Gigex has posted a 23 MB trailer for Prince of Persia 3D, both as full download on this page, and as a small stub program that will allow resuming interrupted downloads. Thanks MeccaWorld and Frans at 3D Action Gamers. On a related note, GamePen's Prince of Persia 3D preview is online.

Stevie "KillCreek" Case sent this .plan update from ION's Steve Ash (just added to the Blue Tracker) which should clarify the reasons for Ash's departure from the Daikatana team (story):

Not this rumor stuff again ;)

It's true, I am leaving ION, but only for boring personal reasons, I'm afraid. I've had a lot of fun working at ION for the past few months. I got to add a lot of cool tech to DK, and now that that's done, I'm heading back to Cali. It's been cool working with John and everyone else here, and I wish them all the best!

Now go away!

As part of Quake2000.net's coverage of games that aren't Quake, they've posted an interview with Dynamix' Nels Bruckner, former programmer, and current manager on Starsiege: TRIBES.

John Romero updated his .plan with word that Steve Ash, former lead programmer on ION Storm's Daikatana, has decided to part with the company. Taking his place is Shawn Green, who many will recall is an id Software alumnus. Here's the scoop, straight from The Romero himself:

Alright, before all of the news sites start going nutty with this information, I just want to thank Steve Ash, my lead programmer, for all the excellent work he's put in on Daikatana. We're past the "adding tech" stage and are working on finishing up the game, so Steve decided to move on and get back to California where he can actually USE his Ducati motorcycle on the winding mountain roads instead of watching his tires melt on the hot Dallas pavement. Heh. Good luck Steve, and thanks for everything. :)

The new lead programmer on Daikatana is Shawn Green, whom I have known for eight years or so and has been doing a great job on Daikatana since its inception.

Dynamix' Dave Moore updated his .plan with word that the recently released Starsiege: TRIBES 1.7 (which was supposed to fix palette errors on 3dfx cards) is causing palette errors on 3dfx Banshee based boards:

Erk! Ok, there have been reports of palette problems on 3dfx cards with only one TMU (Voodoo Graphics, Rush, Banshee). Mea maxima culpa, all my fault. I goofed a logic test (Morgan's law? Something like that. The one that goes ![A && B] => [!A || !B]). We're aware of the problem, and a fix is in QA at this time. This is especially embarrassing, since 1.7 was supposed to fix a palette problem on Voodoo 2's and Voodoo 3's. Sigh.

AGN3D has posted a brief Q&A with James Schmalz, game designer for Digital Extremes (Epic's collaborators on Unreal and Unreal Tournament). Also of note is Unreality.org's interview with Andy Frazier, the composer behind the music in Legend's Unreal Engine game Wheel of Time.

This Seattle Times report sent along by Stillwater refutes the report posted earlier (story) that Bill Gates plans on donating his entire fortune to charity. The article quotes Gates' father, the alleged source of the original report, as saying "I didn't say that...It isn't accurate," and goes on to say "The elder Gates speculated that the Sunday Times writer misunderstood him."

This week's edition of 10 Questions with Sam Hell features everyone's favorite little devil interviewing Mike Nichols (hey, didn't he direct The Graduate?), creative director on Drakan: Order of the Flame. Topics include the game's engine, the competition, and some gameplay questions.

Raven Artist/Animator Rob Gee updated his .plan with word on progress on Elite Force, Raven's upcoming Star Trek Voyager game using the Quake III engine. The lengthy update goes on to describe the reception of SoF and Elite Force at the Activate Conference in Scotland and a welcome to their new artist Andy, but I'll just quote the part about the Star Trek game:

Elite Force is coming along nicely. The newest mission area (undisclosed at this time) is in the
final stages of defining it's overall look. The designers and artists have most of the "major" areas
done and have been tweaking out textures, architecture and lighting effects for final approvals. The
entire mission area is really looking great - the original concept sketches were done with Quake III's
curved surface capabilities in mind. Needless to say, it won't be a very friendly neighborhood when
it's done ;).

While I'm waiting for some model approvals to be reviewed, I've spent some more time setting up some
additional animations for the scavengers. We've been fortunate to have access to the SoF animation
data base, as well as using the CHIMAERA system for our humanoid models to apply the animations to.
We're using a fair number of the mo-capped scenes that Scott and Eric set up with hOuse of mOves.
But unfortunately, there are a few animations we can't use. Most Star Trek races have a very distinct
body language and just wouldn't look right doin that gang bang thang. Klingons just don't go talkin
smack while they cap :) A big thanks to Eric Turman for the ungodly hours he put into setting up the
CHIMAERA system. He has much honor.

Shubes is working on the creature that will be found hanging around the newest levels, mentioned above.
Brian P. is working with Bill to get our official website finalized - it's really looking pretty sweet.
Mark has been doing more concepts, as well as helping Brian get the story boards done for future cinematics.
Lampo has been a big help exporting all the anims for me so that Mike can edit and reclip them into the
game. Kim has been working with Les to get the characters' heads and faces done. B'elanna is looking hot.
hmmmmmmm.... B'elanna. Les has been busy making models and working with Steve R. on some new effects that the
designers will be able to set up in their levels. Todd, Mark, Kim, and our newest artist - Andrew Trabbold -
have been creating some very impressive textures for the new levels.

So, as I said, things are coming along nicely.

id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead updated his .plan with an excited blurb about this coming weekend's festivities at QuakeCon '99. The update warns of how badly over-crowded the small town of Mesquite, TX will be due to the event, and suggests attendees without accomodations get on the ball.

Bleem!'s President Vents is a GameSpot Q&A with David Herpolsheimer, president of bleem! LLC discussing life after the launch of Bleem!, the PlayStation emulation software. The article discusses the legal battles with Sony the product is enduring, and talks about what it will take to make Bleem a mainstream product.

Also on GameSpot is an article called Half-Life MOD Heaven that looks at the doings at last weeks event to show off seven of the best Half-Life Mods currently in production, briefly describing Action Half-Life, Chemical Existence, Counterstrike, Gunman, Kanonball, Science & Industry, and USS. Darkstar.

The Tectonic Latest News page has word of a new version of the TecArena Q3Test front-end program. The new release fixes a "stupid bug" in the last version which prevented the launcher from actually launching Q3Test (which is a problem for a game launcher).

The Croatian Quake3 Arena Scene sends word of their new Quake III Arena User Benchmark Page. A majority of the benchmarks on the page are user submitted, which sacrifices some control over the data, but allows for the widest variety of tested systems. The goal is to to see what hardware is best for Quake III Arena, and is meant to be especially useful to those considering upgrades.

Before It's Done interviews Greg Zeschuk posing ten questions to the CEO of BioWare about their upcoming sequel to the quirky third-person action game, MDK, which, as we've pointed out before, stands for Math Don't Kompute.

The press release for the Quake III US Tour has been well, released, with some more details on the event (or events for that matter). If you're wondering what's going to go on at the bus stops, the PR has this bit of information, "at some locations, lucky players will get to challenge top professional guest-gamers" although nobody specific is named. I also enjoyed this quote quite a bit - actually it kind of scared me:

"You never know where the bus might stop -- there are a lot of routes between cities," Welch continued. "One day it might pull into a cyber cafe or a parking lot and just let people in to play -- it might even be at your house. You always have to be ready. Watch the Web. "

Including a new video card announcement from Bitboys Oy(!):

• Bitboys Oy have announced their new line of Glaze3D video cards, which sport gigatexel fillrates and embedded DRAM.
• 3DWars has posted an article chronicling the battle between 3dfx and NVIDIA for dominance of the 3D market.
• Matrox has posted a Q&A with Chris Satchell, Technical Manager at Silicon Dreams Studio Limited, the developers of Warmonkeys, which will utilize their environment-mapped bump-mapping.
• Ars Technica has posted an article explaining how the Dual Celeron SMP setup works.
• Sharky Extreme has updated their 3dfx Next-Generation Technology article with new images of the in-house demo they saw.

GASource has posted a Q&A with Bungie's PR screwball Doug Zartman, talking about their Anime influenced action title Oni. Some of the questions focus on the gameplay balance, which is an odd mix of hand to hand combat and good old fashioned gun toting mayhem.

The Italian games site Games on Line has posted a new Black & White preview (actually, the preview's in color, but...oh, never mind) complete with 27 screenshots (almost all of which are new, and quite impressive looking). As the preview's in Italian, you may want to stick a Babel Fish in your ear before heading over there.

GameMaster Gamer's Paradise has set up a new Quake II master server all the way over in Holland (mmm...Quake with hollandaise). The server's at www.games.hetnet.nl:27900, with a server listing available at http://www.games.hetnet.nl/quake2/gamespy.txt. So update those server browsers if you're into that sort of thing.

Dynamix' Tinman ("yes, dammit, that is my real name!") updated his .plan with word that he's created a new mission type for TRIBES that's up for testing as we speak. Here's the scoop:

However, I finally decided that everyone else was having too much fun creating their own mission types, so I decided to get in on the action. I've created a new mission type for Tribes: "Flag Hunters"! (It may look familiar, the idea came from some other game I'll leave nameless).

The object? Kill everyone of course, but besides that... Everyone spawns with a flag. If you die, you drop your flag and someone else can pick it up. If you had picked up several flags before dying, you'll drop them all, plus the flag you spawned with. The object is to take as many flags as you can to the "alter". Scoring is additive, so the more flags you bring at once, the higher your score. e.g. 1 flag = 1 point, 2 flags = 1 + 2 = 3 points, n flags = 1 + ... + n points.

This hasn't been released, so the only server you can play this on is: "Kidney Thief's Domain" (address "IP:198.74.33.53:28001")

So... check it out. Keep in mind that I'm not a mission designer, so I'd appreciate any *suggestions* about which maps (I've set up 5) work, which need improvement, and which just plain suck. Also, any bugs. Please keep in mind that this was just a pet project, and not an officially sanctioned Dynamix release.

The Flamelands recently posted a new shot from Psygnosis' upcoming Drakan: Order of the Flame. The shot, of Tahkora, "the renowned skeletal dragon," is the sixth in their series of seven shots showing off the various dragons that are featured in the multiplayer game. Thanks Drakan.Net.

This thread on GT's Unreal Tournament Forum has a a couple of posts from Epic's Jack "Mek" Porter describing the possibility that Epic will conduct a similar program to Valve's Half-Life Primary Server program where free copies of the game may be distributed to server operators who have "demonstrated they can run quality Unreal 1 servers for a reasonable period of time," to help make sure UT server propagate quickly. Thanks Apache from Voodoo Extreme.

Dave at The Adrenaline Vault News sends word that the AVault is going to be hosting a chat with Terminal Reality's Nocturne development team to chat about this upcoming third-person Lovecraftian game. The chat will be this Thursday, Aug. 5 at 7:30 EDT on the AVault's IRC server. Instructions for joining the event will be announced soon.

The London Sunday Times is reporting "Gates to give away £65 billion fortune," quoting Bill Gates' dad (administrator of the William H. Gates Foundation) saying the younger Gates, the slightly well-off co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, "plans to become the biggest single benefactor in history by giving away his £65 billion fortune to help rid the planet of diseases such as Aids and malaria." Props to BetaNews for getting the scoop on this yesterday (they attributed it to Reuters where I couldn't find it, thanks to The AVault for the pointer to the Sunday Times).

Like bookends:

• Thresh's FiringSquad's Pentium III 600 Review.
• Review Zone's Intel Pentium III 600 Review.

Version 1.13 of the ReDeMpTiOn Bot for Sin is now available, offering "a seriously improved combat engine that includes Aim Leading code." Saw that on the Bot Epidemic.

The Myth of the Bugless Game is an AVault guest editorial by Jeff Morris, Programmer and QA manager for Firaxis Games talking from a developers point of view about the complaint that computer games are buggy .

Raven's John Scott updated his .plan with a worklog of his own, detailing progress on Raven's Quake II-engine game-in-progress, Soldier of Fortune. Here's the update:

* Fixed "Failed command checksum" bug
* Fixed alpha surfaces in bmodels not being rendered properly (still not perfect - but should be good enough) and not moving.
* Sorted alpha surfaces, quads and alpha bmodels properly.
* Made undulating surfaces shade smoothly
* Added screenshots to savegames.
* Routinified lightmap creation code and surface rendering - multitexture used in more situations now.
* Used sorted texture chains if multitexture available to reduce texture thrashing (previously it only rendered by texture if there was no multitexture available).
* Went out and got completely blasted Saturday night.

Just a note to say that The Blair Witch Project is bleeding awesome - thoroughly recommended.

I'm also completely hooked on the Sequencer CD by Covenant.

• Hot Hardware's 3dfx Technology Summit gives their report on their recent visit to 3dfx.
• Likewise, Beyond 3D's 3dfx Technology Summit article is online.
• Digital-Clips.com goes to Digital World Expo 99 in Hong Kong, starting the report off with the very salient question "What the hell is Digital World Expo 99?"

Quake 3 French Olympics has info (in French) about this competition (in France) that will feature two-on-two and four-on-four duels, as well as free-for-all competitions in Quake III. Just for completeness, here's the usual link to AltaVista Translations in case you are curious about the proceedings, and your Français is a bit rouillé.

• Singularity Features a MidTown Madness Vs Need for Speed: High Stakes Shootout (in spite of the non-shooting nature of the games).
• Better late than never, UGN3D reviews Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.

• There's a new screenshot posted as a BattleCruiser 3020 AD Shot of the Day, implying there may be daily shots to follow...
• The Skynet Project Tactical Combat Simulation page has some new screenshots of this Half-Life mod in progress. Thanks Killjoy...

We had another blessed event at the Blue Tower yesterday, as the first of our second pair of mourning dove eggs hatched in the flowerpot on the fire escape (can you imagine climbing down 245 flights of fire escape ladder in an emergency? There's a downside to living in the tallest building in the world). As small is the hatchling is, it's still hard to believe it came from something as tiny as the unhatched egg next to it, which is the size of a large gumball. I'd describe the mother feeding the newborn, but some of you are probably eating right now yourselves.

Link of the Day: B1FF#S K3WL H0M3 PAG3!!! As Joel , who sent this along, says: "Everything that's lame about the Web wrapped up in one page!" Also, as he did when passing along the link, let me apologize in advance.
Image of the Day: The Worlds Biggest LAN Party? Thanks Ryan.
eBay Item of the Day: eBay item 140092659 - The Blue TeamFortress Fort. Thanks Nicholas Ryan. Sure bidding starts at $10,000,000, but it's a fort, dammit! Besides, it's blue...

AvPNews.com has posted an edited chat log from the David Stalker chat which was held July 30 on Mplayer.com. David is the producer for Fox Interactive's Aliens versus Predator and the chat answers questions about why an AvP level editor has not been released ("the tools used are not suitable for public release"), and much more, including this about something I've wondered about myself, Alien co-op:

Dave Stalker: Honestly, Alien coop is tricky because of AI issues but it's something that we may investigate in the future expansions that we will be doing.

The Dawn of Darkness News page has word that plans for this commercial Quake II conversion have been scrapped. Here's part of the update, which goes on to describe plans for the free release of some of what they've worked out for the project, as well as plans to continue to develop Dawn of Darkness as a franchise:

It is with a great sense of bitter-sweet that we make the announcement first mentioned last month. Bluntly and plainly:

Dawn of Darkness, as a Quake II total conversion, has been officially and voluntarily cancelled.

Realizing that there is no market left for commercial Quake II products, that the Quake II engine is showing its age, and with a desire to do justice to the Dawn of Darkness concept, we have ended development of the conversion. Though it pains us to cancel the project, there are several good things about it...

Ant points out the FTP directory at ftp.icq.com has some new binaries dated today, and Violent J. points out Tucows has a new ICQ release dated today with a version of 99a Build 1800 244, so it looks like they've crept another new public beta out in that strong silent way of theirs.

Datumplane::Starsiege has broken the news drought by noticing a post by Dynamix' Rick Overman on the messageboards on StarsiegePlayers about the status of the 1.004 patch for Starsiege:

I said I wouldn't do it but being a programmer kinda guy I always reserve the right to change my mind at the last second. So... I am going to change the network protocol for patch v1.004. But I will allow 1.004 servers to optionally be backward compatible with older clients. You will be able to set up a 1.004 server that will only accept 1.004 clients. This is great for matches because you can assure that no one is using any hacks!

OR

You can set up a 1.004 server that will accept any client. The downside is you don't get some of the hack fixes.

Question?
How many of the Dynamix dedicated servers should be configured to ONLY accept 1.004 clients? I'm thinking all but 2 games should be converted. At least this way there will always be a server for those who have not downloaded the patch yet.

Pels Interactive's latest Q&A is with Raven designer Eric Biessman playing their now-classic ten questions discussing Soldier of Fortune, Raven, life in the biz, and all the more you can cram into ten questions. The piece also offers two new screenshots from Soldier of Fortune.

• Extreme Hardware has summarized some posts from the hardware newsgroups trying to convey some of the general feelings being expressed on USENET on 3dfx' newly announced technology. The summary states that "opinions were pretty well split down the middle on the...announcement, with some feeling it was too much hype for a technology demo, and others really interested in the Anti-Aliasing and other features that were mentioned." Head on over for the full treatment.
• Sharky Extreme's MACWORLD Expo New York summary is up with their resident Mac expert giving his take on last week's Big Apple Apple festivities.

Tweak3D has posted 12 new screenshots from Drakan: Order of the Flame giving a dozen detailed looks at Psygnosis' upcoming third-person dragon-riding action/adventure in 1280x1024 resolution and 32bpp color.

There's another Tim at work shot on Unreality from Epic's Tim Sweeney. This is not actually a photo of him at work programming, but rather a screenshot of the latest look of the UnrealEd interface, perhaps of interest to level design-types.

3drage.com's Werewolf: The Apocalypse preview follows their recent Vampire preview (story) with their first impressions of another third-person game based on a pen-and-paper RPG from White Wolf Studios, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of Gaia.

Another Blitz engine release, and a new version of the Act 3d visualization engine:

• The Acid Reign Site has the release of the source code to version 1.2 of the Blitz Engine. This has similar features to the version 1.0 release (story) but now also includes a "completely hand-crafted 32-bit MMX optimised realtime span-level RGB rasterizer with span-level mip-mapping in assembly (Phew...) as seen in Unreal."
• Saw on Voodoo Extreme that 3DFiles has posted the 6th generation of the Act 3d visualization engine. "The latest versions includes loads of new features to create even more stunning graphics than before. This demo displays 4 different 3d models. You can use the mouse to navigate around the models. Direct X 6.0 and an 3d accelerator are required for this demo."

A new version 1.1 of NOP is now available. NOP is a small, speedy, freeware tool that parses q3test-server-logfiles and generates rankings using an HTML template. The program is currently only available for Win32, but they are looking for someone to do a Linux port. Here are a few of NOP's main features:

• generates ranking tables by calculating 'points' for every player
• you can change the table design via style-sheets
• uses a ban-list to avoid ranking of certain players
• strips color-codes from playernames
• converts q3test's special characters to ascii-characters
• you control the number of lines per page and the number of users in the list
• re-run feature: e.g. let NOP update rankings every 20 minutes

Electronic Arts poised for Net play reports CNET News.com (saw that on Tom's Hardware). Here's the lowdown on the report, which currently is still all speculation:

REDWOOD CITY, California--Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video-game publisher, is poised to unveil a series of Internet initiatives that may boost its profit and stock price, analysts and investors said.

While company executives declined to comment on the plans, chief financial officer Stan McKee has been telling investors that Electronic Arts wants to get 20 percent of its sales from online sources within three years. That could equal several hundred million dollars a year for the Redwood City, California, company, which had $1.2 billion in sales for fiscal 1998.

Electronic Arts' bet on Internet-based gaming could help it weather transitions to new game-console technology, which could cause industry sales to stall as consumers wait for new consoles to buy new game software. Still, the company must overcome technical and marketing barriers to lure millions of users to pay for online games and entertainment, analysts said.

UGN3D Q&A with Bill Roper of Blizzard entertainment talking about Diablo II and Battle.net. An interesting bit to note from the article is word that they have not yet finalized how many players can be in a single game. Also MGON interviews an unnamed Blizzard rep on the same subject.

I see on Half-LifeNews a version 2.4b of a mod called DMPlus has been released. This teamplay mod offers features like a grappling hook and a cloaking device, as well as gameplay tweaks like bleeding and increased lethality that can result in single shot kills.

A post titled Venom Compatibility Test Demo Released on GA-Source gives word of the Venom Test Demo now available for download. Venom is a 3D action shooter being developed using the "Vital Engine ZL," but this is not a gameplay demo, but "is a compatibility test demo, which has been released to test how the game works on different hardware, so the developers can remove most bugs before releasing a playable game demo of the first level later this month."

There's a new High Resolution Slave Zero Screenshot on GA-Source showing off Accolade's Giant robot combat game in 1024x768 glory with bump-mapping enabled.

The Kingpin FAQ on Planet Kingpin has been updated to version 0.9 with he addition of a couple of new Q&As about Xatrix' gangsta-shoota. Also, new questions and their corresponding answers have also been added to GT's Unreal FAQ and GT's Unreal Return to Na Pali FAQ. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.

A Quake III Arena Road Tour page has been added to the Quake III Arena site. Thanks Maddes. There aren't a lot of details there, but there is a picture of a big ole Quake III bus, and a list of destinations in the US Southwest that can get the imagination going for locals (or those willing to travel):

• Dallas • Houston • El Paso • San Antonio • Austin • Albuquerque • Phoenix

• Las Vegas • Seattle • Tacoma • Portland • Eugene • Sacramento • San Francisco

• Oakland • Fresno • San Jose • San Diego • Irvine • Los Angeles

Creative Labs Products Graphics Voodoo2 page has a new beta 1.1.2.0025 release of an optimized mini-GL driver for both the 3D Blaster Banshee and the 3D Blaster Voodoo2. Thanks Von. According to the update, "you must be running Creative Labs drivers for the mini-GL to install and operate properly." The update is dated July 28 (and says the driver date is July 23), tough I haven't seen word of it previously. According to the site, the new driver "includes several improvements from the June 16th release," including:

• Support for Quake3 Test 2 (Version 1.07)
• Support for Quake3 Test 2 (Version 1.06)
• Support for Tribes
• Performance Improvements
• Corrected Lighting Issues in Quake3
• Installs newer Glide files to provide better gamma support

Quake 3 Arena Benchmarks on the Meter give Mercury Research's Q3Test benchmarks, which have the TNT2 cards showing up on top. Thanks Tom's Hardware via Stomped.

Voodoo Extreme has posted a pair of new screenshots from Shiny's upcoming third-person action game, Messiah.

There's a new GameSpy LAN Master program on LANParty.com. This is a local master server you can run on your LAN that allows connected clients to easily find multiplier games on the LAN simply by using GameSpy. You can understand the usefulness of this if you've ever been to a large LAN party and tried to keep up with all the servers folks are launching (often running local webserver to provide server IPs). The initial version of the LAN Master includes support for QuakeWorld, Quake II, Q3Test, Half-Life, Kingpin, and TRIBES. More games may be added in the future.

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart made an update to the Unreal Technology page describing five days of work on a Linux client for Epic's upcoming Unreal Tournament. Word is "It runs very well under my Voodoo 3 3000 at 1024x768 (Redhat 6, Linux 2.2.5-15)," saying "The only major issue left on my todo list for the client is to port the Galaxy sound library." The update includes a couple of screenshots and word that "if everything goes well, then the client will be on the 2nd CD of UT."

id's John Carmack updated his .plan with the latest installment of his Quake III Arena worklog with word on the latest progress on the game.

• Anand's 3dfx T-Buffer Overview is up, as well as is a look at 3dfx' new announcement from SystemLogic.
• Speaking of 3dfx, Voodoo.dk interviews 3dfx in a very short Q&A with a "Keith" about unannounced products (which he can't talk about), and inquiring whether the "nightmare" of overclocking will continue with new products.

An update to the Quake Info Pool adds more information about some bugs, including a fix for the FTOS() bug in the Quake engine (which can also be fixed by hacking the Quake executable). Also, a new Ultimate Regular Quake Patch v1.04a and Ultimate Regular QuakeWorld Patch v1.04f have recently been made available.They have also enhanced all the bug-reporting forms there to use cookies.

There is a page up with info on playing the normal Half-Life single-player maps co-operatively on SvenCoop - Atomic Half-Life. I don't know if there's anything on the page that's changes since the SvenCoop stuff was first announced a while back, but questions on "how do I play co-op Half-Life" show up in the mail here all the time, so there it is (described as "far from a perfect method, but it's fairly playable").

The Q2Utils site has a new release of DemoMan, a utility to makes viewing Quake II demos simple. When installed, you can launch a demo and view it simply by double clicking it (rather than opening Quake II and proceeding manually). The program even works to view demos from within .zipped archives.

Now that the mod is release, sign-ups for an Action Half-Life Tournament is underway, though the tournament will not begin until the "AHL teamplay is improved." Also, screenshots, photos, and demos of the Tempolagy LAN Party are now online.

• Action Half-Life Demo Review on 3DGaming.Net.
• 3D Alpha Hardware Station reviews the ASUS V-3800 TVR 32 MB.
• Exxtreme3D reviews the SoundBlaster Live! Value.

• The Console Help section on I.Am-Half-Life has been updated, and a new TWEAKS section has been added...
• RainbowSix.Net has word of a skinpack for Rainbow Six called the Rainbow Skin pack (as far as I know, that's a reference to the game's name, not any Sgt. Pepper's-oriented outfits). Both clients and servers need the pack for R6 skin support to work...
• UrbanChaos.Net interviews Mucky Foot's Mark Zarb-Adami about his roles as lead programmer on Urban Chaos...

The turning of the calendar pages to August serves as a reminder that QuakeCon is coming up quickly, just next weekend in fact. As I anticipate the event, I am trying to figure out the most frightening of these three prospects: Playing Q3A against people who spend as much time deathmatching as I do HTMLing, eating at Denny's more than once in a 24-hour span, or accepting a ride from 3DRealm's Chris Johnson. You see, it's not just the gun-control laws (which require that all citizens over the age of three be fully armed) that make Texas such an intimidating place.

Link of the Day: Virtual Crack Rock(tm). Thanks Ant. They have their own domain for crying out loud!