Old News
(Even older news is elsewhere.)

07-21-97
Oh, sure, now they make the first single-player map of Quake Rally easier...

Did a little bit of 2 and 3 person Internet QR deathmatching yesterday with eeevil and another accomplice. I've decided that the repulsor may be my favorite weapon. Ram `em! Although I still want to see a Speed Racer or Knight Rider expansion pack for QR. Imagine the various powerups. :-) We may get together a medium-sized QR deathmatch soon, and I'll post demos if they turn out at all interesting.

07-19-97
All sorts of cool Quake stuff popping out these days. For instance: "defusion", which is kind of like Capture the Flag but would be more accurately described as "capture the ticking bomb". Looks like a fairly original and fun team game, although they have two mild strikes against them: 1) they went a little too far (but only a little) in the add-goofy-weapons-and-powerups direction, rather than just concentrating on adding a twist to teamplay with the bomb idea, and 2) they're not going to make any instant friends by opening with the lines "Have you ever played one of the various Capture the Flag patches and thought to yourself, 'There's something missing...'? Well, so did we - the excitement." (Ouch.) They don't seem to have a Web page yet, just a zip file of the latest beta.

Also worth a mention is something that's been out for a while now: The Vigil, a single-player map that does a bang-up job of recreating the DooMlike feel of mowing down hundreds of swarming monsters. Ingenious and tough.

Back in the world of deathmatch: any clans out there that consist of good low-ping players that nevertheless lack teamplay practice? Give us a ring. We're starting to wonder if we're actually learning anything and/or having fun when we play matches and scrimmages against players that have logged literally hundreds more team games than we have. Scrimmages against other players in the same sort of situation might be a whole lot cooler.

Finally, the Bonehead Quote of the Month award has hereby been created and bestowed on www.quakespy.com for the following gem:
New features include: Low Ping Shark Avoidance! Now you can not only find servers with great pings, but you can avoid servers where 6 out of 7 players are on a local LAN waiting to rip you to shreds. Boring! Avoid those pitiful specimans and find servers where the pings are fair and skill & savagery make all the difference.
I would hope I don't have to explain the reasoning of the award committee. Bye now!

07-19-97
Woop! Got something for you to shoot for, eeevil. :-) I finished map 1 despite some major boffos (like blowing the end-of-lap jump twice... man I hate that thing) in 8m 16.9s. As you can see from the screenshot one can take a beating on those missed jumps. Just about any completing time should beat this, since I was only 8 seconds under the wire (got cautious at the end). But my best lap time was 47.3, which seems pretty good... although, I just discovered a whole `nother jump that I didn't know was there, which might be a faster route. Oh well.

07-19-97
A little early-morning elaboration on my previous update. DM is fun in QR, although we have yet to try more than 2 people at that. The single-player game is (for me) addicting but wayyyy difficult. The two probably are related... I have yet to get past the first map. It looks like an average lap time of 51 seconds would be good enough to pull it off, but although I can get as low as 47.7, my usual lap time hovers around 52. Doh! Anyone have any suggestions for good lines to take? :-) Anyway, I have to say that this ranks up there with CTF as being one of the best modifications of Quake so far. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) becomes of it, especially in Internet play.

07-18-97
Quake Rally good.

07-17-97
Had our second clan match this evening, and got absolutely crushed by #ClanChat. Memo to self: the Bad News Bears should not accept challenges from the NL All-Star Team. On the bright side, the server was nice and smooth up until almost the very end of the match, and #ClanChat were good sports. (One would think that it's easier to be a good sport when cruising to a massive victory, and one would be right, but we've seen a lot of sad exceptions.) We don't have any snapshots of the final score, but I'm sure one will be showing up at their Web site soon. :-)

07-11-97
Big news for those of you who are admins of popular Quake servers, especially (although not exclusively) ClanRing servers, and who have to put up with disruptive, offensive, and downright nasty players ruining games on your server. Now you can ban `em in an instant with QSmack. Go to the QSmack pages for more details.

07-10-97
Woo, synchronicity. DemoLand has just added a little doohickey that allows you tell it to serve you pages with QDL buttons. So the links at the bottom of the previous news update are no longer that useful. But the service is still in place (for now) for adding QDL buttons to other pages.

07-07-97
On a demo-watching kick lately. If you haven't taken a look at DemoLand over at PlanetQuake, you might wanna. Some good stuff there. Besides the awesome Quake Done Quick demo in its "10 rating" section, it has a lot of excellent deathmatch demos in its "9 rating" section. I recommend most of the 1-on-1 demos that have a 9 or better, and some of the low-gravity FFA demos (most FFA demos I can take or leave). Most recently, I was impressed by a set of four demos of 1-on-1 between Shadow and ParadoX, especially the first two. (But make sure you have Fast Forward bound to a mouse button or something, because they are long ones!)

There's also some good stuff in the "8 rating" section and even all the way down into 7 (for example, meyou.zip).

If you have the DemoLauncher installed (and if not, why not?), here's a little toy to help you surf DemoLand with maximum speed. Occasionally I feel like giving out a little bonus to the two or three of you reading this. :-) Use the links below to access the various sections sorted by rating, and you should see the links to the zip files replaced by QDL buttons. By observing what I'm doing to the beginning of the page URLs, you should be able to figure out how to perform this trick on other pages as well. (Note: this is probably a temporary service; don't count on it being available forever. If it goes away I will make note of that here.)

...It's gone away. :-)

07-04-97
Happy Independence Day! (For all of you in the UFO sighting and alien abduction capital of the world, the good ol' U.S.A.) It looks like the news page has been in good hands. :-) Those of you who frequent the Mothership should hop on over to that page to check out a proposal of mine. P.S. Congrats to Legends CTF for beating a very strong EarthQuake team for the championships of the Frag and Tag tourney POTS division.

07-02-97
Hello fellow Quake players; ahnuld here. With lemurboy slacking on the news, I felt it was my duty to bring you the tale of a momentous battle on the Mothership. Actually, this happened a while ago, but for some reason lemurboy hasn't reported on this exciting story yet. (Must be sulking from the pounding I gave him on DM2 recently.) Anyway, without further ado, here it is! Enjoy!

06-27-97
Quick note: I added a correct IRIX qcc executable to the downloads page. Last I checked, the one available at QUSI (is that site dead?) had some endianness problems.

06-26-97
First, a note that we'll have a very short bit of server downtime next month. See the server page for details.

Second, congrats to our Legends buddies for various recent accomplishments. Wow, that sounds sycophantic, but the truth is that we know some of them & they're pretty cool guys, and we're willing to give the rest the benefit of the doubt. :-) The Legends CTF squad took the Open championship in the Frag and Tag tourney, and they're up against EarthQuake for a winner-take-all best two out of three match for the POTS division championship. Also, of course, LGD Thresh recently won the Red Annihilation tournament, and I think the right man came away with the Ferrari. For those people who are saying, after seeing the RA demos, that they could "take" Thresh, I can only wonder what they're smoking. (Sheesh. Earthlings.) It was also good to see some XP players in the finals as well as our old acquaintance Reptile from Postal. We were pretty sure that the Ferrari would be coming West...

Third, null reminds me that this summer is the 50th anniversary of our arrival here on Earth. Your Earthling news organization CNN has a small photo gallery of various phases of the event, although they are somewhat misinterpreted. (The "bodies" recovered by your Air Force were of course the remains of players kicked from the Mothership. It's a long way down.)

Finally, the updates to the news will continue to be a little sporadic for a while as I deal with important affairs back on the homeworld. ahnuld may contribute an update or two to fill the gap (gulp).

06-15-97
Added a few SGI IRIX Quake-related tools on the downloads page.

06-14-97
Back to the subject of demos: the "promo" included as demo1.dem in the client-side package of TeamFortress v2.5 is a real hoot. Although it does lose a little of its charm when the credits say "written, directed, and shot by Shitscab". Gack. Anyway, it's almost worth downloading the new TeamFortress just to see this little gem, especially if you've ever played TF before.

06-12-97
Small note: apologies to anyone getting randomly kicked from our servers this evening. We were trying a few changes to the AutoAdmin and it ran amok for a bit.

06-12-97
We just finished watching the M3 "highlight reel" demo from the Keygrip team. Well. On coming back over here, I threatened to summarize it as "it sucked so hard that null was pulled into the screen and never seen again", but that wouldn't be entirely fair. At this point ahnuld is now convinced that I am about to wimp out. Fear not; read on.

Firstly, the guys who get the most time in the demo seem to be the Keygrip guys themselves and their friend loonyboi... at least I think so; it was hard to tell sometimes, since +showscores didn't work correctly for stretches during the demos. And they don't seem to be that awesome, frankly. (One of them even looked like -- *gasp* -- a keyboarder.) Certainly not awesome enough for the amount of time they got out of the 8 minute demo. How did they end up with so much of their footage, including lots of running around with a shotgun or axe, chosen out of the vaunted seven hours of raw demos, given all the other Quake players with actual jaw-dropping skill that participated in M3? Also kind of odd: I didn't see much demo footage not already available in raw form from the few demos previously provided at the Keygrip site.

Anyway, we kept wondering when the good stuff was going to start. The h0nus rocket-jumping sequence(s) would probably have been pretty cool if we hadn't seen almost all of it before. And rocket jumps really aren't that amazing -- around the 20th one in a row -- especially when they're taken out of context. Speaking of context, a lot of the editing seemed to be ignoring that; just a lot of cutting back and forth between people blowing up. Disappointing. Many of us think that Quake demos could be pretty darn exciting if edited well and set to a soundtrack, so we were kind of looking forward to this. If you're doing the same, don't. The M3 demo had a "moment" or two (for those of us who, dammit, happen to like the Mortal Kombat soundtrack theme), but that was about it.

My advice: do what we did and go watch Quake Done Quick again.

06-11-97
If you haven't seen Quake Done Quick yet, well then go get it, ya goof. Other stuff: we had a little PainKeep party with various people around the building connecting to a private PainKeep server and whaling on each other for a while. Thoughts on the maps:

start (HUB): An OK idea (the voting thing) for open public servers, but if you're running PainKeep for a private game, do yourself a favor and turn off the Hub voting system. Just play the maps in sequence, exiting quickly from the ones you don't like. The voting thing got to be a pain really quickly.
painkeep (PainKeep): We haven't played on this one yet. Looks OK.
pk0 (Mephisto's Hold): Fun map. There is a definite Power Loop to run on this one, though, and it passes through a choke-spot where there are always lots of underpowered Quake dudes to gib.
pk1 (Prison): Another good one. Didn't see an obvious pattern to run. Lags a little bit in open spaces when the AutoSentries, nails, and grenades get going.
pk2 (Darkstone Temple): Didn't try this one; looked too small and not too interesting.
pk3 (Palace): Didn't play this one, but lemurboy has played it in the past on a public server and liked it.
pk4 (Obscured): Played here briefly. Not the greatest layout, but some interesting areas... all in all a good map.
pk5 (Masters of Earth): Didn't try this one, intentionally. What were they thinking? Deathmatch on this map? Maybe we're missing something...
pk6 (Suicide Staccato): A good map and the best "base theme" map of the bunch, but a little too large for our group of 6.
pk7 (Battered Brains): See pk3.
pk8 (Dakyne): Yet Another Version of Dakyne. Solid, straightforward map. Good for lots of dogfights.
pk9 (The Stronghold): Didn't try it; looked like it might be a little small.
pk10 (Harlequin's Demise): Nice DM4 homage, although it inevitably suffers in comparison to (maybe) the Greatest Deathmatch Map Of Them All.
pk11 (Derelict): Eww. Small, boring.
pk12 (The Other Side): Another nod to DM4, smaller than pk10.

General stuff: make sure you have more health/armor than usual. Also, in the Chain Thunderbolt you now have a weapon to compete with the RL for best all-around killing machine. Yeah, it chews up ammo, but in PainKeep you can have truckloads of cells in your backpack. Anyway, lemurboy took a few demos that will probably get posted soon. Which brings up another tip: look at the maps and new weapons before you play with them. Even with a week's warning, not many people did... which the demos will reveal...

06-10-97
New in the Quake Things series: Quake Things We're Tired Of!

"When It's Done." OK, this was witty once upon a time. Not anymore. I could translate what I think people are saying when they use this phrase nowadays -- but I won't, just in case the CDA makes it into law again.
The notion that people are going to spontaneously leak bodily fluids at the merest hint of a feature from some upcoming games. Unfortunately id is still on this bandwagon with their "Get Ready To Spooge" motto for Quake II, and Disruptor's .plan remarks about Depends. Just saw another promo page for a 3D flying game where they said they weren't listing all the features because they wouldn't want us to "wet our pants." Uh, thanks for the consideration, guys.

Woo, being grumpy is fun!

06-07-97
OK, the CTF server (26004) now has version C of The Cheat Complex available as map 1 of the "custom episode" (when you are doing a warp). Two things to mention. First, a version D of the map may be released, in which case I will replace version C ASAP. If that happens, you can come check this page to find out where to get version D from. Second, as a courtesy to people who don't have that map, if you play a game on a custom map, please warp back to a "normal" map after you're through.

06-05-97
Is it just me, or does "grapple" sound more like one of those combination fruit drink flavors than like a Quake doodad? OK, it's just me.

Even older news...