May 16 - 31, 2001

Wednesday 30 May 2001

Well here we go again. Still working on that E3 article, just that uni work has taken a bit of time away from me! Still, no excuses and I promise it faithfully by tomorrow after noon!

In an interesting piece of hardware news, ATI have announced their new TrueForm rendering technology. This technology enables the use of curved triangles to better represent things like faces and such in order to render them in a more true to life form. This technology should enhance their competition with nVidia and the other graphics card manufacturers. The concept is quite simple on the surface but the implementation is decidedly difficult! If you have a bent for new technology, and graphics cards in particular, Check out these two articles, one from Yahoo News, and one from AMD Zone, for the nitty gritty on the tech!

There is a new game guide for Operation Flashpoint out over at OperationFlashPoint.net. This guide focuses on the life of an Infantry soldier in the game. It is sort of like a "boot camp" (and no I don't mean that pussy TV show!) for the game and covers everything from tactics to weapons and then some. Go on check it out before the game is released!

Strangely enough there is a new beta version of nVMax taking it up to version 2.0 (build 2093) beta. You can download it from nVMax directly or through Savage News.

You can pick up a new version of the nVidia Detonator drivers from M3DZone. That takes them up to 7.97. Now I don't know if they are official drivers from nVidia, but the unofficial ones are somewhere around version 12.4, so it is possible that they are real! Nope just checked, these are still unofficial, however they are for all supported chipsets, rather that just for the GeForce3 chipset. Hopefully these will be a little more stable that some of the beta sets!

All those Mac users can now rejoice! MacGamer have posted an article which details an interview with Diane Zammit, new head of MacPlay. MacPlay is a company that will specialized in porting PC games to the Macintosh platform! Hopefully they will be able to do that fairly concurrently if the developers will release the source code as they develop it! If they do then Mac Gamers may actually be able to play games at the same time as PC gamers do! Now wouldn't that be a huge step forward for the Mac community!

And in another example of extreme stupidity, a Frenchman was taken to hospital for attempting to put out the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe with his bottom! Yes, he found out that fire actually burns! Check the story out here!

Well that's all for today folks!

Tuesday 29 May 2001

Patch news for Black & White! The official Black & White site has announced that the much vaunted and awaited patch for the epic game will be available for download from various sites as of Thursday 31 May!!! Yippeeee! I can finally finish the game!

Not much yet today, but stay tuned, cause I'm putting up a bit on E3 with what was hot and who won what! Back later with the news!

Monday 28 May 2001

Well It seems as if I am having some minor problems with uploading my pages to the server! That's why I haven't finished yesterdays post. I decided to just put it all together in todays post.

12 people attended the evening, with 5 clan members present. Most of the games were won by either Someone or DontTryThis@Home, with Amas usually bringing up a creditable 3rd place. On the opposition, the clear winner was Iceman with his knack of following you around and then shooting you while you are trying to kill someone else!

For this LAN we searched through our game collections and resurrected some of the older games and their variants. Quake 3 GridIron was played by some. This is a really fun game with the object being to get the ball and then get it over the try before the opposition frag you! Team work is very effective here as it is essential for your team mates to "block" for you! I must say, I died a lot, but usually managed to distract the opposition long enough for us to score. Cannon fodder can sometimes be fun! We attempted to run Q3 Rocket Arena 3, but we were unable to get it to work.

Unreal Tournament had the dust blown off it, and was played in it's natural state as well as with the mod Tac Ops. Realistic weaponry in Tac Ops was a real change and made for some fairly interesting fire fights. Often the difference between life and death was the reload time. Great fun was had by all!

We played the stalwart Counter-Strike with both the CT and the Terrorists coming out about even. Such is the nature of the maps that no one side can dominate each and every map.

A few of us who are into Tribes 2 set up a server and played CTF and Rabbit formats. We had a few too many bots in the rabbit scenarios to really hang onto the flag for long, but it was a lot of fun blowing the crap out of anyone with the flag. DontTryThis@Home performed the best at this as he usually managed to get a clean break when he first picked up the flag. The rest of us just got hammered! But it was a lot of fun. The only thing wrong with Tribes 2 is the level of intelligence with the bots. We had them set high and they still didn't go out and capture the flags! This made it very easy for us to sneak around and win the game. All the bots did was attack and bomb the base! They didn't even repair their base when we destroyed parts of it! Oh well, humans are much more fun to play against anyway!

Some of the guys dusted off their old Starcraft skills and put them to the test. I'm not sure who actually won, but the last I heard of the game they were complaining that they were all out of resources! Sounded like it was becoming a stalemate!

Well that was the LAN Party, most of us enjoyed ourselves and managed to build up our software libraries a bit more. I was amazed at the variety of file trading software that was circulating around the group! The newest program (at least to me) is one called Morpheus. It is supposed to combine all the best features of Bear Share and iMesh into one program and then add more features. I haven't tried it yet, but will let you know what I think of it when I have!

Word on the net is that Blizzard are all hush hush over a new title. While they are not releasing any details at present they have faithfully promised to showcase the new game at the European Computer Trade Show in September! At present all they will say is "It is not Starcraft 2"

And now an article from the wild world of cats................
Is your cat bored, lack energy, just doesn't seem to be getting passing grades in feline school? Well then there is a program just for you and your cat! CyberPounce is a game designed to stimulate the neural system of your cat. Yep, that's right folks, take the electrodes away from the children and sit the cat down in front of the monitor and watch it learn! If you don't believe me about this program, check out the article over at EuroGamer!

You can now pick up a copy of the Startopia demo from 3DFiles. This game is a strategy type trading/combat space game and if the reports from E3 are to be believed (and why wouldn't you!) then this game is set to be quite impressive and may even rival the ever developing Masters of Orion 3. Download size is 89 Megs.

The demo for Edge Of Chaos: Independence War 2 has finally been mirrored and can be found at 3DFiles as well. Be warned that this file is huge and demand for it is very high, so it may take a long while to download. Tim over at Tim's News has managed to get himself a copy and has played around with it a bit. He seems impressed with the it but has suffered from several crashes to desk top and lock ups. System tweaking is suggested to get the game to run correctly!

Anyway, that is more than enough for you today! Hope you enjoyed it!

Sunday 27 May 2001

Really early Morning.................

Have just come back from our Clan LAN Party, if you could call it that. A good night was had by all and we played a few games that hadn't been enjoyed for a long time, as well as some of the old staples like Counter-Strike and such. I really need some sleep now but I will be back later to let you know exactly what happened and who killed who! Enjoy the rest, I know I will!!!

Thursday 24 May 2001

In honour of the late Douglas Adams, author of the sci-fi classic The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy tomorrow (Friday 25th May) has been declared Towel Day. In order to participate, all you have to do is locate your towel (we all know where it is anyway!) and carry it with you all day. If you have no idea what the significance of the towel is then I suggest you read the first few chapters of the book to find out!

Important news for all those Black & Whiters that are stuck waiting for the patch to arrive! The patch which was due out on the 21st, has been put back 10 days so that they can fix some communication problem for the Netherlands. This patch is destined to be almost as anticipated as the game was! I can see it now.......Press Release: The much anticipated patch of the year has finally been released to an adoring (if somewhat annoyed) gaming community!

That sneaky man over at Tim's News has again beaten me to the punch with the announcement of that Massive Online War Game from Cornered Rat Software, WWII Online going gold. The game is due to be released world wide (and we will see if that actually happens!) early in June! This game is a subscription based game with figures being quoted as US$19.95 for the game and $4.95 per month to play with the first 2 months free! If I could afford it I would probably become addicted to it. You can download a 50 Mb movie file here or you can check out the official site here!

At E3 the designer of Black & White announced that his next project will be an RPG type game for the X-Box. The game is presently titled "Project Ego" and you can check out the details of the game here!

Good news for Australians. Operation Flashpoint, that cutting edge FPS squad based war game will be available from around the 26th of June! The bad news is that the real fun part, the multiplayer internet team game will not be available until the US version ships sometime in October or November. I have been assured that the Aussie/European version will simply be patched to allow the changes, but we will just have to put up with part of a game until then!. Sometimes I really wonder at the software publishers! They must be short of money and want to cash in on the game before it hits the US market!

If you are into Master Of Orion 3, then you should check out the E3 Gamespy article here which updates the state of development and all the nifty new features of the game.

Tired of buying a game only to play it through once and put it back in the box never to be used again? Well the guy's over at Gamasutra have released an article about just what it is about some games that make them replayable and what it is about others that makes them a one hit wonder! Check it out for interesting reading!

For something different, check out this article on the couple who got stuck together whilst having sex and had to be rushed to hospital to be separated. What a way to get caught!

If you are interested in seeing how the on-again off-again Unreal II game is going then check out the screenies here at the official site.

More in line with this site's practice of weeding out the stupid and really dumb, here is a news article from CNN about a dry cleaner who solved a bank robbery. I will let you read it cause the baddy is just too stupid to mention here!

And along with more stupidity, Germany has announced a 700% tax on violent games such as Half-Life and Quake 3. This is supposed to discourage the violence which troubles our world, but I still don't see them banning violence in movies and on the news. And let's be honest, Kids of today spend far more time watching movies than they do playing violent games, and also the violent movies are promoted far more by the media than any game could ever hope to be. One day the politicians may just get a clue and stop bending over for the rich and powerful enough to bring some sanity back into the world! Anyway, enough of the utopian dreams and back to reality cause it'll never happen!

We have a clan LAN party this weekend and we should be playing some new games like Tribes 2, Black & White, Rocket Arena and a few others that we haven't tried multiplayer yet. I'll let you all know how it goes on Sunday. Well that's it for today, Cheers!

Monday 21 May 2001

A new version of NVMax has been released bringing it up to ver 2.090. Get it from here.

It looks like Asus, the makers of those really great cheating video drivers, have issued an apology, blamed an errant staff member for leaking them, and promise faithfully that they won't do it again! Isn't that what they said last time?? That still doesn't stop the cheaters from using the ones leaked and ruining our games for us!

On a slightly more humorous note - although the topic is rather serious. Here is an article that appeared in the Chicago Times a few days ago. Read it, you will definitely get a laugh from the unsuspectingly funny way the reporter writes about this event! Laugh here!

I thought that it would be a little more packed with news after E3, but everything seems to have slowed down! Maybe some news will start happening tomorrow after the Americans have had their Sunday!

Cheers.

Sunday 20 May 2001

News from the E3 trenches is that the upcoming Half-Life universe game Blue Shift has already gone gold and should be shipped and ready for sale by June 12! Wow that was quick! It seems like I only heard about the game a few weeks ago! Can't wait to see what it looks like!

Ever been new at anything? Ever had to endure the slagging and ridicule of fellow gamers because you just started to play and they have been there for a few moments more? I know that I have! Anyone familiar with my rantings about release dates will probably recall, that was one of the objections to staggered release dates. 3DActionPlanet has an interesting article on newbie bashing and why it ultimately hurts the gaming and computing community. If we pass on our knowledge then the community grows. If we ridicule the newcomers, the community withers and dies, or suffers from the online form of hemophilia. Inbreeds who think they know more than others really annoy everyone. So please don't be one and if you see a newbie struggling with some question or tactic, remember - you were there once! And then lend them a hand so that they can enjoy the game as much as you do!

UbiSoft have signed a deal which will allow them to produce games based on the recent award winning movie Wo hu zang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). It will be interesting to see what comes of this!

It would appear that 10 years ago, the World Wide Web was created and previewed for the first time! Happy birthday! If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't be here reading this! Check out the full story at atomicMPC.

Well that's about all folks!

Saturday 19 May 2001

I really seem to have a problem with what day it is! I'm putting it down to all the excitement over the start of E3! Finally some great news about games is coming out!

First off is some rather mundane and common news...
There is a new patch out for Tribes 2! This is the umpteenth patch for this great game and I am told the list of fixes and improvements are long and comprehensive! As this one also updates the Sierra updater program as well, you really should just log on and update away!

If you are a fan of the MP3 industry, and let's face it....who isn't, then you may be interested in these two articles from Wired News. The first is about the Classical Music Companies making an agreement so that they can avoid the crap that the RIAA is carrying on with (here), and the second is about how the Asian music market is awakening and adapting on-line strategies to sell their music (here). Maybe the US record companies should stop arguing and try to make the most of the changing media! Also while we are there there are new versions of iMesh and LimeWire available for download! You can get them from the company site or any of the numerous sites like ZDnet or CNet.

If you are traveling to Iran (someone has to!) then don't be surprised if you can't keep in touch via e-mail as they are regulating internet cafes and several are closing as a result. Check out the full story here.

There is a new version of that great download manager available for download. GetRight ver 4.5 Beta 6 is available here.

If you are interested in computer games and entertainers?? like Brittany Spears, then you will be pleased to hear that she will be starring in a new computer game by Sony. Details are sketchy at present but may become clearer as E3 progresses. Further details here.

Breaking news at E3 states that the new console from Microsoft, the X Box, will have about 50 games available for purchase as of its release! Very ambitious, but it may be needed in order to wrest the market from Sony's Playstation series!

PlanetBlackandWhite have revealed in an interview with the creator of the game that the much anticipated and long awaited fabled patch is due for release on 21 May. Not only will it fix all the problems in the game, but it will include quite a few new enhancements to buildings, spells and creature dancing capabilities! It is also rumoured that it will mow your lawn and do the dishes for you while you play (just so you don't get into trouble from your wife!). Read more about it here.

While E3 may be all about games and technology, we are all aware that nothing in this world makes things sell better than good old fashioned sex! You can check out some of the pictures of the booth girls and their friends at ShackNews or VoodoExtreme! God bless their little souls!

Thursday 17 May 2001

Well, with E3 starting sometime today (I say sometime cause I'm in a different time zone, if you hadn't guessed) more game related news should be forthcoming! Hopefully something really exciting!!

When Hasbro closed the Alameda development studio and canned the virtual battlefield project series, the last thing I ever thought I'd hear was this!

There are plans for the next installment in that ultra realistic flight simulator Falcon 4.0! G2 Interactive has bought the source code and are now planning the sequel. The sequel is to be named Falcon V to differentiate it from the previous sims. The Falcon franchise of games has had several developers over the years, starting with Spectrum Holobyte and ending most recently with the conglomeration of Infogrames/Hasbro Interactive/Microprose. I don't know how long it will take to deliver the new sim, but I'll be waiting as long as it takes! Flight Simmers of the World rejoice! I just hope they can stay afloat and avoid the marketing department and the number crunchers long enough to produce a truly fantastic sim! Check the full interview out at SimHQ. Thanks Tim for alerting me to this one!

Well it would seem that we will be waiting a bit longer for that ever elusive title - Team Fortress 2! The developers stated, in a post to the Voodoo Extreme message boards, that it is not worth doing TF2 unless it is substantially different to the rest of the pack! I hate to say it, but I think the bean counters will can this one long before the real code ever hits the light of a screen!

Another movie is being made from a game! Usually these movies flop just like the games based on movies! This time the movie being made is set in the Resident Evil realm. The title, (at least a working one) is Resident Evil: Ground Zero. With this movie in the official pipeline, I wonder how long it will be before they "officially" announce the actors for the alleged Diablo movie??

On a more web related topic, the web browser Opera is about to become a whole lot more popular! I personally prefer it to MSIE 5.5, but several programs that I like to use to make my internet experience worthwhile, have trouble running with the program, so I run both. Opera is smoother, faster and more reliable than any version of MSIE that I have ever used. And what's more you can download a free version from here. If you would like to read more about the future of Opera, then check out this story at cNet.

Wednesday 16 May 2001

I missed a day but things have been slow. I hope that there is more to report for two days than there has been lately! On with the news!

On a game related note...The FIGJAM Clan website is up and running! Tim, the founder of the clan, has finally posted more than just the sign-up page. The site includes member profiles, stories of recent clan encounters, and other stuff that will develop later. So if you like online games and are interested in joining a hip and happening clan, then race on over to Tim's News and become a part of gaming history! (Ok, Ok, Ok, so it is a little hypey, but join us and see!)

The makers of Battle Realms have released a couple of new vids showcasing their game. If you have the bandwidth or the time, check them out here!

Gamespy Arcade has been updated to version 1.07g. It features many fixes and updates for several games including Red Alert, Starcraft and Diablo! So if you use it, log on and update! Or if you haven't tried it yet then you can download the program from here!

Along with the sad death of Douglas Adams, GameSpot UK have released some concept shots of the computer based version of Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy that Adams was working on just before his death last weekend. Go visit the site and pay tribute to one of Britain funniest sci-fi writers! Don't forget to take your towel! And most of all DON'T PANIC!

In a strange, (but true!) turn of events, it has been announced by Atlas Games and Human Head Studios, that they are releasing a pen & paper FRPG based on their PC adventure game Rune. Check out the article at Gamespy Daily for the full details!

For all you Counter-Strike fans out there, you will be pleased to hear that they have announced that Valve Software will be developing a single player game based in the Counter-Strike universe. The game is to be called Counter-Strike:Condition Zero. Check out the info at ShackNews.

The annual developers expo, E3, is on again this month and Wired News have run an article on the unusually large presence of Microsoft this year. The article talks about the X-box preview and other eagerly awaited titles such as Duke Nukem Forever (I thought this one was a hoax!) and Max Payne!

There are a new version of nVidia Detonator drivers (beta of course!) out. This brings them up to 12.40. You can get them from M3DZone. Try them (at your own risk) you might like them!

nVMax have updated their program yet again. You can get the upgrade from here. This brings it up to ver 2 build 2050.

Do you have rabbit problems? Can't find a way to keep those pesky critters out of your prized garden? Well a man may have found the answer for you! Just surround your garden with your hair clippings. Yep, hair clippings! If you don't believe me then check this article out! But it may only work in Winnipeg! (I don't even know where that is!)

Microsoft has announced several new privacy features of their next browser which will allow users to determine just how much of themselves they put on the net! IE6 aims to set a new standard in browser privacy and the early beta testing suggests that it actually works! Check out the full story here.

Well that just about wraps up today's news! I am still working on a new look design for the site, so if you have any suggestions let me know! Cheers!