Results are rolling in from Rapture '99. There are several sites with extensive coverage of this international tourney, I'm cleverly excerpting (and heavily editing) some stuff from
Challenge.AU because it gives links to so many other site's coverage along with an idea of some results. Thanks
Aardappel. Checking out some of the fine coverage in the links is recommended for the full story:
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.