Allright, this news headline is by special request of Kingpin. :) Enjoy.

Working on a few web sites, so I really haven't had a hell of a lot of time to post on here. Note to self, whip Rune & Dopper with noodles to get them to work faster. (Sharp spikey noodles. Maybe the type that come with glass and barbed wire embedded in them.)

I have for the first time ever, kinda revoked a review and or opinion of a game. I posted another review of Mechwarrior 4, this time of the multiplayer aspect of the game. I felt so differently about the single & mutiplayer I figured it needed a seperate article.

Those wacky funster french guys over at Infogrames have been up to it again. They've bought out Hasbro Interactive. They now own a HUGE portion of the gaming industry, as both themselves & Hasbro have been buying different studios and publishers like mad lately. Read all about it.

I mentioned the Half Life Rally mod a little while ago. Trying to convince the makers to give me an email interview. We'll see. The guys from PVK never replied to me. (Grrrrrrrr. :)

Kingpin has posted a review of the NAPA MP3/CD player. Go take a look, this is one very sweet little unit. Thanks KP.

Speaking of cool, have you checked out the Canadian Gamers page? No? Whatsmatta fo' you? After poor Skotos puts all this work into it, you all break his heart. Actually it only really went up a few days ago, and I haven't linked to it yet. Go take a look, and if you're Canadian... SIGN UP! It's a buff idea and I think it will do really well. Been helping Sko with it a little bit, and it's coming along rather nicely I thought.

Marauder out. For now.

If you watched those videos I linked to yesterday, you're laughing right now. :)

This site just kinda sez it all about console owners, doesn't it? :) (Sorry Dop, it had to be said.)

Kingpin feels bad because he doesn't have his very own character, so I stole this for him: That's right, It'sa me, Mario! :) (hah!)

I have to take back many of the words I've spoken about the parantage and genetic make up of the game programmers for Mechwarrior 4. The multiplayer is positively phenominal. I'm hooked and dreaming about Gaus rifle rounds. Gah. Oh well, at least I'm gamer enough to admit my mistake. Just don't buy it for the single player. I'm posted in a new review on the mutiplayer.

You know, a good hat made out of meat just never seems to go out of style. Ask these guys. They know the score! Thanks Deadeye.

Speaking of Deadeye, he sent me over a few examples of the AT-AT model he's working on for the Tribes Starwars TC. Wow. Nice work man.

Having issues with friends or customer's machines? Just found a link to this. Like PCAnywhere, but no client side installation. Wow. Damned impressive.

More later

Marauder out. (Heh. Crack. :)

Kingpin (ICQ #: 7100288)

Well I don't have my own Cute little Char all to myself but I do have a review on a great new Portable MP3 player from Amax called the NAPA. All the goodness of MP3's none of the addiction of Crack!

Marauder (ICQ #: 12419781)

We got props on the Sacrifice home page baby! Check it out. :)

While at Kingpin's xmas party, the guys all retreated upstairs to the safety of the computer room while the woman clustered downstairs around their candles and incense like vultures on payday. We were browsing the magic avaliable on Ad Critic when we came across these adverts. Watch them all, but please for godsake don't be drinking any beverages that will damage your keyboard when you do so.

Prae hooked me up with a link to this. The world's most expensive picture frame. Pretty nifty, just like something outta Star Trek. Of course, it's not $400 USD nifty. :)

Got any relatives you really hate coming over this Christmas? Not an issue. Just leave them on this site and they'll be busy for hours. As an interesting note, this is also a handy site to put up on Symaptico and Radio Shack demo computers. ;)

Hasbro Interactive has done it. The final thing more horifying than the anti-christ and Barbra Steisand combined. They have remade Pong. There's just something unnatural about that. It's like making love to your sister or... I dunno..... Being fond of Daikatana. Yech.

I have to eat my words about Mechwarrior 4. online and mutiplayer it's actually a fun game, especially if you get some teamwork going on. The single player is still horrible, but I'm amending my review to add a mutiplayer section.

No one but Kingpin & Goshwin will get the above quote, but I think it's funny as hell.

Not much to post today, and I've just gotten onto my machine and I'm headed for bed. Very very long day my friends. Been soo damned busy lately with work and such. Got the Sacrifice review worked up, check it out here. Still working on that stupid Pacman review. :)

Finally got around to playing Mechwarrior 4 online and.... Well, it's a hellovalot better than it is single player. Complete reverse of Mechwarrior 3, which was excellent single player and lame as hell multiplayer. I'll likely be revising my cruel and unusual review to add a multiplayer component.

To bed I go. I have tons of news, sorry for the lateness in posting it all guys. Will do it up tomorrow. I pretty much promise.

Marauder out.

Working on a Sacrifice review. Almost done. Just a few finishing touches to do, it'll be posted a little later tonight. I don't think I've ever had this many screenshots in one review, but the game is just so damned sexy! Right now I'm off to a christmas party over at Kingpin's place.

Cyah all in a few hours.

Marauder out.

Greetings, I'm back, and more beligerant than ever. Sorry for the complete lack of news posts from me this week. I've been very busy with web page work for a customer, as well as reviewing a few games and editing Skotos' posts. Man that guy can't speell. In fact, he's the first guy I've ever seen that actualy has worse grammar and spelling skills than my partner in crime Kingpin.

Just got a review posted of Mechwarrior 4: Vengance. So far. Eh. It's OK, but it's at the same time very disapointing. Certainly it's not a huge leap over Mechwarrior 3, and indeed in many areas is a step back. However, the graphics are just mind blowing. Check out the review and get my view on it. (Kingpin's as well. :)

After a few weeks away with major DSL problems, the Hormiester is back! Apparently Time Magazine has decided to get a little more honest. Read the front page of their newest edition and see what I mean. And more election humor here. Thanks Horm, nice to see you're online again bud.

Marauder (ICQ #: 12419781)

Since someone overwrote this news this morning, here it is again. Complete and unabridged.. *Dopper*Cough*Dopper*

Grrrrr. Stupid cable working again. Must post news. But not tonight. All I will do tonight is introduce you to Skotos. He's skinny, he's short, and he's funny looking. I can legally make fun of Sko, because he is on dialup. There are only three things that save him from eternal, Diakatana type damnation.

A) He's a good friend (Anyone I like can't be ALL bad.)

B) He's got a GeFORCE (The one true and holy video card)

C) He posted stuff on FRAGtopia. Check out his new posts under reviews and articles.

More tomorrow. Playing Sacrifice and Mechwarrior 4.

Marauder out.

(someone archive this page dammit)

okay so first of all i broke the mold. sue me for being creative. that's technically my job, so watch the fuck out world cause i'm gonna keep doing wild and crazy shit like you see above- a different font! omfg!!!!!!!!!! (editor's note: prae has been on midnights this week and did not properly regulate his sleep. he believes today is sunday and he needs to go to sleep very soon. marauder interrupted his sleep plans for today, mumbling something about a peanut butter and hub sandwhich...) and it was wario from mariokart64 that says my quote.. but moving on....

so first of all, i'm going to explain. i do funnel a certain amount of information into this site, i'm just too lazy to do my own newsposts (since i'm busy maintaing two other wildy amazing and intersting sites that can be found here and here). i also don't like dealing with the 8.7 metric assloads of stuff that makes up this website. my head hurts just thinking about how much server space we take up. but instead of simply adding to it i'll get to my point: i do contribute, just through other people. i ICQ links and info to marauder and dopper and they do all the dirty work. so today, i'ma gonna nab some firsthand credit.

there's this, to start with. and let me point out that this guy did not sell, because his holdout price was higher than the highest bid of seventy thousand dollars. persoanlly, i think he either: (a) never had any intention of selling, or (b) doesn't even own all that crap and just wanted to see how much it would be worth.

it would seem that hotmail has finally gotten its large, bloated, unreliable ass into gear (by which i mean it's moving forward, not getting dressed up) and users can finally read and send HTML email. wow, hotmail. welcome to the fucking internet, would you like me to check your coat?

(note to l33t h4X0r d00dz: yes i use HTML mail. the days of whining about the HTML bloating the email and dragging the download time are gone- hey, tell you what. if you're running UNIX, then i'll disable HTML mail for you. other than that... just use HTML mail. it's far more powerful and allows for better expression of ideas and mood via hyperlinks, stationary, fonts and colours, and all manner of HTML-only goodies...)

but then there's also this. if you are ever on a site that links directly to a lot of images, this shell integration lets you right click anywhere on the page and choose "linked images". a new window will pop up with all the images directly linked to by the page you're currently viewing! this is sweet for thumbnail sites, but it will only work if the image is directly linked to, not a page containing the image.

i was going to tell you about this app, that lets you make the block behind the text in windows icons transparent so that they don't look all ugly on top of your wallpaper... but the site has a bunch of goodies so check them out.

i was telling dopper and marauder the other day about the power of the search and replace function in dreamweaver, and they were both literally and figuratively stunned stupid. they'd never seen it before. well, this app may not be quite as versatile as dreamweaver's, but you don't have to buy dreamweaver to get it. it's a standalone third party search and replace app.. excellent.

and one last little program. i haven't tried bugtoaster that much myself- but here's what it does, which is nifty. it runs in the background and if you get a windows error- those indecipherable codes- it will post it to the bugtoaster archive and search out if someone else has already posted it, and tell you what it means and how to fix it. sound theory, i'm just waiting to see how it works in practice...

i had some more to say but forgot it somewhere in the middle of that mass of useful stuff. and they call me the "phantom editor". pbf. i will be working on some ads for the upcoming fragtopia2(001) and when i get some time to polish them i'll post em... and, you know, print them and distribute them. love them. and truly, be one with each and every one oh forget it. i'm going to sleep.

praetorian13@home.com / praetorian_arg@hotmail.com

ICQ me

"a man like that doesn't come this close to being caught and stay visible. my guess is this is the last you'll ever hear of him..."

Tony the tiger was my childhood favourite excluding Lucky from frosted lucky charms and The Silly Rabbit from Trix of course. But then again they didn't get a cool theme song like "eye of the tiger". Got a link from someone to a site called DirectX Buster. DirectX Buster is a DirectX uninstaller for Windows 95 and above. It supports DirectX from Version 5 (DirectX 3 not testet but should work properly) up to DirectX 8 inclusive all new components.

One of the sweetest sites I've ever seen (at least from a first glance...it looks VERY VERY VERY impressive is FreeSkills.com. I am going to be spending WAY to much time on that site I'm sure! :) Praetorian deserves another PLUG for that one. :) He's sent me a bunch of sweet links, another one included the site UBERSOFT. I've been going through and reading the comics on that entire site, they're hilarious! HAHAHAHA, this one is one of my favourites.

For those of you that were into quake rally, you may want to checkout halflife rally. It looks pretty neat, I still think q3rally looks better though.

You may be wondering to yourself wtf is up with these title bars I've been using the past two days...well for no apparent reason whatsoever other than to amuse myself, I've decided that this week is title bar theme week. The theme is "funny words characters yell out". Wacky? Yes! So maybe you need some wacky mp3's to listen to while you read the news. Try this. Yesterdays "mekalekahimekahynihoe" was something that the geni/magician guy or whatever he was on PeeWee Herman's Playhouse used to yell out. Todays "hadooken" is the words Ryu yelled out in Street Fighter 2 when he executed a special move. Now that I've clarified that I'm sure it'll be interesting to see what Marauder and Rune come up with.

For anyone else out there waiting on the arrival of nvidias new chipset, the NV20...well I managed to dig up a little more info on it. Enjoy :) And yes wienerboy dave (you know who you are) nvidia drivers > good...ati drivers > gay!

Want to try something neat that translates your text into a voice, check out Bell Labs Text-to-Speech Synthesis or AnalogX software.

Also just wanted to thank Marauder for his nice words the other day, just read it before I posted last nights news and was too tired to stay awake when I got around to mentioning anything. Indeed it has been a great year but I think we all know that Dave/Marauder puts in more work than anyone and deserves credit where credit is due. Without him this site wouldn't exist and niether would our monthly lan parties or the big annual ones. He is the heart of the fragtopia staff and *sniff* we love you man!

Just started my A+ certification prep course today...it's pretty sweet, looks like it will be a lot of fun. Got to take a brief peek at some linux distros I haven't seen yet such as storm linux 2000, mandrake 7.2 and the newest version of redhat. Soon we're supposed to get to play with beos and mac.

News from Prof. Stafford: With the recent release of Microsoft DirectX8 and all the reports about lower 3DMark scores, incompatibility issues, game crashes while using the new version of DirectX. The gentleman down under at TweakTown, have kindly uploaded a program to their server and have made it available for download to everyone. The program is called DX Uninstaller, it will uninstall DirectX8 if you are unhappy with it like many others are and revert you back to your previous version of DirectX. TweakTown website: http://www.tweaktown.com/files.shtml#dx st started.

More from Prof. Stafford: World Largest Hard Drive Announced. Seagate has announced the Barracuda 180--the world's first disc drive to store a massive 180 GB, the most single-drive storage space in the world. This 180 GB drive can store the equivalent of a batch of text documents that is three times the height of the Empire State Building. The Barracuda 180 also delivers a record low cost-per-GB for a single drive. The Barracuda 180 will ship to the distribution channel in volume during the first quarter of 2001. The seventh generation Barracuda features low idle power consumption of less than 10.3 watts and a low acoustic rating of 3.7 decibels--the quietest half-height disc drive ever. In addition, Seagate is introducing a rotational vibration protection scheme that monitors drive movement in relationship to the cabinet or the drive mounting and provides input to the drive, reducing positioning errors resulting from rotational vibration within the cabinet or mounting. The Barracuda 180 spins at 7,200 rotations-per-minute, has a formatted data transfer rate of up to 47 MB per second, and will be available in the standard Ultra160 SCSI interface. For audio-visual applications, a 16 MB V-code cache option will be offered. Single evaluation unit suggested retail pricing for the Barracuda 180 is 2195 USD.

If anyone votes for Marauder then I demand a re-count! Hmmm maybe there would be a few good points about his campaign though. For example if Marauder's elected: 1) No games would be taxed except for bad games (i.e. anything with "Extreme" in it's title or anything by Headgames) which would be heavily taxed, 2) LAN parties would become mandatory at least once a month. 3) The government would declare a holiday on the date that Tribes 2 is released. 4) Translucent plastic on computers would be used for good instead of evil. On the other hand, a few of the negative things might be: 1) nobody would be allowed to own a PC that is more powerful than Marauder's (who is, as we all know, all ping and all hardware) without having it "expropriated" by the government. 2) Any and all forms of game consoles would immediately become illegal. 3) any company who makes crappy PCs would immediately be forced out of business or made to display labels bearing the words "complete and utter crap! If you buy this than you are an idiot!" on all of their products. (hmm...ok so maybe this isn't a bad thing).

Speaking of Tribes 2, Media & Games Online (whoa, try saying that one three times fast!) has slapped up a little preview of Tribes 2 with their impressions of the beta version. Check it out here and tell 'em Fragtopia sent ya!

Well well well, it looks like the over-hyped Praystation 2 is turning out to be a little harder for developers to program for than expected. Gamespot reports that Capcom (!) is having a hard time bringing Resident Evil: Code Veronica up to the same level of graphical quality as their Dreamcast version. Read about it Here. (Long live the Dreamcast!)

Id software has released a demo for their unreleased Quake 3 expansion pack Team Arena. You can download it at one of the mirrors here but if you're stuck in 56K land (or your pipe-o-love is not on the phat side) you might want start downloading this one before you go on an extended weekend getaway as it weighs in a 127 meg. I'd recommend that everyone check out this neat little utility that Kingpin found for me. It uses multiple concurrent ftp or http connections to download your file much faster than you would otherwise normally get it.

The bad news is that all of this is for just one map..... the good news is that it's a pretty good map and that it's a lot of fun to play. What's new in this little expansion pack demo you might ask? Well, for starters it looks like id has discovered the joys of an actually usable interface this time around as it is a heck of a lot better than the regular Quake 3 one. Even the id intro movie is very 133t. The actual map is a CTF style map with two identical base seperated by a neutral area with a narrow bridge over a large gorge. The new gameplay types include an enhanced version of Capture the flag, Overload (where instead of a flag each team must destroy the other team's artifact in the enemy's base. The artifact is hard to destroy because it can withstand a lot of damage and it automatically regenerates itself), and Harvester (like the Headhunters mod where you frag someone and then pick up their head which you can then cash in for points by running into the enemy base and going to the flag capture point).

There's only one new weapon in the demo in the form of the proximity mine launcher although in the final release of the game a chaingun and a nailgun will also be available. The powerups available in this pack are a lot more interesting however and they are permant until you die. They include a damage Doubler, Guard (which sets your health and armour to 200 points and regenerates it slowly when you lose points on either one), Ammo re-generation, Scout (which is only included in the final version) allows you to run across the map much faster than normal. My favorite new powerup is the kamikaze where when you activate it a nuclear blast is triggered that kills everyone within range (including yourself). This can be great for clearing out the enemy base and allowing other on your team to get in there and capture the flag or compete the objective.

Firing Squad has done up a little mini-review of the demo for those of you interested in checking it out a bit more before you download it. I've heard that a of people are experiencing framerate issues with this new demo and I believe that it's because of a lot of the increased geometry and texture detail as well as some of the new media running in the game. I've heard that turning off the in-game video and switching your HUD to the mini-HUD makes things a lot more playable.

Someone recently released an S3TC fix pack for Quake 3 that will also work with TeamArena. What this does is change the format that Quake 3 uses for S3TC textures. For those of you who have video cards that support S3TC compression in OpenGL (GeForce, Radeon, Voodoo 5 etc) it may speed up your game a little bit or if you're finding that the default texture compression in TeamArena looks like crap using this you can change it to one of the nicer looking formats. It will also works for a few other Quake 3 based games that use S3TC compression (Fakk2, Solider of Fortune, Star Trek: Elite Force, etc). To use this patch just rename the exe file for Team Arena to Quake3.exe and than run the Q3S3TC.exe included in the zip file. Also remember to change your game shortcuts for this!

First off, happy aniversary to all of us here at FRAGtopia. It was one year ago today we put up the site and I wrote those fatefull words that will go down in history as the start of it all.

"Working on the site....Hmmmmmmmmmmmm....... "

Yes my children. Remember those words of wisdom well, they may very well be on mandatory citizenship exams in the future.

I think we've come quite a ways in the last 12 months. For one thing the site looks one HELL of a lot better than it did back then. :) We've got more people contributing to it, we've started hosting some great sites (Machine baby!) and clans. (Heya Na and Dem!) And we're actually posting interesting news and getting some reviews done as well.

Doing a site, even a small one like this is one hellovalotta work. I'd just like to thank all the guys who send me news on a regular basis. Iceman, Dopper, iLL Techneeqs, Goshwin, Hormone, Mr. E. Mahn, Praetorian & Wienerboy Dave. I really appreciate the help guys.

Thanks to Dopper, Praetorian and Rune for help with the site, especially Rune. Rune's been helping with the news for quite a few months, dillegently covering for me when I'm away, or deeply engrossed in a new game. He's usually the one helping me setup for the smaller LANs as well. Thanks bud.

Thanks to Kingpin, who lets me know when I've gone too far. I ignore him and continue on in my evil little way.. But it's always nice to know. :)

Thanks in general to all the staffers who help out with the big party planning and execution. (See ABOUT for a complete listing.) Without you, the parties wouldn't go anywhere.

Thanks to Tycho and whatsiname.. Gabe over at Penny-Arcade for keeping me laughing and allowing me to get link happy on their site. Really appreciate it guys.

And of course, thanks to everyone who reads our daily ramblings and rantings.

Special thanks to everyone who ICQ's and emails with their opinions and comments on the site. It's nice to know the work we put in is appeciated, and that someone is out there watching and amused.

Just so you all know, we passed 12,000 hits yesterday. :) We're averaging somewhere around 50 right now. Tell your friends, tell your family.. Hell, tell your enemies.

Thanks for the great year guys.

If you've been reading for awhile, you may be aware of my overpowering hatred for spammers and small dogs named "Fifi". Not sure what to do about the dogs yet, but Praetorian has just sent me over what may be the answer to spam. Spam Motel has some interesting services that prevent your email addy from going anywhere. Woot! Check 'em out, join the good fight!

Are YOU adicted to Video Games? Do you dream of TFC? Is your every waking moment spent planning that next kill in CS? I hope so, but the British, in that little British way they have are concerned about such things. Silly humans.

Apparently, the Turkish can't fly. A 7 year old girl jumped off a balcony, thinking she was a Pokemon character with special powers. Guess not. Naturally it's "Ban the (insert item here) time" in Turkey. Politicians are the same the world over, just like toe fungus. Nice that we have things you can count on in this 'ol world.

Huh. More Playstation 2 news, this time from the Future and New Zealand. Note the date on this article. :)

Posted a quick review of Starship Troopers. Not too bad a game, but certainly nothing to write home about. No multiplayer, which dooms it to a quick death. Read it and weep. :)

Peace! (Whatever the hell jive thing that means.)

Marauder out.