Today will be something of a news quickie as I'm in the middle of re-installing all of my software due to a major upgrade on my machine (Yay what fun!). But stay tuned for more of that hot news lovin' next week. Same bat-time same bat-channel!

In not really gaming related but still cool news Ogg Vorbis 1.0 has officially been released! w00t! Grab it from the official download page. Anybody not familar with Ogg Vorbis should definately check it out. Despite the goofy-sounding name (latin?) this is a very cool freeware and opensource audio codec (i.e. think MP3 only better sounding and with better compression). It's been getting even more popular lately what with many of the owners of other professional codecs trying to charge ridiculous licensing fees. Also be sure to swing by their free music page with a few tunes done up to showcase the power of the codec.

Look out Nvidia and ATI, there's a new (well ok not new) graphics maker on the block. Apparently Trident Microsystems is making an MC Hammer-style comeback and is getting ready to step up to the plate with the big boys. Word has it over on news.com that their new chips are coming out soon and will be competing squarely with Nvidia and ATI's midrange GPUs. Despite having less transistors than the competition they somehow manage to get it performing at comparable speeds due to their incredibly l33t software algorithms or something.

Thanks to me blatently ripping this from /. I noticed that Forbes has a veritable orgy of recent coverage on the Linux scene. What kinda state is the little-OS-that-could in now you may ask? Well wonder no longer as they've got you covered. The article on the GAIM instant messager client for Linux is especially cool.

When was someone going to let me know about the Nvidia software DVD player that's coming out? Supposably already being bundled with certain manufacturer's cards and with advanced support for all of the latest Nvidia DVD decoding, IDCT, motion compensation features etc it looks like the real deal. In fact they have a couple of screenshots of it over here at the xp-erience.org forums.

Somebody please smack these people. See? This is what happens when yuppies go wild...

Thot of the day: If ATI doesn't suck anymore... Who will we make fun of?.

HAH! :)

Rune will of course be posting news later tonight, but I have a few quick ones.

First off, Sony is accepting applicants for the Star Wars Galaxies Beta. Go sign up. Now. Yeah, you.

Second off, it appears that ATI may finally give nVidia a kick in the head. Expect more on this from Rune later. Thanks to Dr. Slue for the heads up on the review. :) I hate ATI, but it looks like they're finally getting their heads out of their asses and getting to work. I'm especially hopefull about the fact that Gigabyte and other big manufacturers are starting to buy ATI chips and make cards. In fact, Gigabyte apparently told nVidia to stick it. Gotta be an interesting story there....Wienerboy Dave, who's a long time ATI fan may finally get something that's worth the money he spends.

We're launching a new feature called "Rune Rants". Should be interesting, stay tooned for more later.

hello loyal fragtopia readers! it is i, praet0rian, returned from lands afar. marauder asked me to post some news for saturday, but quite frankly, other activities occupied my friday night, and i was in no condition to post any news. in other, completely, totally unrelated news, britain has taken a giant step towards decriminalizing marijuana. will canada follow the queen's example? only if the uncle doesn't find out.

so, i've been playing a lot of warcraft III lately, and the idea of doing a fragtopia review has come up once or twice... however, i'm going to say this. there are other reviews out there that will say everything that needs to be said better than i can say it. gamespot's greg kasavin, in particular, has some choice words on the subject. maybe once i've finished the game (which i'm damn near to doing), you can coax a couple thoughts out of my brain.. but it won't be a review. i'm going to tentatively call it an "impression" ...

speaking of warcraft, planet warcraft recently went live and looks to be another great resource for material regarding both the dub c 3 and even some of the double dub.

i also posted this at l2c the other day, but i can't get enough of it- google, in klingon... aw yeah.

here's a little article that deals with the other side of the coin to rune's link below

if you're down with functional, simple, minimal memory footprint apps that do their job and do it well, you'd best check out 545 studios. especially if you're down with visually tweaking your desktop, because a good chunk of these apps are fully skinnable!

after years of rumours and questioning, the announcement is finally official: HALO is to be released for PC by Gearbox Software. ETA is summer 2003- perhaps even more startling- a MAC version will be developed by Westlake Interactive (warning: ghetto website) as well!

well that's all the news that's fit to print. until i next surface, frag fairly and lag rarely.

~ and just like that - he's gone ~

Thanks to Rune for covering the news for me yesterday. :) I've not been getting home from work untill late every night, and my 'net connection has been acting very oddly as well, so it's been hard for me to post any news or updates. I'm gone with Kingpin for the weekend to referee up at Wasaga Beach Paintball for the Canadian Amateur Open. (And no, no naked chicks regretably... it's not that sort of Amateur event.)

I stumbled across this the other day, among a collection of bizzare war stories. You know you're down to the bottom rungs of defence when it's all up to the animals to ensure victory. Hell, it worked though so who are we to judge.

I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. I got spammed the other day by these guys. I mean, if you block the harmfull signal.. (And they're everywhere, any time you're between a tower and a user.) wouldn't your cell phone NOT work? Huh. If anyone is smart and can explain how this thing would possible protect you, email me and let me know. Thing sounds like a flytrap for electrons.

Speaking of Spam, nothing pisses me off more than when I get Spam about Spamming people. No. It doesn't work. It just pisses millions of people off and bogs out the internet. Die you bastards. I'm pretty sure that killing these people would be considered self-defence by any judge out there.

I'm sure you've all heard of Art Bell and his radio show. No? Check out his tacky web site. Hell, it even LOOKS like the landed aliens designed it for him. He's an interesting person to listen to on the air, and has some great guests. Used to listen to his show every night when I did security, it was all that kept me awake at 2am.

Hey! After extensive research your buddies at FRAGtopia have figured out why the damned things are so slow! It seems it's actually Satan's fault. He's not living up to his contract with Apple. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SATAN!

Our reviews have recently been getting alot of hits from Neoseeker. It's an interesting little seach engine/page which I had never heard of before. I'm going to be using it from now on though!

Anyhows, out for the weekend. Cyah all later. No news tomorrow from Rune, he's gone as well. we'll do something again on Monday.

Computer and Video games has a rich and creamy interview with Mathieu Ferlan producer of the upcoming Splinter Cell. Based on the Tom Clancy series of games (Rainbow Six, Rogue Squadron, Ghost Recon, etc) and using a heavily modified version of the Unreal 2 engine, Splinter Cell looks amazing. The focus this time seems to be more of a stealthy single player action spy game rather than on the squad based shooter approach as most of the past Tom Clancy games have been. At this point Splinter Cell is supposed to be an xbox exclusive. There's no word no whether or not it'll be also eventually be coming out for the PC (although it is supposed to be coming out for "next generation platforms" some time in 2003). But of course we'll keep you posted as soon as we hear anything.... ;-) Gah, mere words cannot do justice to how jaw-droppingly good this game looks. Here, check out some of the latest screenshots and see for yourself.

Speaking of xbox Tom Clancy games Team Xbox has a nifty video of some xbox Ghost Recon action. After playing Rainbow Six on the Dreamcast I've been a bit of a skeptic about playing these types of games on a console but the movie of the game is quite impressive. Seeing as how I never really got into the PC based Rainbow Six games (as a newbie I found that spawning and repeatedly getting shot in the face by Marauder caused the game to lose most of it's appeal fairly rapidly) at least I might stand something of a chance on the console version...

Yet another(!) beta patch has been released for Tribes 2. If you're feeling bold and like living dangerously you may want to give this baby a shot. But remember boys and girls, there's no going back after installing this puppy (future patches will only patch from the last official version) so make sure that you back up your Tribes 2 directory or face the ugly consequences (and believe me having to install, patch, tweak, and install scripts, soundpacks, map packs, etc all over again is not much fun). Word is that this should be the last (we hope) beta patch before it goes final and all is right with the Tribes world once more. As this'll likely be the last Tribes 2 patch ever I'm glad to see that they're testing the crap out of it and trying to get it right.

How dare they say this about us gamers! Why, I'd love to....do something... to them....can't find stupid words.... aghh.... so mad! ....brain hurt!!! Rune smash! ..... smash them good!! sdf89y4%dsf....

Hey, this is cool... one of the ex-Audiogalaxy programmers talks about what it was like working at Audiogalaxy. Kind of a behind the scenes thing but it really gives you quite a bit of perspective into how the whole thing worked and how it felt to be a part of a company / community that grew so fast.

As most people no doubt know by now Audiogalaxy had the crap sued out of them by the RIAA and so there's not a whole heck of a lot that you can download from there anymore. They're got up a poll asking people what they think that the Audiogalaxy music community should turn into.

Rumours of an ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx card (i.e. a two GPU card....a similar idea to the earlier Rage 128 Maxx cards) have turned out to be just that.... rumours. After this thread over on the Tweaktown forums sparked a bit of a furor HardOCP decided to contact ATI regarding the rumours. The pic is obviously an amateur photoshop job (as is further demonstrated later on in the thread) but kudos to HardOCP for clearing things up. The official word from ATI: "We have no current intentions of making this or similar boards."

As a joke they've also slapped up some "GeForce5 6000" pics.

Anand's done up a UT 2003 CPU shootout of sorts, comparing a bunch of CPUs and GPUs under UT 2003 to see how well they scale. Considering that Unreal and UT had something of a reputation for being real CPU hogs you might want to head over there before the game comes out and find out whether or not your machine packs enough of a punch to run UT 2003 in all it's glory.

Oooh! Look! Pics of ATI's new Ubercard the R300. Thanks to Nvnews for the heads up. Just on the off chance that anyone forgot this is the card that id was using to show off Doom 3 with at E3. It'll be interesting to see what Nvidia does when this is released as rumour says that their next card will be released quite some time after this due to the challenges they're having with producing parts at 0.13 micron (as opposed to the 0.15 micron ATI R300).

America's Army: Operations Recon, the first release of the 'America's Army' game is out! Here are a couple mirrors so crank up those Download Accelerator programs because this puppy clocks in at 202 MB!

3Dgamers

Nvidia

Powered by a next gen Unreal Engine and pumping out the realistic looking eyecandy this game is a must for any tactical shooter fan. Take a look over at the official site for yet more mirrors.

IGN has a bunch of tasty screenies up showing off a bit of the level of realism available in the game. The dev team did a fantastic job making everything look and act like the real thing. The weapons models and animations in particular are most impressive and even surprised an old Rainbow Six junkie like Marauder.

XGR did up an audio interview with Paul Boyce (from the US Army Public Affairs office) when the game was first released the other day. Keep an eye on this one as they should have the achieved mp3 of the interview up anytime now.

Nvidia's really seems to playing up their part in helping out with America's Army. They make sure that you see a nice big Nvidia splash screen before you start the game just in case anyone would've missed it.

I sent this over to Marauder to see if it would get a chuckle out of him as he and the Mrs aren't exactly cat lovers. This is what he responds back with:

Marauder: This is sorta evil:
Marauder: What the hell kinda name is that for a woman?
Marauder: Her parents were cruel!
Marauder: Oh yeah, and there's some s*&t about a cat or something too
Marauder: But I mean get a load of her frickin' name!
Marauder: Shesh

Thanks to Little White Dog for the linkage!

Those crazy grape-loving mac people are back! Apparently people who collect them are making the Amiga fanatics look tame... it's like a candy-coated religion of evil.

Remember if you should have the misfortune of actually running into any of these people just back away slowly avoiding eye contact... If confronted say a couple of nice things about Steve Jobs or say something like "Look it's an iPod!" and run like hell.

Anyone got Warcraft 3 yet? Prae is apparently really digging it... He went out and bought the mother of all Warcraft 3 collections after looking staring at it for a while with kind of a crazed look in his eye. Maybe we'll convince him to do some review action before he collapses of exhaustion from playing the game. In the meantime check out the rave reviews it's getting over on Games Domain and Computer Games.

Well well well, it looks like John Romero and Tom Hall will make you suck it down after all! The learning that is...

And who could resist taunting the hapless students with calls of "You've been schooled by John Romero!" 0wnz0r3d!

It's a long weekend here in Canada, so there'll not be any news posted tomorrow. Today however I have excellent news for you all! Classic Counter-Strike, a project started by our very own Dopper about 18 months ago, and idle since then has been restarted! Protocal-X is going to be running the site and keeping the packs updated. Check out the newly designed and shiny site for all the details.

I've been searching for someone to run this site for me for quite sometime. We still log over 1,000 hits a month on the site, despite the fact that it's been basically a dead page for well over a year. Obviously there's a great deal of community interest and.. well.. We're BACK! :)

In yet more Carmackian news he's posted a bit over on Slashdot talking about how software and hardware rendering are slowly converging and how it is becoming more feasible that hardware accelerated rendering could soon replace much of the work that is being done on large software-based render farms now.

<mini rant/commentary>

There are a lot of previews floating around regarding the Parhelia and most of them have given the card a thumbs down. While the Parhelia offers a few DirectX 9 features it's not exactly a full DirectX 9 card (which isn't necessarily a bad thing given that DirectX 9 itself isn't even finished). I guess that the impression that I got from reading these previews was that the Parhelia comes off as being in an unpolished state. The drivers are very buggy and there doesn't seem to be much of a performance advantage (if any) over the Nvidia Geforce Ti 4600 to justify the added cost. While features like multiple monitor gaming, 16X Antialiasing support, and hardware displacement mapping sound very cool the card doesn't seem to have the performance power necessary to push any of it at a satisfactory rate. It's disappointing to hear about this because the card itself sounds amazing and everyone knows that Matrox is the undisputed king of image quality. Hopefully we'll get to take a look at this baby over at Fragtopia sometime soon and put it though its paces. I'd like to reserve judgment on it until I see the results for myself.

</Mini rant/commentary>

In the meantime you can find the latest of said Parhelia previews/interviews over here on Gamers Depot. They get down and dirty with Kamran Ahmed (a senior manager guy) regarding the Parhelia and how it can slice, dice, and make french fries three ways while pumping out the displacement mapping goodness on multiple screens (as well as little details like what Matrox hopes to accomplish with the release of this new card).

W00t! New leakz0r3d Detonators drivers are out! The 28.90's are available over here for all of you fellow Nvidia junkies.

Ah the joy of re-installing Tribes 2 numerous times after foolishly installing a beta patch for which there was no reverse patch released (as I soon discovered).... Then reinstalling it again from scratch only to have the same disturbing scenario occur yet again when another beta patch was released and one of my hard drives decided to eat my (pre-beta patch) backed up Tribes 2 directory. At this point I've just about had it up to here (/me gestures to above head) with the whole damned thing.

Now understand that this process not only involves reinstalling the whole game and then patching it to hell and back (hello Sierra! For the love of all that's holy please, please I beg you to make an all-in-one patch!)... oh no... there are also voicepacks, scripts, skins, tweaks, weapon reticles, mortar reticles, key binds, favorites, etc to restore...gah!

To further taunt me and make my life now even more of a living hell they've just released a third beta patch. And like the proverbial moth to the flame I keep walking right into the trap.... I just can't help myself. Of course the final patch should be out anytime now too.

A new beta of Winamp 3 is out! Now comes with a kickass MAD magazine skin! Yoink it here.

Hmm... Microsoft just released DirectX 8.1b today. Here's the direct linkage for your downloading pleasure. This release is compatible with Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Careful though, this mother of a patch is about 26 MB and it's a developer's edition so its not final (i.e. it's a beta!). Word is that DirectX 9 should hit the street sometime in October and that Mad Onion is readying up the next version of 3DMark to coincide with that launch.... mmm..more eyecandy!

GamePC takes a crack at one of AMD's new Athlon 2200+ chips based on the Throughbred core. They really give it the full torture test treatment and place it up against a few of Intel's latest. So far not much improvement in terms of overclockability has been reported but now with the new smaller 0.13 micron die they should at least be a little cooler to run.

Well-rounded (you just gotta love a site named that!) has up 6 new mouth watering Unreal 2 shots. I'm glad that they decided to take the time and focus on making this game an awesome single player FPS game even if it does come at the expense of no multiplayer. It looks like it is coming along incredibly well !

Just a few quick pieces of news to post today (I'm still tired from staying up late on the GTA review.)

First off, those of you who're still playing Jedi Knight II might get a kick out of these custom sabres. Have to admit that the flame one just kicks complete ass. I may have to play again just to use this thing. :)

Figured hooked me up with a link to Afrotech, the Gheto mod site. Read the entire site and prepare to laugh you ass off. This guy completely kills me.

Skeezix sent us a link to this... Interesting, it's a Baldur's Gate mod for Diablo 2.

Dat's it. Now go away and leave us alone. :)

GTA 3 review is up and it gets the Marauder seal 'o' approval!

Me kill Rune. He no post news!

Hey all. Back, all data was saved. No .mp3s were harmed in the reparitioning of the harddrive. Sorry (again) for no news. I'm not sure what happened to Rune, he swore he was going to post news for me yesterday. I spend most of the weekend working on my computer, trying to get almost 100 gigs of crap off it and backed up before something horrible happened. The operation was a success, and so we're back.

Working on a review of GTA3, should be up soon. My GTA cool screenshots however were the ONE piece of data that got trashed. (Figures) SO! If anyone happens to have any sweetz0r screenies they want to share, email them over to me please. :)

I've been playing quite a bit of Neverwinter Nights lately. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a big RPG fan, and I most CERTAINLY do not like the DnD rules RPGs. They're too complicated and take too damned much time to get anywhere/do anything. Also I don't enjoy dying every 2 seconds. NWN is however, obviously designed with both the hardcore (Skeezix) and casual (Me, and almost everyone else I know) RPGer in mind. If you really want to, you can spend hours agonising over whether to assign two points to your charisma, or one point to charisma and one point to strength. (If you can take time away from the argument over whether Picard or Kirk was the best officer.) Or like the rest of us, you can click on "recomended" and go back to enjoying your beer and sex. Anyhows, go play NWN. It's good. Very good. If I ever get far enough into it, expect a review. :)

I was quite impressed to see that Rob Hubbard is going to be a keynote speaker at this year's ASSEMBLY party. Damn it, I've wanted to go for over ten years now.. and now I REALLY want to go. If anyone can smuggle me over to Finland, let me know. I have a Canadian passport, so I'll easily pass for an Israli or Russian spy/assassin. Don't know who he is? Shame on you! Click here for all the details.

I've occasionally been known to laugh at Bigger Than Cheeses. This cartoon he's done however completely slays me. Nice work Goon! :) How true it is. In fact, I think the guy being 'naded is none other than my tribe's fearless leader Prozak. LOL

Wow. That guy should play basketball, he can jump. Thanks Dragon.

From Dman comes some news that's sure to horrify and shock the techno-phobes among us. It's about a robot going on a killer rampage and making a break for it. I did find it pretty funny that the scientist in charge was quick to reasure the world that his little toys are harmless................ OK, so there was no killer rampage... But then again the world has yet to see MY thinking robots.... Oh yes.. Then we'll see some rampages. Rampages indeed. I've been keeping them in my basement, forcing them to play Doom twelve hours a day, 7 days a week. Soon they will be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

You all remember Triumph the insult dog right? You can see more skits here. :)

Anyhows, more later. Back to work. If you happen to see Rune, wack him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for me.

Sorry for the lack of posting guys, I've been going to work for 08:00 and not getting home untill 20:00 or later most nights this week. I have no idea why Rune hasn't posted, perhaps he fell in a hole or something. :) Anyhows!

News in from Prae, which is related to Rune's Crazygonuts University post from a few days ago. Yah gotta check out the Homestar Runner homepage. And while there play the Duck game. Get to the advanced level (Thanks Tycho for the heads up, via Prae ;) and watch the graphics.. Ohhhh..Ahhhhhhh..... Such a sweet site :)

In other Prae news... Intel Bad, AMD good. Although I did hear last night that AMD has issued a profit warning. Gah. That ain't a good thing. In fact I find that quite worrying to say the least. Damn you AMD, get off your asses and make some money!

Both Rune and Messiah have sent me this news article. Could teleporters be far off? Could using them to Teleport nuclear missiles into your enemies ass be far behind? I like the last paragraph in the article:

"Quantum teleporting is problematic for humans because the original is destroyed in the process of creating the replica."

Yeah. That could be a problem allright. I just hate when I'm destroyed. It's one of those things I'm sorta funny about.

Thanks to Mr. E Mahn I now have a new king. This guy just slays me with his deliciously sarcastic wit.

Ohh! All you guys in your basements watching Star Trek should be please with this one.. Warhammer Online! It actually looks pretty cool.

Neverwinter Nights hits the stores today and tomorrow. I'm excited... Are you excited? I've been turned on by this one ever since I saw the E3 movie from.. Shesh.. Last year or the year before.. It's been awhile. I just wanna try the dungeon mastering. That sounds like alot of fun!

Hey, they're using vaccum tubes on computers again eh? I just about fell right off my chair when I saw this monstrosity. It's something to do with the audio on the board... Skeezix assures me that V-tube amps and radios were the best... He knows, personally I've never seen one of the damned things in action. I hope they're tougher than they look.. Cause shipping glass things from Taiwan to here never seems to go well. We'll have to see I guess.

It's always nice to see that the terrorists are winning, and turning your country into a police state where people can be held without charges being laid isn't it? New legislation in Canada allows this as well, and frankly I think the person behind it should be shot. We allow this sort of stuff to go on, we might as well live in Communist Russia.

I thought it was pretty cool. Walmart is actually selling a line of computers with Lindows installed. Most interesting, never seen a big chain pimp up anything other than Microsoft products. Go Linux!

Dat's da news.