Also my brilliant ISP upgraded over the weekend. It was meant to take about 8 hours, from late Saturday to earlier Sunday. Well things came back online today at 5 today, only 30+ hours after they said it would. So any email that was send to me over the weekend and today has been chewed up, so if you send me anything, please resend it.

First Update
I would have had all this up yesterday but PQ's ftp was completely knacked. Oh well.

Odd has popped by with an anatomical correct piccy of our lovable Shambler. Also here are a few Quake reviews for you all to chew on. I've put up part of the new archives as well. At the moment its just what was originally there before resorted but I am working on adding the rest of the reviews. Please do take a look at them and point out any mistakes you find.

Also here are the last Quake 2 reviews you'll see here at MPQ. I apologise for there being no piccys on them, but I'm buggered if I'm going to sort them out. My reasons for this decision are explained below:

No more Quake 2 reviews.
I've decided after some considerable thought to stop doing Quake 2 reviews here at MPQ. First of all I would like to apologise to all the authors who have submitted their maps which will, unfortunately, never get reviewed. We do have a list of maps, which I'll sort out so you all see what was meant to be reviewed.

The current staff due to all sorts of personal reasons have not been able to produce reviews at a regular enough rate. Please do not go flaming them. In hindsight I should have made sure I could get reliable people, but this is not an easy thing to do. You have to trust who you get in and unfortunately in this case things have not worked out.

Secondly I pondered on doing less reviews. Just reviewing good maps. For me there is a conflict of interests in that area, Inspection is meant to do that. Which incidentally is what Rush is now doing. He has moved to Inspection to do in-depth Quake 2 reviews there. Anyway, the second grey spot in this area is that it breaks the philosophy of "MPQ Reviews all." I don't think its right doing just good maps, simply because its unfair on authors who submit details and then we reply saying "Sorry your maps not up to it."

Third reason is that I'd rather have no reviews than some. A gradual trickle of half assed reviews is not good.

Then there are the annoying snide comments from various sources. I find it extremely annoying that I get shit when I've done nothing wrong. And thats part of the problem, nothing was being done. Well this is the action I've taken to remedy the situation.

With regards to changing my mind on this. The answer is firmly NO. I seriously doubt I'll get much encouragement to do so and even if I did, it would involve having to get more reviewers. In that case I've been burnt twice, I ain't doing it a third time. I would like to say thank you to the people who offered help on the Qboard but it is not required.

This does also cause problems for potential Quake 3 Arena reviews. My own opinion on it that the game in its current form is piss poor and the general style and feel of it all is definitely not to my liking. The gothic high tech stuff is shit. Maybe the full game will show more variation in this, I certainly hope so. I was originally going to switch some of the reviewers over to Q3A when the game came out but this will not happen now. This then rises the problem that outside help will undoubtedly be required and its not something I like doing anymore. Having to prompt people for reviews is not fun. In fact its turning more into an administrative job than just a fun thing to do in my spare time.

Rest assured though, my support for Quake will not change. I *will* continue with Quake reviews since it is a game I love.

Finally I would like to say thanks to Monsto, Agent Orange, Cauterizer and Christian for their work here at MPQ. Best of luck with what ever else you guys work on.

Thank you.

With that done, I'll ramble on a bit. I downloaded the Driver demo yesterday. I was hoping the faults of the games crappy engine would be sorted. Unfortunately it hasn't, whilst it does look alot better than its Playstation counterpart, it still suffers from huge amounts of pop up. Its annoying to just see the roads and buildings just appear out of no where. Midtown Madness doesn't have this problems! Admittedly it is fun to play with a steering wheel, but I do feel that the forcefeed back could be a little stronger.