January 2000 Archive
23 January 2000 - Betwixt and Between Neglecting my site again, I'm always getting absorbed by my clan's site, which, if you're interested is to be found here. I'm pretty pleased with the design. It's not at all complicated, I don't really have much technical HTML knowledge so I can't do any fancy asp/flash tricks. I've concentrated rather on the "look" of the site. We actually have a "thesecondcoming" domain name but the freenetname service is excrutiatingly slow so I've abandoned it for now and I'm hosting the site on this space. It's very much in its early stages so there's not much to grip you yet but as soon as the leagues get going I'll concentrate on match reports and demos in a similar way to the HooD site when we won Season 7. As far as this site is concerned I've got the problem of updating two sites which is pretty tough going. I'll probably restrict my updates on this site to demos, because with doing the central news on the T2C site as well as personal columns, coming up with something new for this site would be hard and I'd end up repeating myself. So..., for news and columns and match reports on T2C games go to the T2C site, for demos, tips and resources come here :). Cya for now. Oh and I know I haven't change my graphic. I had a go but PSP6 doesn't cater for italicised fonts in the same way as PSP5 so I couldn't do one in the same style. Maybe I'll install the old version just to do the graphic...
11 January 2000 - REViLLA.T2C Omg, it turns out that the title of my last column was quite apt. The coming of Quake 3 has resulted in the collapse of HooD. I don't want grief for going too deeply into the reasons why but, simply put, old inactive members who've had no part in recent HooD history, successes or the rise to Division 1 of the UKCCL decided to return, take over and remould the clan according to a nostalgic model. All the active players, great players and friends, left last Thursday when we heard the proposals. The HooD you know has formed a new clan called T2C (The Second Coming) (except for Stormkeep who's joined top Q3 clan Scorchio). Members from the past like Riprock and B-Boy have returned to HooD, eager for a new game to play, and have taken the clan over so HooD hasn't disbanded as it initially appeared. Being a member of HooD for six months it was obviously a massive wrench to leave but times change and T2C are ready for Quake 3. My name is now REViLLA.T2C and my connection is fixed after two months of solid lagginess. I appreciated some games on a decent modem connection and I'm now thinking of dedicating myself to Q3 and not playing it alongside Q2 as originally planned. Now that I'm no longer a member of HooD I don't need to be ready for Division 1 of the UKCCL so there are no more ties. Catch ya's on the Q3 servers. Bugger! Gonna have to change my title graphic at the top :)
1 January 2000 - The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End Erk, a blank canvas, an empty site. I'll soon get it sorted though, no problem. I'll start out with a simple column article, just to talk about recent events. I've been playing Quake 2 for over a year now. I'm in a UKCCL Division 1 clan, having joined HooD in Division 3 and I still enjoy ordinary Quake 2 Deathmatch on the standard eight maps (well, except for Lost Hallways). I play Rocket Arena 2 quite often and for HooD in Division 1 of the UKRA2L and on the CTF front, er, I don't play it, not sure why though. I never played the original Quake online and only tried Unreal online a couple of times so Quake 2 is all I've known of online FPS games really, but over the last month things have changed - you can feel it. This big change has come with the arrival of two massive new games. Both were announced a year ago and players have been clammering for news and screenshots ever since. On the one side there's Unreal Tournament, a very polished game with a range of built-in mods, slick graphics and Quake 2 style slower-paced gameplay. On the other side is Quake 3 Arena, not as polished in my opinion but it oozes style with some gorgeous graphics and super-fast Quake style gameplay concentrating on raw combat skills and instinctual play. The majority of who played the original Quake have obviously migrated to Quake 3 because this new game is essentially a 90's version of Quakeworld with elements of Quake 2 thrown in. The Quake 2 players seem divided though. Some are eager for Quake 3 Arena, seeing it as the natural progression from Quake 2, others have looked to Unreal Tournament and found that id aren't the only ones capable of producing a top FPS game. The question of which game is better is irrelevant really. Both games play differently and I don't think it does much good to entrench yourself in one camp or the other. Both games offer a different experience and clans, a scene, leagues and a community will develop around both. That's without question. My main gripe is that many players, including myself, haven't given Unreal Tournament a decent look-in. It's seen as a newcomer and id are seen as the only ones capable of producing a quality Deathmatch experience. Is it really reasonable to assume that id have some kind of God-given ability to produce FPS games? I don't think so. Epic have experience after producing Unreal. They learnt their lesson from having produced a game that initially had very poor netcode. Quake 3 certainly has style and a longer heritage, but UT has brought with it a lot of new and fresh ideas and it's not good for FPS games in general if there's no competition or incentive to make better games. So I feel that this attitude of picking one game and abusing the other (a feature of both camps) isn't healthy for the scene as a whole. I'm not siding with either game here, I'm just saying that there's room for more than one FPS game in the world. At times over the past year I've got bored with Quake 2. Now we have two games to flip between, which should prevent the boredom setting in. I've been having major connection trouble lately, so, to be honest I've given neither game a decent chance and I've even dropped off on Quake 2. I want to play but it's been too frustrating an experience with disgusting spiking of my ping making my play very unpredictable and at times extremely embarrassing :). I bought both games, more or less on the day of release and played both out of the box with no major difficulties. I'm about half way through the deathmatch levels on UT and I've completed Quake 3 on the middle difficulty level. I've played Quake 3 more then but this has been due more to the frenzy of excitement around it, rather than its superiority over UT. My plan now is to attempt to play three games. UT, Q3 and Q2. I still want to continue with Q2 because the game's still brilliant and I get a better connection to Q2 servers than I do for either Q3 or UT, and the last thing I want is even more frustration at my connection with the less HPB-friendly Q3 and UT. The title of this column refers to people's apparent uneasiness at the moment. No one's sure of Q3 or how the scene will develop, with it being Christmas, games have dried up and it's hard to judge which game to play and on top of that some clans are now becoming divided between the UT and Q3 camps. It's like a limbo time between Q3 and UT kicking off and Q2 winding down. I'd prefer to see these new games as proof of the lastability of FPS games, and they also show glimpses of what's to come in the future. The faces of the characters are getting almost photo-realistic. How long before our characters sport our own faces, mapped on from a little camera on your screen. The graphics in both games are frankly amazing, if, that is, you have the graphics card to power them. On this score I'd have to say that UT's graphics engine works better on lesser cards, and you won't have to reduce the graphics detail to as low a quality as you need to in Q3. These graphics will only get better and better with more rounding and more and more detailed textures. The one thing that's lacking at the moment though is realistic natural environments. They're all buildings, or rocky areas. You never see trees or hills or real world elements. Unreal's single player game had some but they weren't very advanced, and Quake has never had any that I can remember. This should be the next big development in graphics and should make FPS games amazingly realistic. Looking at the graphics for Black & White (above), a completely different type of game, you get a glimpse of what's to come. The map design is also getting more adventurous with the designers of both games using all the new graphics card features to full effect. Quake 3's fog-filled voids, the dueling map filled with yellow fog, the glowing health packs and glimmering marble surfaces. All amazing stuff. In Quake 3's case the introduction of curves and organic textures has been important. The maps seem designed to highlight these in many cases and it certainly makes the arenas feel more lifelike rather than boxy lego worlds. UT's designers have let their imaginations run wild, with amazing maps like the galleon or the floating castle or the three towers in the low gravity world, that was featured in the UT demo. Or how about the Assault level with the ship at the end of the jetty. The sound is amazing too. Your footsteps change according to the surface you're walking on. Enemies make sounds that top players can use to pinpoint their opponents position precisely and the explosions and weapon sounds really bring the experience to life. Ambient sounds are fantastic too. You can hear when you go outside or when you're in some dark cellar. Speaking of the weapons, they're getting to feel less like toys and more like powerful instruments. I say instruments because of the precision and thought needed to wield them properly and in the right situations. Both games have come a long way from Quake, where gamers used the rocket launcher 80% of the time and the lightning gun the rest. Or even Quake 2 where top players will use just a railgun with the chainer as a finisher. There's a right time to use all the weapons in the new games and the balance that brings helps keep the flow going and stops the game being dominated by one person. So, the end of the beginning then, not the beginning of the end :) Thanks for reading this first column. This site's still in it's infancy at the moment and most of the pages are blank unfortunately but I'll fill them up really soon. I'll be concentrating on demos mainly, with a sideline in tips and resources, though it's hard to compete in these areas when there are great Q3 guides and tools easily available on other sites, but I'll bung some up anyway. My old site concentrated solely on Quake 2 but I hope to deal with both the new games on this site, though UT sadly doesn't have demos so that may not happen. Stay tuned...
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Contact Information - E-Mail: REViLLA, ICQ: 21345065 Site Created on 1 January 2000. All Content, Design and Graphics by REViLLA.
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