after two weeks of stark sobriety, my hunger for q3 0wnage was finaly sated. for 18 full days i survived with nothing but tiger woods pga tour 2001 and a smattering of 300-ping-no-mouse quakeworld to meet my gaming needs. a few of the women who work in the office spoke of the gaming lans their husbands attended, this sounded interesting until i found out that they were in delta force clans!! admittedly i have never played a clan game of delta force with a ping of 20, but how exciting could it be... you spend half the game lying in the grass waiting for someone to walk over the hill, while the others are probably doing the exact same thing. it makes counter-strike look fast. this morning, my 18-day vigil ended. it took over 4 hours of hardcore ftp'ing before i was able to restart my computer and complete my installation of paint shop pro... secure in the knowledge that all 566mb of quake3.ace was safely downloaded.

i was a little bit surprised when q3 was installed without any hassle, no problems extracting the .ace and then the .bin, my only worry at that stage was the fps. after a little while my osp and point releases were sorted, and i was reasonably happy with the 40 - 50 fps i was getting, a p3 600 sounds fast, but the gfx card is just a built-in 8mb thing. that is the fastest computer in the office, belonging to my brother who is the ceo, but luckily for me he is away on business for the week, freeing up the only machine capable of running q3 adequately. i gratefully accepted the temporary promotion from miserable dell latitude pii laptop user with screen visible to at least two other people, moving upstairs to my brothers computer overlooking the rest of the office, knowing that my monitor is well out of sight, and that i have all the time in the world to shut down q3 and alt-tab from mirc when someone comes up the stairs.

around 11am i was ready for a game. with one eye on the stairs and the other on my screen, i went to bw clanarena for a few games before i could try out my l33t 20-ping sdsl on californian servers. i could get used to the solid ping of 180 to bw, but combined with poor fps and a dodgy mouse it made rocket jumping difficult and railing almost impossible. so i made things easier for myself by finding a more local server. this is not as easy as it seems. nearly all the us servers are using point release 1.29f, including the servers for the new cyberathlete amateur league. most of the cpm servers stuck with 1.27 i think, but all i could find was a load of weird mods that i never heard of... i knew americans played unusual maps a lot.. but it was very difficult to find a normal tdm or ffa server anywhere. upgrading to 1.29f made a lot more servers available, so i was able to play with 30 ping at least (the only san fransisco 15-ping server i know was empty) but no clanarena unfortunately. railing as slpb = ez.

occasionally work got in the way of my gaming, and i was asked to fix laptops at one stage, but after a quick diagnosis "no cd rom drive... must be sent back" i was able to return to my game knowing that i had earned my pay (i still don't even know what they do here.... does anybody know what outsourcing is?) for the rest of the day i did nothing but play q3 (and spec and play some qw)... so as soon as i improve my fps a bit you're all ded.

i'm looking forward to the bwdml and bwctfl starting, although i was a bit disappointed with bigfoot's preview: "those new players are quite talented so look out for them to help push fh up the table." the new players bigfoot is refering to are robbo, nightstrike, lucutus and vincent who were added to the squad since last season. i'm disappointed that bigfoot sees these players as more talented than lorcan, dest, spoonman, jc, casc and bug who made up our active squad last season, and that he assumes that the new players will feature in our starting lineup and were added to the squad primarily to help us gain promotion to div2. robbo, ns, lucutus and vincent were brought in to add a bit of enthusiasm and activity (and also ctf experience in the case of lucutus) almost regardless of their skill, and we haven't even had a chance to evaluate their teamplay yet. i agree with bigfoot in that they are talented players, and they will all get to play in this league, but if fh are going to be pushed up the table, it will not be because we recruited 3 former acid players. i don't know why uk league admins all thought acid were so great, but fh have always matched them and more. fh played acid 6 times, we won 5 of them and lost the 6th by about 6 frags when we had a weak team fielded, and acid played their best team. i don't want to start an argument... i think acid was a good clan with plenty of talent.. but i don't see why uk admins all thought they were so much better than us!

that seems hardly worth mentioning in a column, but this is just one of many little details that irritated me in league roundups (i'm not blaming bigfoot... i can imagine what its like writing a review on a team you have never even seen play). for example, the review of last season stated that our best result of the season was probably the draw with bog. no offense to bog, but they were so easy, we had a weak team out and were lagged to bits and we still would have owned them if it weren't for their one player chodak (who left bog to play for the div2 clan rx right after the fh game). our best result of the season was the week 1 game against kotr who fielded their strongest team of 40 pingers while we had to contend with our usual lag on dm7 with a 400 ping modemer playing and we won. the review of that game was that kotr were "perhaps unlucky". my point is that its very difficult to give an accurate review of the league without seeing the teams play, although bigfoot does it as well as anyone could.

as it is, the weekly review is only reading the results and saying what you thought of them.. it doesn't tell anything about the game itself. the best way to improve this imo is to designate an admin to each division, who watches the demos of all the games, and really knows what hes talking about when its time to write the weekly review. i know this is a lot to ask of the admins but theres plenty of good writers in bw, and if there were 14 people with nothing better to do on their weeknights then i think it would be great for the league.. but i can see how time-consuming it would be and the problem would be getting 14 different admins willing to spend 100 minutes watching demos (on timescale 2... although theres likely to be postponements or defaults) and then writing a review on it every week.

as it is, i always look forward to bigfoots roundups and previews, but i think it would be a lot better if the reviews had more depth and were less vague and uncertain. clan-wars 4v4 season 1 had a good system where each admin would write a review of the match they adminned, and a match of the week was reported on in depth or something... i can't remember fully how it worked, but clan-wars 4v4 was a small league, and when wpdml attempted the same process, it wasn't successful due to a lack of admins with time on their hands. a similar system could do well in bwdml, a featured match of the week would not be difficult to implement. it would allow people like me to get to know clans that i would otherwise not know, in the same way team fear were introduced to me in quakenation's featured clan. this would also help promote the pmq, as we would be able to bet on more clans that we know.

congratulations if you made it this far down the page (unless you scrolled to the bottom you cunt), yes i do ramble, so if i said anything offensive or unusually stupid please tell me in comments.. i blame the all the californian diet water i have been drinking.