James Galvin

Ireland’s most experienced gaming clan, Clan FH, are now playing Warsow. The clan has been going since August 2000 and has played hundreds of official matches. When Quake 4 turned out to be such a disappointment, I thought that FH’s days were over but we’ll give Warsow a crack and see if its worth playing. I moved the website into Wordpress and got most of the news / match results archives imported.

It’s funny to see that after 6 years, the lack of broadband is still the major issue for me. FH had 21 dedicated Irish gamers in its teamlist. Looking through the news archives, it wasn’t until 2003 that any of us were able to get broadband. On 6th Jan, 2003, quozl was the first of us to have more than 128k bandwidth. He was living in Dublin 4, actively involved in Irish WAN, an engineering graduate with broadband a major priority. But like the rest of us in Cork City, Carrigaline, Bray, Malahide, Galway City, Dundalk, Ennis, Limerick, Portlaoise, and er.. *cough* Ballymore Eustace, it was simply impossible to get any kind of broadband (bar satellite) until this time.

Some FHers still weren’t able to get DSL until just a couple of months ago - Spacey went to extreme lengths including bribes and intimidation in order to get his line to pass and it finally paid off. Out of the blue, Eircom upgraded Vincent’s local exchange. Anyone else who still couldn’t get broadband had long since resigned themselves to the Xbox I think, so that now in the middle of 2006, I’m the last remaining ISDNer. I think I’ll write a song about it.

I was at GameCon 9 in Dublin this weekend. Held in The Spa hotel in Lucan, a good venue, and a nice LAN. I was there for the Unreal Tournament 2004 - I don’t get that much time to play it online, and when I do, the ISDN is too much of a disadvantage. My clan TMS had a full team, but unfortunately the other Irish clan, Doozer, were short a man, so we had played a lot of mixes. Played a bit of WarSow (good fun, but it will never be an e-sport!), and 40 mins or so of CoD2… but as with most LAN events, after the first 16 hours I was wrecked, and it was roasting hot outside, and I couldn’t bear to look at the monitor anymore. Zombie-mode kicked in, so I managed to stick around until I played my UT 1v1s.

There were a few tourneys running - I followed the Counter Strike: Source team tournament, although I didn’t participate. The hot favourites were a Korean team from GHM 5 Star internet cafe, a very professional looking outfit, with Fnatic mousemats and the leader barking orders non-stop. I was sitting next to the clan No Friends, who were meant to be the #1 challengers, but they got destroyed by GHM in the first round and it looked like the rest of the competition was just a formality. But there was a surprise winner, so well done to those lads on the far side of the room.

UT2k4 1v1 was as expected - the Dubliner, kRoNic, taking the spoils by defeating Jazzy, Dardoz, and Mang en route. Some very close games, notably Dardoz vs Chosen, and Dardoz vs kRoNic. I was gone home when kRoNic stepped up to the podium, and thats when the controversy arose. It had been announced that the winner of the UT 1v1 would receive an Xbox 360 as a prize. But when the winner turned out to be kRoNic, one of the admins gave thumbs down (because he won an Xbox 360 at GameCon 8, and sold it soon after) and decided to give him some Logitech® Z-5400 Digital 5.1 speakers instead. Unfortunately for kRoNic, these are worth much less than the original prize, so when he slaps these up on eBay, he’s not going to do so well.

I have to say, this kind of thing pisses me off - if you announce a prize, it is extremely unprofessional to pull it just because you don’t like who wins it. I mentioned to one of the organisers that, in my opinion, the prizes should be set in stone beforehand to avoid such circumstances from arising, but this sounded like a very alien suggestion to him. kRoNic got shafted by the discretion of the admins, plain and simple - I don’t think anybody would deny that.

So its fair to say that the GameCon admins owe kRoNic:

• an xbox 360 in exchange for his speakers
• OR cash to the value of the deficit between the Xbox 360 and the speakers they gave him
• OR an apology, along the lines of “Sorry, we fucked up, we have no money so it would be difficult to set this right - have some free GameCon t-shirts and a mousemat, is it OK if we leave it at that?”.

For as long as I was in attendance, the LAN was entertaining and well organised, it was a good way to waste a couple of days, so well done to the admins. I hope you sort kRoNic out with an apology, otherwise I’ll have to hold a grudge against you for the next few decades. Next time around, I will probably go up on the Saturday so that I’ll be in better form for the competitions.

Have been playing UT2K4 with The Muppet Show for a few days now. Only TDM so far, but CTF and maybe TAM to come. Its good fun, and theres a bit of life in the Irish Unreal Tournament scene at the moment, and plenty of grudges and tension and sparks flying which can only be a good thing ;). Only problem at the moment is my woeful connection, with bad ping and terrible packet loss on dodgy ISDN with the Irish ISP’s as bad as ever.

TMS current line-up is as follows:

• Jazzy (leader)
• Mang87
• kRoNic
• reikz
• killy
• Redemption
• Cavey

I’ve just been playing War§ow - a free stand-alone fast-paced “full of trix” FPS running the Quake 2 engine, inspired by QuakeWorld and Q3 CPMA. A new version released today has breathed fresh life into the small but dedicated Warsow community, and inspired many new players like myself to give it a go. The cartoonish graphics can appear off-putting at first, but its easy to get used to them. The game focuses on the “art of movement” more than aim, and thus is closer to CPMA than to QW in design.

Heres what Chas says on quake.ie:

A little about the game : free, fast FPS. Based around collecting ammo for your weapons - when you pick up a weapon you are firing weak ammo, you must collect stronger ammo packs to get the most out of each weapon. Weapons may have different damage / slightly different behaviour depending on what ammo you use (for instance: the weak electrobolt (wsws rail) is a high speed projectile, whereas the electrobolt with strong ammo is instant hit.

I doubt I’ll be sticking with it, but I like the fact that its good fun, only 61mb, and free. You can download a Warsow for Linux here and Warsow for Windows here.

A guy linked to this on IRC - a FFXI Games Master’s blog. Having wasted €50 on Final Fantasy Online when it first came out, I have no remorse for these losers who continue to play it, and I must commend [GM]Dave on his good work.

[GM]Dave>> You said he was a gilseller
[GM]Dave>> Just because he was there for 5 days.
Player>> Yeah.
[GM]Dave>> And then you said you were there for 5 days.
Player>> Yeah.
[GM]Dave>> And 2 plus 2 equals…
Player>> 4?

*makes a note in player account*

Attention: Player is apparently mildly retarded.

[GM]Dave>> Logic and math skills.
[GM]Dave>> You must beat the girls off with a stick.
Player>> Yeah. A stick +1. lol

*makes a note in player account*

Attention: Player is apparently mildly functionally retarded.

America’s Army is a propoganda tool that was launched by the U.S. government to help with recruitment - a realistic first person shooter computer game. Released in 2002, it is still popular today, with several thousand people playing it at any given time. DeLappe has made it his mission to counter the PR to some small extent by listing the names of each American service person killed in Iraq.

As of 5/25/06 , I have input 505 names. I intend to keep doing so until the end of this war. As of 5/25/06 there have been 2,460 American service persons killed in Iraq.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if a hundred people joined in his protest? [via]

I don’t know how long this has been around for, but Spaceman just pointed it out to me. Turns out there is still a bug in World of Warcraft allowing items to be duplicated. This site is selling the hack, they claim to be able to duplicate 20+ epic items in 10 minutes. Anyone know if this is a scam, or if its a legit hack? Either way, I don’t endorse it, but at the same time theres no point pretending these things don’t exist.

I hate e-sports. Computer games should be games, and nothing more. There have always been super competitive teenagers who alias and quit servers and make excuses and whine, but since the rise of e-sports, this has become the norm. All the same, I hate to see Ireland left behind, and this is exactly what has been happening for the past three years, as Ireland has lacked any semi-professional online gaming organisation since the downfall of clan dNC. I hated clan dNC, I hate Four Kings, and kick-esports, and all these queer organisations with “e-sports” or “gaming” tacked onto the end. Basically I want any clan that has a CEO to cop on and get a life.

Unfortunately, gone are the days when we could play our weekly league match against against a group of lads who play the game for fun. The entire European clan scene has sold their souls in return for a branded mousemat, and a fancy IRC bouncer. These days, a clan is more about a corporate identity, getting their name in the media, and sucking up to their sponsors.. As much as I hate all the lameness and lack of sportsmanship and 14-year old egos that this new competitive streak has brought to online gaming, I have to acknowledge that it is not going to go away, and its time that Ireland starts catching up.

Traditionally, Ireland has a good pedigree in internet gaming. Famously, we won the QuakeWorld four nations in Scotland at Rapture ‘99, beating England in the final. Since then, as a nation we have severely lagged behind the rest of the world in terms of our internet infrastructure, namely the shameful lack of availability of broadband, and our prowess as a gaming nation continually declined. We had some success in Counter Strike in the early days, with some great clans, most notably dNC winning major competitions at home and abroad, but this somehow fizzled out to the extent that we now have about one decent clan left. I was captain of the Irish Quake 3 team for several years, and despite our absolutely dire connections, we managed to hold our own against the second tier nations of Europe. We claimed many scalps, against the UK, Netherlands, Estonia, Portugal, Slovenia, Norway, among others, but we were still living off the talent that was produced in the early Quake days days, as we very rarely came across promising new faces.

In the early days of this century, we had clans in the ClanBase Eurocup in Counter Strike, Quake, and Unreal Tournament, which were the biggest arenas at the time. But by the time the wave of e-sports arrived, and the new generation of games - RTCW, Enemy Territory, Battlefield, Call of Duty, the number of clans and skilled players was at rock bottom, and we had very few national teams competing.

In the past four years since Ireland’s last participation in the Cyberathletes Professional League, we have had no representation at any of the major international events - the E-Sports World Cups, or the World Cyber Games. We have never participated in these tournaments - consider that the following countries, among others, are named as participants: Egypt, Iran, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (South), Malaysia, Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Cyprus, Qatar, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand.

So why is it that the flags of Qatar and Moldova are proudly present, but our beloved tricolour is not? The answer is: because no organisation has stepped up to the plate and taken responsibility for the qualifiers. Now, the E-Sports Association of Ireland has been announced. In its current state, its a poorly designed PHP Nuke website, with no community and no resources, recycling the news from eSreality and ClanBase. But its the best attempt yet at bringing Irish internet gaming into the 21st century. My worry is that it could easily fall by the wayside. It has been very poorly promoted, there seems to be one guy behind it and he seems to be out of his depth. This will not be a problem, assuming the ball gets rolling.

Several months ago, as I pieced together a disaster of an Irish national Quake 4 team (disaster because we ended up with a total of 5 players, one of whom was on ISDN) in the hope that we would not concede another entire game to the void of Irish apathy, I considered organising an e-sports association like this myself. I looked at the success of e-Sports.lt, the Lithuanian E-sports community, and thought of how badly we needed a bridge between the different Irish gaming communities, to get all our shit together on one site that would open the door to sponsorship, and facilitate and encourage new players in all of the different games. But then I thought - why bother? I would be better off channeling my efforts into something more worthwhile - how about chess? How is it that half of the young people of Ireland don’t even know how to play chess? Or why not yodelling, or curling.

Nonetheless, I’m glad that somebody has assembled the fragments that I was never going to piece together. I hope to see this growing in stature - hosting leagues, organising WCG/ESWC qualifiers, maybe some LAN events. For now there is a long way to go, and this starts with a website and a community. The community is the hardest part.

For anyone who uses Razer Copperhead and has at some point been frustrated by Razer’s lack of support for Linux users: here is a new (unofficial) tool for controlling the mouse in Linux - upgrading the firmware, switching profiles, etc.. It has a command line version and a gtk version, and it is very handy.

I’m not even going to bother with a pun. Mark rightfully points out that there are more important things than the name. After much soul searching and agonising over the dilemma, I have decided to accept it and move on. Having relieved myself (doh) of that burden, the strengths of the console are so evident - the innovative “Wiimote” controller, the (predicted) low price tag, and most importantly, a Zelda title available on launch!

The reaction from E3 has been overwhelmingly in favour of the Wii - here is a video showing the queue of people waiting to have a go: