Topic might make it look like they have anything to do with eachother but uhm, I just wanted both names up there.

Starting with the first one... Chess 48 Arena was my friend Eczkchtl's contribution to a contest held by gamedev.se, and as the name hints the object was to create a game from absolute scratch in 48 hours.The theme for the contest, published right before the start, was "board games" and while Chess might be the immediate thought of a lot of people (excluding me who suggest Hero Quest, huhu), my friend was the only one who made something resembling it. As "board games" was only the theme, it could be an existing one or an entirely new concept as long as it related to the theme, and while I've never been a big fan of ordinary chess I had a lot of fun in Eczkchtl's version :)

Thought I'd link to the game both because I managed to find 3 hours to make the music for it, some kind of uh... "Techno"-ish thing (...I think, forgive me if I'm blaspheming any genre here - I listen to, and play, 95% metal and even there I avoid using genres other than really basic stuff like "heavy", "evil", "fast") which I thought suited the visuals of the game and was fairly decent considering it was my absolute first contact with Fruityloops ever and the mentioned time pressure (would have loved to have those 48 hours but unfortunately I had to combine watching over my parents - who were in Norway for a week - cats, and doing what's mentioned in the second part of this post) of 3 hours which I could easily have spent listening to all the weirdo sounds in Fruityloops. Excuse the excuses, just telling how it was and hoping nobody will torch me if their ears start bleeding or something, might have violated some fundamental electronic musics rule in that track, who knows? Not me, I thought it sounded alright and a bit evil, bite me :p That, and because well, I find it genuinely amazing what he built up from scratch in 48 hours - game concept, coding and definately graphics - not only because he's my friend. So if you have a couple of minutes and can survive a download of less than 4 megs, it'd be cool if you told me what you think about Chess 48 Arena :)

...chances are it won't even work on your computer, it did on his but not on mine until he added a couple of files. Shit happens.


Also, yesterday, the team I created back in 2002 finally won their third consecutive EuroCup final in Soldier of Fortune 2, which has not been done by any other SoF2 team (only one other team has won even two in a row) so it feels like we can leave the game with our heads high. Unstoppable is the word a lot of people have complimented us with and while we certainly haven't had any mercy on our opponents even in the finals (EC XI: 26-11, EC XII: 28-12, EC XIII: 37-20), it definately hasn't been a walk in the park when some one... Well no, when _I_ really wanted to quit and focus on Quake 4 instead and we nearly left the cup. Heads up though, to a team that I believe I've held together a couple of times during the years and now repaid by doing the same when things were rough for myself (some of you have read my earlier, less jolly journals)... Congratulations to all of the players in my team, achievement-wise we are "untouchable" in SoF2 and no matter what people think of it or their game, 3 consecutive EuroCup wins are rare. I don't recall it having happened at all, but then again I haven't followed exactly all of the game which have had EuroCups.

Time to uninstall, and get going on fixing those things I'm missing in Quake 4.