I noticed this interesting update on Peej 'n' Fribs last weekend.
- secondly, I've already copped some criticism from a certain ungrateful bastard who shall go unnamed, to the effect that I should post more news. Well what the hell am I to do if there's nothing to post!!? Before you complain, how about you go search for some news, and send it in to us, eh?
Frib you just can't win. Now you know what its like to be on the end of it ;).

Pingu has released Back2School.(216Kb). I'm downloading it now. Comments later.

ProdigyXL is now nicely settled at PQ with a funky new site. It took Kable ages to get that design done. He kept changing it all the time. Also Kable said you should be using the font arial, size -1 on your news updates because otherwises its using the browser default which in this case is crappy Times Scumbag Roman. Anyway he has some new screenies up on his site. I am extremely glad we'll see the Special Edition of xl1dm4 because I had a rough beta of it and the Quake 3/Kingpin texture set is so much better. The new map that he is working on also looks pretty cool.

I think we can also expect a flood of new maps in the next few days. Bal has said he *may* (that guy loves to keep us waitng) be releasing two new maps, or maybe he was joking? Then there is Mr Excessus with exdm5 in the works.

Seems like there are some weird things going on at id. Brandon James, mapper, has left. Heres what he said on the Giga-a-board.
Why did I leave id Software? I'm not going to answer that. However, I will say that I really needed time to get by myself, to pick up the hobbies (music, gaming, etc) that I had put aside for far too long. As for any other reasons, I will not talk about or answer those now or in the future.
The guys gotta work though (well he probably doesn't have to since he's most likely loaded), so it will be interesting as to where it turns up at.

Paul Jaquays then said this on the board.
Why did he go? I don't know. That was his personal decision. But he wasn't fired or anything even close to that. Let's make that clear. Frankly, we were all pretty stunned by both his decision to leave and the timing of the decision. I didn't find out until the following Monday. Brandon has a lot of varied talents and I wish him well in whatever he chooses to do in the future. How will this affect Quake 3? Brandon James's incomplete maps and other responsibilities will be divided up between us. It does mean a bigger work load for the rest of us, but that's what we get paid to do.
Maybe Q3A will be delayed a little. I do find it very odd why he left at this time almost when the game is almost completed. He is kinda shitting on the people there.

I see that sCary has changed the colours on his page. Now it looks like someone has sneezed all over it. Funky bright green links just look ugly.

The Qboard has had an influx of newbies. A couple of daft threads and messages have been posted but things will most likely calm down.

I got an email earlier on in the week from head guy at the Choas mod. I downloaded it a while back but haven't got round to playing it yet. Actually I have a stack of Quake 2 mods that I haven't installed yet. Anyway by the magic of the clip board here is the email, in its entirey, void of spelilng mistakes =P :
Hi News Peoples!,

We have got alot going on over here at Chaotic Dreams! As you may know, Major, our new coder, has debugged and optomozed our mod already. He and Spa feel that ver2 of Chaos should be out in 6 to 8 weeks. I will give you the lowdown on our new version closer to its release date, but for now, there are a couple of recent events that I'd like to announce.

First thing is a whole new site design. Spa did an awesome job on it too. The artwork is top notch. We also have several new features on our site.

•     We have expanded our online help/stategy guides
•     A voting poll will be in place soon
•     We have a live server page where you can jump on a server from.
•     We have had our 200,000th hit as well
•     Myself and BeelzeBubba have been accepted on the Chaotic Dreams team

Here is the Chaotic Dreams site...
http://www.planetquake.com/chaotic

Secondly we'd like to announce a new official Chaos mappack. The raYgunn team made it for us and they rock! Even got a kickass CTF map in there too.

We have a Chaos clan competition coming up on July 17th. If you mention this competition please direct people to the Clan TnT website as they are the ones hosting the competition. http://members.tripod.com/clan_tnt
This clan, by the way, is desperately lookin for someone to host them and get em off of Tripod.

Well thats it for now, but with all the new energy being poured into this project, you will hear from us again, I assure you. Thank you in advance for any coverage you provide.

Frag in Peace,
Spank

I saw the Matrix earlier on in the week and its good movie. The special effects are amazing and I thought the Agent Orange guy was brilliant. His accent was just stupid! Also its only 7 days til Star Wars arrives on the sliver screen here in the UK. The local cinema has 30+ showings of in on the first two days of opening!

I've also had chance to play some other computer games instead of Quake! First up are a couple of Playstation games which are Driver and V-Rally 2. Both are driving games (not that the titles don;t give them away).

Driver is set in the 70's with the big funky American cars which handle like huge bricks. The idea behind the game is pretty good. Doing bank jobs, ramming shop fronts etc.. Unfortunately the game engine stinks! The draw ahead is rubbish and pop-up is a regular occurance. Then you have the problem when you play at night in the rain, the game slows to a crawl! So avoid it!

V-Rally 2 is alot better. It has all of this years rally cars, so you are able to smash up the new Ford Focus! Wahoo! The handling is much better than the first V-Rally game, but instead of being twitchy its very happy to slide the back end out. It feels very sluggish. Other than though its excellent, lots of tracks and cars to crash.

I also have couple of PC games to mention. They are Dungeon Keeper 2 and Descent 3. DK2 looks superb and is much improved over the original. It doesn't really offer anything new but its just done better that much better. Descent 3 is good as well. The engine has such clear and crisp graphics and the level of details is top notch. The new outdoor sections really add to the game. Unfortunately I still get confused as hell when playing since the machine you're controlling have full movement on all axis. It also is one of those games that give me a really bad headache after playing it. All the previous Descent games did that. Maybe its because I'm required to think a little :P.

All of this makes me worry a little. Out of the 4 games mentioned 3 are sequels which just consist of better execution of same idea with a little expansion. Driver is fairly original but they have just screwed it up by having a crap engine for it!