F-ZERO MV (GAMEBOY ADVANCE)
Archived News 2001 2002 2003
December 28, 2001 | There were no new records set this week, a rarity for the site. The holidays seem to have slowed our activity a bit. No matter, because it will pick up again once the people who received GBAs and FZMV games for Christmas find us. :-) Despite the lack of records, we did see some great efforts . . . *Mathieu Lecoeuche solidified his King status by moving past Wes McKinney for 7th place. Mathieu had 14 unique PRs this week, including a 16"68 lap at Championship! *Fabien Tognet is new to the site, but not the game. Anyone who has a 1'55"50 at Pawn 1 has been playing for a while. He begins with us stunningly in 10th position (Master)! *In his second week on our charts Fred Just improved many times, moving four spots to #18. He even set a top ten mark with a 1'49"77 at Bianca Ultimate. Congratulations on becoming a Master, Fred!! *Elliot Jones set three new personal records and is at #24 (Expert) this week. *J.T. McNally had 21 PRs, moving ahead of Kris Milo. J.T.'s top time was a sparkling 19"52 lap at Bianca Ultimate. It ranks 15th on that chart. He holds at #32 (Bishop) due to Tognet's entrance (see above). *It was a rough week for Milo, who was also passed by Paul Sansom, who set 13 new times and is now 33rd overall (Bishop). Paul's new 20"07 lap at Bishop 2 is ranked #22! December 25, 2001 Merry Christmas!!! December 22, 2001 While this week was relatively quiet, some interesting things did happen. Most notably, Site Champion Grégory Tiaïba almost set the site's first world record at Pawn 4. He recorded a time of 1'59"98, just a quarter second away from the best Japanese time. Keep an eye out for that course, we could see history being made there soon! Congratulations are in order for Gustavo Donoso, who moved up to the Master rank, and Paul Sansom, who earned Bishop status. This week we gained two new members: Justin Viale and Fred Just. Fred is the webmaster of the first French F-Zero MV competition listed in the Time Trials links on the right. Welcome to you both!! Dave Crawford (#12), Jeremy Wachter (#56), and Fuzzy Willmott (#65) all moved up in the rankings this week. Richard Corrigan, J.T. McNally, and Tom Collopy also set PRs this week. Richard says he's done competing. I hope you change your mind Richard, but if not, good luck in all you do! Once again real life is wreaking havoc with the update schedule. I'll be at a Barenaked Ladies concert on Saturday and my nephew's 7th birthday party Sunday, so I've moved the next update to Friday. After that I hope to resume normal Sunday updates. December 16, 2001 Tiaïba Fights Back Grégory Tiaïba regained the Site Championship this week. Tiaïba and newly dethroned Simon Cheetham now own most of the records (37 of 42). They've distanced themselves from the rest of the field. Who will be the next to challenge them? The answer may come from our other active Kings. Richard Corrigan and Mathieu Lecoeuche both set some great new times this week, and hold onto their rankings at #6 and #8 respectively. We had a grand total of 13 active players this week, including new members Gustavo Donoso (Expert!), Jeremy Wachter (Pawn B), and Eduardo Donoso (Pawn D). Welcome, guys!! Several players upgraded their rank this week. Léon van der Wagt became an Expert, Dick Grinwis made a big 20 place jump to become a Knight, and Fuzzy Willmott moved up to Pawn C. Our other active players all moved up the chart. Dave Crawford was up one to #13 (Master), J.T. McNally moved 2 spots to #32 (Bishop), and Paul Sansom improved in the Knight rank by 6 places to #37. NOTICE: Due to Christmas holiday scheduling, next week's update will be a day EARLY, on Saturday the 22nd. The Players Site Message Board is your best source for tips on how to improve your times. Check there often!! December 9, 2001 The times submission form caused me some headaches today. We'll still be using it, but I'll have to make a minor change or two for my ease of reading. Here's what happened this week: *Simon Cheetham held off the hard charging Grégory Tiaïba by the smallest of margins to retain the Championship for a second week. *Richard Corrigan claimed his first two Site Records with fantastic runs on Pawn 4 and Queen 4. *Mathieu Lecoeuche returned after a long layoff to slip past David Van Moer and into the King rank. *We received our 86th player, Dick Grinwis (Pawn C). Welcome!! *Léon van der Wagt made a huge 17 place jump and is now a Bishop. *J.T. McNally also joined the Bishop rank this week, staying a steady two spots behind the always active Justin Dovale, who set 14 PRs. *Paul Sansom reached the Knight level, and Erik Edlinger improved his Knight standing with a four place gain. *Fuzzy Willmott broke out of the Novice level, becoming a Pawn D. December 2, 2001 Cheetham Takes Title!! After a three week run at the top, Grégory Tiaïba has been replaced by Simon Cheetham as the Site Champion. Simon set or improved an amazing 15 site records this week, and now holds nearly half of the records! Meanwhile, Tiaïba submitted new times for the first time since gaining the Championship, but it wasn't enough to hold off Cheetham's impressive surge to the top. Richard Corrigan reached a personal goal this week, passing Wes McKinney for 6th place overall. 21 PRs in a week is an excellent output for a top ten player. Antoine Bourlon briefly held several site records, and still held onto the Pawn Final lap mark by week's end. He's up a spot to #10. Dave Crawford continues his slow but steady progress, also moving up one at #14. Léon van der Wagt (Pawn A) and Sam Mulez (Pawn B) are our new members this week. Welcome to you both, and good luck! Justin Dovale cruised into the Bishop level with a three place gain. J.T. McNally is just two places behind Justin, entering the Knight ranks very strongly. Paul Sansom was our biggest gainer, moving 12 places to #50 (Pawn A). He broke 33 PRs in his first serious week of time trialing. Fuzzy Willmott got back into action by setting 18 new marks and gaining 80 ranking points on Jordan Butler. November 25, 2001 It's great to see so many active players lately! Lots of news, so let's get right to it: Simon Cheetham is breaking records like crazy, and now leads all players with eight 1-lap records. He's up to #4 this week, and shows no signs of slowing. Can he make it to the top? 51 points to the title, Simon! Richard Corrigan set more than 20 new times this week and moved much closer to challenging McKinney for the #6 spot. His consistency is excellent, with all 42 of his times at #11 or better. Only 5 other players can make that claim. Antoine Bourlon hit the Pawn courses heavily again, and that earned him a two place gain to #11. We welcome two new players this week: Alabama native Paul Sansom is Pawn C, while the Vancouver area's Chris Johnson is at Pawn D. We're very glad to have you both aboard! Dave Crawford drove JV to eight new times, and threatens to pass Talboom for #14 next week. Richard Yafai, Justin Dovale, and Erik Edlinger were all Knighted this week. Congratulations guys! Now is the time when asking lots of questions to the top players can lead to big breakthroughs for you. Don't forget to use the Strats & Tips area of the Message Board as a valuable research tool. Wise words for all of us, actually. :-) J.T. McNally is our "Big Mover of the Week," up 9 from #55 to #46 (Pawn A). Knighthood is calling you, J.T.! Thinking out loud: I need to come up with arrows, or color-coding, or SOMETHING to highlight movement on the Player Rankings . . . 83 members now, the century mark is approaching quickly! . . . The driving strats page is outdated. Any offers to help? November 18, 2001 Richard Corrigan tops our news by breaking into the King level (#7 overall) with another strong week that included course times for K2 and B5 that each rank 6th on the site. Great job Richard! Antoine Bourlon served notice that he's ready for the big time by breaking one Site Record (Pawn 2 lap) and tying another (Pawn 1 lap). He stands at #13 this week. Ohio's J.T. McNally has joined our ranks and debuts at #55 (Pawn B). Welcome, J.T.!! Richard Yafai keeps rolling, and is knocking on the Knights' door by climbing to #41, up 5 places. Justin Dovale remains hot on Richard's heels by setting 30 PRs. He's at #45, up from #53. Michael Ho is back after an absence of several months, submitting many new times and jumping 10 spots to #58. Dave Crawford set 7 PRs this week to strengthen his hold on #15. I have been completely without my DSL for two weeks now. I didn't announce it because I thought it would be fixed more quickly than this, plus I am still able to do the updates by dial-up modem. But my Ameritech e-mail account is backlogged like crazy, I presume, because I have no access to it. My apologies to anyone who has tried to contact me at that e-mail. If you need to write to me personally, you can write to my hellocity@yahoo.com address, but I only check it maybe once a week. Hopefully my DSL will be fixed soon!! November 11, 2001 New Champion Crowned!!
Grégory Tiaïba knew what he had to do. His lap times were his "weakness," if you could call it that. He was already #1 for the 5-lap times, but was only 4th place for the 1-laps. So this week he focused on improving those times. He set many PRs and is our new overall Site Champion. Congratulations, Grégory!!
November 4, 2001In other action, Simon Cheetham set two more Site Records this week to bring his total to five. His best showing was an amazing 1'43"52 race at Bishop 2. That run shattered the Site Record by over 2½ seconds and put him only 1.24 seconds from the World Record!! His steady improvements are showing that he could be challenging for the top spot in the coming weeks.
Since Wednesday's update:
Grégory Tiaïba set two new Site Records (Queen 3 5-lap and Queen Final lap) and had hopes of becoming the new Champion, but was passed by Simon (see below) on several tracks to temporarily thwart his bid for the crown. Simon Cheetham's 15 times included a Site Record 21"90 lap at Pawn 3! Richard Corrigan had 10 PRs and climbed from #10 to #9. Dave Crawford's 4 PRs were enough to move him up a spot to #17. Nicolas Vandenbussche returned to submit 31 new times and went from #49 (Pawn B) to #36 (Knight). Richard Yafai also came back with 9 PRs and improved from #55 to #53. Justin Dovale set 20 PRs and jumped from #70 (Pawn D) to #60 (Pawn C). November 1, 2001 I redesigned the main page today. I hate to lose the cool title art, but I hated the frames and scrolling even more. Other factors included improving our placement on search engines such as Google, and reducing the annoyance caused by the Geocities pop-up ads. Other pages are also subject to redesign with notice. :-) October 31, 2001 It has been a fairly quiet 10 days since the last update. Grégory Tiaïba continues his climb, moving from #4 to #2. Stephen Chan has tied Derek Kisman for third. Simon Cheetham is up a spot to #5, and Richard Corrigan appears to be driving toward the King level. Ol' Mr. Crawford himself has managed to find a little time to play and has nearly regained his long lost Master ranking. Justin Dovale has joined us as our 80th player. Welcome, Justin! Wow, 80 players . . . my spreadsheet was only set up to handle 100 players, so I'll have to do some major upgrading soon! Now that we have so many players, I felt the need to divide the large number of Pawn ranked players in some way. So I split the Pawn section into grades: Pawn A thru D, plus Novice at the bottom. Check out the Player Rankings and you'll see what I'm talking about. Let me know what you think about the change. Yes, I will do another update this Sunday. So if you're visiting the site and you haven't played for awhile, get that game back out and see what you can do!! October 21, 2001 Records continue to fall as Stephen Chan, Grégory Tiaïba, and Simon Cheetham all set new marks. I'd also like to give a special mention to Leroy de Leeuw, who broke the Championship record late last week and didn't receive credit for it on last week's update. We had an increase in new recruits this week with three players joining us. Elliot Jones, Chihao Tsang, and Martin Kirsipuu all submitted to the site this week. Welcome guys!! My new internet service will be activated on the 29th or 30th, barring any unforeseen technical problems. So I've moved next week's update to Wednesday the 31st. This will allow me the necessary time to move the site to its new home without any missed updates. October 14, 2001 At last, an update!! Well, there haven't been very many active players over the last two weeks, and I hope my absence hasn't been a reason for that. My move is now complete. Rest assured, future updates will go on uninterrupted. The good news is that the players who were active have set some excellent times! Site records continue to fall as players fine tune their strats. Stephen Chan, Grégory Tiaïba, Simon Cheetham, Leroy de Leeuw, and Richard Corrigan have all done an excellent job keeping things going. Great job everyone! I knew that some people would feel that the site was dead when I had to "disappear" for a couple weeks, so I want to strongly emphasize that this site is just as strong as ever. The weekly updates and daily conversations that you've grown accustomed to will continue on as normal. So keep playing, keep setting great times, and make sure that the world knows that this site is still very much alive and is NOT going away! :-) October 11, 2001 This site hasn't been updated in nearly two weeks because I haven't had internet access. I'll be doing a full update within the next few days to get everything caught up. I'm temporarily on a dial-up ISP right now. I won't be fully settled in until the end of October, when my DSL will be activated. Please continue to submit new times to the Yahoo Group. You can send me any direct correspondence to hellocity@yahoo.com or post a message on the message board. Check back right here for future updates!! Dave Crawford September 29, 2001 This update is complete. The date of the next update is undetermined. Friday I learned that cable internet is NOT available where I'm moving to. I will not have a phone line for a dial-up connection (we only have wireless phones), and I wouldn't be satisfied with a dial-up anyway. As I understand it, DirecTV's internet offer (through AOL) requires a phone line, and Dish Network costs a fortune. This sucks. Any ideas? I won't have access to this location after Monday (October 1). So nothing will be updated here after that. I will move the site to a new home. The http://surf.to/fzeromv address will still be useable, I'll just redirect it to the new location. If you're reading this in the future, use the above surf.to link and you'll find this site's active location. Once I get this situation settled, I will post to the message board, the Yahoo group, and GameFAQS to let everyone know what is going on. My e-mail address will have to change. My primary (MediaOne) e-mail will close after October 1, but I will still be reachable after that at hellocity@yahoo.com. But I may not be able to respond quickly because I will be having to go to someone else's home to check my e-mail for a short while. This sucks. Goodbye to you all for now, I'll see you on the other side of this (hopefully) brief blackout. Did I mention that this sucks?? Well, it does. Dave September 28, 2001 Update is done, but NOT done! I updated the site, but keep sending in your times today, and tonight at about midnight my time (Eastern USA), I'll update the info again one last time before I have to sign off for at least a couple of days to move my family into our new home. I have no date yet for when I will be able to get my cable internet connection hooked up at the new place. I'm really hoping that it will be sometime this coming week. I don't want to be offline any longer than I have to! Dave C. September 23, 2001 A major changing of the guard took place as Aksu Ruuska finally dethroned Derek Kisman as our #1 player. Aksu now holds 21 site records, followed by Derek with 14 and Stephen Chan with 7. Aksu and Derek also became our first players to eclipse the 7-minute barrier for one-lap total time. Five players joined since our last update, led by Antoine Bourlon, who is at the Master level. Welcome to you all! The next update will be coming early. I'll do an update this Friday because my weekend will be very busy moving. I'm not yet sure when my Internet connection will be available in my new home, so a Friday update is the best way to prevent a very long stretch between updates. Our Driving FAQ could use an update. I'd also like to see a strategy page designed for the specific tracks. Many of you have been trading tips for tracks on the message board. Maybe you guys could fine tune those thoughts into a strat page. If anyone would like to contribute to the general driving FAQ or a new track strats page, please submit your updates, re-writes, or whatever to Dave. September 14, 2001 On this day of rememberance, I announce the following schedule change: In honor of the victims of Tuesday's horrible crimes against humanity, there will be no update this week. Regular weekly updating will resume Sunday, September 23. In the wake of this tragedy, please take time to renew your appreciation for those you love. September 9, 2001 After Aksu Ruuska's big week last time, this week Stephen Chan and newcomer Grégory Tiaïba took their turns breaking site records. But Site Champion Derek Kisman also fought back and reclaimed numerous marks. Grégory checks in already a highly skilled Master level player. We also welcome Michael Devanandan to the site! Stephen passed Aksu and Wes McKinney to take over the #2 spot. Leroy de Leeuw, Simon Cheetham, Erik Edlinger, Sean Burke, and Landon Sykora all made sizeable moves in the rankings. Seth Anderson has done us a big favor by putting our site address in his signature on message boards. It would be great if many of you would mention this site in your online travels. With a good membership drive, we could reach 100 players in no time! Many thanks to everyone for their continued participation in this site. You guys rule!! :-) |