Okay, before I start into this, none of this is meant to rag on anybody from Llamanet or Barry's World servers. I will be completely honest and open about the things that have transpired lately. Here we go.

After the delays getting the Llamanet servers moved over to the Barrysworld backbone, now I get more things to deal with. The new concern I have is with hdd space on the ftp site. The original agreement I had with Llamanet was that I would get 20 megs for site files (pages, graphics, menus etc) and unlimited hdd space on the ftp site. Cool, this was probably the main reason (along with the FP accounts) why I joined Llamanet.

Yesterday, I spoke with the Llamanet head admin guy (Bloated) and he informed me that DBs (head admin dude from Barrysworld) wasn't too keen on the amount of space I was using for my Quake demos (109 Megs as of yesterday). Bloated offered me 50 megs of space which would cut the demos available by about 55%. I told Bloated that I would talk with DBs next time I saw him on-line and discuss it this with him. DBs and I have always gotten along very well so I figured I could talk with him on a mature level and come to a compromise on this situation.

I spotted DBs on-line today and messaged him to find out where he (we) stood on this issue. He told me that he knew about the "20 megs plus unlimited ftp" agreement that Llamanet had with Tophost (previous server owners) but that "rules are changing" and the new agreement (between BW & LN) for all Llamanet sites is 25 megs. I informed DBs that 25 megs would cut down my demos significantly to approx. 12-15 demos plus my site files. This would pretty well defeat the idea of having a demos section on the site.

I informed DBs that I was using approx. 2 megs for the site files and 109+ megs for the demos / downloads. Knowing that 25 megs was much too small and the 110+ megs I'm using now was too big, DBs asked me what would I need to run the site properly. I compromised on what I wanted and DBs agreed with my request. Since I don't have his go-ahead to mention what we agreed on, I will refrain from giving any numbers. Suffice to say, it was more than the original offer by both Llamanet and BW but less than what I'm using now.

Now, there are a few thoughts I have about this. One is that DBs (much like Bloated prior to him) went out of his way to help keep Methos Quake running on the BW servers. He and I could have been belligerent assholes about this but that wouldn't have helped matters get resolved. This was dealt with in a mature manner by everybody involved. By both of us compromising, it became a win-win situation that we will both be able to deal with.

On the flip side of the coin, this new wrinkle hurts some of the plans I had for the site. I wanted Methos Quake to have the "biggest and best" Quake demos section in the world. This probably won't happen but it can still be the best selection of demos found anywhere on the internet. I'm not very happy with the turn of events but I will live with it.

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I watched the Worldcup match today between England and Argentina and it was a dandy. While I was watching, I was in 2 irc channels, both were on a UK server (irc.thedbs.com) so the majority of people there were die-hard England fans. The tension was incredible. In both channels, comments were made after each goal, miss, foul and referees call. At half time, the game was tied 2-2. Both irc channels started to feel the tension. When the game ended at 2-2 and headed into 30 minutes sudden death overtime, the irc channels went almost silent. Getting close to the end over overtime, the tension was indescribable. Then came the shoot-out. People were on the edge of their seats for the 10 shots to come.

Argentina would go first and England would have every second shot. After 8 shots, the score was still tied. On the ninth shot, Argentina scored. England would have one chance to continue the match. On the tenth shot, the Argentina keeper made a superb save to win the hard fought match.

The reactions in the irc channels was surprising. One channel, you couldn't read because the messages were going by so fast. Most lamenting England's loss and some non-English supporters throwing laughs at the rest. In the other channel (called Worldcup), there was dead silence. Nobody said a word.

If you have real audio on your system, make sure you listen to the real audio links I put on the news page today. They are (for the most part) very funny. Just the sample with Immoral calling a record store to ask about Thresh's latest record is a hoot.

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Speaking of jokes, a friend of mine sent me this list. Not Quake related but Star Wars related and decently amusing.

You Might be a Redneck Jedi if...

You have ever used your lightsaber to open a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
You think the best use of your lightsaber is picking your teeth.
You can easily describe the taste of an Ewok without using the word "chicken".
You can find no grammatical errors in the way Yoda talks.
You think that Stormtroopers are just KKK members with really good sheets.
Your master ever said, "My finger you will pull..hmmm?"
You have ever had an X-wing up on blocks in your yard.
You have ever used the force in conjunction with fishing or bowling.
You have ever used a lightsaber to clean fish or open a non-twist-off bottle of beer.
Your father has ever said to you, "Shoot, son come on over to the dark side, it'll be a hoot."
The number of droids you own exceeds your I.Q.
You have ever wrecked a landspeeder while trying to light a cigarette with   your lightsaber.
You consider your lightsaber the ultimate bug zapper.
You discover that your greatest enemy is, in fact, your father, and your uncle. and your brother.

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Quitting Quake? Turns out that the UK clan Gib Gurus have decided to disband. Too bad as they've been around for a while. On the same note, the UK nightmare known as Tyro has decided at the ripe young age of 16(?) to retire from Quake. The response to this by the 10 or so e-mails I saw was very favorable. LOL

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Another big thanks to Hoony over at Challenge.AU for all the mentions on his site. Although Spookie over-exaggerated a tad in his update, I was pleased to see the mention of his page.

Since Spookie has been bantering about XP for the last while but never listens to me, I went and updated his "info" page to include umm what was it again...oh yeah, Xtreme Prejudice as his current clan.

I watched the demos from the PGL guys (plus friends) All-Star match from E3. The demos were nice. It was interesting to see the styles of play between the players. The cam demos sucked. I don't know why they ever made them. The 2on2 matches between Clan 9 (Doomer and Nikodemous) against DR (Unholy and Thorn) were probably great matches but the cam demos sure don't show it. The only demo from the PGL I ended up posting to the site were the 2 U4|Gollum demos. Gollum won both the all-star games and also won the Icon Lan 1on1 finals.

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Saw some interesting comments in Mark Rein's .plan (Epic/Unreal) who talks about sales and marketing of big games. A couple of comments that he made were...

• When GT insisted their foreign language versions were more important than the internet multiplayer patch we had little choice but to agree. They spent millions of dollars acquiring and marketing Unreal and had a right to ship it into these countries before grey market imports destroyed the marketplace and customers lost interest in the product.
• Americans tend to think they're the big PC game market but they're not anymore. Foreign sales for a game like Unreal now account for significantly MORE than 50% of total game revenue. Outside the USA the biggest countries in terms of sales don't even speak English.

These are very revealing comments. One for the sheer power that the publishers have over the actual makers of the game (remember Quake 2's early release?) because of the money they spend. The other is that even though the USA is the #1 country for game sales, it's noted that they are not the only country that buys vast amounts of computer games. With the internet the way it is these days, it makes for a small world.

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I still haven't finished going through all the demos I received in the last week or so. I've gone through about 100 of them, deleted about 80 and the rest went on the site. I still have another 20 or so to go through.

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The mail has been slow these days, mostly because I haven't ranted about a whole lot lately and also because the mail hasn't been working properly. Hopefully things will be fixed up soon.

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I installed Windows 98 yesterday to see what it was like. It took about 22 minutes to install on my P-233. My other system runs NT so I won't be touching that one any time soon. I like Windows 98, it's easier to use for novice users and has some nice features for the more advanced users.

I received an e-mail from Richard that runs the Challenge.AU site that I mentioned in the news page. He seems like a very nice guy and we tend to think along the same lines. (oh no!) Anyway, go visit his site when you get the chance. If you're a Quake fan, it's well worth the visit.

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At least one person has asked how the Microsoft pens (that I received last night at the boring Win98 seminar) are doing. Well, the pens must be the new version because they haven't locked up once since I got them.

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Just a note about the stress .mpg I mentioned in the news page. I've had that on my hdd for a long time but Randemarr sent it to me again the other day. I don't know when the last time I laughed so hard as when I saw that idiot get caught on camera. If you haven't downloaded it yet, go to the news page and take a look at it.

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Just a note on the new llamanet server changes. The demos now have to be linked to the new ftp site as the http link doesn't work anymore. What does this mean to most people, probably not much. However, if you live in the western part of the world, it will take much longer to access the file. The download itself should be a bit faster though as ftp connections tend to be.

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Wow, upload 12 demos to the ftp site this evening. My modem is exhausted :) There are some pretty good ones in there including a rocking performance by Timber.

Like I mentioned on the news page, I went to the Microsoft Win98 Roll-out thing to watch the MS guys brag about their new product. I can't express enough how boring it was. The people that were there sat and listened to Bill Gates and another guy talk for 90 minutes. The biggest applause came when Gates said "In closing, I'd like to say this". (true story :)  What also bothered me was the fact that just before the seminar, I was asked by a gorgeous woman to join her at the bar for a few drinks and like a fool, I still went to see it. (DAMN!)

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Still can't upload demos to the Quake demos page :)  I know the Llamanet dudes are working hard but this is getting to be a real pain. It's been over 8 days now since the move started.

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For the second night in a row. I saw clan [9] take on clan R3V (sCary's clan) and [9] defeated them 3 matches in a row. The pings to the USA server were bad for everybody. In the final match, clan 9 defeated R3V by a score of 137-30. It was a complete victory for [9]. Well done guys. To the credit of everybody playing in R3V, even after the 3rd loss in a row, not one person bitched or whined about anything. That's always great to see.

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The mail is now working fine, no need to send to the geocities addy anymore.

After finishing my last update on Monday, I was unable to post it until about 24 later. This was due to glitches with the new llamanet server. I was under the assumption today that the server was for the most part "up and running" but after trying in vain to upload demos to the server, it clearly isn't finished yet. Unfortunately, the demo problem might not belong to llamanet, it could be a problem with my connection to the new server. :(

Speaking of the new server. I just wanted to say "good job" to Dave from llamanet for working hard to get the new server running. It's not an easy task, especially when he has people like me whining at him.

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Since I mentioned the "bad" with Clan [9] losing a match to EG a few weeks ago, I guess I should mention the good. Last night I watched 1 1/2 matches of [9] vs R3V. Nine lost the first match by a few frags (8 I think) and won the second match by a few more. The pings were in favor of R3V since it was played on a server in the USA. The pings for [9] averaged around 150 and R3V had 2 guys with 150 pings and 2 guys with 60-80 pings. For those of you that don't know Clan R3V, it's the clan that sCary plays in. DOOMer and sCary were the best players in both matches.

It was 2 years ago today that the Quake shareware was released. Wow, just think of how much it's changed our lives. (okay, not everybody) Does anybody remember a game that has controlled our lives so much? Perhaps Doom is the only game to come close but since the internet isn't what it is today, it didn't affect as many people.

Let's look at the side-effects that Quake has brought on us.

1. Numerous people losing their jobs (trust me, I know - no, not me)
2. Tons of people getting gaming related jobs that wouldn't be there if not for the success of Quake
3. Numerous people being kicked out of school
4. Tons of people alienating their friends, family, lovers, wives (ex-wives) & kids (is that daddy?)
5. People making lots of money for playing a game (Thresh owes his life :)
6. Around 5000 Quake related web sites / pages owe(d) their success to Quake (including PlanetQuake and Bluesnews)
7. Hardware industry making hundreds of millions of $$$ from Quake (Video cards, RAM, CD Drives, Hard Drives, Mice & Controllers, 3dfx anybody?)
8. Nearly a billion $$$ made by software companies making Quake clones, peripherals and addons.
9. Phone companies making money in countries where local calls aren't free (UK etc)

What does all this say? It says that the gaming community owes a HUGE debt of gratitude to id Software for making such an outstanding game that is still going strong. Thanks guys!

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The notes I wrote yesterday regarding cheating in Quake being at a rampant state brought on some curious responses. I received approx. 50 pieces of mail and more than half asked where they could get these altered maps & .mdl files. HELLO? McFly????  Are we unclear on the concept here? The idea is NOT to cheat. The idea is to make sure servers are setup so that they limit cheating as much as possible. Sheesh, some people kids!

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Quake world, things jump up and surprise you. The people who are running the 5 Nations tourney had a chance to do things the right way but alas, it didn't happen. Now, don't get me wrong, the organizers have worked very hard in arranging this more than difficult event.

There are however, a couple of things that "mildly" bothered me about the tourney rules.

• The fact that the games weren't home and away matches. Without this, nobody will say that the tourney was fair. Besides the lack of proxy (until a few days ago), it was one of the main reasons why France pulled out of the tourney.

• Teamplay 3 - What is it with this? In my opinion, TP3 is bush league stuff. The players playing in this tourney are the best of the best. They don't need to worry about shooting each other.

I guess I should note that I am a huge proponent of the 5 Nations tourney. The idea of these nations playing against each other is very good. Nightwing has been nice enough to have his Captain's Log on my site. It's just that when I finally thought that everything would be done the "proper" way, it ends up with a big sigh. Oh well, not to worry, there'll be other tourneys. :)

Well, even though it's Father's Day and the first day of summer for most of the world, things haven't exactly been sunny with the site lately. Still waiting to hear from Llamanet on the status of the server. I'm also waiting to hear from Reaper on the status of the graphics. What did I get for Father's day? I got nothing at all. But, I still have the most important gift I could ever have and that is the love of my daughter.

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Nightwing's next 5 Nations update should be good. Apparently, the team from Ireland were using some "different" .mdl files. Go get'em Nightwing. :)

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Speaking of cheating. I got a report from the last Qday Quake Tournament in Holland that "nearly all" the players in attendance were cheating in one way or another. Either they were using different player.mdl files, weapon.mdl files, edited maps that had invisible walls or floors plus many other cheats. I'm sure it wasn't everybody but the most mentioned players were from Sweden, Norway and Germany. Now, before I get 100 letters, this does NOT mean every Quake player from those countries was cheating.

Now, what do we do about this cheating which has become more and more obvious in the past few months? I say we quarter and shoot the players but, some people don't like that idea. Hey, here's an idea. How about all the Quake servers do checking and not let people play that have invalid models or maps use the server. Sounds like a plan to me. I'll give Zoid a call about the model files later. :)

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I started preliminary work on a new / different design for the Quake demos page. Let me reiterate that it will take a while to get this done. I don't want to make anything fancy, I just want to clean it up a bit.

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I watched most of the USA - Iran Worldcup match today. It was a very well played game and Iran won 2-1. Huge amounts of credit to the players and the fans who treated this for what it was, a game. it was a very intense game that could have erupted into much more but all emotions were contained enough so that nothing silly (or much worse) happened. Not that it means anything but my applause goes out to the players on both teams and the fans in the stands. The fans for both sides were very loud during the game but didn't let it get out of hand.

As I type this, the Llamanet servers are still unavailable to me. I haven't heard anything from the Llamanet guys (except what is on the llamanet page) as to when they will be back up. Needless to say, this is rather annoying. I hope that things will be back to normal soon. Just this second, I got a message from Dave (llamanet admin dude) who apologized for the delay and said it would be available in another "1 to 2.5 days". grrrr  Let's hope it's not that long.

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Site graphics are still not finished. Reaper, who has been "attempting" to do the graphics for the site has either disappeared or is ignoring my messages. Either way, the site graphics aren't being done. Last I heard, he's away this weekend so I'll try to get a hold of him early next week. If he still can't / won't do the graphics, I'll have to look for other volunteers to help me with the site graphics. Any takers? I'm even to the point now where I'm thinking of adding Java to the site so that I can do it myself.

Wow, I can't get over the huge Quake news the last couple of days. 3D Realms switching to the Unreal engine in mid-stride for Duke Nukem Forever. (now due to be released in Summer of 1999) Then John Carmack making an even bolder move by canning the Quake 3 project. After mentioning in my .plan a couple of days ago about Quake 2 fading away very quickly, what does all this say? I've heard rumors that John Romero was also thinking about switching to the Unreal engine.

While reading John Carmack's plan file, I wasn't sure what to think. He seemed to be lamenting the fact that it takes too much time and resources to make a "proper game". This seemed a bit strange with all the success they've had in the past. On the other hand, it's a move that only id could get away with. By releasing a top flight "deathmatch style game", they could change the way companies make any type of "combat games" from now on.

Leaving the single player game behind is a very gutsy move by id Software. This will either make or break them. If this move fails, it will probably mean the end of id. If it works, we will see many companies follow very quickly in an effort to make games that take half the time, half the staff and most importantly, half the money.

John Carmack has always been smart when it comes to programming and games. I hope this is his smartest move yet and doesn't backfire on him. You can bet that John Romero, who has never failed when it comes to making great games, is anxiously waiting to see what happens.

As of this moment, it's all a "wait and see what happens" type of situation but, if nothing else, this is making for some great Quake discussions. We'll be talking about this for some time to come.

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I have removed 9 demos from the demos page. If you have a keen eye, you'll know which ones they were.

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I didn't get to watch any Worldcup matches today but I was able to see the Detroit Red Wings defeat the Washington Capitals in 4 straight games to win the Stanley Cup. The Stanley Cup is emblematic of the National Hockey League championship.

I noticed on the net the other day that there was a Swedish Quake demos site. Don't ask me the name or addy, I don't remember them. The guy who setup the site decided to do it the easy way. Instead of getting his own source for anything, he went about stealing everything from other sites. He stole the exact graphics that Demoland uses and all of the demos came from my site and from Demolition. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, he didn't watch the demos and write his own reviews. He just converted my reviews from here and Demolition to Swedish and posted them "as is".

Now, I don't mind people using demos from my site, god knows, many have downloaded them and sent them to other sites. However, blatant rip-offs really bother me. At least he could've watched the demos and made his own reviews of the matches.

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I re-worded the "We Hate Thresh" club message from my last update. I wasn't intending it to mean everybody in the UK. Obviously, many UK players are impressed with Thresh (some are and don't want to admit it :) and it was wrong of me to paint them all with the same brush. Soz if I offended any of you UK Thresh lovers. :)

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I removed a demo from the demos page today. Now, let me explain my policy on this. Let's assume that I have a 1st person pov demo between Ray and Methos (Ray's pov). Now, if Ray has a problem with the demo being on the site, he can e-mail me and let me know. I will take it off the site unless it's available on other demo sites. If Methos doesn't want it on the site, unless he has a very good reason, I probably wouldn't remove it from the site. Mostly because it's not Methos' demo or his pov.

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Oh, since I was on the topic of players in the Worldcup pissing me off by faking injuries. How do we explain the mentality of the idiot fans who sit in the stands and blow whistles throughout the match?

Is it my imagination or is Quake 2 dying really fast these days? Since it was released and then the point release 3 months later (to add dm maps, team play fix a ton of bugs), people have been disappointed in the product. Does id Software wonder why there are still many more people and clans playing Quake than Q2? I'm sure this question has entered their collective minds.

Now, with the release of many new games including Unreal & Descent Freespace, Q2 seems to slowly be drifting from public attention. I don't know about you but, to me, Q2 just isn't as exciting as the original Quake. I wonder what John Carmack will do to make Quake 3 "more fun" for people to play. John Romero always knew what it took to make a great game. (or should that be "game great"?) I hope that the gang at id knew what they were doing when they asked Romero to leave. Otherwise, come 3 months from now, we'll all be enjoying Daikatana and wondering what the guys at id were thinking.

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The response to the PGL 1st person pov demos was outstanding. It seems that except for the few member of the UK's exclusive "We Hate Thresh" club, people are starving for Thresh demos. I was particularly impressed with the Thresh / Reptile demo on dm2. If there's a smarter Quake player than Thresh, I haven't seen him.

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The Chicago Bulls won their 6th NBA championship in the last 8 years by defeating the Utah Jazz by a score of 87-86. Michael Jordan scored 45 points including the winning basket with 5.2 seconds left. MJ also won his 6th playoff MVP award. Not bad for a guy who might retire this summer.

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I've been watching the Worldcup soccer on TV lately. There's a channel here that is showing every game being played. I'm very impressed with the intensity of all the games, the talent of the players and the passion of the fans. What does bother me is the players that keep taking "dives" trying to get a penalty called against opposing players. These flagrant acting jobs are an embarrassment to the players involved. I saw the Croatia game today and there was a player (Suker #9) that had to be taken off the field on a stretcher because he was injured so badly. 15 seconds later, he was running down the field after being completely cured. Amazing!

It's been 3 days since my last update. I've just been so distressed since the formal announcement of Ginger-Spice leaving the Spice Girls. Things will never be the same. :(

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Is Quake 2 really Quake 2 or something else? Let me explain. I've been told a nice juicy rumor by a very reliable source that Quake 2 was actually suppose to be Doom 3. Because of a couple of reasons, namely the technology for the Trinity engine which was originally suppose to be used with Q2 and John Romero's virtual ownership of the Doom name, they decided to release it as Quake 2. I didn't believe this at first and then I started thing about how much Q2 reminds me of Doom2. Oh well, even if it's just a rumor, it's a good one.

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Was watching some of the PGL converted demos. They're so much better than watching cam demos. I was particularly impressed with the Thresh / Reptile dm2 demo. Thresh is a very smart player and does all the little things very well. Speaking of the converted demos, it takes a long time to download all the demos and then convert and upload them to the site (all via modem). I managed to get all the winning demos on the site.

It's now been just over 2 months that I switched from my old server to the Llamanet servers. The "official" opening date for me was April 4th. It's only a coincidence that it fell on the anniversary of Martin Luther King being killed.

There have been good times and frustrating times during the transition. I found out I was moving my site in early March and was told that I could move whenever I wanted to. I closed up the old site and put a "coming soon" type of page there. Little did I know, it would be almost a month before the site would be open for business. This was a mistake on my part for not continuing the old site. I lost a LOT of regular visitors who got tired of waiting for the new site to open. There were also some problems with the llamanet admins getting everything in order for their new host site. Keep in mind that they were starting from scratch so they had a lot more to worry about than a few sites.

There have been many server problems along the way. More than a few times, the server was down, people weren't able to connect or download and many complaints about how slow the server is. Most of these problems have been fixed and the speed of the server will be fixed shortly. (or so my secret sources tell me :)  There seemed to be almost a daily changing of minds by the admins as to whether or not they would allow Front Page accounts. This seems to be settled now (touch wood) and the FP accounts are here to stay. Then again, I drive the admin guys nuts with the amount of data transfer caused by all the downloading Quake demos from the site. Sorry guys :)

The last server Methos Quake was on had approx. 30,000 hits per month. I'm not up to that level on Llamanet yet, but I will be soon. During the first month the site was open, I had 5200 hits which was really disappointing. Things picked up substantially in the second month where I had over 16,000 hits. In the few days of this month, I've already had more hits than I did in April. Hopefully things will continue to get better.

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I saw on the Llamanet home page that SuperFuzz has left the Llamanet admin ranks and gone on to other things. I wish good luck to Stuart in whatever he ends up doing. I'll remember him fondly for saying to me on a daily basis.. "um, not sure, you'll have to get Dave to do that for you" and "I don't know if we can do that, you'll have to ask Dave". Anyway, good luck Stuart. I hope everything goes well for you. :)

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I'll be posting a demo on the demos page (as soon as I can get off my lazy ass and type a review) of Sniket against Timber on dm6. Now, Sniket is a very good dm6 player and Timber freely admits that he's not great at dm6. This demos certainly proves this point as Sniket destroys Timber by a score of 37 to -3.

I like players that can be graceful in losing as well as humble in winning but the Quake ego can be a fragile thing. I was sent the demo immediately after the game by Sniket. Unlike the Timber / Nightwing demo from Fusion which had already been posted on another site for all to download, I wanted to wait a bit and talk to Timber before posting it. I finally talked to Timber a day or two later and although he was a very embarrassed at losing so badly, he had no problem with me posting it on the site. Kudos to Ian (Timber) for being a good sport about the demo.

Hmm, pretty quiet in the mail today, which is nice because I get to rest my typing fingers (all 4 of them) for a little while.

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The spotlight demo on the demos page of Lakerman getting a million frags on 12 reaperbots has been downloaded quite a few times. A few people (4 to be exact) had accused Lakerman of cheating in the demo by using the framerate command to record it. I also mentioned on IRC that I thought he was cheating. When I asked him about this, he said "I've been through this a billion times". (obviously lots of other thought he was cheating as well) I told him I would check into it further and if I was wrong, I would apologize to him. Well, I can't be arsed to look into it as I don't really care if he cheated against reapers. (gee, it must be Monday :) So, I will take Lakerman's word for it and just say "I apologize". I won't bother doing it in IRC as many more will see it here anyway.

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Unreal review. I said I would post an Unreal review after I had played it for a bit so, here it is. The review would've been much more enthusiastic if I would've done it an hour after playing it. Keep in mind that nearly everything with the game revolves around your system resources. (or lack thereof)

• It's VERY pretty in GL, it's nice in non-gl too if you like dark pictures with 8fps.
• The gameplay itself reminds me of a combination of Hexen 2 using Dark Force 2 weapons (pretty pictures, cartoon'ish weapons) but still very nice.
• I didn't get to try the network play (Lan).
• Unless you have a VERY fast connection, the internet play just plain sucks. The internet code needs a ton of work (where's John Cash when you need him?) to make it even semi-playable to the extent of Quake and Quake 2.
• The only real quirk I found is that the weapons seem to be at a different angle heightwise than what I'm use to with Quake. I always have to remind myself to aim much higher on the screen or I shoot at the floor.
• The enemy AI is the best I've seen
• The sounds are wonderful (although I haven't played with headsets on yet).
• The levels are nicely laid out and all seem to have a combination of indoors & outdoors scenes.
• The built in botmatch is a great feature so you get a bot designed for the game and knows every level. Unlike Quake and Q2 bots that have to "learn" levels.

It could be a great game but I don't think they will be able to get the internet code in order. If they don't, the game will be popular like Riven for a few months and then die. If they can get it running smoothly, this could be the next Quake.

Spoke with [TC]-Reaper today about the graphics, he told me that they should be "tweaked" by this Friday.

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Ahh, the innocence of youth. I was on my regular irc stomping ground (quake.uk) last night and there was an American kid (13 years old) from "meechigone" (as he said) named Imp-Nether. This kid was in complete awe of the talent that was in the channel. He nearly pee'd himself when he saw Sujoy and Danold. Saying things like "omg! You're Sujoy!" and "omg! I can believe this" throughout the time he was there. Although it was very humorous, it was nice to see the natural excitement the kid had towards some of the great players. But alas, being irc, all things come to an end. About an hour after he was there, he started swearing, yapping about drugs, sex with his step-mom and ended up being kicked and banned from the channel. LOL (it's a true story)

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Nightwing finally posted an update to his 5 Nations tourney page. Included are the rosters for both team A and B from England. Damn, must have been some VERY tough choices which I wouldn't want to make. Oh, Nightwing also mentioned for the players that did make the squads, to please send cash only as payoff for being selected to the address he specified earlier. :) (it's only a joke)

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Wow, 2 plan updates in one day? I'd better go lie down. :)

A big thanks goes out to [TC]-Reaper for doing the new graphics. This was a bit tough because the one thing I want is the site to be as fast as possible. However, I think that [TC]-Reaper did a great job on them and still kept them very small. He will be doing more "tweaking" over the next while so they might change a few times yet. The entire graphic on the left page, including Java script is only 32k in size. When you think that the button alone that Sujoy uses for his site is 43k, the 32k isn't big at all. Reaper sent me a graphic for the site last week that was 150k. You needed some java (coffee) to stay awake while it loaded on the page. :)  Thanks again Reaper, great job.

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Spoke on IRC today with SAS-Aerotus who is the admin for the UKCL. After calling each other names for about 10 minutes, we finally started acting (close to) our ages. Aero now completely agrees with my point of view and will make all the changes to the UKCL that I suggested a few days ago. Nah, just kidding.

Ahem, the conversation was (for the most part) very amicable. I won't bother going into everything that was said in the conversation (transcripts can be made available for a small processing fee :) but, we did come to an agreement that the ping rule(s) are "unfair in some cases" and it should be looked at further by the admin and the players in the UKCL. I did make a suggestion that he liked which would enable him to get responses from nearly all the players and not just the ones that happen to have read their UKCL mail that week and bothered to reply to it.

We didn't talk about the sponsorship topic as there wasn't much to discuss. There seems to be too many variables in this and it can either be very good or very bad. Nobody can be arsed to try it so it will probably be left as is. Aero doesn't need to get paid for what he's doing, the kick backs from fixed matches are more than enough to keep him happy. :) (for those that didn't notice the smiley, this last statement is only a JOKE)

The team play mode. I thought this was a no-brainer but Aero told me that there are people who are opposed to using team play 2 (nobody was opposed in the mail I received). Supposedly modem players will have a hard time playing with TP2 and they want TP3. I don't agree with TP3 because I think it gives players freedom to blindly shoot at whatever they want. If players knew that they can kill team mates, I'm sure they wouldn't be firing rockets around corners without knowing who is there. It also makes 1on1 battles in clan matches better because other players can't just shoot in the middle of it to kill the opposition.

Last note on this. I was impressed that nobody associated with the UKCL (player or admin) flamed me for the comments I made (cept the odd letter in the mailing list). The comments & suggestions I made were only meant to help the league. They weren't ranting or complaining. By all accounts that I've heard, Aero did a very good job with admin'ing the league this past season and didn't let it go to his head. (well, not too much anyway :)

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Movies, I saw 3 movies last week. 2 at the theater, 1 rented. I saw the movie "My Giant" with Billy Crystal. Unless you're a huge fan of Billy, don't bother seeing this movie. Second was Godzilla. Some parts were okay, Mathew Broderick actually impressed me. The special effects were very well done. I would give it a 6 out of 10. It might have been higher if near the end, the movie didn't melt on the screen and people had to wait 15 minutes before it came back on. LOL The last movie I saw was Peacemaker from DreamWorks starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. This movie was action from start to finish. Some good acting by Kidman, a very good story line (what would you expect from DreamWorks) and realistic characters. I would rate this one 8 out of 10.

Let's get to the important stuff first. My daughter Kim who is 12 years old and just finishing grade 7, spent the last 2 days at her school's athletic competitions (called Frontier Days). There were 200 kids from her school and hundreds more from other schools in her area. Kim competed in 11 different events (against girls and boys). She received 6 first place finishes and 5 second place finishes. She returned home with 11 medals, the gold medal as the games best athlete and a scholarship to attend a two week Olympic camp at University during the summer. WOW! Needless to say, Daddy is a pretty happy guy right now. Kim, I love you and I'm VERY proud of you.

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Letters, we get letters. (sung to David Letterman's viewer mail song) Wow, banner day for e-mail yesterday. I'm sure the postman had a sore back. Over 450 e-mails dropped into my lap yesterday, mostly as a result of my ranting here on Wednesday.

First off, I had lots of nice responses to the DaNoLd interview. Most of the mail about Dan was from USA readers which doesn't surprise me because I've always known just how popular Dan's Quake demos were in the states. I had more mail about Dan's interview than the Sujoy, Reptile and Romero interviews combined. Also, considering the fact that the Danold interview wasn't mentioned on BluesNews and the others were, this is even more impressive.

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Oh yeah, I did get a couple of e-mails regarding the UKCL stuff (about 300). Most (about 250) were regarding the ping rules, around 40 for the team play stuff and about 10 for the sponsorship topic. I won't go into much of it but here are the "for and against" totals.

75% of e-mails were in favor of abolishing / changing the ping rules
100% of e-mails were in favor of changing to teamplay 2 from tp3
50% of e-mails for getting sponsorship in the league

Now, the ideas & suggestion I gave the other day were just that, ideas and suggestions. Do things have to be done my way? Certainly not. But, with 75% of the 250 e-mails I received agreeing with me, it means that problems do exist and most people want some changes made. It would be nice to see even a few small changes made.

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I'll be doing a few more things on the site when I get back from work. I spoke with [TC]-Reaper and he is doing the rest of the graphics while I type this. Hopefully it will be done soon. Went to see a few movies lately so I'll let you know what movies not to see. :)  Have a few demos to post, more e-mail to answer... blah, blah, blah.

Wow, it's been 4 days since my last .plan update. I've been too busy with work and other stuff to get around to this. Oh well, I guess I'll have to make up for lost time and do some real ranting.

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I posted the interview with DC_DaNoLd or I guess I should say DaNoLd since he's not really active with DC these days because of UKCL rules. The interview turned out very well even with some of the translation problems. Dan is a smart guy but it was hard for him to convey his thoughts into English. Since I've been a DaNoLd fan for such a long time, it was a pleasure doing this interview. Thanks Dan.

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A couple of questions for the UKCL to think about. Why does the UKCL have an HPB / LPB rule? Just to clarify, it's not really an HPB / LPB rule, it's a modem rule. If you have any connection other than a modem (isdn, cable, adsl, T1, janet), no matter what the ping, you're considered an LPB. This was probably done to facilitate the players that used proxies to camouflage their pings.

Let's think about this for a bit. There's already a modem league, so why not make the UKCL a league that contains only the best players no matter what their ping is. It would provide for the best clan league possible and they wouldn't have to worry about ping rules. I'm sure there are many modem players that would still make it into the league. Let's look at some of the advantages.

1. It would cut down the number of clans, thus making the competition much better
2. It would make the modem league (MCW) MUCH more competitive
3. It would ensure that all clans would have a chance to get the best players available
4. The level of skill in both leagues would improve dramatically
5. Less and less players everyday use modem so there's more than enough lpb's to go around

If you look at some of the elite (l33t) clans in the USA and you see a modem player, you can be damn sure that he's an awesome player to be able to beat out x number of lpb's to get into the clan. Do people forget how good Fragga was on modem? I don't.

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While I'm on the topic of UKCL... I was surprised the other day to learn that the UKCL plays with teamplay mode 3 (clan mates can't kill each other, only take away armor). I had thought this was the case but I never bothered to ask anybody. I knew they used TP3 in some Euro countries but I didn't think it was used in the UK.

To me, this is bush league stuff. It was apparently done (correct me if I'm wrong) because people figured that modem player would have a hard time coping with the lag and would end up shooting their own team mates. I can only laugh at this. Most of the modem players I've seen in the UKCL can tell the difference between their own clan mates and their opponents. A lot of them are actually pretty good (and smart) players. I noticed in the UK Quake mailing list that there's a lot of discussion regarding this lately. I sure hope the masses can agree on teamplay 2. It's the only way to go to make the UKCL into THE premier clan league in the world.

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Okay, one more for the UKCL. Can some of the UKCL admins PLEASE go out and find some sponsorship for the league. I'm sure there are enough companies in the UK that would provide support for on-line gaming. If AMD can support the PGL and Software Etc can support the CyberAthletics in the USA, there's got to be a way for some computer related company in the UK to throw in a few quid to support the UKCL. Barrysworld is always offering the servers, perhaps somebody can donate trophies, plaques or even a little money for league champions etc. It would be nice to see.

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Barrysworld, who run 33 Quake and Quake 2 servers from London, England and control most of the on-line Quake activity in the UK, have upgraded all 22 of their QW servers to QW v2.21. There was a lot of discussion on this with bickering from a lot of players who didn't want BW to update. The reasons behind the bickering were varied. Most complaints were that faqproxy didn't work (even though a different proxy could be used to connect, if needed), the friction was set too low, it lagged when in water, the physics were all wrong plus a few other goodies. The biggest reasons for changing to v2.21 were that the new version all but eliminates cheating (heard a cool way to get around this one) and it closes the gap between QW and regular net Quake.

I only have one thing to say about this, More Rock, Less Talk! (yeah, like I don't talk too much :) DBs, you made the right decision. In my opinion, it should've been done sooner. As much as you try to, you can't please everybody. I only know of one person that will have a "real" problem with the new version and that's because he needs a proxy compiled for Solaris. Other than that, everybody will be able to play.

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Enough ranting for today. (enough for a month perhaps) If you've gotten this far, I'm very impressed. Oh, what's this here? A nice shiny new box with Unreal in it. I'll post a review on this baby when I'm too tired to play it anymore. :)