19. November 2008 by Monkk.

Right off the bat, let me say, this is a great game! Fun, suspenseful, and Co-Op! If you enjoy shooting zombies, You just can’t go wrong here. Hats off to Valve.

Single player and Co-Op (THANK YOU VALVE for bringing it back!!) are great.

Versus… Well, I just don’t like it much… Random team, random player? Why the long respawn for the infected? The survivors have far superior fire-power…

What about 32 player Death Match and some CTF?

Alas…

Totally awesome game otherwise, go buy it!

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3. July 2008 by Monkk.

Diablo 3, ‘Nuff said!

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7. March 2008 by Monkk.

Due to a DNS registrar issues, Quake-Revolution.com is now available at www.quake-revolution.net and will be returning once the registrar issues have been resolved.

 The team apologizes for the inconvenience and offers a reminder, “No good deed goes unpunished”

Regards!

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17. February 2008 by Monkk.

This is the most active dead Quake III Mod I’ve ever seen.

Version 1.39Beta6 Released. Head on over to quake-revolution.com for a full list of changes

Additionally, they’ve added 3 new developers: Duality, Whinger, and donvito. Duality and Whinger have volunteered to help with the Quake 3 mod, whilst donvito is going to help Lucron and I work on a Quake 4 mod.

Quake4 Mod eh, Hmmz I say

The Quake Revolution Tournament needs at least 3 more teams to sign up for participation, so, dust off that Railgun, hop on over to the Quake Revolution Project Forums and sign your team on up!

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1. February 2008 by Monkk.

On the urgings of a new co-worker friend, I hopped on over to http://www.plaync.com and purchased City of Heroes. As it turns out, one can purchase the combo set of Cities of Heroes and Villians for $29.95 USD.  The downside of course, would be the $14.99 USD a month subscription fee (the 1st month is for free.) It is worth pointing out that if you buy in 3 / 6 / or 12 month blocks, the per month fee is somewhat lowered.

Now, PlayNC is the same guys who brought you Guild Wars and Dungeons Runners. All 3 of these games are VASTLY different. Though I believe they all run on the same 3rd person based game engine.

Once you buy the game online and download it (it can also be purchased in stores and activated online). It hooks to your exising plaync account and while the client is a hefty 2.4 GB of download, the servers seem to be pretty responsive. A few hours and you’re good to go.

When you login, you create a character and pick a server. Each server seems to be named for various virtues like Liberty, Freedom, Gaurdian, etc. It also seems that you have 12 character slots per server. Apparently there is a way to transfer between them at a $9.99 USD. cost.

At any rate, the character designer is pretty damn AWESOME!! You could seriously just make heroes or villains all day in whatever depth of customizable skins and powers as you can dream.

Of course, you start with just a few powers and as you progress through the game more and more unlock and are available to you.

I’ve only created a single hero and am just getting used to the interface. It differs from guild wars. It is themed well for a super hero type game, but it seems more… N00bish, if you will. I guess I can’t say thats a bad thing but it has a ton of features and I find them pretty difficulat to find wheras, Guild Wars seemed much more intuitive. Although, I have played many Fantasy themed RPG’s in the past so maybe it’s just more of a mature and demanding market.

Any way you slice it, it’s a fun game. I probably will not extend the original month much past 1 perhaps as I have an erratic gaming schedule and would like to allow myself the chance to find something new.

Anyway, I recommend it, it’s fun. You know you’ve always wanted to be a super hero and villain, you know it!

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13. January 2008 by Monkk.

The guys over at Quake Revolution are having a Quake3 tournament for their mod towards the end of February, AND there are prizes (oooooooh!)

SpAzy has donated 3 months of Quake3 server hosting and the fellas over at ClanTeamWork.com have donated a years worth of Web hosting for the winner!

Get that railgun polished up and swing by www.Quake-Revolution.com for more details !

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30. December 2007 by Monkk.

I should have wrote this a week ago, but with the holidays, well you know how busy they can be.

Heres a little excerpt:

“Sev3n of the XCM clan came to me the other day and asked about Revolution, notified me that he and quite a few others thought Revolution was much better than IU, especially for cross-Atlantic play. During our discussion he asked if there was a way to limit cg_railHum without the use of PunkBuster.”

The Quake Revolution team has gotten together a little Christmas Release for ya’ll in response to some Euro gamers requests. Hop on over to quake-revolution.com and check it out!

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29. December 2007 by Monkk.

A gaming group, “Team: Work” has just blown into town. Not so much a competive gaming clan, but more of a group of folks who like to play online multi-player games of all styles and genres. The name comes from the concept that team based games require Team Work! Crazy concept I know. There is definintely room for individual excellence, but we feel the fun is from playing with your team!

 Hop on over to the site and forums, and certainly try out the new Team: Work Team Fortress 2 server:

http://www.clanteamwork.com

Regards!

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9. December 2007 by Monkk.

It was with much reluctance that I downloaded the Unreal Tournament 3 demo after being urged by a friend. I have played UT in the past and own 2004. It was fun but just a little too knock-off-y of the Quake franchise, nothing special, yet another first person shooter. Although I have to give UT credit for being there to compete with it from the start.

So it downloads and I install it, which takes freak’n forever, and then it starts up. I won’t speak to the graphics, suffice it to say it’s a modern game and looks good.

Let me begin with the one unpleasant item in the game. Like a lot of new online multi-player games, you log in to an account to play which allows the game manufacturer to track you playing for the online stats. I’ll leave the debate about privacy out of the picture, but what can ya do… My issue with the account concept is, apparently, UT3 uses your gamespy account which is fine, until you realize you made a gamespy account years ago and never use it anyway. So you must EXIT the game to fill out a form on gamespy web-site so it will email you your account information so you can start the game again and use it. I realize this is a (hopefully) 1 time thing but, if you’re going to go the distance and allow account creation from the game, DON’T MAKE ME LEAVE THE GAME TO GET MY ACCOUNT STARTED. That’s just lame, and as a matter of fact caused me to not even bother for about a week and a half…

If I had any kind of integrity I’d have left it at that, but my boredom brought me back. I have not played the multi-player, just the single player with bots. Why? Well I forgot I had to look my gamespy account information up and I realized I could start a single player game with out it. What can I say, a bad idea once, is a bad idea the second go round. Having said that, I will try the multiplayer and look-up my account info due to my enjoyment of the single player game. I wonder how many customers this will lose.

Single Player give you 4 game modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Dual, and Vehicle CTF. It additionally has Campaign style paly, but that is not available in the demo. I immediately went to Vechicle CTF being a HUGE Capture The Flag fan!

So, its exactly what the name says, CTF with vehicles. Riding a vehicle is not mandatory, the periodically spawn in your territory and you can hop in and drive or hop on and use the turrets for multiple players. The maps are pretty large so the vechicles come in handy or you’re walking for a while to get to the action. The maps could easily handle 32 v. 32 players maybe more. Giving it a sort of Battlefield 1942 feel. BUT it’s CTF :-).

The Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Dual are what you would expect: A free for all most kills wins, Red Vs. Blue most kills wins, and of course the boring 1-on-1 dual.

I’m not going to talk about the weapons, they seem to have kept it in the UT franchise, I assume they are updated looks and graphics, etc. Suffice it to say, they have cool guns to kill people with. What I can say is, it’s a TON OF FUN to play! Feels like a game in all aspects (if you’ve read some of my other gaming rants, you know what I mean.)

In my eyes, Unreal Tournament 3 picks up the legacy of fun competitive gaming where Id dropped it 8 years ago after Quake3. My only real gripe is that I will have to learn a new set of console commands. I suppose there are worse problems to be had

Regards!

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8. December 2007 by Monkk.

So, I returned to TF2 after working my way through Orange Box (ok, well I had already finished HL2…)

Anyway, I think I have made a 180 on this one. I really have to say it’s über fun!! Which has increasingly been a problem in modern games. What do I mean? Well I’ll tell ya! The 3d rendering engines of today are all beautiful, some may handle shadows better, maybe lighting in another is better, pretty particle effects, smoothed high poly-count models. To even be a FPS game today, visually stunning graphics must be included.

But what has happened to the fun? So now that worlds my battles take place in look almost as realistic as the one I live in. Now i’m left in a combat simulation. And while I agree it’s “cool”, it’s not fun.

Team Fortress 2 has brought the fun back to the FPS! It’s cell-shading leaving the game environment rendered somewhat like a comic book is the perfect touch to remind us that, “hey you’re killing time playing a game, ENJOY IT Asshat!”

The sound samples and music and announcer voices are sheer genious! Over the top campy sound bites really make the characters feel real. And when the Pyro lights a Soldier on fire, and the soldier is screamming, “fire, Fire, FIRE”, I almost fall outta my chair everytime.

I still am not a fan of class based games, I prefer and equal ground for all players, but it does allow for people to play to their strong points, and enforces team work (which in my opinion shouldn’t be required but definitely is in the highly immature world of online gaming (no offense, but ya gotta call a spade a spade.))

Compare that to “Enemy Territory:Quake Wars” offering using Id’s latest greatest. Visually stunning, awesome sounding guns, and boring as hell. Not any better then any other Battlefield 1942 style of multi-player combat, just using Id’s licensed characters and content. While neat and pretty, just leaves me bored. Quake3 was their crowning achievement, a perfect balance of fun and combat. Big floaty power-ups, smooth movement, fast respawn, perfect. And then they stopped making games for the gamers. Sad, I hope they come to their senses soon! Until then, Team Fortress 2 is it!

Regards!

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