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 =]