James Galvin

On boards.ie they are discussing a remake of Golden Axe for the PS3 and Xbox 360. Cue flashback to the snooker hall in Schull and all the money I wasted on that game. That is until I discovered “the headbutt” and then everything became so easy.

Theres also a mention of the return of Duck Hunt for the Nintendo Wii. Although I haven’t played it since 1989, I can still hear the music and the quacking of the ducks… in fact, thats all I can remember of it (I didn’t play it much, probably because the gun got lost or something). But never again shall the death cries of electronic ducks triumphantly echo off these walls. I won’t be playing the resurrected Duck Hunt, not because of any opposition to the concept of murdering innocent wild fowl, but because I could never have faith in such a badly named product as the Wii.

When the Game Cube originally came out - I was suckered by the marketing. At the time, Nintendo were the Apple of the console world. The Xbox had a 733mhz CPU and doubled up as a DVD player. The Playstation II had more (and better) games. But from the moment I saw the neat little black cube in Smyths, I had no other option. Nintendo: what has gone wrong with your marketing division?

Why can’t you give the console a different name outside of Asia? I thought all these big companies did market research? Your average Japanese person might be happy with the name Wii, but Nintendo: reconsider before its too late. Go down to Patrick Street or Grafton Street, or Eyre Square, or Picadilly Square and randomly asked 100 non-Asian people what they think. Nintendo Thundertooth, Nintendo Cyclops, Nintendo Pantherclaw, Nintendo Skullcrusher, Nintendo Doombringer, Nintendo Acorn, Nintendo Parasite… even Nintendo Revolution. Anything would beat Nintendo Wii. I am extremely confident on this one.

Meanwhile, Victor Barry points out that the PlayStation 3 will be retailing for €499. Thats roughly equivalent to a new Dell PC, three and a half iPod nanos, a decent pool table, or 49900 penny sweets. Not cheap by any means, but at least it looks and sounds cool.

I’m getting tired of all this talk of tech-savvy militants leading al Qaeda’s cyber-terrorism department. Perhaps there is a room full of Islamic extremist hacker nerds somewhere preparing their weekly status report for Osama, but if that is the case, then I seriously doubt that they are focusing their activities on modifying computer games, as Yahoo suggests.

The makers of combat video games have unwittingly become part of a global propaganda campaign by Islamic militants to exhort Muslim youths to take up arms against the United States, officials said on Thursday.

Here is the shocking truth: whenever a new game is released, a number (directly proportional to the popularity of the game) of buck-toothed, short-sighted computer gamers immediately knuckle to down to the business of modding. From Barney Deathmatch Classic to Zombie Horror - sometimes its for the fame, sometimes to provide something valuable to the community, sometimes as a learning experience, sometimes its just for a laugh, but please find me the kid who thinks his mod is going to contribute to the destruction of the Western World, I would like to interview him for my book.

The ESRB would also do well to take note. Bethesda Softworks, the makers of the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, have been battling since the game got its rating bumped up to M for Mature last week due to a third party modification which created topless characters. Slashdot have been covering it for a few days now, and they point out that the ruling has required Bethesda to pull all of the current stock of the game to relabel.

John Romero blames the modders, for “financially screwing the company they should be helping” - which is possibly the stupidest thing I have heard since “Islamic militants are using video games to train recruits and condition youth to attack U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq”.

While you’re getting ready to play QuakeWorld, here is something to whet your appetite. x0n has posted on quake.ie about the latest port of id Software’s Quake 1 engine: IF Quake, created by one of the developers of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Jason Bergman.

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.


Any of you who have played a bit of QuakeWorld in the past but found that the standard online was too difficult to compete against - now is a good time to give it another shot. There have been a few mini-revivals over the last few years, but this year in particular a small but dedicated community of new Irish players is growing.

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.

ClanBase link to this gem from the study group for gaming culture in Korea: many Korean mothers are power-levelling their children’s characters so that “their daughters and sons can enjoy respectable status in the virtual world without sacrificing their schooling advancement”.

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.

I was in Wired to the World MacCurtain Street yesterday - the biggest netcafe & callcenter in Ireland, they claim. I sat down at the first computer, and started looking for the mouse… with no success. Slightly confused, I asked the guy next to me and he showed me how to power it on. It was about 10 seconds afterwards that I realised this was an xbox360. I shamefully sidled away, conscious of the audible hiss of my rapidly deflating ego.

It could happen to anyone, it is natural to choose the first available terminal, who would have guessed that this whole row is dedicated to xboxes? A middle-aged Polish man just entered the cafe, asking the staff if he could use this “chip” (brandishing a USB stick). I smugly observed his approach, as he hovered hesitantly above the xbox at terminal 1. With a swagger, I rose to shepard him towards a PC… but too late - he knowingly moved on himself. I was once again a chewed-up squeaky toy, in a the primitive darkness of a dog’s kennel.

I thought it was a bit strange that they would have the very first row dedicated to the xboxes… usually they hide the noisy (sometimes smelly) gamers down the back. Despite all the advancements in the availability of broadband, it seems the gaming cafes are thriving. I have never been one to frequent these establishments regularly, but I have taken the opportunity to sample most of them. Last year I was doing some contract work in the city, with three other lads who were fond of Counter Strike. Our work took us to different parts of the city, and we would sometimes spend our lunchbreak in the nearest net cafe. This is when my eyes were opened to the world of cafegamers.

I had no idea that there was an entire community, composed primarily of northside teenagers, who spent their lives inside the different cafes in Cork, moving up the rankings in the local CS ladder. There are entire clans wholely contained in this local scene. I bumped into a guy I went to school with who was playing World of Warcraft. He was level 46, with 11 days played. Thats 11 x 24 hours spent in Area51 in the space of just a few months. I tried to work out what 264 hours would cost at the standard rate, but I was too distracted by the revelation that this room was packed full of gamers on a Thursday at 1pm, and was open and active 24 hours a day.

Cork has set the standard in recent years, with the comfort of the Web Work House, the dedicated back-rooms that Wired to the World offer in three different locations, the luxurious Zeon, and most of all - the 24/7 gaming venue with Alienware machines: Area51. In comparison, Dublin has surprisingly lacked these resources, as most of their cafes would be geared towards the millions of webmailers… particularly since the demise of Does Not Compute and Nethouse which, despite being run by gamers, did not see the market as being sufficiently active to warrant the costly hardware upgrades and licence fees. Until recently, there has been nothing to cater for the market that Area51 and others in Cork depend on.

TCAL mentions a newly opened Dublin gaming cafe with 40 xboxes. This coincides with the launch of Bartizan Gaming World a couple of weeks ago in Midleton, Co. Cork, which really takes the concept of a gaming cafe to a new level. No longer satisfied with a crowded back-room with some WWII paintings on the wall, Bartizan has a luxurious VIP members-only area with biometric fingerprint access. In Russia, most gamers attend a club like this, where they compete against other gamers on LAN, rather than playing online from home as we do in Western Europe.

Here are some of the benefits of VIP membership:

• Full access 24/7.
• Full access to new games. The games you want – you want it, we order it.
• Bring a guest.
• Host your own LAN parties.
• Pre-book private rooms for you and your guests.
• Free entry to movie and games club.
• Entry to leagues and competitions.
• Opportunity to join Bartizan Clanz.
• Join members forum on line.
• Members only parking.

At a cost of €125 per year for adults, €75 for 13-16 year olds, and only €45 for children, this is valuable service. Why fork out €54 on a new game, dialup costs or hardware upgrades when you could just head down to Bartizan at any time of night and relax in the comfort of the VIP zone. In theory anyway - there is always the danger that a gang of screaming kids takes up residence. Either way, this is certainly an major development in the Irish gaming scene, both LAN and internet (as Bartizan intend to mirror their community online). With similar new venues set to open in other parts of the country, it could be interesting to see how this new trend develops.

I believe Quake 4’s swan song was sung in New York this weekend, at the ClanBase/GGL TransAtlantic Showdown where a $100,000 purse was on offer. For those of you who don’t follow e-Sports (I use the term lightly), I’ll give a small bit of background. There has always been a high degree of professionalism in South Korea (where top players are celebrities and there are dedicated StarCraft TV channels), but multiplayer gaming in the rest of the world never was never quite worthy of that term. You’d get the odd $40,000 tournaments here and there, going back to when Denis “Thresh” won his Ferrari playing Quake 1998, but never enough money on offer to kindle mainstream interest. This changed in 2004.

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.