Sunday 14th August 2005

Quakecon is almost over...

Im sitting back in my hotel room writing this journal right now and trying to remember exactly what happened over these past two days of non journal activity (save for more Q4 vids). Its pretty hard as weve done so much today especially. But here goes at my best stab.

Saturday was to be finals day in the nVidia Tournaments and therefore a busy day for the iTG crew. We also had a few other things to deal with too, but luckily and thanks to Intel our connection problems were not an issue. Its worth thanking the guys from Intel here, as they gave us their bandwidth as soon as they heard about the connection issues. It turned out to be a rogue router at the event, which blighted not only us but a few other areas as well. You just cant plan for those kind of things and I dont really blame the organisers as they did everything they could possibly do. Intel though, were awesome and we really enjoyed working with them, even meeting up in the hotel room for a drink after we closed up. (more about that later).

In the tournaments there were few surprises with missy taking Q3 from ms.X, Check6 winning a lengthy ET final, Purri doiminating the Q2 and the appearance of rocketboy in the final of the Doom3 competition. It was only really in this last game that we got a surprise with the winners bracket Rocketboy facing a losers bracket fnatic\gopher. Gopher had to win two maps in a row, rocketboy just once. As it turned out though, Gopher was brilliant on map 1 and then with a narrow lead played brilliantly and clever in map 2 to take it.

Of the casts, I managed a few which was great. Covering some quake 3 and doom 3 with Lun was awesome, the guy simply rocks. The fact we share a passion for fast bikes also helps I guess but hes great behind the mic too. I also got to cover the D3 final with Wheat and as ever he was on fire, its sometimes hard to stop him when hes in such fine form. TosspoT was literally worshipped by the throng of ET players here and im sure he enjoyed what for him is the pinacle event on the calendar for ET. All in all then it was a great day for casting and the matches were always entertaining, at least from our point of view.

We did manage to get fatal1ty to come over and do an interview, which I'd arranged with him and his advisor the day before. I was due to interview him and had a host of questions from you guys on IRC, but sadly for me, Wheat jumped in and did it. It was no problem obviously, iTG got the scoop and the low down on Q4 from Jon anyway and thats what mattered to me. The interview was interesting in a few ways and it was obvious that Jon has really enjoyed playing it this week in the shootouts, which by the way, Lun, Trillian and wheat have all casted live in the Creative area for him.

Talking of creative and without wanting this to be a "we love u sponsors" kinda journal post, its important i say a few thanks and one of those is to Creative who supplied us free of charge with an awesome speaker set for our place in the Intel Lounge. It certainly went a long way to helping the local spectators enjoy our casts. What did make me smile was that occasionaly the guys from Creative had to come over and turn it down a bit! perhaps they regretted giving us such great speakers lol. We also got to keep these speakers, so thanks Creative.

Of the rest of the day, we spent answering a huge number of people on IRC and hopefully we helped a lot of you, its not possible to please all the people all of the time, but I hope we helped overall and provided the kind of commentry that the games rightly needed.

I also had a chance to speak with Angel Munoz and Id like to say thanks to him for a couple of things. Firstly he told me he had seen the videos I posted on Q4 and because of these he came to the event to see it himself as he was impressed by it. I asked him a very direct question too which was "So, do you want Q4 for CPL?". His reply was pretty much "Its a done deal for me, I really want it, its just whether we can do something with iD". I understand that Intel may be involved in trying to broker a deal, but id guess its early days just now. Lets hope for the sake of dualing in FPS that Q4 unites some of the finest players in various games right now. Its awesome for me to think about getting the chance to cast games like Fatal1ty v Cooller or Lauke v czm or Rocketboy v v00 and many other combos of course. Its all possible right now, who knows who will like Q4 though, time will tell. For me and many others at Quakecon that played it, it was awesome. And I dont mean that in an excited "omg I got to play it first" kinda way. After several days of watching and playing, I really do believe it has the ability to unite players of different games and be popular at many different levels. Heres hoping the corporate situations can be sorted in order not to harm those chances it has.

When we finished the doom3 final, quakecon's tournaments ended and with it our casting for the week. We messed around after for a while and recorded some fun stuff and then packed up our gear and got back to the hotel. We then set off for a mass invasion of a local diner at about 10.30pm. I went with Lun, as he had kindly gotten me a helmet and jacket to use on the back of his GSX750R. It was an awesome ride and I wont even share with you what kind of speeds we did getting to our diner, but suffice to say it was ace fun for me. We ate, chewed the fat a little and then headed back to the hotel, once again on the back of Lun's bike and another awesome ride.

We were then joined by the guys from Intel, which was great fun and then they invited us all down to the lounge area to play some Q4 ctf and have some fun. CTF was everything I had hoped for and once again I can see it being hugely popular, not just to quake players but to other ctf game players too. Its simple, its fast and its fun, perfect ingrediants for a CTF game. We had loads of fun with it and I really cant wait for it to be released.

Finally then, Im back in my room and its 4.20am and im still buzzing from the day. I will post this now and leave some more Q4 videos uploading overnight (Dallas time) and then post to ESR again tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who has listened, watched and read the content iTG has provided over the last 5 days or so, I really hope you guys have been given plenty to talk about and discuss, it sure seems like ESR has not been this busy for a while now.

gg, red out.