First off, here's that contest dealie where you can win a Voodoo3, good luck to all who enter. Also, the promised rush of reviews has begun. In additions to my Voodoo3 Preview, now online are: the Preview of 3Dfx’s Voodoo3 Chip on Tom's Hardware, Sharky Extreme's 3Dfx Voodoo3 Review - Almost, VE's Voodoo3 preview, AGN Hardware's Voodoo3 Preview, and The RIVA 3D Voodoo 3 Review (or "Blank 3D" as they're humorously listed on the Voodoo3 On-line Reviews page).

The Aliens version of the Aliens vs. Predator demo is up on GameSpot. The demo is about 30 MB, and as the name implies, allows you to play the game from the alien point of view. Thanks AvP Network.

Arcadia has posted an Eric Biessman interview playing ten questions with Raven's Prime Minister (hey, that's the description listed in his .plan) about Raven's upcoming Soldier of Fortune game.

The A3D Downloads page has new Win95/98 drivers for Vortex 2 (AU8830) based sound cards only. Thanks Randy Perry.

After a brutal weekend of battering the Voodoo3 around in the Blue Labs, I have completed my Voodoo3 Preview, which actually pretty much takes on the tone of a full review, the hedge of calling it a preview is outlined up top. Having said that, I'm comfortable that this is a good rundown of the upcoming accelerator's pros and cons.

Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, the new loonygames is off and running. Here's the schedule for the coming week:

Oy, my back. Hey, is that issue twenty six? Go figure. Whining this week:

• - Two Programs, Two Dimensions: Rick Grossenbacher, a professional 2D game artist, and graphic designer teaches this tutorial on using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create seamless 2D game artwork. [Monday]
• - From the Mouth of Madness: Jason "loonyboi" Bergman gives his list of the most overrated games of all time. From Zelda 64 to Myst, to Rampage? [Monday]
• - Guest Editorial: Russian developer Sergei Klimov gives his account of the ups and downs of the Russian game industry, and the development of his still in production RTS/RPG title. [Thursday]
• PLUS: Whole bags of User Friendly [DAILY], Penny Arcade does FFVIII...or at least tries to [Wednesday], a look at Fallout 2 in Pixel Obscura [Tuesday], a dual review of Fallout 1 *and* 2 in The Top Shelf plus lots more! And then some more, because we just kick it that way, dammit.
• Note: This issue of loonygames is dedicated to the living memory of Gene Siskel (1946 - 1999).

ICQ 99a is available for download on Download.com. Thanks mACK.

There are a pair of new Soldier of Fortune screenshots on GameLinks.Net as part of their Soldier of Fortune Week, dedicated to Raven's upcoming Quake II-engine game. There's also an interview with Kenn Hoekstra, talking about the game, and a Soldier of Fortune Contest that will give a free copy of SoF (when released) to a pair of random recipients.

A new beta of the free Crystal Space 3D Engine is now available offering several fixes, including a whole bunch of OpenGL changes. Thanks BetaNews.

New version 1.0.8 of the Fast Card overclocking utility of the RIVA TNT and 128 is now available. Thanks again BetaNews.

This 3Dfx press release announces support for AMD's 3DNow! technology through the entire Voodoo family. Thanks Billy at Voodoo Extreme. According to the announcement, "The optimizations will particularly benefit the new Voodoo3 product family..."

There's an Industry Interview on 3DNews.Net asking questions about current trends in gaming of a panel of experts consisting of Adrian Chmielarz from Metropolis, Scott Herrington of Shiny, Robert Stevenson of Interactive Magic, Paul Steed from id Software, Raven's John Scott, Paul Butterfield of Monolith, Legend's Glen Dahlgren, and ElectroTECH's Alan Gassanov.

This week's edition of 10 Questions With SamHell is a Q&A with Cail, lead programmer of the famed Action Quake2 mod, and its upcoming Half-Life sequel.

There are three new The Glyphs Screenshots on GA-Source showing off this game from Coil that uses the Quake II/Heretic II code.

The Rainbow 6 Retreat has a Rainbow Six mod called Nato 2.0 for download that adds new weapons sounds and missions to the game, as well as tweaking AI, weapons, and other details. Thanks Online Gaming News.

A new beta of Terror Quake2 is now available offering new weapons and gameplay changes for Quake II including bleeding, limping, and bullet holes.

Solar Eclipse has posted a Solaris port of Gloom version 1.0e.

There is now a 3 Team CTF version of Expert CTF running at 171.64.206.97:27920. Expert is described as being "all about combat. That 'other stuff' - heavy armor, mega-powerups, big fookin guns - it's all been reworked, replaced or removed." Also, Charles 'Myrkul' Kendrick, the creator of the Expert Quake mod for Quake2 is featured on the latest edition of Scum Radio.

There's a new official AMD K6-III FAQ giving the latest on AMD's latest. Thanks Voodoo Extreme.

• Da Valkyries (Women Gamers Online) are holding what is described as a "just for the fun of it" monthly Quake II tournament called DaV. The first tournament will be Thursday March 25 at 9:30 PM EST. To participate you must be a DaV member (they are not a clan), "any game playing women and interested men may join."
• The results have been posted for what is called a highly successful season of the QIL2 along with demos of some matches.
• Last Clan Standing is a Quake (1) tournament setup for teams of four, high or low ping (but not mixed).
• The first version of the Clan World ranking system is online.

• Sharky Extreme's Kryotech Cool K6-3 500 MHz PC Review is up looking at this super-cooled, over-clocked machine that's been reconfigured in response to the early reactions to the first version they reviewed six weeks ago.
• Aureality reviews the Xitel Storm Platinum, a new Vortex2-based soundcard.
• AGN3D reviews South Park, the PC port of the first-person shooter where, believe it or not, you don't kill Kenny (those bastards!)...

• Hey Jeff! The 3D Guy answers reader questions, "To kick things off, Jeff discusses Triple Buffering, how it works, and how it can make your frame rates considerably higher in certain games:"...
• The TF Sniper page offers hints and tips TeamFortress' deadly long-range class...
• The use at your own risk link of the day is Hansis Homepage where you can find the Maxclock utility for overclocking the RIVA TNT and RIVA 128. Thanks Viper 3D and Dimension 128...
• Zip & Jaz Drive Click Death page on the Gibson Research Corporation home (wow, I remember using SpinRite well over ten years ago!) that offers a utility to tell if your Jazz or Zip drive is on its way to a premature death. Thanks John...

My monitor tan is even on both sides from the glow of the second machine running benchmarks all weekend. After I post my Voodoo3 dealie (sometime after 3:00 PM Eastern time today) I will also have some new benchmarks to post, which will include some Pentium III results for the V3 and the TNT as well. As a follow up to the recent recommendation for SyGate, I've received recommendations to check out both NAT32 and WinRoute, both of which are said to overcome problems (that I have not experienced) that can manifest themselves with SyGate. It will probably be some time before I can check them out, so I'll just pass the word on them along untested. Thanks Chris Hodge for the source of today's quote:

Quote of the day: "Upstairs, junior's playing Quake XXII online, complete with real-time audio heckling."
From CNN - What will the Internet of the future be like.

GA-Source interviews Levelord talking to Ritual's own beerf*ck a bit about his work as a level designer, and mostly about games and outside interests.

Raven's Eric Biessman updated his .plan with word to expect weekly updates in the future to help share more of what their upcoming Quake II-engine game, Soldier of Fortune, will be like, promising screenshots and in-game movies along the way.

There's a new Paul Jaquays interview on Pels Interactive playing finish the sentence with the id level designer talking about Quake III Arena, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and more.

There's an interview with Stevie "KillCreek" Case on GA-Source talking to this ION Storm level designer about her work on Daikatana, gaming in general, and some personal stuff as well.

The GamesCon site has the announcement that the first public showing of Mortyr, Interactive Magic's upcoming World War II game, will be at GamesCon's upcoming event at the end of the month in Toronto.

An new version 0.7 of the AirQuake II mod is now available. AirQuake offers a flying action mod for Quake II putting you behind the stick of a jet fighter. The new release offers a whole list of features, which can be found on their page, along with a poll asking your favorite mod, offering a choice between "Some junky TC not worth mentioning, another one, same here, and AirQuake 2."

The BotJohnny Home Page has a new version 2.2 of the BotJohnny front-end that offers support for well over a dozen Quake II bots.

PlanetBlood has posted some detailed info on what will be included in the upcoming mission pack for Monolith's Blood2. Thanks Billy at Voodoo Extreme.

Gangland.org interviews Drew Markham, CEO of Xatrix Entertainment, about their upcoming Quake II-engine game, Kingpin, discussing the inspirations for the game, what to expect from Kingpin, and a bit about the realities of the game business.

There's a ten question interview with EpicGames' Cliff Bleszinski on the newly opened Arcadia talking about games and gaming.

Team Reaction Home Page has posted version 1.0e of their Gloom mod for Quake II. This is "mostly a bug fix release which prevents player lameness." This is a server-only update, and the new version also fixes a bug that would crash Linux. A new client "should be out in a week" with new levels and sounds.

The Coven website has news of their new Napalm II mod for Quake II that adds a second firing mode to all of the game's weapons. New actions include fireballs, incendiary rounds, napalm rockets, flame-throwers, firestorms, and an anti-matter gun. The new weapons are available in single-player and deathmatch.

FvF QW Headquarters has a new version 4.7 of Future versus Fantasy for QuakeWorld, the "cult-favorite TC." Also, there are some new FvF Redemption screenshots on the FvF Redemption site that show off the development of the AI in the upcoming Genesis3D sequel to the Quake version.

Boardwatch Magazine's February1999 Cover Story talks about Internet gaming and factors that influence gameplay over the 'net. It's an informed discussion of the topic that tells ISPs how to gain extra revenue by proving good service to gamers and can also help gamers know what to look for in an ISP. Thanks David Ross.

Ace's Hardware goes on The Quest For The Best Videocard for Super 7 motherboards. Also, PlanetHardware Reviews the Storm Platinum, a Vortex2-based audio card from Xitel. And, Tweak3D reviews the card cooler, a giant dual-fan card cooling system aimed at overclockers.

A contest on the Sanctum offers a first prize of a Diamond MX300 soundcard, and a second prize of a copy of Half-Life. PQL is a Quake one-on-one league in Portugal.

• An endgame walk-through has been added to Gamers.Com's Half-Life guide with word on how to finish the game...
• Wingate and Half-Life tells how to get online playing Half-Life from behind a Wingate proxy...
• 3Dfx invests in Quantum3D -- technology alliance follows is an article on 3Dfx and Quantum3D's still strong relationship. Thanks Pyscho_Clown at 3DNow.net...
• An Indoctrination in Carving and Hollowing is a new level editing tutorial on Rust...
• Version 0.54 of the Gladiator launcher for the Gladiator Bot for Quake II is now available...
• The Texture Studio has posted a sixth texture pack containing 50 "photorealistic" images for use in a variety of 3D games in the following file formats: BMP, PCX, DTX (lithtech), WAD3 (Half-Life), and UTX (Unreal). This brings the total number of textures offered by The Studio up to 465, but represents the last such release for a while, as the site's maintainer is relocating soon....

More birthday madness, today is id Software texture artist Kenneth Scott's birthday. It seems the traffic caused by the link to the SyGate home yesterday busted their bandwidth pretty quickly (I debated about making that a link again, but decided to chance it), links on the page that went up in place of their homepage still had download links to get the program. As mentioned here before, connecting multiple machines through the same 'net connection is a native feature in Linux, and I'm told by several folks that this is a recently announced feature to be added to the Windows 98 service pack.

I guess Blammo! is officially out of beta, as the news page has relocated back to its traditional home at /news/news.shtml. I spent all day locked in the BlueLab with the Voodoo3, but managed to hook up with furn to work through some Blammo! enhancements, one of which is the new headline section up top. By the way, if I haven't stressed it yet, the news database is searchable (woowoo!). Until we perform a conversion to get older HTML news in, there's only a bit more than a week's news in the archive, but it's a start. There's a search from on the News Archive (there's a link at the bottom of this page), and I've got to work out a handy spot for a version of the search dealie like this:

Search news archive:

• Use the % character to match any number of characters (Even none).
• Use the _ character to match any one character.
• To search for a reserved wildcard character, add a \ before it, i.e \% or \_.