July/August 2000 Archive
22 August 2000 - Addicts Lo demo addicts, I've uploaded two new demos for you, both brilliant, one for Quake 2 and one for Quake 3.
22 August 2000 - Diversions Haven't been updating as much recently because I've had more to do in my team, MKC. In fact I've just designed the MKC site in a very clean and fresh style. Have a look please.
14 August 2000 - Demo Links Lo, soz I'm neglecting my site at the moment, just can't find much motivation at the moment :(. Anyway, a few people have reported problems downloading demos from the gamesinferno domain. I ignored them for a while because I thought it was just Gamesinferno being poor but they've updated to "hosted.gamesinferno.com" urls so that's why. Anyway, they're up-to-date now. That includes most of the recent demos.
30 July 2000 - Web News Another site that's been going a few weeks is Challenge-UK. There is a worldwide network of Challenge sites for various countries/regions but now we finally have one of own. The site is well designed with good UK scene based news. There's also an interesting column by Rude about the apparently unfair imposition of rate capping on servers. He argues the case for dropping the cap pretty well but it probably won't happen. In Quake 2 I'd prefer to see more stringent FPS capping because it's that that does modemers in. One of my column articles became the focus of a UKCCL message board debate, which was nice :). It revolved around the aliasing part on my recent State of UK Quake 2 column. Must say I was pleased and no one's slagged me off so far :). Actually, I've now restructured the section. It was previously a massive page with loads of pictures on so I pity those who tried to click the posted link. Most of them probably gave up to be honest - hehe. Anyway, it's divided up now with one page per article. The way it should have been :o/. Demonic Core have finally sorted themselves out with a website and it's very good indeed. Regularly updated with general news as well as member columns and several demos to download. This is what a clan site should be like - well worth keeping an eye on.
30 July 2000 - Cleaning the Cobwebs A good couple of weeks' gaming since my last update. First off I played with [MKC]Caldazar in the Quake 3 Clanwars 2v2 League against [UNR]Rude and [UNR]Luke. Obviously, with us both being HPBs against these two was a nightmare, but I still enjoyed it as an "experience" :). I've decided I'm going to largely drop playing Quake 3 until I get a new connection. On the subject of UNR, why oh why does it take over half a year to do a Q3 redesign of their site. No news, no demos, no nothing in fact. Doh! But, having said that, RA3 is now here! It took me around five hours to download and I'm a third of the way through downloading the music. I haven't played it yet though so I'll report back once I've given it a good test. By the way, I imagine you know where to find RA3 but if not it's here. Also played some great games with MKC this week. First up was an amazingly close game with AMG on The Frag Pipe, a full report and my demo for which are up on the MKC site. Next I played a UT match, the last of the current Barrysworld season. I had been thinking of dropping UT but I enjoyed the match so much I'm going to continue with it for now.
30 July 2000 - Mouse Trouble About a month ago I decided my two year old Logitech Mouseman Plus was past it and I replaced it with a Microsoft Intellieye Explorer. This is the mouse wih the laser eye. Now it wasn't quite as plug-and-play as it should have been. The idea of USB is to plug it in, install the drivers and away it goes. My Windows 98 didn't seem ready for USB though and insisted on me inserting the WIndows 98 CD several times and never found what it wanted :). Eventually though it worked and I booted up Quake 2 immediately. It was jerky as hell! The cursor was all over the place. If I moved it too fast my character was spinning round and round. Not impressed. However, it cost £50 so I persevered and lowered the speed of the mouse and dumped the 3M Precise surface and used a book, a piece of paper, glass (no movement whatsoever), and finally a piece of varnished wood from a cabinet! This was the best surface and the mouse finally moved reasonably well. I tested it with Mouserate though and found I was only getting 90-100Hz sampling speed which is very rough after coming down from the Logitech at 200Hz. So I tried the PS2 connector but the rate was still max-ed at 100Hz. Bugger. I struggled on with the thing for about 6 weeks, all the time getting worse and worse at Quake2, and so, at last I've taken it out and gone back to my trusty old Logitech. £50 wasted. I still want to replace the Logitech which, though class, is a bit worn out. However, the only ones on sale are USB ones and I'm concerned that these too will have a max rate of 100Hz, even with the supplied PS2 connector. Don't want to spend another £25 on top and then go back to my old one again :(. I'm just not sure whether it was the laser technology of the Microsoft that meant it couldn't go to 200Hz even with a PS2 connector or whether that's a feature of USB mice in general. If anyone can confirm that you can use the Logitech USB with its PS2 connector at 200Hz with PS2rate please mail me :).
16 July 2000 - UKCCL News
Not much has been happening for my clan this week due to the UKCCL cup being finished off at last! CS were the ultimate and easily predicted winners, both of the LPB and HPB cups. One thing that annoys me about the UKCCL at times is that there hardly seems to be any prize for winning. I wouldn't expect actual prizes but I think a clan should get more than a simple news update :). Maybe the roster of actual playing members could be shown. Not the full roster because a lot of clans contain a lot of glory-sharing members who never play. So, a list of the winning players might be some reward and would also encourage people to play better and demand games :). My clan, MKC, has finally recruited some new talent following one of the longest threads ever seen on the UKCCL messageboard, though none of it was about us :). In fact after the initial load of tripe arguments an interesting debate arose about who the best HPBs are. I've often wondered about this myself. Most of the names cited are duellers which is quite a limited area to judge someone on in my opinion. The best HPB I ever played with was probably ReLiC in RA2. He put a lot of LPBs to shame with some of his railing. On the servers today CS^SkydanceR strikes me as an excellent HPB and another big clap on the back to him for not aliasing all the time despite being in CS. His skills are so good though he probably doesn't fear any embarrassment of playing shit. Who else is there? Obviously Blokey in Quake 3 springs out as maybe the best ever HPB imo, along with vorvavoo. Both of these players would be fielded along with the LPBs in Free games which is very unusual and it wasn't just their duelling they were renowned for but also their teamplay. Of course some HPBs get away with using "rates" in excess of 5000 and frames per second over 75. Others can barely go above 40 so there's some element of luck in what your conditions are like. Personally, I think my setup gives me a fair chance. I use a rate of 4800 and frames per second of 67. Not 65, not 70, but 67 ;). I thought that people mentioning LPBs who use modems sometimes was wrong. If you've got ISDN you're a LPB. ISDN improves your play not just through the connection but also leads to you playing more and improving in that way so coming back to a modem you'll still be very decent. Anyway, some of the debate has been interesting so check it out here.
16 July 2000 - Fatality Interview No, not by me, I don't have that kind of pulling power ;). There's quite an in-depth interview of Fatality, undeniably the greatest Quake 3 player of all time (um 7 months) over at Stomped, though. Interesting reading. Seems he's a regular guy, plays loads of sports, goes out with his girlfriend. All this and a great gamesplayer :). Here's his advice: Stomped: Can you give any advice to players who would like to be like you one day? Fatality: You have to practice hard and have a good schedule for practicing. Practicing your aim is the key to Quake 3 and after that you will want to know how to play maps. Watch demos of players who play in really tough matches and you will learn a lot. I've learned everything by actually being there in previous situations and thats how I win. I win with aim, knowledge, prediction and timing. Aiming comes from practicing and prediction, timing and knowledge comes from playing a lot of 1on1's. You can win with really strong knowledge, but if you have aim to go with the knowledge, you'll win by a lot more. Good luck. Don't know about you but I find it quite pointless/frustrating reading advice like that. Firstly, everyone practises their aim in every game they play. I've watched countless demos but to me it's one thing seeing a great player gliding around the map and picking off some hapless foe and quite another to actually replicate the feat. Being in the situations, well I think to think I learn from my mistakes but the fact you know it's a mistake to charge someone down when you only have 5 health doesn't always stop you - hehe. To be fair, it's not easy to tell people how you play. A feature I've been considering for a while is a deathmatch playing guide focused around some actual demos of me playing. Thing is, I'm a weird player. I play to win but I don't always play in the way you need to to win. By that I mean that some players, whilst not openly camping, will hang around in the water on DM1, say, and get frags. OK they don't stay there long enough to be called a camper but they push it ;). Or they might have a very rigid route that takes them to all the busiest areas. I'm pretty fixed on my idea of how deathmatch should be played, i.e. moving around, never stopping. Another problem with my play is the fact that I insist on always using the rail if I have it. It's a fixation - hehe. I have been trying to force myself to use other weapons recently, in particular the chainer and super shotgun in FFA, because I've seen other players use it to great effect. SHAFT! was always a big super shotgun user and it worked for him. That's one of the big bonuses of Quake 3, the ability to almost instantly change your weapon. Occasionally, when I'm feeling in a flamboyant mood (mostly) I try the same things in Quake 2. Rocket jump in the air and switch to rail. It might switch in time for you to hit the ground :).
9 July 2000 - Quake 3 Demo Section I've now updated the Quake 3 demo section so it's in the same format as the Quake 2 section. I've been severaly neglecting Quake 3 demos since I came back to play Quake 2 more, so I've put up a recent top match between Four Kings and Scorchio. On the Quake 2 front I've put up a demo of Memento Mori vs Clan 9, which is a classic. Enjoy!!
9 July 2000 - MB Threads [MKC]Hex put up a message on the UKCCL Open messageboard advertising for new players. The UKCCL board being as it is, it turned into a big slagging off session and has now run to over 130 posts. It went from scraps between Pigeon and Exor to a discussion of who the best HPBs are. Hehe, don't think any of the posts relate to our request :). It's till not quite as bad the old UKCCL board which was nothing but arguments but it's getting pretty close.
9 July 2000 - New Hit Counter I've replaced the hit counter with a new Nedstat one. The Beseen one had gone dodgy, showing me with 100 hits :). Beseen's support e-mail wasn't useful. The corrections it suggested put the hits down to 1 - hehe. Anyway, the new counter shows more detailed information and from what I've been reading in .net magazine, numeric hit counters such as Beseen's are very passe these days :)) lol. For the record I was up to 2350 hits before the new counter, which obviously enough starts back at 1.
8 July 2000 - Cruel Mistress Played with MKC against LE on Q2DM2 this week. What a thoroughly boring map that is. Even in FFA I sigh now, maybe even a bigger sigh than Lost Hallways causes :). We actually lost both our matches this week which was a shame. The CS loss wasn't exactly a surprise but I hoped to do better against LE. It's also been an interesting week trialing some MKC hopefuls. I'd never been involved in trialing anyone before but it was quite good fun. I especially liked putting them all on the same team and letting them play off - hehe! Yes I am a bast :). Should have 1 or more new LPB members by the end of the week, the votings still going on at the moment. Sites-wise I was pleased to see the return of Ride The Rocket at Planetquake, a Quake trick-jump challenge site. There are already some class demos up of amazing jumps. Also find excellent write-ups and demos of the recent Q3 CPL qualifiers here at Eurogamer. Great QW player Timber won by the way :). 1 July 2000 - Quake 2 Demo Section I've completely revamped the Quake 2 demo section, listing demos in order of upload along with pictures and ratings. There's also a new Top 10 listing. To go along with the new format I've uploaded 5 clan demos of Clan Unreal. Two against FED and three against Clan-9. Hope you enjoy them.......
1 July 2000 - Completed Season 3 of the BWQ3FFA Played week four's match and for the fourth week running I was top HPB but couldn't beat any LPBs. Grr :). Quite pleased though because I've finished mid-table above a LPB who missed a match (hehe) so I shouldn't get demoted. Division 3C for the fourth season running? Actually athena was saying she will be re-structuring the league next season because so many people are not turning up :(. Congratuations to my team-mate [MKC]Prophet for a good performance, finishing second overall.
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Barrysworld have posted a good link to a guide to l33t 5p34k which any aspiring gits could do well to study ;). Find it 
I've been practising more FFA this week in an effort to regain some lost skill. It's very easy to go online and then just prat about browsing and reading message boards when you should be playing. Quake's a cruel mistress to be honest and if you neglect her she will punish you. Um what am I on about :).
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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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