My brother, Cody, painted up a football helmet for me to wear as Commander Keen for the convention.

The Hilton Anatole is quite a sight, it is filled with amazing Asian artwork. There are a lot of statues of Gautama Buddha and there is even a piece of the Berlin Wall on display outside.

Here is a Ctrl+Alt+Del comic on convention hygiene and my BYOC pass.

0v3rk1ll and I brought our laptops and were glad that we did since they’re a lot easier to fly with than a computer would be.

The BYOC was full of interesting computers and case mods.

There were many vendor booths there as expected. AMD & ATI had the main booth in the center where most of the excitement happened at. They had a couple of AMD Build-Offs where two people go head-to-head at trying to assemble a computer as fast as they can. There were a lot of companies that just had computers set up for LAN play within the vendor area so you could try out their computers with games that you are familiar with. 0v3rk1ll got called up to the AMD booth from a raffle and won a motherboard, he talked them into shipping him a Radeon 4850 with it. We entered in some Quake 3 & 4 tournaments at the PNY booth, I came in 2nd place in a Quake 3: Arena tournament (lost by one kill!) and won 4 GB of RAM that I gave to 0v3rk1ll so he would have more parts to build a new computer with.

There were two Wolfenstien booths, one was playing the trailer to the new Wolfenstein that is coming out and the other was for Wolfenstein RPG on the phone. I won a Wolfenstien RPG t-shirt after trying the game out.

I got called up to the stage for a big AMD raffle with a couple of other people to compete for a computer that was assembled by Maingear. For the first round we played The Price Is Right and guessed at prices of selected computer hardware on Newegg.com, I guessed the closest prices on the first two questions without going over so I moved on to the next round with another con-goer. We then played The Dating Game. I ended up winning the computer and was very happy.

At the end there was a big party. There were ET:QW and QuakeLive tournaments, prizes were awarded, and the Frag Movie was played.

I had the computer that I won shipped to my house, it arrived within a week of returning home. I brought it to my friend Zildjian’s house for a LAN party and found out the hard way that lugging around a 55 lb full-tower computer is a real pain in the back. Since the case that the computer came in was very large, heavy, and lacked USB ports on the actual case, I replaced it with an Ultra E-Torque mid-tower case that is a lot smaller and lighter. It even has USB ports on the top of the case, which is the best place for them in my opinion. Here are some photographs of it with the original case and then some of it with the new case that I put it in.

The current specs of the system are:

• Power Supply: 750W MAINGEAR Ultra Quiet Power Supply
• Motherboard: MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX Chipset
• Processor: AMD Phenom X4 9950 BLACK EDITION (2.6GHz x 4)
• Memory: CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC 6400)
• Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache – SATA II (I also added a 160GB SATA drive that I had in my old computer)
• Optical Drive: 20X Dual Layer DVD.RW Drive w/ LightScribe Technology – black
• Video Card: Visiontek ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5

Hopefully ATI will release some solid radeon drivers for Linux sometime soon so I can boot the penguin on that machine to play games instead of having to go into Windows XP.

That’s all for now. I am already stoked for QuakeCon 2009

~ Tinny

Quake Live is what has been made of Quake Zero, id Software’s project to make a Quake III based game that is free through in-game advertisements and can be played from within the user’s browser using an application plugin. It was discussed in John Carmack‘s QuakeCon 2007 keynote speech.

Late Thursday night I received an e-mail to confirm my acceptance into the Quake Live beta. I had to reboot to Windows since it is only a beta and their website currently weeds out anyone who isn’t running Windows since the beta release is for Windows. I’m under a non-disclosure agreement, so let me just tell you that I like the weapon set and I couldn’t ask for a better set of maps for competitive Quake III playing. If you want to have a good look at it, check out the E3 Quake Live trailer.

Everyone who is registered for QuakeCon has received or will be receiving a Quake Live beta invite according to the QuakeCon News, I think this is a great idea and I can’t wait to play it there. It’s on the Quake III engine so it does look dated, but the point isn’t to make a new game out of it, the point is to make the game free through in-game advertisements. Quake III has been my favourite game engine for a while now, so I’m not complaining about it looking dated, as long as it plays well.

So far there haven’t been any promises for Linux gamers, but from John Carmack’s 2007 keynote and various interviews it has been made clear that id Software wants to make Quake Live available for Mac and Windows.

I still have many unanswered questions about Quake Live, hopefully they’ll be answered at QuakeCon.

~ Tinny

The games of the night were: Age of Chivalry, a total conversion for Half-Life 2, and Crysis. This was the first time I had played Age of Chivalry and it proved to be a great mod for LAN play and it’s pretty good online too depending on who you’re playing it with. It still needs a lot of work done as far as balance goes, footmen seem too powerful to just be footmen. Crysis is great as long as the map you’re playing on has an aircraft base, VTOLs are my favourite part of the game.

I think this was our largest LAN party so far, we had nine people there

Spook, Ghost, TinMan, CaBo0sE, and 0v3rk1ll

Spook and I can frag with our eyes closed!

Voxx lies.

0v3rk1ll and his Airsoft gun.

Tree, Zildjian, Voxx, DeFAulT, and CaBo0sE

Sinkist, not Sunkist, look closely at the letters.
Mountain Maze = Jewel’s Mountain Dew

Mountain Maze
Some stay dry and others feel the tase
Mountain maze

That’s all for now. Peace.

~ Tinny

0v3rk1ll, DeFAulT, Spook, Voxx, CaBo0sE

The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), has confirmed the date and venue of this year’s CPL Summer Championships, which will host the $40,000 USA Stop of the 2007 CPL World Tour, sponsored by Sierra Entertainment. The CPL Summer Championships will take place from Thursday, August 30th to Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 (Labor Day Weekend) at the Hilton Anatole, in Dallas Texas.The BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) will be hosted by the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL) and will have tournaments for several CAL supported games.

The online registration for the CPL Summer Championships will launch on Thursday, June 21, 2007 (Summer Solstice) at noon CST.

2007 CPL World Tour News

CPL Alert