Title shameless stolen from an epic YouTube comment in Goose's "1:10:00 has been broken video!" What a crazy week; I originally intended to play Aztec 00 Agent for a 1:29 to break the barrier (to no avail, great level as always!) before this wacky R-lean strategy dropped out of nowhere and I knew I had to jump on the goldrush quick because of the bounties at stake why not try to regain an untied sweep on Train for the first time since 2010? I was incredibly late to the party in getting my first warp, with my frustration encapsulated in this fairly embarrassing comment on the day the strat was announced that I will share for all to see:

Eventually I figured out I was doing the leans wrong. Once I had that sorted out I warped 5+ times in a row, got keen, and knew it was just a matter of, or perhaps race against, time. Unfortunately I had one of the busiest work weeks of my life, with a 15 hour day on Friday. Nonetheless I did an 8 hour stream on Saturday where I was able to clutch out an incredibly fast warp on a fairly fast start. Because that was my first "THIS IS IT" run with this strategy, I had no idea what to expect. I was shook by how unexpected the warp was and knew I had an untied in the bag, but seeing 0:50 was almost as astonishing as seeing the 1:01 endscreen back in 2007. Achieving it live also meant I could be a nice little post-run commentary. ;) Happy to have gotten that one live after getting my previous two untieds offstream (Train SA 1:21 & Bunker 2 SA 0:37).

Shoutouts to Calle and Henrik for optimizing the strats and grinding respectively, and Onslatt for actualizing an absurd strat 28 years after the game's release. Even though I'm sad one of the greatest skill tests in the level has been completely killed, this is natural progression of the game and it's a significant breakthrough (up to 7s cut on an Agent level!) that gets us closer to the mythical 1:08:59, something I will talk about in a future blog post. The last 3+ second skip on Agent was back in 2010 when Clemens discovered a new Aztec Agent strategy, so this is a pretty gigantic deal.

Will I continue for lower? Probably. Back to back 0:49s on Train and Jungle would look epic, and that would put me 2 seconds away from sub 19 total Agent time. I think I'll probably take a short break from the level for now though, and perhaps return to it after New Year. What could the other two seconds be? I'm not sure, but there's now more incentive to play levels I put on the backburner. Archives Agent 0:15 perhaps? Statue Agent 2:18? Perhaps even something actually insane... we shall see...

But I should really get back to Surface 1 Secret Agent 1:46. This is the second time I've been distracted from that grind to play for something else, and we can't let it creep up the all-time LSU rankings!

Gents we have done it again. I caked Bunker 2 Secret Agent 0:37 in a 10 minute session. BELIEVE it or not, this was actually a shocker because:

1) I had a completely swollen hand from arthritis (yikes) I developed a couple of days earlier and was only planning to do a "semi-casual" 30 minute session, and 2) I was in the midst of "working", running an automated test for some software that was going to take 30 minutes, and so I wasn't 100% focused.

I'm disappointed OBS didn't recognize my mic and capture the reaction, because it was pretty cool. But I DID go live immediately on Twitch for some commentary!

I've updated the goals and tier list pages... and I'm still waiting for my hand to heal so I can give S1 SA some proper attempts. We'll just have to wait! 😀

Yup, that's right! Achieved at precisely 11:28pm EST on the 18th of November, 2025. 4 hour session, about 40 hours this season (aka the past couple of weeks).

The full run can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBwQZDIn-M

(also how's the audio level? I realized the volume was too low in the original video, so I applied gain to fix it).

The full run with bonus webcam & mic (not that I really say anything since I was tired, although funnily enough there was a popoff after I ended the recording): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms_zLxbmA1E

And a silly music vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psHq9iPMW7A

I've had the itch to play since I came back from a trip to Europe this September after a six month inactivity from the game. Plus there was 700 CAD on the line, so yeah, it made sense to finish this one up after spending about 40 hours last year just after the 1:47 on 00 Agent. 3 122s and a handful of 121 fails this season, most of which had a failed Ouro Shot. So that's about an 80 hour grind combining the 40 or so from last year with the 40 over the past couple of weeks, which is actually quite good for an untied in 2025. More importantly, I think I might be done with Train. 0:55 and 1:21 are about as good as you can pace without wanting to paint the ceiling, and there's no real incentive to effectively dupe 1:21 SA pace on 00 Agent. Note the run features the infamous audio glitch! I'm not sure it actually "helped" me this session, since I had terrible lag throughout, all sorts of dumb guard bullshit (getting backed in the second car multiple times in a row is always fun) and wasn't generally focused on the gameplay.

I don't think I'll make a commentary video of the run, but the tl;dr is this run was "standard 1:21" pace to the 4th car, which is nothing new. That's like once every 15 minutes on a good day. BUT then I got an incredible boost that warped me past the first door in the green car, which PROBABLY made the run barely 1:20 pace at that point. Unfortunately that boost usually comes with lag and pushes you in a way that makes the first of the two double doors tricky to open, which naturally I fucked up. Still, I had the music change at the corner of the brown table in the second room and a clean last brake and Ouro shot. I KNEW it was 1:21 pace after I killed the two ZMG guards. Of course the run doesn't end there since you can get boosted past the Train (which nearly happened on my original 1:22), or bungle the leave, which sounds embarrassing but is very possible and has happened to me under the pressure, especially when every tenth counts for the leave. A 30.63 fade is pretty good but I wasn't sure whether the cinema would pop up since I didn't pay attention to Nat's earlier message, since I was too busy (successfully) trying to do the nifty dual-wielding trick. ;) I was pretty confident this was 1:21 after the cinema popped up. What a nice endscreen.

I haven't felt the urge to play anything else, but with Train out of the way I'll probably play a few levels here and there and see if anything else sticks. Surface 1 Secret Agent 1:46 was on my radar earlier this year, but I lost interest in that one quickly. Might be worth a revisit to break the 24:00 barrier on SA. It is slowly climbing up the LSU rankings, which speaking of...

...18 days until Facility 0:42 ties Dam 00 Agent 1:55 to become the Longest ever LSU... holy smokes! Will it make it? I've been popping into Marc's streams every once in a while and I have seen some close attempts, so we'll see. Regardless, I'll have to think of a new poll for the right side of the site in a few weeks. And on the topic of LSUs again, can we talk about how absurd it is I've had an untied sweep on Control for OVER SIX YEARS now? They're high quality times but even so... I don't think they've been challenged the past few years if at all since I got them. Who knows if or when that'll change.

Ace out!