The Disposable Heroes downloads page offers Linux and Solaris ports of the ArmourBack and flame entity mods for Quake II from The Coven's Disposable Heroes deathmatch pack. A Linux port of MAD is also in the works.

There are five exclusive Shugotenshi Screenshots on GA-Source showing off this upcoming mission pack for Monolith's Mobile: Armor Division in development for Instant Access by the Nevolution Group.

The Ultimate Uplink Walk-Thru offers tips on how to get through the new Half-Life Uplink demo.

The official Quake III Arena site has been updated with a brand-new Quake III Arena misc. publication screenshots section that offers five screenshots that have appeared in various recent print publications. Some of them have been scanned and posted on the 'net already as well, but these are the originals. Thanks Simon Speichert.

Rust has posted a short interview with Dan Koppel, Xatrix Entertainment level designer and technical coordinator, about his work on Kingpin, Xatrix' upcoming Quake II-engine game. The conversation covers the game, as well as editing-related stuff, making mention that they plan on shipping the game bundled with the level editor.

A run-through of the Interloper level has been added to Gamers.Com's Half-Life run-through giving step-by-step instructions on how to complete the penultimate mission in single-player play. Thanks Apache at Planet Half-Life.

There's an interview with yours truly on pels interactive, in what I invariably describe as their amusing finish the sentence format (though I think I managed to provide them with the least amusing set of answers I've ever seen on one of these Q&As).

A new beta 0.11r055 of the free Crystal Space 3D engine is now available. Crystal Space offers state-of-the-art features and cross-platform (Linux, general Unix, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, BeOS, NextStep, DOS, Amiga, and Macintosh) support. Thanks BetaNews. The new release fixes the Linux/OpenGL port so that it works correctly with Mesa, fixes the SVGALIB port, and adds assorted fixes to other versions.

3DsoundSurge interviews Toni Schneider from Aureal Semiconductor about Vortex2 and wavetracing technology, including a preamble that makes the case for wavetracing as the "correct" way of creating acoustic effects. Thanks WarDog.

Sharky Extreme's 1998 first-person shooter shootout looks at ten FPS titles released last year, ranking them "start(ing) off with the cold and migrat(ing) to the hot."

So, you wanna make games for a living? is a Gibbed.com article by John Williamson giving advice on how to break into the biz by this employee of Zombie Interactive (currently working on SpecOps 2).

Game-Interviews.com talks with David Wu, Programmer and President of Pseudo Interactive (not to be confused with Pseudo Online) about their upcoming auto combat game, Inertia.

The first public beta of the Rainbow 6 Toolkit is available through the Rainbow 6 Retreat. Among the tools provided is an R6 multiplayer launcher, an R6 server creator, a function to disable the Windows key (which crashes R6), an address book for favorite servers, a mouse sensitivity adjuster, and more features to come.

Version 1.03 of the Ultimate Regular Quake Patch has been released on the Quake Info Pool (they were even prepared for me this time, including this note in the announcement: "for Blue: everything 'ultimate' can be made better," which we'll just leave as the philosophical theory for the day). As always, the new version includes more QuakeC bug fixes for classic Quake, but this time many new features have been added as well, like QW's popular "Drop Quad/Ring" function, deathmatch modes 3-5, an easy expandable map rotation, and more.

I should have mentioned this the other day, Citizen talks Giants with Alan Pavlish is an interview on IPlayGames talking to the head of the Tantrum division at Interplay and co-producer of Giants: Citizen Kabuto, about this upcoming game of living large from PlanetMoon Studios.

This week's new interview on 10 Questions With SamHell talks with Angel Munoz, mostly about the CPL (actually, this Q&A belies the site's name, offering an unprecedented eleventh bonus question).

Also in the Q&A queue: There's a MindRover Interview on Beta Bites talking with CogniToy's Quirk Family who are all participating in the development of the upcoming action/adventure/strategy game, MindRover. Also, The Beauty of Madness interviews FlameThrower. HardOCP interviews ABit's Jeremy Smith. Finally, Action Xtreme interviews John Graham talking to the webmaster of MPOG in part one of a two-parter.

According to Curtains at nVidia Pages, there actually is one new shot in the once Portuguese TF2 preview from yesterday (story), the shot showing the sniper, infantry dude, and a medic coming out of an APC which provides an insight as to what the HUD is going to look like.

PlanetHardware reviews the Pentium III 500, in another review that claims to examine actual shipping units.

• HardOCP has a post up on improving the cooling in your machine (look on the page for the descriptive headline, "How To Up That Fan Voltage To Give Ya's More Cooling Power"...
• Dan's Techie Zone has a how-to article on setting up Half-Life to work through the Winroute proxy (not Wingate, as I originally wrote, though I'm told this info could be applied to using Wingate as well)...
• Word from 3 Fingers is he's hosting a Mad Dog CFG Aliases page, saying "Mad Dog has built quite a reputation with the 3Dfx Voodoo2 News Group gurus as being the man in the know when it comes to even the most complicated aliases and .cfg files. I kid you not, check out his site and you most certainly will learn a few new tricks (no matter how advanced your alias/.cfg skills may be)."...
• The Tiger Den looks to organize LAN play at Clemson U., since their outbound network connectivity is apparently a bit rough...

Hope your Valentine's Day was a happy one. Take a President out to lunch: Today is President's Day here in the US, celebrating the combined birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but I like to take a moment out to remember other past leaders as well, like Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce. Things seem to be working out well so far in the beta of the news database, no serious glitches have surfaced, and most every known bug has been squashed. There's no real connection at all to the archive of the older (HTML) news when you go back, but one of the things we should have a handle on soon is what's involved in getting older news into the database, and how far back it will be practical to go in a conversion project based on that.

Image of the day: A 22 player TRIBES stack. The jetpacks help =]

Tim Gift updated his .plan with word on what he's been contending with on IRC that's kept him from updating some of Dynamix's TRIBES servers. Here's an excerpt:

Hmm, well I had originally intended to come in this weekend and upgrade the Combat and Training server and get ready for our next release, but when I got in our IRC server was under attack again. Using IRC for our chat server has been a major pain in the butt. We had wanted to use it because of it's open architecture. Wanted to allow people to connect and chat outside of the game, something people were used to using, etc., seemed a lot more flexible and friendly than a writing another proprietary chat system. Unfortunately, there are quite a few bozos who seem to get a kick out of disrupting our chat server, booting people off, or otherwise being a nuisances. I've already wasted several days getting up to speed on IRC and the MS server, and here I am over the weekend doing the same, when I could be working on TRIBES....

There's now an English version of the Team Fortress 2 preview on Halflife.com.br mentioned earlier (story) that was originally posted in Portuguese. By the way, I'm sorry if I made it sound in my follow-up (story) like they were the ones that said there were new screenshots in the preview, I was actually correcting my own mistake, not anything they said.

Sharky Extreme's Expendable Update adds 15 new screenshots of Rage's upcoming third-person action game, with the promise of a movie showing off gameplay soon.

A couple more guides for Starsiege TRIBES have emerged, it seems likely these projects were all started around the same time to provide what had been, until recently, a pretty a scarce commodity. Regenerated Forces Starsiege TRIBES guide, promises to teach how to "terrorize" a TRIBES server, and GriBBsY's Beginner's Guide to TRIBES is online offering a way to get your feet wet before spilling blood on the live battlefield.

It turns out there is a common thread behind the few emails I've received asking if there was a problem with the archive of the Half-Life demo released the other day--all the problems were from one download location. If you've had problems and you downloaded from ftp1.sierra.com (this was not the copy posted here, so you should not have had this problems with the local download), that archive is indeed a few bytes shy of a mouthful. If your FTP supports resume downloads, you might be able to pick up the remainder of the file from another site, or you may indeed have to re-download the whole dealie. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers. Also, I'm told the TF2 shots in the Portuguese TF2 preview posted earlier are not, in fact, new. Sorry about that, though of course, some always welcome the opportunity to brush up on their Portuguese.

The smoothies at Orange Smoothie Productions have released a new Quake II mod called OSP Rocket Olympics, described as "a virtual play land of rocket jumping feats and events. Categories included Height, Distance, Accuracy and oh ya.. Quad Height!!!" It would have been more thematic to release this during the Olympics, but it's not like I can think of any logical Valentine's Day mods (not any that I can imagine wanting to play anyway).

This Valentine Interview on Cali Girl News talks to notable romantics from the gaming scene like CliffyB (Epic Games), KillCreek (ION Storm), Wicked (Voodoo Extreme), and of course Wanker (PlanetWank) giving insights on love and friendship. Also, In their grand tradition, the Tormented Souls have posted some new e-cards, these with a Valentine's Day theme, of course, along with their trademark Quake trappings, so make sure your valentine understands your concept of romance before you fire one of these off.

The Team Fortress 2 preview on Halflife.com.br is in Portuguese, and even if you can't make sense of that, or AltaVista's Portuguese translator, the new screenshots are worth those proverbial thousands of words. Thanks SailorScout.

Computer Games Online interviews Scott Youngblood, talking to Dynamix's own CornBoy! about Starsiege TRIBES.

Version 0.3 of the unofficial Mortyr FAQ is up at the Widerstands updated with the latest intelligence on Interactive Magic's upcoming World War II Shooter Game.

Word from X-M4N is that to solve some difficulties, the Italian Master Server for both Quake II and QuakeWorld is now 194.177.113.32.

There's a KillCreek edited chat log from the recent online conversation with this ION Storm level designer on The Daikatana Deathmatch page offering info on their upcoming Daikatana, as well as the even more imminent Daikatana DM demo.

The Sniper Tips Section on the lonegunmen site has continued to grow, and now offers seven pages of tips on how to pick folks off with perfection in Starsiege TRIBES.

Realm Technologies has a Half-Life mod that is a simple replacement skill.cfg file that makes locational damage more pronounced, increases weapon damage and enemy health, and emphasizes the differences between difficulty levels.

GA-Source reviews the ABIT ZM6 Motherboard.

The palpy.com Quake II tournament is a one-on-one competition with a "rare Quake II action figure" as the prize.

• So You Want To Be A Webmaster? is a new article on PlanetQuake that offers a suitable degree of discouragement and some sage advice for aspiring game site webmasters...
• Internet Challenges Game Publishers is a CNN article on trends in the biz. Thanks Mynx (the birthday girl no less -- Happy B'day Mynx!)...
• S3 Planet has a new version 1.03 of the S3Tweak program. Word is "No major changes... just a couple of safeguards put in place." Thanks DemoNews...
• Updates to this Optimizing The Swapfile guide include confirmation on whether constant rewriting of the same area of a drive reduces the MTBF as well as a tip on how to move the swapfile to the outer tracks of the hard disk without paying for a commercial defragger..
• Site stuff: The MarTim site has moved, and PlanetCrap 2.0 is online...

Happy Valentine's Day! Welcome to the beta test of ProjectX, otherwise known as the Blue's News version of Blammo, the game news system being created by my friends RonSolo and Bagpuss, the mad geniuses behind the BlueTracker .plan Summaries and Webdog, and Blammo's main programmer, furn (who showed amazing patience as we conferred on this yesterday in what amounted to an all-day transatlantic phone call). As I mentioned when I tempted fate by predicting we might be ready for a beta today, the change is hopefully almost completely transparent at the moment, but the difference behind the scenes is significant, as the stories on this page now are database generated. While things seem under control, there are a couple of glitches I know about already (if you use the headlines in the left frame, the finger insert disappears, the target links on the archive at the bottom are whacked out, as is the archive page, and the yesterday links in the headlines), and, of course, there's the possibility something unforeseen will pop up, so if everything blows up at some point, that may be what has happened. Going forward, for those that don't want change, not much will be different (this was a top priority), but the database will allow a bunch of neat functionality to be added that will be quite helpful, and I'm really excited about what we should be able to do with this. More on that as we go forward. Excelsior!