The Haus

Friday, December 1, 2000

Q3:TA Movie Released

id CEO, Todd Hollenshead, updated his .plan with word of a new movie containing never-before-seen footage of Quake III: Team Arena. Here's a snip:
Even if you have played the demo 18 hours a day, for the last 9 days, only taking breaks for bathing, food, and familial Thanksgiving responsibilities, you should still check this out as it contains scenes from our new large scale, terrain based maps. That's right, included in Team Arena are a number of never-seen-anywhere- before-now huge maps. These maps include castles, watchtowers, rivers, bunkers, forts, mountains and just about anything else you could want in battlegrounds of this magnitude.
Here's the link to the 21M mpeg on pc.ign.com. It should be showing up on Quake III Arena.com soon.

Alice demo released

EA and Rogue have released the demo of American McGee's Alice. I'll get more mirrors up as they pop up, but for now here's the 2 I have. The download is 79 MB, so pack that lunch.

LucasArts Interview, Pt. IV

Gamecenter posted the fourth and final part of their interview with Simon Jeffery, the president of LucasArts. In this installment he talks about the balance between Star Wars and original titles and plans for future games, especially Episode II games.

GameSpot commentary on Alice

GameSpot has a preliminary commentary on American McGee's Alice online that pretty much reinforces my feelings on Alice. This looks to be a VERY intriguing game - freakish environments with plenty of dark and twisted characters to haunt your dreams. Cool :-)

Thursday, November 30, 2000

Roberts Canned by M$?

The Daily Radar is reporting that Chris Roberts has been forced out of Digital Anvil by Microsoft. Great, just when a title like Freelancer catches your eye, it all falls apart. I guess that's what happens when you dance with the devil. Naturally, this is Daily Radar that is doing the reporting, a site that is not always known for accuracy. I'm sure we will be hearing from M$ and Digital Anvil one way or the other. Thanks Blue.

LucasArts Interview, Pt. III

Gamecenter has posted the third part of their interview with Simon Jeffery, president of LucasArts. In this installment they talk about BioWare's forthcoming Star Wars RPG, PS2 titles, and the future of adventure gaming. Tomorrow, the fourth and final installment of the interview will be posted.

On a related note, the official Star Wars Galaxies site has gone live with preliminary information on Verant's massively multiplayer Star Wars game. The most interesting thing so far seems to be that they intend Star Wars Galaxies to be a series of games. Time will tell (wait until 2002).

Tonight's NFL Game

I don't have the rest of my week #14 picks done yet, but for tonight I'm picking the Vikings. I hope I'm wrong.

The Master comments: Eeyore picks the Vikings as well. She's torn, but it's home field advantage.

A.T. Hun comments: Sadly, both Eeyore and I were correct. I'd just like to go on record that the Vikings == Satan. Thank you, and good-night.

The Master comments: No, I have to disagree. Dallas Cowboys == Satan. Vikings == Poor imitation of Satan.

Q3:TA Tweak Article Updated

I made some updates to my article on tweaking the Quake III: Team Arena demo. Acting on a hunch, I switched back to the old, reliable NVIDIA 5.22 reference drivers. My hunch was proven correct when I found out that the 5.22s give at least a one frame-per-second increase over the 6.47s I used in the article originally. If you are using a TNT or TNT2, I'd advise that you stick with the 5.22s.

More P4 Issues

According to The Register, 3dfx is reporting that their AGP Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 products will not work with Pentium 4 motherboards. The Voodoo4 will work fine. The problem apparently lies with both 3dfx and Intel. Intel didn't include support for 3.3V signalling on the P4 motherboards--even though it is part of the AGP spec. 3dfx didn't include a universal AGP edge connector on the V3 and V5 (although, curiously, they did on the V4). So if Voodoo owners want to upgrade to a P4 at this point they cannot take their video card with them, even if it is 3dfx' latest and greatest.

ATi's Radeon and NVIDIA's GeForce reference boards include the universal connector and therefore will not be affected. Having said that, why someone would drop so much cash on P4 systems that are buggy right now anyway (even without this issue) and in many cases slower than the P3 is completely beyond me. Thanks Shugashack.

Baldur's Gate II Patch

BioWare posted a patch for Baldur's Gate II, their CRPG that is all the rage with the kids these days. The list of fixes is as long as my arm, so if you have BG2, this is a must-download. It can patch the game, regardless of whether you installed the beta patch or not.

I've been playing a bit of the BG2 demo (after spending far too much of my life downloading it). I've found it to be very entertaining, although I'm having a hard time without a manual. I'm debating if I want to get something like BG2, or just wait until their Star Wars RPG comes out and try that. Having said that, I'm wondering how they will add RPG elements to the Star Wars universe . . .

Hook on DX8

VoodooExtreme checked in with Brian Hook (who all of the sudden has a considerable amount of time on his hands, since he recently quit working at Verant) about the advantages of DirectX 8, as opposed to earlier versions of DirectX or OpenGL. The key advantage that OpenGL still holds, as he points out, is portability.

The Real Deer Hunter

I mentioned previously how deer hunting season is practically a state holiday in this neck of the woods. Well, this article shows how real men hunt deer. I saw this on Blue's.

Past Two Days' News

Recent Headlines

January 5, 2015: It Returns!
August 10, 2007: SCO SUCKS IT DOWN!
July 5, 2007: Slackware 12.0 Released
May 20, 2007: PhpBB 3.0 RC 1 Released
February 2, 2007: DOOM3 1.31 Patch

January 27, 2007: Join the World Community Grid
January 17, 2007: Flash Player 9 for Linux
December 30, 2006: Darkness over Daggerford 1.2
December 19, 2006: Pocket Tunes 4.0 Released
December 9, 2006: WRT54G 1.01.1 Firmware OK with Linux/Mac

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