Team.ie Travels

It’s been a busy month or two for the national Irish Quake team. Following on from their recent trip to France where they battled well against an experienced French Quake team (Ireland lost the team games, but won the one on one or “duel” matches), the team journeyed to Northern Ireland on 27 March for the “Lan Meat Se7en” event. Team.ie (featuring some members from their B squad) played their NI counterparts over three levels, and won all three. Fun was had by all and a proposed rematch was mentioned for this year’s QuakaPalooza LAN in Dublin (Team.ie, Lan Meat).

Quake 3 Latest

The end-of-the-month release of q3test (assuming they stick with the naming convention of its predecessors q2test and qtest!) has been postponed due to some last minute issues. It now looks like the beta version will not be released until the middle to the end of April.

The WDT (World Deathmatch Tournament) organisers have also announced that the tourney will be played using Quake 3 Arena only, much to the dissappointment of Quake and Quake 2 diehards who feel their existing skills will be lost in the “new” game (Quake 3 Arena, WDT).

QuakeWorld VWep

QuakeWorld players can now enjoy the ability to see what weapon their opponents are holding thanks to a new add-on for Quake called VWep (Visible Weapons). This nifty little feature has been available in Quake 2 for some time, but was not available for Quake until now. This adds another level of strategy to the game since you can now act as a thief of sorts, picking the player who has the nicest gun that you want (assuming he doesn’t get you with it first!).

The release of VWep totally overshadowed the QuakeWorld 2.34 update, largely ignored by the Quake community in any case due to its restriction on team messages and warnings via proxies (VWep, QuakeWorld).

Community Moves to New IRC Server

After a happy two years on the IOL IRC server, the Irish Quake community has moved to a new server (IRC.Quake.ie) connected to Europe’s largest IRC gaming network, QuakeNet. QuakeNet comprises of IRC servers from a number of countries: Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The number of active users on the network ranges from 1500 during the day to over 3000 at night.

Irish players can usually be found in the #quake.ie channel on IRC.Quake.ie:6667. The move was encouraged to allow more international games (and player inter-clan transfers!) to take place (IRC.Quake.ie, QuakeNet).

Cloud Boards Grow

The Cloud Boards have expanded yet again. From a humble beginning as Ireland’s main Quake discussion area, new boards for the Irish Tribes, StarCraft and online RPG communities were recently commisioned.

Now the boards feature many other entertainment and technology forums (Cloud Boards).

IGN Test Half-Life Server

The Irish Games Network have recently started testing a Half-Life multiplayer server at 159.134.244.150 (on the default port 27015). This server is currenly limited to ten players at any one time (IGN).

IGN’s Tribes Server

Tribes has really taken off in Ireland with the first Irish Tribes server getting busier every night! Although the game has not been officially released in the country as of yet (expected European release date is in April), players have been buying the game from friends in the US or from suppliers over the internet to keep up with the latest 3-D online gaming sensation where the action of Quake meets the strategy of Command and Conquer.

If you have Tribes, just look for the IGN entry in the server listing. Or you can connect directly from the Tribes console (press backquote to enter and leave this console) by typing connect(”IP:tribes.ign.ie:28001″); and pressing return. The game format can be voted on by players (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Capture and Hold, Defend and Destroy, etc.) currently active on the server.