Just to recap on Grand Theft Auto’s mod, Hot Coffee – from Wikipedia:

When installed, it unlocks a hidden part of the game which involves having sex (featuring oral sex with an “invisible” penis and dry humping) with the main character’s girlfriend to try to improve the relationship between the two.

The Oblivion mod, on the otherhand, unlocks this:

Does anyone think that is worse than GTA’s Hot Coffee mod? I think that Jack Thompson preys on the cluelessness of American parents in order to make a name for himself. This Oblivion issue has been blown way out of proportion, but Jack Thompson wants people to believe that World War III has started and he is the only guy who can save us from the enemy. Jack: this is not going to make you a guest on Oprah. Silence you furry fool. You’re finished here, you understand?

The DaVinci Code hype has gone beyond a joke.

I went to see American Dreamz yesterday, the American Idol parody. Such an easy target, but this was a weak effort. The early rounds of the real American Idol are infinitely more funny (see William Hung). However, Hugh Grant is no longer the most annoying guy on Earth, he’s actually not too bad (please don’t kill me).

From ClanBase – news of a major security flaw in the six year old Quake 3 engine:

Today, on milw0rm.com, a hacker nicknamed Landser has released a hack that exploits a serious leak in games based on the Quake 3 Engine. It grants hackers full access to take over your computer.

Technically, the leak creates a unsuspicious “boundary error” when sending malformed messages from the gameserver to a client during the remapShader process. Once a buffer overflow occurs, the computer is fully exposed to any type of activities.

This also affects Enemy Territory, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and any other games running the Quake 3 engine. The patch is out, but PunkBuster anti-cheat program is slowing things down, so you if you plan on playing league games this week, don’t upgrade just yet.

In other news, the Swedish Quake legend Blue is back dueling in the Eurocup after five years absence. Will be interesting to see how he does in Quake 4

Soccer – Ireland’s squad was announced for the training camp in Portugal and upcoming friendly vs Chile. Great to see Steve Staunton building a team for the future, with many young faces in the side including the 17 year old Terry Dixon from Spurs. A big surprise to me was the inclusion of Shelbourne’s Jason Byrne. In the past, I have always campaigned for the managers to look to the Eircom League, and in particular to the likes of Jason Byrne, when we had no options (other than David Connolly) up front.

However, at the moment our strikers are better than I can ever remember, with Robbie Keane in flying form at Spurs, Stephen Elliot looking very lively for Ireland last season, and Kevin Doyle named Fan’s Player of the Year at Reading, making the team of the championship, and spawning a 58-page thread of appreciation on the Royal’s forum in the process. Thats not to mention Clinton, who has often done well for us.

Since Jayo’s inclusion is obviously just a token, why not give Georgie a few minutes to dazzle the palta-eaters over in Chile? Still, at least theres good news for one Cork City player, as Denis Behan has been called up into the U-21 side to play Azerbaijan.

A few years ago, Text Mode Quake was summonning Satan all over your hard drive. This year’s offering to the ‘cool but useless’ catalogue of Quake is a late April Fools joke by someone with too much time on his hands. Written using the Inform Programming Language – a language for creating Interactive Fiction games, the game has been translated into a text adventure.

Elevator Room
This room is really more of an inlet off the previous corridor, as it consists only of some metal walls, and a bright red button that is flashing.
A grunt is standing here, armed with a shotgun and looking rather surly.
The Grunt's shotgun shoots across your shoulder, hitting you for 5 points. It's only a flesh wound.



>attack grunt with axe
You hit the Grunt taking off 4 from his health.
The Grunt's shotgun hits your foot, hitting you for 5 points. You'll be fine tomorrow, but it really smarts.


There are games on Irish servers every night which will cater for all Irish players regardless of their ability or experience. Any oldschoolers looking for a blast of nostalgia, or any of the new generation who wonder what all the fuss is about, I urge you to dip your toe into the tempestuous water of Irish QuakeWorld – theres a good chance that you will be swept away. Myself, I have taken part in the nightly pickups upon occasion during the past two weeks or so, and am impatiently waiting for tonight’s game.

Coinciding with the renewed activity in the QuakeWorld scene, season 19 of the Jolt Quake 3 CTF League began on Sunday. The league is stricter than before, indicating that perhaps bigfoot is becoming fed up with his duties, but this ensures a higher degree of activity and promises fewer drop-outs. I nearly got my clan, TS, booted from the league just because I was 10 minutes late for the game, having rebooted into Linux because my sound wasn’t working properly in Windows, only to find that PunkBuster anti-cheat program wasn’t updated in Linux, and when I rebooted back into Windows, as you would expect my mouse would not work – Razer Copperhead’s fancy firmware can be troublesome at times. A final reboot into Windows allowed me onto the server, but if I had been one minute later, one of the oldest clans in the league would have been dumped out needlessly.

Bigfoot redeemed himself with a quality review – no fewer than six mentions for the Last of the ISDNers (thats me btw). Remind me to gloat to Aly about this one

Players of the Week:
TS – killy – Despite ongoing connection issues looked a real threat and could fire TS to the title if he gets enough support.

Which brings me onto the connection issues… for some reason Irish ISDN has gone down the tubes in the past four months. Even at its best, ISDN is barely usable. I have complained so much about the lack of bandwidth, bad quality of routing and connection flooding in the past that I swore I would endure it silently, but for some reason, ping times (even to Irish servers) are twice what they should be. With the increase of bandwidth and reduction of latency on Irish ADSL in January, Irish internet connections are now better than ever. So why is it that the performance of ISDN is steadily degrading. To compare, I used to get 27ms ping times to Irish servers, and 33ms to Jolt in the UK – now I get 52ms even to an Eircom server. Oceanfree is no better, and I have tried this on both Windows and Linux with different internal TAs without improvement. Latency is bad enough, but to make matters worse, my connection can no longer take the higher rates in game that I have been using for the past five years. I wonder if this is the case all over Ireland, or if its just the wonderful Donoughmore exchange. I have not been able to find any other ISDN users to ask.

As you well know, many online games require intensive time-consuming for advancing the level. The power leveling or grinding, “level No-ga-da” in Korean language, is the basic part for lots of games. If you want to be the best in the game, “Ji-Jone(至尊)” in Korean language, you should pour as many hours into game as possible. This nature of online games is also strongly present in games tuned for kids. They do never find enough times both for studying and playing hard.

What is solution for this conflict? Let me do your power leveling, kid!

ClanBase isn’t usually a site that I would read for gaming-related news, but they have surpassed themselves lately with some quality articles. They also bring the news that MTV has partnered with Snoop Dogg’s gaming league.

When I first heard that about this elite xbox gaming league for hip hop stars, I laughed out loud. I can’t understand why so many gamers were so vehemently opposed to the concept, it sounds great to me. “We’re going to take this thing straight over the stratosphere, and the whole world can watch and participate as people like myself – who hate to lose – put it on the line.” Knowing MTV, I’ll probably be watching this for six hours a day between Pimp My Ride and Pimp My Ride UK.

The player line-up for the inaugural season includes personalities from the worlds of hip-hop, sports and entertainment, including Paul Wall, Just Blaze, Twista, David Banner, Krayzie Bone of Grammy winners Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony, MLS Star Cobi Jones, Murs, Kaine of the Ying Yang Twins, NBA Star Jalen Rose, Fredwreck, BReal of Cypress Hill, Eric V. of the Baka Boyz and Method Man.

My money is on the guy from Cypress hill, as it has been reported that he’ll “jack your ass like a looter in a riot”. Snoop mentions that the league will expand in future seasons.

Carmac’s article about the death of Quake echoes my own thoughts from last month that we are flogging a dead horse. He rightly asserts that the whole deathmatch genre is dying out, with Unreal Tournament 2007 likely to be the final offering. Its a shame, but after 10 years, the public has decided that it would rather play Paris Hilton video games.

In a blast of nostalgia, Quake 3 was temporarily restored to its glory days, as ten top CTF players returned to the Arena. Commentary was provided by Lun’s former colleagues at iTG (djWHEAT and ReDeYe) as OoZe, forever, thedutchone, Appleseed, chewie faced off against Zonic, Raoul, Vertex, derfel, and Deus. Hundreds of players turned up on GTV, with hundreds more listening in to the shoutcast. A very worthwhile event, well done to forever and the other organisers.

The first real eye opener was the Fatal1ty challenge. With a train of sponsors behind him, Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel (the only true pro-FPSgamer in the western hemisphere at the time) offered $125,000 (courtesy of Abit) to whomever could beat him in a 1v1 game of Doom 3. The Chinese star Meng “RocketBoy” Yang took the honours and the money in a 15 minute game in Beijing. In China, $125,000 for 15 minutes work is serious money. RocketBoy bought a house with it.

Soon after, the revamped Cyber Athlete Professional League launched a World Tour, which saw nearly $1,000,000 distributed as prize money. The funny thing about this year-long series of tournaments is that the primary game which was chosen, Painkiller, had a community of around 17 players. The game was fast, and entertaining, modeled on the original Quake. It was also hideously unbalanced and largely unpopular, and none of the top players, bar Fatal1ty, bothered to take it up. Along with Fatal1ty, an 18 year old kid from the Netherlands, Sander “Vo0” Kaasjager, who had been making a name for himself in Q3 CPMA, cashed in on this easy money and earned over $230,000 each in CPL prizes alone. This was a wake-up call for gamers across the board. For kids who have never seen a full paycheck, the lure of such prizes was extremely potent. Realising they missed their chance to cash in on the Painkiller World Tour (and it was a golden chance, as there was big money up for grabs for anyone who was willing to dedicate a lot of time to the game) they vowed they would be ready for the next one.

Long before the game was even launched, the CPL had announced that Quake 4 would be their primary game for World Tour 05/06. Like rats on a sinking ship, wannabe pro-gamers abandoned their respective communities in droves. Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, Enemy Territory, Soldier of Fortune players all vowed that they would be the next Vo0. But this time around, there would be no easy money, as the superstars of Quake 3 had also moved on, with their years of experience.

Then all of a sudden, the bottom fell out of Quake 4. The CPL merged with the the World Series of Video Gaming. The World Tour was cancelled, and everybody realised that this game actually sucks. So what will happen to the thousands of baffled, competitive teenagers who worked so hard? Maybe Blizzard knows the answer to that question. For your average games developer, it is the casual gamer who pays the wages. The guy who plays the single player missions, and then gets the expansion pack. The online community is such a minor slice of the market that there is no point spending too much time or resources on it.

However, Blizzard is not the average games developer. After the massive success of World of Warcraft, which saw 300,000 gamers forking out $15 every month in subscription fees, golden dollar signs are surely flashing in their eyeballs. Last week, they announced a partnership with the WSVG to offer an “unparalleled gaming experience”. Blizzard know the potential that exists, since it was their own StarCraft that really set the ball rolling. In my opinion, this could be a major turning point for the world of e-Sports. Whichever direction it takes, I can see no competitive future for the Quake series, which was the height of 1v1 gaming for 10 years.

And back to the original topic, the final standings of the TransAtlantic Showdown are as follows:

Quake 4 TDM
1.  Sweden iCE-cLIMBERS
2. Darkside
3. Blackdragons
4.  Sweden aCtion Ligan

Quake 4 1v1
1. United States of America coL.socrates_
2. Russia Mouz.Cooller
3. United States of America x6\cha0ticz
4. France *aAa*winz

Congrats to iCE-cLIMBERS, who have continued in Quake 4 where they left off in Quake 3 – as the best TDM team in the world. They easily defeated the top American clan Darkside in two maps.

What an apt finish it would have been had Cooller top, but his arrogance and his apathy proved his downfall, as he was easily beaten by socrates. This is not a surprise, as Cooller’s strength was in his strategic play, and his ability to outwit the opponent. This worked in Quake 3, where the big maps relied more on strategy and less on aim, and it also worked for him in the early days of Quake 4, where lesser players were not yet clued in. But as the game matures, the superior aimers who play 24/7 are waking up to the subtleties of map tactics that came naturally to Russian, and thus his one major advantage is now lost. Socrates, on the other hand, is a great aimer and a good thinker. He deserved the win, and although I wouldn’t rate him as highly as the likes of Fooki, he will always be a contender, while Cooller’s days could be numbered as he appears to have lost interest. Winz, in my opinion, did not deserve to be there, qualifying thanks to a lack of interest by other top players like Fooki and Fox. I would expect this lack of interest to spread in the coming months, perhaps UT2K7 becoming the nail in Quake’s coffin.