• ValveWorld interviews Randy Thomas From I.Am/Half-Life (and several other I.AM.sites).
• This week's 10 Questions With SamHell interviews Game Girlz' Vangie "Aurora" Beal.
• Ars Technica The South Park interview talks with the Systems Administrators for the computer network used to produce South Park.

• GameSpot's The Benchmarketing of the Macintosh pits a G3 against a Wintel machine in a steel-cage deathmatch.
• Abit BH6 owners who are feeling very daring may be interested in a BIOS update for the BH6 on Abit's Taiwanese FTP site (direct link) that's dated today. Thanks Jason Moore.

• The AMD Glide Optimized Games is a new list of games that have been optimized to use 3Dfx's Glide along with 3DNow!™. Thanks 3DNow.net.
• BigKid's Diamond V770 Q3test & Overclocking Guide is online, chock full of info, and colorful graphs & charts.

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO - news), and its subsidiary, TalonSoft Inc., announced today that "Hidden & Dangerous" will be shipping to stores nationwide beginning today, Monday, July 26. The game was developed by up and coming international game developer, Illusion Softworks.

Hidden & Dangerous was released to the UK market in early July, where it was met with immediate success. The game is currently at number 2 on the PC sales charts according to ChartTrack. A resurgence of interest in World War II and strong word-of-mouth is expected to help fuel strong sales in the US.

Hidden & Dangerous sets a new level of excellence for the squad-based combat genre. Players will find the game to be an extraordinary combination of tactical combat, strategic planning, and exciting action. Gamers will be responsible for leading a four-man squad of elite paratroopers on daring commando raids behind enemy lines.

Using a revolutionary new graphics engine called the Insanity engine, players will experience World War II combat action like never before. Hidden & Dangerous is set in a truly 3D universe that incorporates beautifully rendered backgrounds, objects, and vehicles, as well as realistic terrain. Players can easily toggle between 1st and 3rd person views during gameplay, including combat sequences. The game offers support for a wide variety of 3D accelerator cards, such as the VooDoo product line from 3Dfx.

Players will have 23 unique, immersive campaigns to choose from in Hidden & Dangerous. The game includes a roster of 40 international commandos, from which players must build their squad of soldiers to complete a series of missions. The advanced overhead mapping system allows for precision planning of squad movement and attacks. The game's powerful AI will put players' skills to the test as enemy soldiers can see, hear, and react to player's movements and sounds. In addition, sophisticated environmental effects like rain, snow, fog, and sleet will affect mission difficulty.

It's all over and the big news is not so much the EU win over North America (US team) - although that is certainly huge news, it's the Irish team beating England to take out the 4 Nations finals. In the third game (out of the best-of-three) they came back from 30-down to win by a single frag...In other results, Kane beat his SK teammate Timber in the "Elite 1-on-1 Tourney" to cement his rep as the best Quake player still playing the game today. The other two contenders would be LakermaN and Thresh. LakermaN has "retired" and may be back for Q3, and Thresh, well, he seems to have other things to do these days (does he spend hours practicing Q3A? We'll have to wait and see). Is this the last we'll see of serious 1-on-1 in Quake? I hope not, considering that the 1-on-1 Q3A demos I've watched so far are very slow and tedious by comparison.

The "US vs EU Clash of the Continents" was a victory for Europe by five games to four, after a grueling nine games of DM3. All the games EU won were close, in the case of the third game only 7 frags separated the two teams. NA (North America) apparently got a 40 frag lead in the 9th game, but the EU guys came back to win another very narrow victory...There's some good coverage on FPSGamers, some match-by-match commentary on Methos Quake, and there is lots of useful stuff on Quake Nation. Over on Spores Den, Bert (who watched the games by proxy) offers his thoughts on the match, suggesting that one of the problems the NA guys had was "poor pent control"...I'm still waiting to d/l and check out more demos (watched Cable's POV in EU-vs-US game 2 last night). Some of them (including Kane in the EU vs US games) are up at Quake Nation and some more (including duel demos) are at FPSGamers. All in all Rapture'99 appears to have been a huge amount of fun, and it certainly produced some of the biggest and best games of Quake ever. Now if only we can all do it again with Q3A, and actually have the US and EU teams both playing "current" games with the same level of excitement. I guess that's all up to JC and his sixth sense for what makes good gameplay.

It appears there was a major crash in the Kingpin patch client, which only seems to occur with the particular binaries that were released. I believe this may be the unfortunate occurance of a MSVC 6.0 bug, which causes some builds to screw up. At any rate, the onus falls on me, for not having that particular build tested before release.

As a result of this, I have decided to open up the Kingpin beta testing to the public. With most of us on holidays (yes, that includes me) at the moment, I'm thinking the best thing to do, is to make what would usually be internal builds, available to anyone willing to help the testing process. Then, once these builds reach a state where things are running smoothly, I'll release that build as the official patch.

This way those that are experiencing major problems with the commercial release, can get access to builds that may fix their problems, or at least they can help me get their problem fixed sooner, rather than later.

The beta page can be found here

• Extreme Hardware's Voodoo2 Experiment describes the mixed results achieved in trying to get several different models of Voodoo2 accelerators to work together.
• AMD Zone's K7 FAQ is up to version 1.5 answering questions about the Athlon.

• 3DGN's Quickie looks at Asheron's Call.
• BigKid previews Submarine Titans based on playing a pre-alpha of this underwater RTS.

• GamusMaximus reviews Kingpin.
• ActionXtreme.com reviews MechWarrior 3.
• U-Games.Com reviews Dungeon Keeper 2
• The Boomstick Joint reviews the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D for Quake (1).

Hardware:

• 2xtreme.net/3dimensional's UltraQ review is up, offering a look at a device that can add 3D sound to a 2D soundcard for the price of a cheap 3D sound card, though the short review also speaks of other benefits it provides.
• FPS3D.COM reviews the Abit BE6 Motherboard.
• SystemLogic reviews the AOpen AX6B-Plus Motherboard.
• BXBoards' A-Top Case Review looks at this new sex-ified case.
• AbsolutePC reviews the Antec ATX Value Line Mini-Tower, a generic ATX case.

• The Wanted page has word that this Quake II conversion devoted to the old west is being ported to Half-Life, with the ultimate goal of a commercial release...
• The ILL Clan (makers of Apartment Huntin') together with StarFury (of the Devil's Covenant movie) will present a QMovie workshop on Friday Aug, 6 from 7:30-9:00 PM at QuakeCon99. The workshop will discuss production techniques for creating movies with the Quake or Quake II engine...
• Tzar Heaven's Beta signup offers a chance to test this game, described as "fantasy-medieval realtime strategy game with a touch of RPG"...
• The Quake Sanitation Authority has info of a new private beta of LFire CTF 2.0 B125 with enhanced bot protection...

Neat thing of the weekend was definitely seeing American Pie with my in-laws, just to see how impossible to embarrass they truly are...we all laughed until our ribs hurt.

Link of the Day: TV's Springer Says He Will Weigh U.S. Senate Bid. Thanks Apache. Why do I fear the voters will cry Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!