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September 2001 Archive

24 September 2001 - How embarrassing

These movies just don't stop. Exclamation have now released one and it's very original indeed with some never seen before effects and some skillful play. The only downside is that since they are regular practice partners of MKC, you see us dying a fair bit. Me three times, hehe. You never think about the poor chumps being fragged in these movies! At only 80Mb it's highly recommended, so go check out the review.

23 September 2001 - Free To Decide

The Trick Jump Centre over on Q2Central has published the results of its first set of competitions and the very worthy winner was escape, with opengl scoring highly too. This is basically Ride That Rocket resurrected, which is amazing to see and it makes sense really when you think how skilled the players are these days and how many trick jumps they can do. I found the toughest map in the first competition a bit embarrassing, I could hardly get to the first box in my attempt and then I watch the winner smoothly climb right to the top in perfect flowing jumps without a single pause. Stunning. Check it out and have a go.

On the Movies page, I've re-jigged and re-scored some of the movies seeing as I've a much better idea now of what really makes a good movie, and I've promoted the Clan Bio movie to the Number 1 slot for the creator's artistic talent. I've also added yet another movie, this time by RA3 clan Defiance, who narrowly lost out yesterday to induce in the Barrysworld RA3 Cup. Induce have a decent write-up on their site but there are no demos yet.

22 September 2001 - Jolt RA3

Nightstrike's Jolt RA3 League kicked off this week with a Cup competition to decide the initial league placings and it was very well run, with a decent admin and timely start. Even the results have been typed in. My clan, Massive Killing Capacity, has been placed in quite a tough group, with two French clans Monsieur and Lord and fellow old-schoolers Brother :). Lord have a poll up on their site for you to vote what place they'll finish. I've just voted for 4th. It's a psychological battle too you know ;). Anyway, the format was a best of two maps affair, each clan choosing a home map. Now, seeing as we play well on all maps, ahem, we had some difficulty picking our home map. We don't have one basically. We were going to pick RA3MAP11, but MsR chose that first so we picked Castle map RA3MAP4.

RA3Map11 is the one with a huge tower and balcony area overlooking a courtyard area. There are also several abysses to fall down :). One highlight of the first game for me was admin !.alex's comment, "Mind that first step, it's a dooosy" as someone fell down one, a brilliant line from Groundhog Day :). There are two ways to play, either attack the tower strong or play defensive and take the bridge and rear courtyard area. We decided to be positive and attack so it was a quick first game. There was some packet loss but since everyone was getting it, it was fair. MsR were very strong on the tower and we generally came off worse in the initial melees and then were out-numbered for the rest of the round. MsR won 6-3.

Next up was our home, RA3MAP4. This map can be really campy because one clan usually takes the garden and the other tries to look in and gets picked off. We were stronger at taking the garden for the most part but probably didn't hang back enough, falling for MsR's bait at times. MsR won this second game 6-3 too, but it was definitely closer than the first game. All in all, not a shocking result to be honest. MsR won Division 2 of the Barrysworld RA3 League and have beaten us in all previous encounters. One day :). Nightstrike's written some predictions on his Quakenation column and predicted we'll finish 2nd to MsR. I'll be perfectly happy with that of course, but the Brother game is hard to predict, us having beaten them in recent games, but their team is very variable and they can be very tough opponents. Roll on next week.

Looking over the other results, there were no particular upsets. At this early stage it's impossible to predict of course but I would say there are five real contenders: Clan X, Clan Xe, Defiance, Exclamation and Induce. I'll stick my neck out and pick Exclamation for the Cup :).

22 September 2001 - Clan 129 Movie

I've updated the Movies page with a new movie, similar in many ways to the aYb demo, but not quite as good ;). Check out the review and download it to judge for yourself. I'm also in the process of downloading Defiance's 200Mb demo, so I'll review that as soon as I get it. It better be good :).

The 129 demo credits run to some pretty funny music (Clawfinger - Biggest and the Best), which sounds just like it's being sung by a l33t Quake player ;).

Download the movie just for that, hehe!

On the demos front, I'm thinking of starting up my Quake 3 collection again, which I took down a few months ago for being pants. I'm getting some quality ones together for the first page. Quake 2 demos are becoming harder to come by but most new ones are making their way onto XTC's Demo Central pretty quickly (as well as some old familiars). That's by far the best source for new demos at the moment, but I am still keen to create a top quality collection of my own, so I'll still upload anything worthy of my filespace :). Please send me any quality ones you have though as I always credit all sources ;). I've just uploaded a new demo, however, Polosatiy vs Antiplayer.

22 September 2001 - Logitech Optical

Just a quick update to say I've been using the Logitech optical for some weeks now, and, as well as looking gorgeous, it performs superbly too. There's no slipping or missing as has been a problem with some early optical mice and, combined with my Everglide, it's very smooth and comfortable to use. At £35 it's not too bad a price either, especially compared to Microsoft's offering. One thing I would be keen to know is how well the new optical and cordless mouse performs as mouse cords do annoy me. On my own desktop I've tried to recreate the effect of Everglide's mouse bungee, which holds the cord up in the air to simulate a cordless :). It works pretty well and makes the mouse far more easy to move. Maybe I should stop being cheap and get a real bungee though.

9 September 2001 - Night Owls

Lo, you may know about my Seinfeld obsession so this is just a quick reminder that the new series starts on Monday night, BBC 2, late on at 12:05. Why do they keep putting it on so late fgs? I don't want to be a cult viewer :)

8 September 2001 - Information Currency

I've updated my Movies page with reviews of a couple of new ones, including the Clan BiO one that's been featured on several other sites to wide acclaim and also the excellent All Your Base RA3 movie.

The guides section has been altered slightly, getting rid of the separate Quake 3 tips area and merging it all in into a single, large Quake tips section, which makes more sense really. The Quake Tips section covers all aspects of playing the game, gives detailed map and tactics tips, provides a comprehensive bind- and config-writing guide and I also have my paks ready for download. Just in case you'd forgotten ;). I've added a short netspeak guide for newbies, but then I saw this long guide with loads of net abbreviations I didn't know. Puts mine to shame tbh :).

Over on Q2Gamer, Flake has posted a "daring" list of what he believes are the Top 50 Quake 2 clans. It seems like a simple thing to do, but I don't remember ever having seen anyone post a ranked list of clans before so it's pretty interesting and sure to cause some disagreement. I doubt many people would argue over the top two positions though. Good for links too.

The UK have had a great start in the Nations Deathmatch League, with a strong result over France. Rob* has posted demos on the Clan Stealth site along with a tonne of other demos of their practice sessions. Fianlly, I've just read a satirical update on bork, discussing a new Hollywood movie of the England football win over Germany, very nice hehe!

2 September 2001 - You Get What You Give

Just to link an interesting column by Rave over on the Savage site. He's basically preaching the virtues of treating people on the net as you would treat people in real life. Good read and very true. Another good article, which I spotted on Lamerkatz, is a short satirical column on The Toque entitled "Why I Lost that Deathmatch". He comes up with every excuse imaginable :).

1 September 2001 - Order to the Chaos

Following a recent suggestion by mainop (ta), I've put up a full list of all my site's demos to make searching for particular ones a bit easier. My first site did use categories but I didn't like it because I felt that people wouldn't want to check them all to find new demos so I went with a straight chronological list. Anyway, now I've got both! I've also added another Quake movie to the movies page, another nice1 by the way and only 40-odd meg this time, doh :). I can imagine all the cable/adsl people grabbing that in like 2 minutes when it took me 2 hours :). Oh and another thing, has anyone else noticed a "slight" similarity between that new TV advert for those new Megabeanz sweets and the "All your base" cartoon?

UPDATE: I've now beefed up the movies page with some longer write-ups. I think people maybe want some more reassurance than me saying "it's top" before starting 100-odd megabyte downloads ;). I also found a way to take screenshots, so it's a nicer looking page now.

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