June 2000 Archive
28 June 2000 - Don't Give Up Haven't managed to update for a week, which is poor, I'm sorry :). I played my usual Barrysworld Q3 FFA game and finished, once again, top HPB, but couldn't manage to beat any of the LPBs. In fact last week was problably the best chance I was likely to get because it was Q3DM11, the map without a railgun :). It did help and I was leading after five minutes but lost out later on.
Some good news in my own clan. We seemed to hit an all-time low a couple of weeks ago. No one was turning up for practice and important matches were left unattended. Fortunately though it's getting sorted out and we've won the first two games of the UKCCL Mixed league, playing WW and AbFab so far. Having said that, progress in the new Free League hasn't been great, mainly due to a lack of LPBs in the squad. Might as well just pimp my work on the MKC Site while I'm here ;). So far I've made updates for every match with reports and demos for each match. There are a couple of good demos up for last night's game vs. AbFab, from Moneypenny's and Kaa's POVs. Check 'em out.
Site-wise, I spent a lot of time on that last update on the binds, I hope you got something out of it. It was also great to get a link on Barrysworld, in the Games Watch section. Was well chuffed with that :). In fact, so sad am I that I took a screenshot of it - hehe! I'm currently re-vamping the demos section. I find that the current system of various sections is a bit cluttered and cumbersome. I'll be switching to a simpler system of listing in chronological order with a favourites section. There'll also be better write-ups and ratings of individual demos. I'll dish out some new demos as well from my vast REViLLA archive chambers ;). Next demos to be featured should be a couple of classic FED-vs-UNR games :).
20 June 2000 - Heaven Bound (sorry) I've just put the finishing touches to an Advanced Teamplay Bind-Writing Guide for Quake 2. As far as I know this is the only one of its type, and I go into some pretty complex areas of bind-writing. If you play in a clan I'm sure you'll find something useful in there. Newer players in particular can learn how to edit their quake files to create coloured console characters. I believe I've created one of the best guides available so please check it out.
20 June 2000 - Steaming It (ish) Had a two month high of 51 hits in one day yesterday, which is good going for my site. Just shows that I need to update more :). In March I had 307 hits, April 404, May 513 and so far this month 428. At the same rate I should finish with over 600 in June and will bust through the 2000 hits barrier where I will overtake my old site. Added together that means I'll have had 4000 hits which is pretty good. Seems to suggest clear growth anyway, which is great. I have several ideas still and I'm still toying with the idea of accepting contributions, but that could be risky and/or offensive if I rejected them :). I'd certainly be reluctant for people to write central column updates, but reviews of software/hardware is something that I can't do at the moment because I don't buy enough :). I'm wavering on that score.
18 June 2000 - Guide to IRC Learn all about IRC in my new guide, including how to do annoying things like this (what have I done - hehe):
18 June 2000 - The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands
OK, so I was bored. Actually very easy to make, just set cg_railtrailtime to some mad figure and then keep changing your rail colour. Being a flash kind of guy, my rail changes colour every time I select it :).
18 June 2000 - Demo Competition at Quake3World Anyway, the results are up and there are a load of very cool short Quake 3 demos to be downloaded. The winner's demo is a continuous set of amazing jumps around Q3Tourney6 (The Very End of You). You know the switch thing at the top that you shoot. He manages to rocket jump onto that. I was also impressed with the runner up. He manages a circle jump accross Q3DM8, from one side of the hall to the other. Not at all easy. Anyway, go check 'em out. The site's not a bad one either with some very interesting news articles, including one that caught my eye about a Quake 3 engine powered platform game. Hehe.
18 June 2000 - New Quake 2 Demo Lo, quick update to mention a new Quake 2 demo up in the Clans section. It's on a LAN and focuses on top-player [lm]Voo. He's in the rail position on The Edge and gets 60 frags. Need I say more. Ta to Zipgun for the demo.
16 June 2000 - He's Blue Ba Da Bee..... You've probably read by now about Blue, of Clan9, winning the big Quake 3 CPL/Atomic Arena tournament in Asia. This was the follow-up to the massive $100000 tournament in Dallas a couple of months ago. A lot of the professionals made the journey out there, including Hakeem, Sujoy, Fatality and Blue. Blue proved invincible right up to the final, but Fatality had been knocked into the losers bracket by a pro-Korean player, s21.0 (catchy eh?). Anyway, Fatality reached the final, but because Blue hadn't lost Fatality had the task of beating him twice to take the trophy (or more importantly the $3500 cash). He managed it in game 1, but narrowly lost game 2, so Blue, a Swedish player, walked away the victor. Great stuff. The next big CPL event is being held up in Scandinavia, so he can be expected to make a good showing there too. Nice to see someone finally beat Fatality anyway. All four finals demos (two matches from each POV), along with loads of other demos of the final matches and some coverage of the event, are available over at Cached. Find the demos here.
16 June 2000 - BWQ3FFA Week 2
Small update just to say that this week wasn't any better in the FFA league. Looks like I may be on my way down a division this time. There are just too many decent LPBs to compete with. Still, Division 4 may be fun, actually winning sometimes, just maybe :).
14 June 2000 - Blatant Correography I've put up two new demos in the Quake 2 movie section, the Xenoclan Shift demo and the Ex-SAGE Showdown. Both superb recams, check 'em out now if you haven't seen them. Oh and don't baulk at the 7.5 Mb download, it's worth it I promise :).
14 June 2000 - New UKCCL Season After what seems like weeks of waiting the league has restarted. Unfortunately the clan I'm in, MKC, is having some internal problems at the moment which isn't exactly what you need at the start of a season. Oh well. Read more here.
10 June 2000 - Modern Classic I was browsing Cs' site and found a link to a recent game of theirs with Rv. This is a fantastic close clan game on The Edge, definitely a classic game. Find it here. I've also just read on the UKCCL board that MKC have found their way into Division 1 of the UKCCL's new Free League. Whoopah!, or something :). Looks like they're be some great games ahead with FED, CS and Rv. Doesn't really affect me though as a HPB, but it's exciting all the same.
8 June 2000 - Division 3C, Again?! Just played my first game in Division 3c of the Barrysworld Quake FFA League. This is my third season now and it looks set to be the toughest yet. When I arrived on the server there were five LPBs waiting for me, I was the only HPB. Fortunately HMonkey arrived to give me some company so I wasn't the only frag-bait :). I quite enjoyed the game, but I'm more rusty at it than I was a couple of seasons ago when I played Q3 full-time. Really I was only playing not to be last, but it's a laugh all the same. Well done to my clanmate [MKC]Prophet for winning by a good margin.
After what seems like weeks of aimlessness with no league action I played a couple of great games of Unreal Tournament with MKC last night. We lost both unfortunately but only by small margins. Developing tactics for new and fresh maps is good fun and I enjoyed every minute despite losing. Clan games are very fast and frenetic and people who claim UT's weapons lack ooomph have obviously never experienced a flak gun in the face or a slicer through the neck - hehe, though I got my own neck a few times. Anyway, looking forward to further games. On the Quake 3 front I'm also a member of MKC offshoot team DP, Dark Prophecy, so there may be some 2v2's coming up. It's a big league and we're starting in Division 3. Find out more here. Site-wise, I've had a request for a Memento Mori demo so there's one up in the Quake 2 Demos section.
3 June 2000 - England Team Btw, just in case you've heard about the Barrysworld England team trials run by Sujoy for the soon to be held Barrysworld European Championship but haven't seen the demos, they're linked on Quakenation and below. Sujoy's the captain and has announced the team as below. Click for their trial demos. Final Team: Anarchy, Billox, Blokey, Mist, Mozilla, Q50, Timber, Vorv Other Trialists: Stormkeep, Requiem, Veno, Tek, Oppy
3 June 2000 - Lava Hehe, people are funny. I've just been playing a deathmatch on Lava Tomb and people get so annoyed at the lava. Whenever you play it you'll frequently see:
Killer has fallen into the lava Some people just can't cope - hehe.
3 June 2000 - Team Play I don't know for sure how many people read my last column but it came a day before a column by S.A.S on a similar subject at www.barrysworld.com. There he was arguing that Quake, generally, was dying out, to be replaced by more team focused games like Tribes and Counterstrike. Bigfoot followed up with a conflicting argument that team play is strong in Quake 3 due to more even balanced weapons, etc. For my part I would have to say that a lot of people don't want a really complex game. Part of the beauty of straight Quake-style Deathmatch is the way you just connect and start fragging. No navigating menus or issuing binds, it's just in-your-face competitive action. As for the teamplay element of Quake, team games are definitely fun, when they work, but they can also be incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, fighting with teammates, gaining victories together, practising tactics and then implementing them can be incredibly rewarding but then again team games can annoy. Standard DM teamplay consists, as everyone knows, of a 4v4. Noting simpler than that you might say. Well that's true, but how many battles are genuinely even, both between teams and within teams. Either one team is vastly superior to the extent that the opposing team just loses morale early on and plays out the match, hoping to salvage some respect and not look too lame, or the teams are even but there may be one wonder player in one and/or both teams. One that propels one team to victory with the lower standard players feeding off that one's domination. At the other end of the scoreboard, the lower scoring players feel embarrassed about their scoreline to the point where they sometimes don't want to play anymore. Quake 3 is especially misleading, just looking at scores. In Quake 2 battleground you are at least shown the deaths as well as kills. Most players realise that it's the net difference between kills and deaths that is your real score. By getting 10 frags and 8 deaths a player has contributed +2 to the score, whereas a player with 17 frags and 20 deaths has contributed -3 to the score, a worse performance even though the latter will be top of the board. It must be remembered that each death is one point in favour of the enemy. In Quake 3 all you see is kills which, to my mind, encourages recklessness because players no longer care about how their efficiency will look, they just want frags to be top of the scoreboard. I would argue that at the end of a match a lot of players look perhaps first at their own score in relation to their teammates and then at the match result. It's that aspect that can make the game frustrating, especially when you take into account the fact that some players inevitably get the better fragging roles, such as being the quad whore. The lift guard is never going to obtain the same kills. Then we come on to tactics, the thing that people argue makes Counterstrike so good. Personally I get bored of tactics very easily. Some maps obviously demand areas and weapons to be controlled but it also stifles the game. My idea of a perfect game is where you can be flexible and move around a bit, guarding your allocated area when necessary but also free to wander around. However, unless your opponents either have no tactics or just aren't very good, you won't win like that. The trick is to hold position, catch every spawn and to warn your teammates the instant you lose position. Basic area control and quad timing tactics are fine but I think I would find anything more elaborate quite annoying, mainly because things *never* go to plan and one person failing in their task tends to throw everything out the window. So no I don't think the concept of a simple fragging game like Quake is dead yet, because the very fact that it's simple means you can just get on with it and play.
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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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