19th March - New score submission categories As mentioned earlier Lance Way, Sun and a couple of other users made some useful observations about Christmas nights scores. You are now able to submit their scores for Claris' level on Xmas nights, Sonic into dreams Pia/Mare scores and due to yet another helpful sugestion from Lance, max link scores for SV1, MF1, SM1, SG1, FB1 and SC1 as well as the first mares from Claris' and Eliots levels in Xmas nights. More areas to compete in, so lets see those scores. Gillwing 115 from Miles! - 19th March Miles seems to have some kind of vendetta against Nightmaren. Not satisfied with his 114 on Gillwing he went one second further and got a 115. A week ago bettering the recorde of 113 would have been unthinkable but he has now done it twice. There is a webcam video and a thread devoted to the Gillwing time here in which Miles was good enough to tape his method. Unfotunately it is a little hard to see what is acctually happening as the whole battle is over in 5 seconds. I have asked him to provide us with a little more detail. Its excellent work and Miles is now a full 3 seconds clear of previous leader Lance Way in the total boss times. Stay tuned.... GSK, Lance way - 18th March GSk, pulls level with the large number of users at 113 with Gillwing and improves 3 site records on Soft Museum Mares 2,3 and 4 are now all over the 50 000 mark, SM2 considerably so. These improvements now put the potential total for Soft Museum is now comfortably over 500 000. I hope GSK manages to be the first to break it as he is clearly working hard on it. Lance improved a number of his scores, most significant was his 85280 on SV4 which adds around 7000 to the previous site record. SV3 is a very random level which makes the score all the more impressive. 18th March - Random site updates I have spent a few days tweaking random things on the site. The look of the score tables and other pages (faq and submission page are being worked on) has now been spruced up a little. I changed the left menu so it will now look ok in IE as well as the sensible browsers. The total dreams page seemed kind of redundant so I moved the total dream score for each level into the relevant page. This makes alot more sense to me. As was observed in the site suggestions topic the Xmas nights pages needed a little tidying up partly due to the Sonic minigame being timed slightly differently and the Claris levels having a few subtle gameplay variations from the standard SV1 level. You can now submit scores for the Claris levels of Xmas nights and the Mare and Pia times for Sonic into dreams. I separated the Xmas nights and standard nights scores into separate tables in my database. This makes things much more easy to manage for me and means people with scores in one game wont appear with zero scores on the other games table. I finally managed to get a half decent Clawz Video. While its still not the fastest possible time, it is good enough for people to learn how to beat him. I appreciate this is duplicating the boss battle at the end of Lances FBT video, it nice to have it here for consistencies sake. Also be aware that were it not for a huge amount of help from Lance in this thread, I may never have achived a 2.0 at all. Miles and the bosses - 18th March Miles is on some kind boss vendetta recently and has done some truly amazing work. He now hold 4 boss records on his own and 2 joint records. He improved the current Jackle score to 105 and equalled the accepted record for Puffy of 100. Most impressive however is the new 114 on Gilwing. There has been some discussion on this in the forums and Miles even went as far as to provide a video which is viewable via the above thread. The camera looks a little out of focus but you can get the general idea. Miles has leap frogged Lance's 711 boss total and now has a new record of 713. Very good work there. Various - 17th March Plenty of action today, Lance way has work on Spring Valley with a no less than 4 site records! A 74,430 on SV1 (including a 100 plus link on the notoriously tricky backwards infinite) a 62,020 on SV2 and a 78,110 on SV3 supported a new dream total of 540,660. GSK has decided to take a look at the very difficult Soft Museum. When looking at these scores please bear in mind that nobody on the site has yet to break 500k as a dream total. His new SM1 is 94400 and his SM3 is 45600. Much more interesting as his two new site record on SM2 with 53870 and 49060 on SM4. His dream total isnt a site record but its a solid score at 468740. He rounded out the evening with 4 new PRs on Splash Garden and his first 500k plus score. GSK doesnt pot often but when he does its done in style. I have been working on Frozen Bell and added a few thousand points here and there and managed to break 600 000 and get my first 2.0 on Clawz which I was very happy about. Reaching 600k gave me a new appreciation for Kraken and Lances work getting to 700k so once more, hats of to them. Various - 16th March A 104 on Clawz brings Miles to within a second of Lances 711. He has another second to take add to his Puffy and Wiseman scores so a new Total Boss time records could be around the corner? I pushed my FB2 and FB3 scores just over the 80 000 mark although I cant quite get thehang of the bars, I am getting there. Perhps most interesting thing to note is that Lances latest scores edged his Total Mare Score over 1.9 Million. It now stands at 1,901,130! I wonder if its possible to break 2,000,000? Miles - 15th March Miles makes improvements on every Soft Museum level increasing his dream total by 50 000 points. Also he managed to bring his claws total up to 103. He now has a total boss time of 709 which is only a couple of seconds of Lances 711. 15th March - Site Records page. After a bunch more fiddling around I finished the site records page last night which is now available for your viewing pleasure on the left hand side. I am kind of pleasantly surprised to find that I have a few records left. 15th March - Site updates I spent a little while doing various bits of maintenance which I should have done a while ago. The mouse/rollovers are working again and I renamed all the php files so them make much more sense. Also the high score tables had some wierd left over code in them which was making things look rather messy. I updated the news page to look a little neater and added in all the peripheral Xmas nights times and enter Sun Wu Kongs scores into the database. I have started work on a site records page which can be viewed here. It is working as far as the scores go but I am foxed as to how to get the usernames to display. Once I do this it will be added to the site. Lance Way - 14th March Lance made a couple more small improvements on his SG scores including a new site record for SG1 of 104,750 and an SG2 PR of 57,600. This puts the potential total for Splash Garden just over the 600 000 mark, will it it be the next to fall? 13th March - Lance Ways 698,140 vid Along the race to 700 000 Lance way was good enough to video this VERY near miss. There is now a thread here if anyone has any comments or questions. Lance made a few comments about his run: When I played this run back, the first thing I noticed is how many times I *fail* to get the extra points I needed to go over 700,000 - there's at least a dozen spots where I made really bizarre errors, and any one of those spots would have given me the hundreds of extra points (not even a thousand!) that I needed, had I not screwed up in a variety of silly ways. Heck, even before I become NiGHTS my jumping goes kind of wonky. Also, if you can work out what exactly my Course 3 strategy was meant to be from watching this video I salute you, because after the time-consuming slip-ups I make early on it turns into a slightly ugly contingency plan. Another thing I noticed while playing this back was how often I ended up pausing the game during this run to get my bearings or navigate through tricky sections. It's a pretty bad habit to get into, and I think I was doing it more often in this case because this was recorded at 2:00 in the morning at the tail end of an extremely long playing session, and my concentration was really going. So, sorry about that, and I hope the stop-start bits of the run aren't too irritating to watch. On the other hand, I guess it gives the run a bit of character because you can try and work out what was going through my head each of those times I hit Pause: "What? I didn't screw that up?", "What? I actually did screw that up?", "Is there any way I'm going to be able to salvage this or shall I just quit now?", "Going... too fast... please don't... screw up again..." and so on. But anyhow, if this run teaches you nothing else you'll at least have a better understanding of how Kraken managed to get an insane-looking 700,000 for this level - if I can get 698,000 with so many minor slip-ups, it shouldn't be a surprise that someone playing really well could make the difference. Finishing line - March 12th The race is over, about an hour ago Kraken posted a FB total score of 691680 new score which, while very strong, still fell short of Lances records. Just seconds after I updated it a new post was made with an absolute monster score: 704,200 Take a good long look, its a monster. Kraken was denied by Puffy 3 times on hit way to breaking this mile stone and deserves huge props for setting a record that would have seemed impossible only a few months ago. The race to 700 000 - March 12th Both Lance and Kraken are putting in major time on Frozen Bell both trying to be the first to break 700k. Lance has increased his records to 107,720 on FB1, 101,760 on FB3 and 51,410 on FB4, he currently holds the FB total record at 698,140 just a hairs breadth ahead of Kraken. This run was apparently captured so we may possible have it available for your viewing pleasure sometime in the future. Kraken isnt taking the competition laying down he responded with a new record of 104250 on FB3 and a 98430 on FB2 thanks to adjusting his strat. his FB total is now 689460 although he apparently had a 356K plus run ruined by and unlucky Puffy fight. This leaves Lance and Kraken with two FB site records a piece and with both players clearly capable of that elusive 700k plus score. This is the kind of action I was hoping for when I started Scoreattack! March 12th - Miles Miles continues his steady progress on the charts with about 20 000 in increases spread across SM 1,2 and 4. Also a new score of 146030 ok Twin seed largely due to his experiments with TS2 where he reached 33910. A 75 on wizeman rounds out a fairly nice set of improvments. He is now about 30 000 shy of 4th place on the total mares list, March 11th - New videos. A couple of new videos, first being a reasonably good run on fb1. I am going to try and get good videos for every level, while getting high scores on ever one is likely to prove very difficult getting withing 2 or 3 thousand should be possible. This one is only 1500 or so off Krakens records so I will use it for demonstration purposes. The second is a rather bizzare glitch video for the Clawz boss battle, he basically vanished, warped across the screen and froze in mid air until I paralooped him after I took out the mouse he was sat on. Any ideas what is going on? Also could this be used for a faster way to kill him or is is just yet more plain nights wierdness? A small update on a few of my scores, made some nice improvements on several of my FB times and shaved a couple of seconds off my clawz time which I was happy with. I am now less than 100 000 points from lance in the total mare scores which is something to chase! Miles, Kraken - March 8th Congratulations to Miles who brings us his first two site records with 16380 and 14950 on TS 1 and 4 repectively. These may not look like huge scores but Twin Seeds is a very technical level with virtually no margin for error when playing for scores an increase of a hundred points on levels 1 and 4 is worth of respect. Miles also improved all of his Spring Valley scores bringing his total up to 368,240. Good work. Apparently not satisfied with his earlier TS4 record, Miles tacks on another 500 points. Kraken returns to the fray with a new FB2 score and an increase on his FB total bringing it up to 654660. Who will break 700 000 first? Lance - March 8th Lance has been busy working away for a couple of weeks on his Frozen Bell game and come up with a few new scores. Rather than thinking of superlatives I will let them speak for themselves. Course 1: 107,410 Course 2: 102,720 Course 3: 89,810 Course 4: 49,020 Pretty impressive stuff. More so when you take a look at his total FB score which is now 690,160! As is pretty typical of him, Lance immediately shared all his strats in this thread, so we can try and catch up. He made perfected a his Gulpo and Jackle scores taking his boss total up to 711 which is almost 20 seconds ahead of the competiton. The final thing of note from this little round up is that Lance pointed out the total of his and Krakens best Frozen Bell scores with a 2.0 multiplier would be over 700 000. Another milstone about to fall? March 7th - Score stats page. Something I really liked about the first NiGHTS high score site was the page which gave a kind of global progress showing total scores for bosses/mares/dreams. This was really handy as it game me a good picture of how I was doing on the game as a whole rather than just the individual levels. I have implimented something similar in the new page which you can access from the Score Statistics button on the left hand side. There are three further tables in the works to give an average of the same three criteria. I will upload this once I manage to make it display at something less than 100 decimal places which isnt really that useful. I also chose to add a border to the table. This doesnt look quite as good in my opinion and I will try to do something along the lines of alternating rows being a very light shade of grey or something to make things easier to see. With the number of new players increasing almost daily I though something needed to be done on a temporary basis. I will do the same thing on all the other pages depending on feedback. And finally, the score stats page wouldnt have been possible without aid from an igo buddy of mine and the ever helpful EVL. Nick R - March 7th A third new player in the last few days joins. Nick R makes his presence known with a solid set of numbers around the 300k mark with the traditionally high Splash Garden and Frozen Bell scores, both over the 400K mark with Splash Garden just shy of 500k! March 5th - Kraken Kraken seems to enjoy playing by focusing on a single level at a time and work up the highest score he can. Mystic Forest is apparently the current focus and he put a massive 20 000 on his MF1 score upping it to 102410 with a small jump on MF2 and the MF total, still a fair way to beat Lance Ways 630k plus monster though March 5th - pbones85, gsk Far more important than all the site technical info are the two new players. Gsk was kept waiting a couple of days longer than I would normally like due to the transition detailed below but has now made his debut. Made it in style too with a 40790 on TS3 (interesting as other players seem to favor ts2 for the "dirty trick") and a Total TS score of 171900 which just edged out Lances record of 170620. Worth noting many of his other scores are already over 300k with another strong score on Splash Garden of over 450k. Pbones85 enters the fray with nice set of sentry level scores which will hopfully be working up the charts soon. March 5th - Major site overhaul. It looks like all the security certificate errors are indeed sorted. This is mainly due to a huge amount of incredibly helpful suggestions from EVL without whom I would probably be floundering still. I added a couple of new users to add which took about 4 or 5 minutes each rather than 20 or 30 which it was taking previously to I think the investment has paid off. Rather than being all generated by HTML the site is now generated by PHP which is FAR more flexible for a number of different things and thank you most kindly to an igo buddy of mine who made large amounts of that possible. I still have a couple of issues to work out like non working rollovers and two of the scores for Xmas nights not working and a couple more pages to add/shift around but the main body of work is now done. March 4th - Index.php beta Securities issues fixed? Have a click about. I think it is now ok? I know the Total Dreams page isnt working just yet by the way. March 3rd - index.php beta I have worked on the php version of the site for a while and there are still a couple of issues with it which will be sorted very soon but there are several advantages of this way of doing things. First one being there shouldnt be any typos/people in the wrong order and things any more. Secondly adding a new member will now take about 2 minutes as opposed to 20 and updating scores is about 5 times faster. There are a couple of little pecadillos to work out though. There is a wierd pop up error stating a "domain name mismatch : invalid security certificate" which I think is due to my database being on a secure server which I have applied to have unsecured, hopefully this weekend. The mousovers arent working on the menus and I have probably made a mistake or two which means one or two things might be a little odd for a couple of days but should all be sorted very soon. Anyone spotting an errors is positively encouraged to post about them here. March 2nd - PHP and Me It may look like I have been doing a whole lot of nothing here for a while but I am in the process of re writing the entire site in PHP which will make things a whole hell of alot less messy. The dabase is finished and populated with everyones scores. I am just working on the front end for it. The site may go a little peculiar for the next day or two as I am trying to make certain functions work but should be back on the road to reclaiming a site record or two by the weekend if nothing goes wrong.