Demos

01-09-98: The Man Who Would Be King

Our local one-on-one tournament ended with pre-tourney favorite xris, standing tall atop the winners' bracket, facing everybody's All-American lemurboy coming out of the losers' bracket. If I do say so myself, a pretty good game resulted. You can get an archive containing demos from both viewpoints (1.1 MB). Note that to view these demos you will need the map ZTNDM3 Blood Run (You'll like this map.)

11-06-97: We ain't Death Row, but we shore is enthusiastic

If you've been playing on the Mothership recently, you may have encountered Joe Boo, the real-life brother of SesameChkn and a fairly recent convert to the Way of Quake. He asked if he could get a little teamplay experience by teaming up with lemurboy against a couple of other C9ers. eeevil and VanillaIce volunteered, and we decided to have a slightly nonstandard team game by playing with deathmatch 3 rules on Trilogy Multiplayer (which you of course you will need to have to watch these demos).

Would Joe Boo be a teamplay boat-anchor, or a secret weapon? To find out you can watch the LemurCam (792 kB) and/or the BooCam (808 kB) view of the 20-minute match. Like the above title hints, we don't play the Perfect Game (and you will be less than amazed at our strategy), but we're OK, and the configuration for this match ensures that the rockets will be a-flyin'.

If you can't stand the suspense, highlight the blank area below to reveal the final frag scores and efficiencies.

Player	Frag score	Efficiency
Joe Boo	30	63
lemurboy	27	66
VanillaIce	13	30
eeevil	12	31

Note: these two demos are tweaked so that if you use them along with the custom player model from our T3 demos page, you will be able to tell who is who. During the actual match the players on each team were identical, but in demo playback it's fun to be able to tell them apart. On the yellow team, lemurboy is player 0, and Joe Boo is player 1. On the red team, eeevil is player 0, and VanillaIce is player 1.

04-16-97: A taste of the new CTF maps

After running around on the maps for a few hours with a couple of other aliens, lemurboy ventured into the Internet to mix it up with the Earthlings on the new maps. Of course he brought his trusty demo-recording FAQ Proxy along...

I managed to make it through four maps and bits and pieces of others. Two of the shorter and more entertaining demos are here to give you a look at CTF 4.0 if you like. You will of course need to have it installed on your system to view them.

This generally was the first time I played a real team game on any of these maps, so I'm not presenting these as demos of optimal tactics/strategies/flag-routes/whatever, because they certainly are not. I would also be embarassed to claim this is my best personal play, but there are a few cool moves in the demos (or I probably wouldn't be showing them to you). These are just here to show examples of a couple of games on the new maps, with people on both sides more or less still figuring them out but not completely lost -- so maybe you can identify with them. As an inveterate demo watcher myself, I would be interested in such a thing, so I thought maybe someone else would be too. One last note: the teams fluctuate pretty wildly in number and ping breakdown, so don't draw too many conclusions from the scoreboard. Except of course that naturally I belong on the leaderboard. :-)

CTF2M7, Gloom Castles: lem_glcs.zip, 874 kB. At quake.arctic.org, first map played after a brief stint on the trail end of The Two Towers. I've actually played a couple of games on this map before, when it was idctf1. But I still got confused a few times by the mirror layout of the castles. Some fun offense and defense. This demo doesn't show the pentagram area; unfortunately, as you will see, the other team was much more active there than we were, but that only gave us the oppourtunity to demonstrate The Right Way to defend against a pentagram carrier (fall back! fall back!). I changed teams at one point to even out the ping ratio :-), and an (eventual) whuppin' of my former team ensued. Note: I really need to rebind my quad/pent/invis "alert" keys to say something different. Unlike teamplay DM, in CTF they should be more of a notification than a "WARNING DON'T SHOOT ME" shout, since friendly fire is disabled.

CTF2M1, McKinley Station: lem_mcks.zip, 914 kB. Took a break after two-and-a-half levels at quake.arctic.org and came back to play at FactoryX. This was the first map on that server; I came into it late, joined the trailing team (red) and led them to victory, helped a weeee bit by the departure of the blue team leader. Some good offense and defense action throughout the map, although it starts a little slowly while I'm still trying to remember how that mouse thingy works. This demo will show you why the new regen rune is your friend. It's the best of the few CTF 4.0 demos I've made so far.

I would have liked to post more demos, but the big maps and the as-yet-low numbers of players make for long games... usually still a lot of fun, even (surprisingly) with few players, but they generate very large demos with slow stretches (especially when I'm defending). Maybe if I get some more good bite-sized ones I'll link them in here. And if you have any demos on the new maps, let me know!

Footnote 4-17-97: CTF2M5, Disciple War Grounds, is looking like a very fun level. I wish I had been using the proxy to record the game from the screenshot below... unfortunately I was using QSpy to find and connect to a server instead of doing it manually, so it didn't occur to me to bother. Oh well.

04-14-97: Ahnuld backs it up

ARGH! These accidentally got deleted in some housecleaning... I'll see if I can find copies somewhere. :-(

C9 was having an informal gathering on the Mothership, commenting on each other's skills with their usual, let's say, "enthusiasm", when lemurboy decided to egg on ahnuld's observations about eeevil and havoc until they vowed to settle the matter in a 1-on-2 match. The terms: 20 minutes on a map chosen by eeevil/havoc (DM4) and 20 minutes on a map chosen by the Bavarian Barbarian (DM3), with a rubber match if necessary.

The terrible twosome roared out to a frag ratio of almost 5 to 1 at the halfway point of the DM4 match, but ahnuld staged a comeback over the next five minutes to take and hold the lead for the remainder of the map. A very close match, discounting a little of the last minute Tactical Lava Diving by eeevil and havoc. The next match on DM3 was a runaway for ahnuld, as he dominated the powerups on his favorite map for a crushing victory, despite blatant favoritism shown by the server admin toward the other team.

Since lemurboy has been pestering everyone to play with the FAQ Proxy, we have demos of the matches. Linked here are the two from ahnuld's POV (although they will almost certainly be less amusing to non-C9ers than they are to us): the DM 4 match (540 kB) and the DM 3 match (485 kB). If you have an urge to see one of these, we recommend only the tighter DM4 match unless you are a Dedicated Demo Downloader. Small hint: once the match is over, so is the action, although the demo itself will linger on for a while (unlike some movies where you get to see something cool if you stick around through the credits).