We've got another local LAN party soon guys. Another big one, if they can manage to get enough people on such short notice. Check out FRAGlimit here. Same venue as we used. (The local curling club) I don't know if any of the FRAGtopia Staff will be attending (Most of us work Friday/Sat) but we'll be sure to pop by and take a look and a few photos at least. You never know tho... The draw of LANing is a powerful one, especially when it's put up against work.

Good news from the Battletech front! The server has been reset for Multiplayer Battletech 3025! Get your ass in here and lets play. Dopper, Kingpin, Shadowolf and myself are completely hooked on this game, it's hella good! As usual, my team (Kurita) is getting beat up on by everyone... But we'll show those Davion dogs how real men fight sometime soon.. oh, and will they be sorry when we do!

More news in a bit. :) (We hope!)

This just in from Hypn0tik over at Tribes Universe:

After 5 days of being shut down for construction, Tribes-Universe.com is up and running, with a brand new look! We are very excited about this new look of ours, and hope you all will be as well!

In addition to the new look, Tribes-Universe.com has a few more things we are excited about! For one, we have added some great new hosted sites! Also, we have new forums that are better, and faster then ever before! But best of all, we are happy to announce the addition of our 32 player, Tribes 2 match server! The server is powered by artofwarcentral.com and will soon be available to Tribes to use for their OGL, TWL, and UGL matches. Here are the server specs:

32 Player server running Base

OC-48 connection

Dual 1Ghz Machine

1 Gigabyte of PC133 Ram

Server ip: 208.62.89.160 Port: 27210

We are also currently accepting applications for hosting! So if you have a Script, Map, Mod, Skin, or Clan site...head over and check our Hosting Section for more info!

We at Tribes-Universe.com hope you enjoy the new site, and all we have to offer! Make sure you check back every day, and remember to join our Mailing List, found on our left nav menu!

Thanks Hyp. More news in a bit

Hey ho all. Got a bit of interesting news for you today.

First off, the review is up for Alone In The Dark 4:The Console Nightmare. Take a look, and for godsake don't buy the game. If you want to play a killer nighmare/survival game, go get Clive Barker's: Undying. There's a reason I rant and rave about Undying, and it's cause it's not AITD4.

Been playing Anachronox, Ion Storm's latest little game....... Basically it's trying to be Final Fantast as near as I can tell. The turn based attacks are SOOOO FF it's just amazing. I didn't have an textures on my first install, so the game looked like hell. After a complete new install it's running good.... But I'm not really all that impressed with the game so far. It's OK, but really not great. And the battles are long and boring. Mostly I've been wandering around trying to figure out how to complete a few quests that don't seem to be beatable. Odd. I'll post a review when I'm done, likely in another week or so.

Talvis, one of my old teamates from the Gold Knights sent me a link to Multiplayer Battletech 3025. Zombie told me about this a little while ago, but I never really looked into it. Wow. Was I an idiot. It's like Mechwarrior 4, but massively multiplayer. Damned sweet. Go here, create an account then click on PLAY to download and install the game. It's free for the moment.

Hey! You've heard all about buying babies over the internet right? These guys promise a full refund if unsatisfied. Now THAT's customer service! :) Thanks Blue.

You can tell that poor Donut911 misses his precious cable modem.... Misses it indeed, for rather than teaching bitches to suck it down in Unreal Tourney he's been playing stuff like this..... Sad really when this sort of thing happens. (sucker)

Good news comes from Lone Predator for all us Canadians! We're really not as boring as everyone says! Why, if it wasn't for us, the world wouldn't have green garbage bags or gingerale. Yay for us.

Looking for a good Counter Strike player, but can't talk either Red Leader into joining your team? Well, if you've got $15,000 USD, you can have WiCKeD, the self proclaimed best player to ever live on the face of this 'ol world of ours. (Thanks d0zer)

Please note that for a smaller sum you can have myself join your team. I'm not the best, but you don't know that. Buy me a Fruitopia and I'm all yours. I also do Windows.

Heard about the AOL "Virus" gag spread by Joke A Day? No? Read all about it here. Praetorian told me about this most hillarious and AOL user harming little prank. And you know, if it does damage to people who use AOL willingly, it's always a good thing.

Protocal-X sends us over a link to a little site that I feel Kingpin will enjoy greatly. Check it out here, you idiot. :)

Wienerboy Dave just sent me a link for a third party version of ICQ that's one HELL of a lot more efficient than the AOL release. Grab it here. It is tiny and very fast, but it didn't import my contact list properly, which really annoys me... Maybe someone else will have better luck. If you do, let me know.

Marauder out... For now.

PC Gameplay has slapped up a bit of a preview of Alien vs Predator 2 the hot sequel currently in development at Monolith and being published by Sierra Studios. Also, Happy Puppy has done a play test based on the AVP2 E3 demo with gameplay comments.

If you're really hungry for yet more screenshots on this amazing looking game don't forget to check out the screenshots page over at AVPnews!

Hopefully the Predator won't be so superior to the other races this time. In the orignal the Aliens were fast and could really deal out punishment but they didn't seem to be able to take much damage. The humans were basically Predator or Alien fodder but their miniguns packed a punch. Note to readers: When playing AVP multiplayer never let Marauder play as the Predator…

Sonic Mayhem, the guys behind some of the biggest gaming soundtracks (Quake 2, Quake 3, and Q3 Team Arena for example) sent a demo track to Fox Interactive for AVP2. The Fox people loved it but the spot to do the soundtrack for AVP2 had already been filled. So being the r33t d00dz that they are Sonic Mayhem decided to make the demo available as a free mp3 download! Sweet! Just head over to the website and scroll down a bit to grab it! I highly suggest listening to this while playing the original AVP if you have the means.

In other big gaming news, John Romero (in what I'm sure is the first step of many in his evil plot for world domination that we here at Fragtopia exposed only a week ago today) and Tom Hall have left Ion Storm! Voodooextreme received word from Byran Davies at Eidos that they've offically left the company:

John Romero and Tom Hall have decided to depart Ion Storm to pursue other interests. We wish them luck in their future endeavors and thank them for their contribution to Ion Storm over the years, without which we would never have put together such talented teams in both our Austin and Dallas offices. Ion Storm will continue as a wholly owned subsidiary of Eidos and work on the sequels to the awarding winning Thief and Deus Ex titles as well as Deus Ex for the PS2.

No word yet on what these guys are now planning to do but my bet is that they'll form a new game company. Interestingly, no mention was made of Warren Spector who as far as we know remains at Ion Storm and is working on the new Thief 3 and Deus Ex 2 sequels.

Speaking of Thief 3, Randy Smith , the Project Director on the game, has posted a big-ass (™) development update over at Through The Looking Glass forums. Randy talks about the switch to using the Unreal Engine this time around (the Dark Engine was used in the two previous Thief games) and the impact that that has made on the development process. He also discusses some of the new game features and introduces a few new members of the Thief 3 team. If that wasn't enough he's also posted a few preliminary developed screenshots of levels being produced with the new engine and some of the early concept art for the game.

In non-gaming news but of potential interest to video buffs the new Divx4 codec has been released! Grab it here. A fairly fast CPU is needed to encode or decode video with this new codec but the image quality on it is very good and I'd go as far as to say that it's the best codec yet. It's also compatible with all earlier versions of the Divx codec and some of the existing movies encoded with Divx 3 look noticeably better.

Being an eyecandy whore and a fan of the Unreal series of games, I was pretty stoked to see that Epic has updated their Unreal Engine News page! New features in the engine include a brand new particle system, volumes, specular highlighting effects, and an advanced terrain system. They've also announced that as of Build 739 they now have complete support for the Xbox platform (as was demonstrated by the Unreal Championship Demo at E3). Plenty of new eyecandy to see here folks… check it out!

A few people have recently asked me about those OpenGL and Directx 8 Unreal Tournament renderers that enable support for the high resolution compressed textures from the second UT CD. Daniel Vogel, the programmer guy from Loki software who originally put together these renderers has since moved on to become part of the Epic team. As a result the latest version of these renderers are now hosted on the Unreal Technology page along with word on how to install these babies. Give it a shot! Here's a couple screenshots of what these renderers look like on a Geforce 3 (with Quincunx AA and anisotropic filtering enabled of course). Nice eh?

Hey all. I've finally recovered enough from the weekend at Wasga Beach Paintball Adventures (Refing, not playing regretably) to actually get some work done.

First off, review is finally posted for Operation Flashpoint. Wow. Great game! It's kinda like Wargasm meets Project IGI meets Team Fortress Classic meets Delta Force. Most excellent, and I can't wait untill more people in North America get it so I can start owning me some bitches multiplayer. Upcoming reviews are in the works for Startopia, Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition (Once Dopper gets off his ass and posts the damned thing!) and the new Alone in the Dark game.

Just heard from some American friends last night that they had aquired legal copies of Mechcommander 2. Considering how the first one grabbed me by the ying-yang and wouldn't let go, I can hardly wait to get my grubby little hands on the second one!

Rune was right. (He does that occasionally, it's quite annoying.) The GeForce 3 is indeed my daddy. Tribes 2 @ 100fps with most of the graphics cranked is quite a treat... And X-Isle from Crytek is pretty damned sweet sweet on the new video card as well. Check em out, and eat my video card. :)

Now that's what I call TASTY!

Oh, and some SOB hacked the guys we use for a web counter today.. Grrrrrrrr. Hate these little idiots.

Marauder out... For now.

I attribute my long absense to my quest of hunting down John Romero for that horrible game-that-shall-not-be-mentioned. Unfortunately I was unsuccessful as he seems to be hiding out and is most likely hiding in an underground bunker somewhere in the middle east planning more gaming horrors to subject us to. Hopefully one of these days he'll realize that he's a game designer and not a manager.

I've also noticed a distributing similarity between Romero and Chakotay…. It must be an part of an evil plan to take over the world using Romero clones!

Lately I've been busy playing with my shiny new Elsa Gladiac 920 Geforce 3 and mercilessly rubbing that fact in poor Marauder's face (well, he deserves it anyhow). So how is it? In a word, amazing. This is without a doubt one of the biggest updates in shear graphics features that we've seen in a while. I mean sure, my wallet just got a whole lot lighter, but as you all know it's all about the framerates and the purty looking graphics (so sue me, I'm an eye-candy whore!). Besides, you don't need both kidneys to live right?

Nvidia threw in everything but the kitchen sink and trust me I'm sure that it must be in there somewhere. Just to demonstrate, here's a couple of shots from Quake 3 with Quincunx Antialiasing and 16 tap anisotropic filtering.

Of course I should probably add a few shots of the luscious looking Geforce 3 enhanced Giants too.

I'm not even going to mention the extra 3dmark 2001 eyecandy that you get to see with the aid of a GF3. It's just too mindblowing.

Whoa, did someone skip the 13.00's when I wasn't looking? Maybe it's because some people consider 13 to be an unlucky number. Anyhow for all you Nvidia users there's some tasty new 14.20 Detonator drivers available courtesy of gamers-ammo. Ahead over there and pick up these bad boys ASAP!

Extreme Tech has just slapped up a big multicard, multiplatform roundup for your viewing pleasure. Find out just out well your CPU and vidcard stack up to the best!

Although by nature I'm suspicious of a site that calls iteself "Max Reboot" this time I have to give them props for being one of the only sites that currently has the latest DirectX 8.1 Interim2 release (build 648 yada, yada, yada…). Grab it here… you know you want it! They also have a couple of other goodies over there such as the latest alpha of Winamp3 and ICQ 2001a.

Remember to be careful and that if your system blows up because of using this beta software we all get to laugh at you….

Oh yea, I'll be picking up one of these babies after I find that damn cheque for $10,000, that I misplaced the other day. Athlon SMP server very very good, even better looking in a rack mount case. Damnit where did i leave that cheque?

This could be something really worth picking up if it every hits the streets, some dood, decided to take a keyboard, split it in half and attach a mouse on one half, don't know how well it would work but if it does, whatch newbies your ass is gonna be owned.

And finally, for all you Diablo 2 junkies, go here to check out a review of the latest expansion pack "Lord of Destruction", looks pretty sweet, and they are actually using high res textures in this one.

With all these new exciting high end graphic titles being released, its nice to still remember the old greats where todays games are getting their inspiration from. So on with the new Half Life update 1.0.0.7 updating current TFC 1.5 and adding DMC, Yes!!! its the QUAKE mod for half life. Only played it for a bit, though I never really played the original game its quite and impressive mod, so what are you waiting for? go grab it now using the sierra autoupdate feature.

Speaking of oldies, here's an interesting article about the ol' K6-3 cpu, looks like AMD got an earlier start on overclocking then we thought. To bad they didn't make a very powerfu chip to combat the Celeron 300A.

Uh-oh, I think these guys have been smokin' the crack pipe a little too long, its a great idea but how the hell do they plan to pull this off?

Ready for another API to enter the picture? too late, The Khronos Group has been working on something called Open-ML! what the hell is that you ask? well here's a few things that the new api is supposed to be able to do.

foster a cross-platform, cross-OS development environment. The group will drive open standards between platform, hardware, and application vendors to enable a seamless interoperability to customers for transparent migration of content creation and playback across a variety of platforms and devices enable integration and synchronization of video, audio and 2D/3D graphics to deliver compelling content through media-rich interactive applications enable hardware and software providers to produce a larger number of standardized, transportable, and compelling media products to be brought to market in a more timely fashion, which will in turn foster user acceptance and market growth with customers benefiting from a larger selection of systems, applications, and peripherals establish synergy to multi-purpose and re-purpose content for a variety of distribution mediums such as broadcast and the internet build on the strengths of OpenGL, and work with the OpenGL ARB to strengthen OpenGL

Open-ML will have full support across the board on all major OS's including linux and MacOS. Expect to start seeing it pop up everywhere near you in mid-200. The Khronos Group was founded in January 2000 and is currently working with such companies as 3Dlabs, ATI, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel, NVIDIA, SGI and Sun Microsystems.

Here's an intersting way to keep that shiny new video card cooler, not too sure how well it works... well you can't strap it on to anything, it just sits on top the back of your vid card. Well go take a look at here you'll see what I mean.

I know Marauder is working on a little review of Startopia so I won't stay too much on the topic but take a look at a few shiny screenshots that can only be attained on a nice, new, EXPENSIVE, Geforce 3!!

Well ummm... hmmm... this site may be in another language but this is one hell of a way to remove your expansion cards. WARNING!! not suggested for those who believe everything on TV and the Internet is true.

This may be old news to some viewers but I thought I'd repost just incase no one has seen this before. No its not a new type of drink its the Espresso Pocket PC. Go take a quick read here.

Thats it for now maybe a little more news later on... as always you can send news to anyone one of us to post and you will get credit for it... heck you could be famous... well maybe not, but you'd really be helping us out. l8r.

Greetings, seems though those who have bought a Geforce 3 already should take a look at this interesting article, let's just say this isn't a good thing if this whats to come for future games using the geforce 3 features.

I just tried this, just to see what the scores would be like, with the GeForce3 I disabled Pure Hardware T&L in the Options in 3DMark2001 and set it to D3D Software, to basically see what the scores would be like not relying on the GF3's T&L unit. Well all the tests were slower as I expected, EXCEPT the Nature Test!!!!! I got 10fps FASTER, usually it hovers around 20-22 fps, but It got all the way up to 34 fps with D3D Software instead of using the cards T&L unit! Just an interesting thing I found, you may already know about it, but it was news to me. So it looks like this is the FIRST sign we've seen of the hardware T&L unit ACTUALLY holding a benchmark back! In this case looks like the CPU and it's Instruction Set is better then the T&L unit, for that nature scene at least. I wonder if this will be the same of all future games that use the same features as that nature demo does. Go ahead and try it out on your system if you want, I'm curious if it's the same for everyone.

Credit goes to hardocp on that info.

Some folks over at The Opera, have released a new half life mod, apparently they have been working on this sucker for over two years. Check out some screenshots here. Downloading still seems to have some bugs in it, they are apparently working on getting the download servers operational. Right now I get a whole 1k/s on any of them.

Interested in adding a little life to your boring dull looking case? Check out this quick article on case lighting giving you a few choices on what you can do (within reason).

Want to multi boot OS's without screwing around with your boot sector info? I know more then one case I did something while installing two OS's that I didn't want to do and ended up formatting cuz I modified the boot sector. Romtec have come up with a way for you to install all your operating systems without making major changes to your boot info.

Want to get rid of those nasty faulty beta detonators? first of all shame on you for using beta drivers and getting mad about, but anyways the guys at Guru 3D have written a little program called, Detanator Destroyer, to help you rid your system and do a clean install of your detonator drivers

Well I'm off for some sleep, be back in a few hours to update some more...

As you may know, I've been seeking my revenge upon Rune for the last few weeks, as his incessent taunting and hounding about his shiney new GeForce 3 ring thru my head like that damned skeeter you can't quite manage to hunt down and kill. A few lessons have been learned from my plot for revenge... One Good, one Bad.

I can't even remember who sent me this.. but you just know this kid's going to be hacking up some wicked furballs after this.

Kingpin has returned to his Total Annihilation ways... and he dug up a TA2 site.. All you TA fans might want to drop by and take a look.... As far as I'm concerned, TA is still the best damned RTS ever..... Even after 4 years it still 0wnz j00 and j00r little Red Alert 2 Dopper.

I love Blue. He sends me the greatest links.... Dance you little bastard! DANCE I SAY! WhAhahahah!

Sorry for the usual lack of newness, I've been working on another review (Startopia), totally revamping my personal site, and working on a few other little pet projects. I should be back in full swing with news updates later today.... I HOPE.

Marauder out.... For now....

07.26.01
They're BACK!

07.25.01
AITD4 Review
Anachronox News
Battletech 3025
Buy your baby here
Bowling for Donuts
Canuk Pride
CS Player 4 Sale
AOL Gag
You Complete Idiot
New ICQ Client

07.21.01
AVP2 Preview
Romero & Hall Leave Ion!
Thief 3 Update
Divx 4 Codec
Unreal Engine news
UT renderers

07.19.01
Wassabi Wasga Paintball
Operation Flashpoint Review
Mechcommander 2
Rune's your daddy
Webcounter's hax0red

07.15.01
John Romero must die!
Geforce 3 = Good!
Detonator 14.20!
CPU & Vidcard roundup
DirectX 8.1 build 648!

Athlon SMP
Wacked Keyboard
Diablo2 LOD
Half Life Update1007
K6 3 Overclockin'
OpenML API
Startopia Eyecandy
As Seen On TV
Espresso To Go

07.09.01
FRAGtv!
Geforce 3 bad?
The Opera!
Die Detonator! Die!

07.06.01
Die rune! Die!

Operation FP
Boomslang
WWII Online
ACE122C Media PortGlobalwin

UBER LAN Case Mods Part I