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Thursday, October 29th, 1998

Barrysworld Up and Running
After a recent incident with a serious hacker, the Barrysworld site is now back in business. This doesn't affect me much, other than the fact I can connect there and I can now upload some demos to my site.

I can also go and read the rules and regs to see what the criteria is for Barrysworld to host my site. Hmm, I wish I could remember that addy I was suppose to go to. (not a joke)

More BW Stuff
Since Barrysworld are one of the largest Quake / Quake 2 servers in the world, they probably have the highest population of "undesirable" players on their servers. To remedy this, BW now has a the "latest Zbot kicking code in place together with automatic Rate capping, Global IP banning and Global Name banning". Anyway, you can download the Q2 server plug-in here. (hmm, I had to find this link someplace other than the BW site) I think that all Q2 servers should be running this program. Hmm, wonder if I'm ever gonna get on their servers now? Oh well, they never did before, why should they start now. :-)

Quake II Ground Zero Survey
For those that have tried it, Go fill out Rogue's Ground Zero Survey. Let them know exactly what you think of their Quake 2 mission pack.

New Qizmo Released
The ever popular QuakeWorld proxy Qizmo v2.5 has been released. It has lots of new features including anti-cheats and the ability to dramatically increase your PS/2 sampling rate from 40Hz, all the way up to 200Hz.

War Has Been Declared
Gonzo sent word that he has released his Quake deathmatch level "Warfare"  (217kb). It's a nice 1on1 or 3-5 player FFA level that reminds me a bit of Aerowalk. Go take a look.

Site Stuff

Monday, October 26th, 1998 - 2nd Update Today

Fast Demos
I was looking through all the great demos they have on the Speed Demo Archives page and I found This Demo (142kb). It's a demo that finishes Quake level E1M7 (The House of Chthon) in 34 seconds WITHOUT a Rocket Launcher or Armor. Download it and take a look. I would've ended up lava swimming about 10 times.

Heretic II Slows The Internet
Raven Software / Activision released the demo of Heretic 2 on Friday and the net has been slow ever since. Quite a few people have lots of nice things to say about the game. Here's my take on it.

I tried the demo and I have mixed thoughts on it. Raven Software is the only company that that has continuously done justice to the id Software 3D engines. This time is no exception. The game is gorgeous. The art, the levels, the enemy ai and of course, the engine are all great.

The bad news is that I probably won't play the game. I don't understand why a company would take arguably the best 3D engine and make a 3rd person shooter game. I've never cared for 3rd person shooter games such as Tomb Raider etc. Not that it's a bad game, I just don't care for 3rd person games.

BluesNews has a whole stack of cheats and game codes on this page. Oh, and the command "Quake_amount" that they can't explain is whether or not the earthquake feature is enabled in the game.

Quake Poll Brings More Responses
The Quake world continues to be "a buzz" from the results of the "Ultimate Quake Poll 2". I'm not sure why it is that people complain after thousands of people have voted. I personally, disagree with a lot of them but, I'm not going to worry about it. The poll was a lot of fun and people should take the poll as is.

This isn't to say that the response was negative, far from it. The vast majority of the mail I received was possitive. It also had the cool side-effect of people saying "hey, post some of our demos". In the next day or two, I'll have a couple of demos from clans like Negative Burn, Z and SK. :)

New Winamp Released
Everybodies favorite MP3 player (hey, those are illegal!) Winamp is now available in a shiny new package called Winamp v2.04.

This Just In!
Another Shogo patch coming very soon. Umm, this may seem like a joke but it's not. Shogo now holds the record of releasing the most patches within a week of the official game release date. Their total now stands at 1,527 patches. Keep up the great work guys. (note: it may not be exactly that amount as they may release more patches by the time you read this. umm, it's also very tongue in cheek)

Oh, and to make sure they release more patches, you can send any bugs and general feedback on their bug report page. It's hard to imagine that Shogo would need a page like this.

Site Stuff

Friday, October 23rd, 1998

Quake Poll Brings A Huge Response
The Quake world continues it's love / hate relationship with Thresh and many others in the "Ultimate Quake Poll 2". If you haven't seen the results yet, please go and take a look. It was very hard work but it was also very rewarding. The response for the poll was amazing.

I've put some of my thoughts regarding the poll in my .plan file.

All Heretics Day errr, Not!
With all the grace of wounded duck, Raven Software couldn't live up to their promise and provide the long awaited demo of "Heretic II" on Thursday.

Raven Software programmer Rick Johnson updated his .plan with the following information.

"Boy, a *free* demo is delayed a few hours, and people go nuts. I would hate to hear what you have to say for games that are delayed for over a year?"

Well Rick, that depends on whether the game that was delayed a year was a) hyped, flogged  and promoted on every gaming site this side of China, b) was given a special name for the day / date it was to be released and c) the release date was promised to the public. Other than that, I can guess that some people might be a tad upset.

Heretic II Demo Released
A day late but better late than never, Raven Software "just" released the Heretic II demo approximately 10 minutes ago. You can download it here (37 Megs).

Cracked, And Broken
The bad news is that Golgotha creators Crack dot com has gone broke and is closing their doors. The good news is that crack dot com is releasing the source code for Golgotha. This is a full blown 3D engine for anybody to develope a game with. The really cool news is that it's all free.

In his .plan update, Dave Taylor (owner of Crack dot com) had the following to say:

WHAT: Crack dot Com is closing its doors.

WHY: Ran out of cash.

REALLY WHY: Lot of reasons, but then again, there are a lot of reasons that we got as far as we did. I think the killer reason, though, was that Golgotha was compared by publishers primarily to Battlezone and Uprising, and those titles sold really poorly.

WHAT NOW?: Now we file articles of dissolution w/ the secretary of state, and we file bankruptcy.

IS THAT IT?: No.

WHAT ELSE?: We're releasing the Golgotha source code, and data to the public domain.

HELL YES! WHERE'S THE SOURCE CODE?: I want to personally thank everyone who supported & rooted for us. That was really nice of you.

YEAH YEAH, BLAH BLAH, WHERE'S THE SOURCE?: I want to apologize to the fans and business partners we've let down.

BOO HOO! WE CARE. OUT WITH IT!: Thanks for your patience. The source & data can be found at http://www.crack.com/golgotha_release. And of course, the ex-Crack developers are up to new & interesting things which you can follow at the web site.

WAIT A MINUTE. IS THIS STUFF FREE BECAUSE IT SUCKS?: No. Even if you thought the code sucked, there are 15 gorgeous pieces of music, 100 cool sound effects, and over 2000 hi-resolution textures. But trust me, even the code is cool. It's an ultra-modular outdoor 3D engine, and it does WAY more than Battlezone or Uprising even came close to. Check out the features page. You should definitely check it out if you've ever wanted a public domain, competetive, outdoor 3D engine.

THANKS!: Welcome. Have a happy.

Sorry to hear the bad news Dave. Good luck in the future. Shame to hear that all this happened so soon after your wedding day.

Quake II v3.20 Beta Released
id released v3.20 beta for Quake 2 yesterday. I haven't tried it yet as I don't like using beta products. I'll probably wait until they release the completed non beta of Quake 2. I'm sure it won't take too long as it's already been 10 months. You can download the Win95/98 version here. If you want the other versions, got to the id ftp site.

Shogo A No Go (so far)
After the game Shogo was "officially" released in stores last week and then a patch was released for it on the same day, now the silliness gets taken one step beyond. On Friday (today), Monolith will release the multiplayer patch for the game. Here's a segment of the message that was posted on Shugashack.

"Unfortunately, they left out one important piece of info...the version of the patch we are talking about releasling on Friday is an *ALPHA* version. The internet play is awesome--but it's not totally finished and/or bug-free yet. There are also tweaks we're making to the single-player game as well."

Umm, did I mention something the other day about games that were being released before they were finished? LOL

Site Stuff

Wednesday, October 21st, 1998

Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Results
They're finally here. After two days of compiling numbers, the results of the Ultimate Quake Poll 2 are now available. A few surprises, a few changes and lots of results. Go check them out.

Tuesday, October 20th, 1998 - Early A.M.

Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Results Coming Soon
I'm feverishly working on the Ultimate Quake Poll 2 results. There were over 3400 entries in each category after I deleted around 250 multiple voters (most from Finland) so, it takes a while. I've finally gotten it to a "workable" size and I'm starting to compile all the totals. I should have the results posted later today. Please check back in a bit.

I must say that I'm a bit disappointed because "Cheesy Poofs" didn't make the finals in the "Favorite Quake Snack" category. :-(

Sunday, October 18th, 1998

Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Finishes
The Ultimate Quake Poll 2 voting has ended. Thanks to everybody who took the time to answer the questions. The results should be done by Monday (fingers crossed) and I will post them as soon as possible.

Site Stuff

Saturday, October 17th, 1998

Last Day for Quake Poll
The Ultimate Quake Poll 2 will cease to exist as of midnight tonight. The voting numbers were MUCH higher than the last Quake poll. To give you an example of how big the results file is, it took (literally) 24 minutes to load the file into MS Excel on a machine with 64 megs of ram.

If you haven't voted and especially if you're from the USA or the UK, please vote today.

Thresh Kicks Some Quakeadelica Ass
Paul2 was quoted as saying that Quake 2 was "a bag of 3dfx spank". I'm not sure the game is that bad but, you can see his point. One of the good points about Q2 is that the smarter you play, the better you'll do in matches. Level knowledge and sounds are even more important in Q2 than they were in Quake.

Billox won the Quakeadelica (PQ coverage) competition and with that honor came the rights to a one game playdown against Thresh. Thresh is still the smartest player I've seen and no matter what happened in Sweden, he's still the toughest 1on1 opponent around. It wasn't a pretty sight and Thresh won the match with relative ease. Once he had a few frags under his belt, he was seemingly unstoppable. You can download the demo here. (re-cammed version, 484 KB)

Since Thresh wrote the bible (err sort of), you know that he has studied all facets of Q2 and  he would be a tough person to beat. Talent and good reactions won't win as many games with Q2, especially against a player like Thresh. Once he gets an advantage, it's very hard to take it away from him.

Oh, and make sure you check out the interview with the London cabbie from the morning after the match. It's hilarious.

Diamond's In The Rough
If your neighbor decides to sue you, you tend not to take it too seriously. This isn't the case for Diamond Multimedia. Diamond is being sued by mega-giant Creative Labs. Here's the ZDNet post in regards to the story.

Creative Labs Inc. filed suit against Diamond Multimedia Inc. accusing its rival graphics board maker of false advertising, unfair business practices, trade libel and defamation. Diamond executives declined comment, saying they had not seen the suit.

New Quake Frogbot
Metro has the latest release of the only decent DM4 and DM6 bot for regular Quake. They have released v0.12 of the FrogBot. The new release offers many fixes and enhancements.

Site Stuff

Friday, October 16th, 1998

Quake Poll Need YOU!
The Ultimate Quake Poll is going very very strong and there are quite a few surprises in the voting. Here are just a few of the notable things I've seen.

There's the challenge for all you American and British Quakers, get those votes in before I tell Paul2 what bad little boys and girls you've been.

I'll probably end the voting this weekend and the partake the arduous task of compiling all the data. The massive results will be cool to see.

Quake II Internet Pack: Extremities [Blues]
id Software announced today that they will be releasing a compilation of community created mods packaged as a retail product called "Quake II Internet Pack No. 1: Extremities". Here's the official announcement:

"As you all know, the id development team is hard at work on Quake III Arena. We do, however, come up for air and some fun in between all the work. This is where the idea of "Quake II Internet Pack No. 1: Extremities" originated. Many of us at id have enjoyed the great mods created by the community and we recognize the hard work and high production quality that goes into creating them. This convinced us to bundle some of the best Quake II Internet mods as a retail product. Yep, retail. Extremities will make these mods available to fans who might otherwise not be aware of these great works. This is a great way we at id can recognize some of the great work that's being done out there in the community.

I will update you with more information about which mods will be included as well as when you can expect to see Extremities on the retail shelves once these details are finalized.

Hmm, I'm no rocket surgeon but let me see if I have this correct. id Software is going to put together a bunch of Quake 2 mods. Then they want us to pay money for these same mods that we can download for free on the internet? Now I understand why these guys are so popular. :)

DOOMSday Birthday
I forgot to mention this the other day. October 10th was the 4th anniversary of the release of Doom II.  Needless to say, it was a banner day for the gaming industry.

Sujoy Meets Thresh But No Frags
I noticed on Sujoy's site that he had a nice chat with Thresh who was in London for the Quakeadelica challenge. He has some nice words to say about their conversation.

Fragga Vs Reaper Demo
I've had quite a few requests to post the old demo of Fragga against 1 Skill 3 Reaper bot on DM4. Well, you can download the demo here. (174 KB) I remember at the time it was recorded that it was pretty cool and a good demonstration of how effective the grenade launcher can be against the Reapers on DM4 as they have a habit of sitting on the bottom level. When I watch it now, it seems a bit err umm well, watch it yourself.

Site Stuff

Wednesday, October 14th, 1998 - sCary is God! :-)

Site Stuff

Tuesday, October 13th, 1998 - Methos Is A Birthday Boy

Quake Poll Doing Very Nicely, Thank You
After being mentioned on nearly every major Quake site (cept sCary's), the hits came fast and furious for the Ultimate Quake Poll 2. Once again, the votes have been interesting to say the least. Even without seeing what country the person is from, I can usually tell when the voter is from the USA. When they get to "Best DM4 Player", they usually say something like "some Euro guy".   LOL

Since nobody seems to read what it says at the top of the voting page, PLEASE READ THIS. if you get a "Front Page Error" after clicking the submit button, don't worry about it. It just means that it couldn't resolve your ip address. Your votes have been saved and there's no problem. You DON'T have to send me e-mail about it. Grrr :)

Opinions Are Like As.. err umm
The writer of this article called "Is id Losing Their Grip" asked me to mention it. It's a long opinionated read but I suppose some points are valid. You can decide for yourself.

Speaking of Opinions
I was going to mention this site ages ago but, I forgot. For those that want to know where the "good" Americans have their Quake chats. Try the messageboard called "As The QuakeWorld Turns". Some days it's pretty slow there, other days, people have lots to say. Hmm, maybe I should send Paul2 over there to aquaint himself with the Americans. LOL

Computer Games Addictive? [Blues]
I just had to laugh when I saw this. I couldn't believe somebody spent money to find out this info.

"Games An Addiction? is a GameCenter article that cites a new British study that indicates that gaming might be an addictive habit."

Heh, they could've given me the job and I would've had the study done in less than 10 minutes at a very reasonable cost. :-)

Heretic ll Demo Date
Raven Software and Activision announcement the Heretic II demo release date as Thursday, October 22, 1998. Here's the scoop:

Heretic II News: Gamers - prepare to renew your faith on All Heretics Day, Thursday, October 22! Activision, Inc. and Raven Software will launch the highly anticipated Heretic II demo. The launch will also include giveaways from Diamond and Mad Catz. The demo, which is comprised of two single player and two multiplayer levels, will debut simultaneously on Activision's Web site (www.activision.com) and on GameSpot's Spotlight (www.gamespot.com) at 6:00p.m. PDT.

That would be 9:00 p.m. Eastern and 2:00 a.m. GMT for those that don't live on the west coast of the USA.

Site Stuff

Sunday, October 11th, 1998 - Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Posted

Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Posted
The Ultimate Quake Poll 2 page has now been posted. It's bigger and better than the last one. This means that your intelligent opinions are required. Please make sure you take a few minutes and vote.

Saturday, October 10th, 1998 - Minor Update

Ultimate Quake Poll 2 Ready To Go
I finished putting together the Ultimate Quake Poll 2 page last night. I will post it later tomorrow evening. The first poll had 40 questions, this one has over 50 questions. Thanks to all the people who send in their ideas for the poll.

PC Gamer Gets Scoop
I don't usually mention any type of computer magazine on my pages but I wanted to mention something about the latest edition of PC Gamer. I picked up the latest edition (November) and was very impressed with the job they did. It has 13 pages of Quake 3 Arena, a John Carmack interview and a Todd Hollenshead interview. Very in-depth stuff. Plus, a sneak preview of Tomb Raider 3. Just to top it off, the Thresh column is about the DeathRow & [9] matches. What more could you want from a puter mag? Go get it and take a look.

Friday, October 9th, 1998

Ultimate Quake Poll 2
The Ultimate Quake Poll 2 will start on October 13th. I'll try to get it on-line before then but, it will be Tuesday as the "official" starting date. If anybody has ideas for questions that weren't on the previous one, please send me e-mail with your ideas.

Australia Vs New Zealand Tourney
Hoony sent along word that he and Greyseer are putting together (with the help of a lot of other people) an Aussie / NZ tourney at the end of November. For more info, head over to Challenge.AU and get the scoop.

Methos Quake Moving?
I just received the official "canned" message from Barrysworld mentioning that the Llamanet servers will be shut down in a month or two. I do appreciate the advanced notice. Most host sites I've dealt with tend to give you very short notice.

Tony and the guys over at BW have been pretty nice to me in the past (where's my damn shirts!) and I've enjoyed being associated with them. Anyway, now I have to decide whether or not I want to stay on the BW servers or find a new home. Although, there's no "real" problem, I have a couple of concerns that I need cleared up before I can make a final decision.

Half-Life Coming Soon?
The 1st person shooter from Sierra called "Half-Life" (I guess that's better than no-life) is still on target for release. The Electronics Boutique reported a December 2nd release date. When Sierra was contacted, they said the following:

"We've seen what's been posted on the EB website and it is incorrect. Half-Life is still on track to go gold later this month and be in stores by November. We are contacting EB today to alert them of this."

Official Quake III Arena Site
It was only a matter of time. id Software has opened their "official" Quake 3 Arena site. You won't find anything there except for a pretty picture.

In some ways, it's a lot like my site. All form and no substance.  :-)

New QuakeStarter
QuakeStarter v0.64b, which is a front-end type programs for Quake and Quake 2 is now available for download. It also offers support for using a Compression Manager add-on to zip TCs. Seems like a cool program. I think I'll give it a try.

Another Quake Babe™
Okay, for those that can't get enough. Here's another Quake Babe™ for all of you guys. This girl is truly deserved of being called a Quake Babe™. The picture was submitted by Malby who says the following. "Natalie [KN], well, ex KN member, ex Tormented Souls member.. friend of mine, good quaker too." The only thing I have to say about her is "w00p!!!".

nat.jpg (8467 bytes)

As per usual, Natalie will receive my traditional marriage proposal. I certainly hopes she accepts it. :-)

GibFest II Coming Soon
Received word from [TC] Reaper that Dave and the gang are in the middle of arrangements for GibFest 2. GibFest is a Quake 2 Lan tourney held in Winnipeg, Canada. I'll let you know when more information comes available.

GNDM Tourney End
Last weekend, the GamesNet DeathMatch Tournament, which is the only large American tourney that uses the QuakeWorld mod, crowned it's new champion. Nearly all the best American and Canadian QW participated in this tourney. The winners were NB (Negative Burn) who beat EG (Evil Geniuses) in the finals, 2 games to 1. Evil Geniuses did very well by finishing 2nd in the LPB division and winning the modem division.

Of special note, to reach the finals, NB defeated ZT (Zero Tolerance) which has my old playing buddy CrezyMan leading all scorers. EG made it to the finals by beating R3volution, which of course, is sCary's clan.

Quake III Arena Screenshots
I saw on sCary's site that he mentioned some Q3 screenshots from the UK version of PC Gamer. These are hi-res pictures and if you look really close, you can see that the system requirements will be just as "hi-res" (trust me). You can see the pics here. Make sure you take a look, they're very cool.

Site Stuff

Sunday, October 4th, 1998

Ultimate Quake Poll Returns
Well, it's been a couple of months so I decided to revamp the Ultimate Quake Poll and run it again. This time, people won't have an excuse for not voting. I'll probably post it in a week or so. Tell your friends and clan mates, advertise it so that your favorites will be chosen.

In the last poll, I had 1009 voters in 4 days. This time, I expect double or triple that amount and certainly more from the USA.. I'll be adding a few more questions to help make this the best poll ever. Stay tuned for more info.

John Romero Interview
A very cool John Romero interview can be found on this site. It's done in a type of word association manner where the interviewer says a few words and JR adds the rest.

More Unreal Fixes Soon
Tim Sweeney announced what patches the Unreal gang will be working on next. Here's what he had to say...

The response to Beta 217 has been pretty good. There are still a few new issues that will be fixed shortly.

Next, I've split off the Unreal network code and am beginning work on the low-level protocol rewrite. This rewrite, which will go through several stages of increased performance, is the key to improving Unreal's network play significantly further. Here is a summary of the technical improvements that will be worked on:

Damn man, give it up. Just fix the low-bandwidth Internet code and worry about everything else later. When you get to update v2.17, you'd think that the Internet code would've been fixed ages ago. Am I the only person that thinks this way? Oh well, I guess that's why I have some silly office job and these guys are making the games.

How Quickly Time Flies
It was 1 year ago today that Spookie (Jarlaxle) sent me the DM6 demo of Reptile and Paradox. I remember thinking how awesome the demo was and how I was so impressed with the way Reptile played. If you haven't seen it yet, you can download it from the Quake Demo Page.

Hoony Teases Us
My buddy Hoony, who runs the Challenge.AU site, came out from under his rock to post something on his site. Unfortunately, it was just an ad for an upcoming lan event down under. C'mon Hoony, you can do better than that. Don't make me come down there!  :-)

Updates Too Slow?
Damn, I gotta keep up with the site more. You know it's bad when both Spookie and Paul2 send you updates and start hounding you to update their pages. LOL

Shogo Demo Released
Okay, go and download the latest / greatest demo. The Shogo: Mobile Armor Division demo is available on this site. It weighs in at 40 Megs.

Site Stuff

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