Monthly Archive for November, 1998

Review: Quakapalooza

Published on 30/11/1998 in Video Games. 0 Comments

QP Logo

QuakaPalooza - Ireland’s largest LAN for players of the computer games “Quake” and “Quake 2″ - was held in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, from 24 to 26 October, 1998.

The original idea behind QP was that fifteen or so people would bring along their own PCs to play on, and each person would also have one or two invitees who would share the PC with the owner. A lot more than this actually showed up, I think it was somewhere between 100 and 150 people altogether!

Hype for QP had been growing steadily since it was announced in the summer. On the Friday night before the weekend, a couple of IRC regulars in the #quake channel started sending messages via the web to an LED display panel based in Netscape’s offices, the results of which were transmitted back over the internet via a WebCam!

Netscape's WebCam

I left for QP on the Saturday morning. After getting trains, taxis and buses, I eventually made it along to the venue sometime around 4, picked up my weekend pass, and strolled on in past the numerous other GaelCon gaming and role-playing events.

An amazing sight met my eyes as I moved to the back of the room… Even by now, I was expecting the Quake section to be in a state of chaos with PCs, network cards and cables still strewn everywhere. But the place was in a happy state of organisation, people sitting at all the PCs and actually playing on a variety of QW and Q2 servers.

Weekend Pass

This was the best opportunity yet for the average Quake player to put faces to the aliases because nearly every big name in Ireland was there with a badge saying who they were. Wandering around the edge of the action for the rest of the day, I came across a number of familiar Quake players -

Ace Ventura, Beast, Bunny, Chaos, Carnate, DeVore, Earthworm Jim, Jaden, Kaile, Koloth, KoopaTroopa, Mickah, MindPhuck, Reaper, Reginald, Scary / OverLord, SeP, Slaanesh, Sniper, Steo, Thinker, toilet, Trojan, Zero.

Pages: 1 2

Published on 29/11/1998 in Video Games. 0 Comments

CT IQCL Loss

Our first IQCL year two game was pretty tense, the dreaded CT (Koopa, Bunny, DeVore, Kaile AWOL) beat the GI team (Cloud, Regi, Spud, toilet) by over 10 frags in 20 minutes on dm3. Regi was jumping from low to high pings, but DeVore asked another one of us to go HPB. toilet and I both had to .lag up to modem levels, and were disconnected halfway through the game by Qizmo just when we had things under control. CT eventually proved their worth and retook the rocket launcher room towards the end of the game. Unfortunately, the mod did not display the actual GI total score. Also, because of an incorrectly configured sv_gamedir, no one was able to record a demo… Correct scores will be obtained later from the server logs (I hope!).

INC Friendly Win

Incarnate HPBs challenged some of our LPBs to a three on three friendly on e1m2 yesterday. The GI team was just too strong for the high ping opposition, but fair play to INC, they didn’t give out or whine or any of that lamer carry-on that other Irish clans go on with. Thanks for the game.

CD Revenge

Published on 28/11/1998 in Video Games. 0 Comments

A _very_ out of practice GI team lost to CD in a dm3 friendly last night. The CD team of Chaos, Hendy (soon to join HC), and BB-GrimTim won by 50 frags against GIs Cloud, Spud and Mer. Okay, it was our first real Q1 team game since the end of the last IQCL, but to be fair, the CD lads have come a long way from the hammerings we used to give them, and Chaos’ deadly aim doesn’t help! Still, it was good practice, and I was also pleased by the amount of GIs that showed up (thanks to Mer, Moon, Spud, and toilet). Weekly GI training is now planned to get us back up to speed.

Published on 26/11/1998 in Video Games. 0 Comments

GI-Ronin

Ronin joins the IQCL squad. Welcome, Paul!

This is the full list of GI players at the moment.

IQCL Cloud-Warrior, Euclid, MerIDiaN, MoonGlum, Mouserat, Poohmeister, Regi, Ronin, Spud, toilet.
Others Corinthian, Explodyboy, H-K, Poor_Monkey (Honourary), Predator, Radmozorak, Q-Rat-Q, Scud, VisHnU, War Gimp.

Published on 24/11/1998 in Video Games. 0 Comments

GI Lite

WooHoo! It’s GI Lite, a very slimmed-down set of GI pages, where I’ll be bringing you the latest Guns Islanders news (since there is _still_ no sign of clans.quake.ie/gi).

Shorts

Guns Island (quake.ucg.ie) up temporarily, Kombat Teams mod · Regi joins the fold in time for the forthcoming IQCL · MerIDiaN has LOWER ping than Cloud for once on Pooh’s temporary server · Cloud beats Carnate in QL grudge match over two levels, dm4 and e3m3

Preview: Crusade

Published on 15/11/1998 in Television. 0 Comments

The Babylon Project: Crusade

From the people who brought you Babylon 5 comes another sci-fi television saga set in the universe of the Interstellar Alliance… ‘The Babylon Project: Crusade’.

So what do we know about the forthcoming series? The year is 2265, where the last episodes of Babylon 5 left off. The series is based on an Alliance ship, the Excalibur, captained by Matthew Gideon, introduced in the B5 movie ‘A Call to Arms’. With the threat of the Shadows (evil man-sized black bugs travelling in giant black spider ships) gone, all is quiet on Earth - too quiet.

An alien race, the Drakh, vows revenge for the loss of their old masters, the Shadows, and their home planet, Z’ha’dum. They aim their wrath at Earth, unleashing a deadly biogenetic plague. Only five years (a convenient story arc - the time it will take for the disease to adapt to human physiology and become lethal) remain for the inhabitants of Earth unless the Excalibur succeeds in its quest to find a cure for the mutating plague. John Copeland, producer, says -

The mission of the Excalibur is to seek out places where the First Ones [of which the Shadows were one race] may have had colonies or where their homeworlds were because this plague is based on Shadow technology. The Earth scientific community could figure this out in 50 years. Unfortunately, that’s 45 years too late. These guys are on a scavenger hunt. They’re getting clues from the Rangers [Earth / Minbari elite squad], who are out there looking for it, too.

Starring Gary Cole

The captain’s role in Crusade is being played by actor Gary Cole, famous to TV viewers as the DJ from ‘Midnight Caller’, or more recently, as Lucas Buck, the diabolical sheriff of Trinity, South Carolina in ‘American Gothic’.

Apart from some preliminary artwork on the TNT / B5 site, I haven’t seen any shots from the series, but the CGI is rumoured to be a lot smoother than that used in the original B5 series. I was expecting the Excalibur to be a ship from the White Star fleet, but from the drawings below it looks more like one of the traditional Minbari ships.

Preliminary Artwork

In August, the Crusade producers announced they were teaming up with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The scientists at JPL are providing the Crusade producers with knowledge from the space program in order to help them depict future technology and astronomical situations realistically, therefore creating ‘the most accurate vision of the future ever attempted for television’. J. Michael Straczynski, show creator and executive producer says -

JPL’s involvement is massively exciting for all of us associated with Crusade. Viewers will see distant worlds never before attempted on any other TV series - worlds around twin stars, bizarre and strange environments, and alien life forms based on the best available scientific research from JPL. We want to bring the sense of wonder back into this kind of storytelling, and put the science back into science fiction.

Crusade is currently in production, and will be broadcast in the US in the new year. If you liked B5, then you’ll really be looking forward to this…

Cloud Boards

Published on 3/11/1998 in Boards and Video Games. 0 Comments

DeVore posted a message last night complaining about the way the new board systems don’t show all the messages - i.e. you have to click on a topic folder before you can see what messages you have or have not read.

I’ve added a [Show All] link to each board on the main page, this will list messages by date and hopefully will please the currently split community.

Hopefully if this board takes off, we will eventually be able to buy the full version which even allows users to go back and edit messages they posted earlier on.

Someone else suggested recombining the Quake 1 and 2 boards - let us know what you think.