Zero
Ronan Condon
Absolute Fucking Champion
clan : n8z
posts : 816
site administrator
| ah, another year, where do they go etc etc. i would say i hope ye all had a good christmas, but as you know i couldn't give a fuck. i'm well due a column update, and of course i'm too lazy to do any work so i spose i'll bullshit on a bit here for a while. had a good christmas, santy came and left me a chest infection, but sure what can you do. of course copious amounts of vodka and cigarettes probably made a certain contribution to the whole thing. has to be done at christmas though, it's great to just go home before christmas and sit in a haze of booze and family slaggings for a week. (you know how bad i am, imagine 3 or 4 more of me sitting around a table dosed with grog and giving it loads, trust me it's entertaining).
on the quake side, i kinda find it funny in one way and sad in another the way quake has gone, or more so irish quake. "back in the day" as we refer to it, (the phrase newbies are sick of hearing), the reason irish quake was so big was because there was no other game, or if there was, it was a small minority. when mindphuck announced quakelords '97, there were over 250 signups, imagine that, for an irish duel competition. we barely managed the 32 for the irish cpl which was huge. the day before the finals, (there were 16 finalists), i remember going up on the train with the lads, and thinking, "right, who's gonna be dangerous tomorrow", and it was overlord, reaper, krusty and beast were in my head, in that order, but that was just me helping my own state of mind, i knew lorcan, dest, mickah and a few others could just as easily shine through and beat us all. but it didn't matter, we knew that there was gonna be a big crowd turning up to see it all and have a laugh, fuckin hell, there was nothing like it, something like 100 people turned up on the day to watch the games, and in the end of the day, it didn't matter even for the guy who came 16th out of the finalists, he was now a quake bigshot in a huge community that looked like it could never die or get smaller. that of course changed, but like, quake2 and halflife only made a bare dent in the numbers of quakers, but it's all different now.
there are a number of reasons for it, one of the smaller ones being the fact that people grow bored of playing games and sick of spending hours online and go do some other shit. some people would largely blame the decline on counterstrike, which is more than likely true, but i think a big factor in the whole thing is the fact that quake, especially quake3, went totally professionallistic, if there is such a word. look at it this way, if i sit down with a mate who hasn't played many computer games other than playstation stuff etc, and i show him tony hawks 2 or driver or colin mcrae 2, he'll think it's the dogs bollox and play away, and even if we play multiplayer in it and i finish each rally in half the time, the guy is still having fun, and even though he acknowledges he's shit at the game, he's going to enjoy getting better at it.
compare that to quake3. jesus.
"right you sit at this computer and try and use the mouse for aiming and the keys for moving. if you want to turn left, hit the right arrow key but turn the mouse left."
"woah, ok, so what are you going to do?"
"i'm going to grab the rl, rocket-jump off the back jumppad, bounce off the rl door, then using the strafejump method, i'm going to come barrelling around the corner at about 80mph and uttterly fuck you up."
"oh....ok then."
"no, i'm not finished yet. when you die, i'm going to kill you every time you respawn within about four seconds for the next ten minutes."
"oh well that doesn't sound like much fun."
"no no it is, seriously, spend four hours a night getting beaten and abused by the little net gays for the next two years, then you might be reasonable enough at the game to hold your own in a game against an average player on this level. then you need to learn teamplay."
"....."
in fairness, how the fuck do you expect people to start playing the game, how can we expect to have irish lads joining servers and setting up clans? and pointing out that the english scene is still big is no excuse, it used to be way bigger. at least in counter-strike, the theme is kinda cool, "wow, terrorists against cops", and because there is such a big following there are loads of servers so even the stupidest cunt sitting at the game might once or twice fluke it that he points his gun in the right direction and hits a guy who's very weak on a server where the standard is very low. that doesn't happen in quake3 because we are all such elitest fucks that we are all locked inside a room together and slowly but surely we all die out until in the end there will be fuck all people playing. and that makes it sad, because i fuckin love quake.
i remember in ul, around that time of the quakelords, or indeed, for nearly 2 years afterwards, if you did a search in winquake for local games, there were at least 3 or 4 games running with a minimum of 4 players per game and that was nothing compared to the 16-20 player games we used to have. we couldn't get 20 irish quake3 players onto a server now in a fit if we tried.
but at the same time it's cool, we have our small core of players but at least with us we know there is proper interest, and organising stuff like irish teams isn't half the job it used to be because players are willing. mindphuck is getting both the q3ctf and qw teams together at the moment, and it's deadly, we can't wait to get out and play in some leagues, even if we do get the shit beaten out of us. another cool thing is that because it's a small group of q3-ers, the most of them are reasonably oldschool so everyone knows everyone and its all a bit of a laugh, sitting there on a server watching the many variations of "vincunt" being screamed by killy and the lads, not to mention the slagging sam gets when he arrives on the server even though he is everyone's quake hero.
fuck it, it's all a laugh in the end of the day.
and yes, this was totally cut short and ended because i suddenly got a shitload of work to do. gone.
|
search
quake.ie 
"they peed on your fuckin rug, dude"
(hopefully) it probably wont last long, but at least we'll have one huge IQ4CL before stuff quietens down again
