Very cool stuff, E! Mind the paragraphs though ;p

Your writing style is superb, as in all yer columns.
Very readable, enough difficult words to keep a foreigner like me on his toes ;p and nice descriptions of personae etc. overall, although the descriptions are a bit lenghty at times, like in the battle of the cathedral story.

Looking forward to see you develop this into a novel.

GL!

Edit: Your experience with gaming and your love for it gives your writings that feeling of being very possible and just around the corner future stuff. Just great stuff for every gamer to read, even if they play CS or UT or whatever :p

i usualy hate reading long texts onscreen but this stuff was very very good, highly engrossing

i cant push the [+] button enough to do this justice

Good stories dude.

About them:
#1 I kinda agree with the dad :D
#3 A pity that it seems to tell how cool violent behaviour and cursing is

Nice but not great. I agree that it's better to post such stories in different section.

Excellent writing, you shape gaming as a lifestyle beyond the boundaries of sitting behind a screen.

gaming is mor etahn that?!

I dont understand why there are polish people involved though? Is it big in Poland? Im part polish (im English tho) and wen i go to poland i dont see jack to do with gaming?

You could have said that about Senegal and football until this world cup.

It's set in the future.

I'd guess it has somthing to do with the fact that Carmac is polish...

Ever heard of CarMac?

the best promode (a mod for q3 for those who dont know) players were/are polish too (at least they gave me to see the best cpm (if not q3) games as of yet :), actually polish made that mod popular by being so good at it
some trick jumpers are polish as well =p

great ... raising columns/articles to a higher level .

keep ´em going

PS: I wonder if this starts something like "esports-fiction" .

sounds like an appaling father, using words like bullshit and so on, when talk to his son :o

Imagine tellin ur dad i failed my A-levels coz i want to be a pro-gamer.....i think my dad would die from laughter and not much else really.

Very nice work, though you never use abbreviations in a novel and it seems as if you are sponsored by the playing field to write this. Other than that, outstanding.

Copyright Richard Elliott 2002

What even words like "Blokey" and "The Playing Fields"? :)

if u're a specialist on this kind of thing, please enlighten me.

hehe

Very nice read, its something really new.
Your style is awesome. im looking forward to read more esport fiction short stories.

Very nice man.

I didn't like the beginning that much. I actually almost didn't read any further.. But it kept me interested enough to get into it and I started to really like it by the time it got into some 'in game' stuff. The story really shines here I think. Definately the best part of the whole thing. Your descriptions were great and I wish i posessed your writing skills.

The switch to the cyber cafe's got a bit confusing... Player names seemed to mix with alias' and I couldn't follow the story completely. However I was skimming a bit (it's how I read for some reason), so I wouldn't be suprised if I found it confusing because I wasn't paying attention 100%.

Overall I'd say the story is fantastic. The 'in game' parts especially. It held my interest all the way till the end. Which suprised even me ;). It's not often that I will read something that long on the internet. Prefering to read large amounts of text on paper.

I wouldn't be concerned with my small criticisms above. You can't please everyone and I'm sure other people enjoyed what I didn't.

I too, have started a short story type of thing based on Quake. However my writing skills are not as good as yours, and I got a bit overwhelmed by the work involved and the segways the story can take. So I havn't touched it for around 4 months now. Reading your story has given me some motivation to give it another look however. So thanks ;).

Oh and one last thing. Since when do you have invincibility in duels! ;).

hehe thanks. I share your concern with the mixing of identities on chap 3, i'll sort it.

The beginning is a mish mash at the moment, and perhaps (like the bond movies) it's good to start with action.

These are the questions which concern me atm.

That just might w0rk yeah. Try some action at the beginning, like for instance the way you started the chapter with the zkilim guy. or whatever his name was, you started out with action there and then went back to the beginning, a means of getting attention from the audience used in most movie flicks these days...

This is truly fantasic ;) If this is all released as a book, I will buy it, not questions asked.

This is way up there MrE. I'm still baffled over what I just read. It's just so amasing.

If this could be rated as the movies here do, I'd give it a 10, and sign up for another account, so I could give it another 10 :)

I hope you are planning to write more, or release whatever more you have written.

GG!

agree with netrex, bit worrying how bots are gonna take over the world though :)

very nice, if it only was not fiction-style but real stories of real gamers and how they came to the top spot, it could have become first serious book about e-sport.

the one thing i liked most was duel on The Edge, i think you described one the real duels on q2dm1 there but i failed to determine which one. Thresh-Immortal? Pele-Polosatiy?

and hey man! 2 guys from usa won cpl followed by the player from uk?? this is ridiculous :\ you should have mentioned that russians had problems with visas or something... cant be other way..

Very nice, Richard.

just as long as it doesnt have a happy ending i'll be happy :)

Nice story and there is probably a marked for sci-fi books like this. I agree that the beginning would probably earn from a "action intro" and then begin with the father/son stuff.
Also imho the step from the kicked-out-of-the-house scene to a full blooded pro-gamer was a bit short maybe, dunno.


Anyway, fun and interesting reading, but:

Doom4 with quake weapons, quake powerups and quake maps????????

Please, make "Doom4" more of a general fps game that most gamers will recognize when it comes to weapons.
That means...don't use "railgun", "lightning gun" etc, use the Rocketlauncher, Sniper, Grenade launcher and other typical fps weapons that aren't quake spesific.
That made me feel it was actually a quake-in-10-years story, and it almost made it a bit "doh" :P at times to be honest. (Because I don't play quake)

Then I think gamers from other games like CS, UT and other games can have a relation to the action sequenses too if you change it a bit.

I didn't like the first chapter that much, but the other three were superb!

I'd imagine you'll need to get permission from id to use names like Doom 3/4 and stuff, but I'm not sure.

Can't wait for the next chapter :)

Actually, I re-read Chapter 1 again, and I was wrong, I do like it ;/. It's just the text formatting was a bit off-putting on the first page, but you'd got it sorted out by the second page.

wowinwow! i knew it ! i said as much a few days/weeks back :) mr.e uber1337writerskillzorzpwnaj - seriously tho all u need is an editor and a publisher. ill imsg you e, n1 gg.

OMG, don't people have anything better to do in their life than to post this stuff- i mean, come on -go outside for a change for fuck's sakes....

oh my god!