ShackES has a couple of updates and a quote from the CPL president about some really major changes that are happening with the league which features those big cash Counter-Strike and Quake3 tourneys. Check it out here and a follow-up here

Stomped has a quick story on the CPL Events that will be held this year, which indeed now include 5 U.S. events. They are also looking for third parties who they can license U.S. events to.

Stevie 'KillCreek' Case has put in her resignation at Ion Storm. Stevie gained a lot gamers attention for beating John Romero (whom she is now involved with) in Quake. Following that she landed a job at Ion Storm moving up from QA to a level designer position within the year and working on The Daikatana. Stevie has also been a 'voice for the female gamer' over the years. Then she posed for playboy, which garnered her the most prestigious award possible. Her very own GONE GOLD thread, and some pictures she gave me permission to publish.

I will end my two and a half year tenure at Ion Storm. Leaving the company that I practically grew up in has been a very tough decision for me, but one that's been brewing for a while. My time at Ion has been wonderful, and at least when it wasn't enjoyable it was most certainly educational. :)

No word on where she is going, aside from projects like eGamingTV and CPL

The CPL sent out a press release announcing their upcoming international tournaments, with one Latin America Quake3 event in Brazil and a CPL Europe event in Holland (wooh). The CPL also hopes to confirm events in Asia and Australia soon. More info on the CPL website.

Turtled.com has an interview with Fatality (part two here). The guy who made the most money during 2000 playing Quake3 talks about the European CPL event, the Babbages event, the future of pro-gaming, teamplay and a couple of other things.

A while back there was some possibilities of ESPN2 giving coverage to a recent CPL event (which ended up only sorta happening). Well get this, ESPN2 in cooperation with Konami and Circuit City have done something crazy. A videogame has just become an official part of the Winter X Games. (Also thanks to Cached & DR)

Konami has teamed up with Circuit City to allow anyone with some good reflexes and love for snowboarding to compete for an actual X Games medal. Starting in local preliminaries, the competition will end on February 3 and the final will be televised on ESPN and ESPN2 as an official event during the coverage of the Winter X Games.

Gamers.com (fresh and in your face!) which announced a while back that they purchased the rights to PGL has been pushing a smear campaign against CPL (a competitor) for quite some time. In fact I got yet another anti-CPL email from Gamers.com just today. You can check out the CPL open letter to Gamers.com & PGL here. If Gamers issues a response, I'll link it here.

ShackES has an editorial on the simple question of why is Counter-Strike taking over the competitive (CPL) scene lately? Cant say I agree much with the reasoning myself.

Domain of Games has an interview with David Eddings, taken during the recent Babbage's CPL event. David talks about the CPL, the upcoming Gathering games, and a couple of other things.

HardOCP has posted pictures of the case competition that was held at the recent Babbages CPL tournament. Some pretty crazy stuff was there.

A couple of bits from ShackES this *hoppin* holiday Sunday, firstly Matt has written up a quite critical article (along with pictures) of the latest Babbage's CPL event which was plagued by delays related to the tournament software. (Eventricity, which has since been dropped by CPL). Also, CPL has announced some of their 2001 schedule. Which 4 out of 5 are now featuring Counter-Strike which looks to have been fully adopted by CPL.

Instead I want to talk about what went on at the event, about the accomplishments and the many failures of the CPL's four day pro gaming shindig. Babbage's was the CPL's final event of 2000, and it started a number of league trends that are supposed to continue in 2001. I'm wondering if some of those trends should stop, because after going to the last three CPL events I think I'm qualified to say that the Babbage's CPL Event kinda sucked. [...]

Maarten also snapped up a bunch of pictures of the event you can check out.

There's an interview with the CPL president Angel Munoz on Gameloft. There are questions about why he started the CPL, violence in videogames, the Cyber Athletic Stadium and a lot of other things. Also, the The CPL website has been updated with the news that they will no longer be using Eventricity for their events. The Eventricity software was the cause of many delays during the recent Babbage's CPL event.

Well we havent had a little conspiracy around here for a bit so here you go, just for the holidays! According to a post on ShackES (Which I assume he got from Domain of Games) Angel Munoz, the president of the CPL stated that after conversing directly with John Carmack (at FRAG4), there is "no question" that the next DOOM game will be a part of the CPL feature games. What is more interesting though, is that the next DOOM may possibly enter that line up as early as the December 2001 tournament, which would place the release of the game probably just under a year from now. Keep in mind DOOM was announced just about 7 months ago. That would place development time at about 18-19 months for a December 2001 release. Thats a realistic schedule for games like KISS and Alice which were developed in less time (but had fairly simple implementations of single player), but given the immense focus on single player and depth/complexity that the id guys have been pointing towards, I really wouldnt count on seeing the game until 2002. Until then, we're stuck doing stupid contests.

As expected the CPL has made a statement concerning the 'irregularities' surrounding a match played by Henrik "Blue" Bjoerk who was one of the top players in the running for the $100,000 tournament in a match against Mark "Excalibur" Cowley. They acknowledge that there was a problem and cant really replay the tourney now though...

... The CPL officials are now aware that some aspects of the game modification may in fact have caused irregularities in latency in a match between Henrik "Blue" Bjoerk and Mark "Excalibur" Cowley. [...]

Such is the growing pains of big cash tourneys...

The CPL ruling mentioned yesterday for the 'Blue bug' which impacted the $100,000 Babbages CPL tourney which was scheduled for yesterday has been postponed for till later today. Should be interesting to see how CPL deals with the situation. Here are a couple good posts by Strider on ShackES explaining things: [post1] [post2]

Several people have been sending in word of the 'Blue bug' which seems to have impacted a match of one of the top seeded players in the Babbages CPL tourney. ShackES has several posts covering the whole thing. I was actually behind All*Blue as the match was taking place and it sure looked like something was hosed to me.

Having some problems getting started properly this morning, but it should be alright now. I was going to update with all the CPL pics and while I have the pictures ready, the caption page is going to take a while longer. Some of the pics are kind of grainy and/or blurry, but I couldn't use flash in there. Flash during a match is not a good thing.

Ok early captions are here. I'll be updating once I get all the names from the other pictures.

The Babbage's CPL event is over, and zero4 has won the Quake3 1on1 tournament, taking home $25k. succubus won the female tourney, and clan Eyballers won the Counter-Strike tournament.

It's like the mini early Sunday morning update as we need to head back out to the CPL in about 5 hours (although I'm the only one up right now). That and there's not a whole lot going on, but I will be posting some more CPL pics around 12:30. It was a pretty good day yesterday, some exciting matches to watch and some upsets like fatal1ty getting knocked out of the tournament. Steve is flying back to Seattle tonight but I'm still gonna be here in Dallas to keep your ass covered (is that a good thing?).

The Babbages CPL tournament is going down this weekend, Maarten and I are both attending to check out the Counter-Strike and Quake3 tourneys. To celebrate I throw in the last plug for the newly launched ShackES (with the ugly logo!) Which has been giving stellar coverage. Here are the article you'll probably want to read if this is your thing

Counter-Strike: Tournament info and interview with CK3
Quake3: Tournament info and Predicted finishers:
1st- 10th Place - Harass Matt!
20th-11th Place - UNR-Timber - [9]-c3 - K9-Burn - Pure-r3v - nb.ryanbrown - dnx3 - All*DOOMer - FxR|Python - cK-Matador - stx-revenant
30th-21st Places - Bitchslayer519 - [sk.Insane] - PowerK - UNR-Blokey - DiehardD-r3v - D|S-BadSlinky - s0crates - All*Aim - [9]immortal - kOz.Sector
40th-31st Places - [sk.Xenon] - [9]vise - 4K^Q50 - FxR|Lobsta - eD[171].C4rN4gE - a|pureluck - All*Treble - [xeno]Dy-Syng - a|method - K9-Moonshine
50th-41st Places - |4|Cloak - ]km[propolys - a|citizen - gring0 - [9]Sujoy - stx-doggod - nb.greghunt - d2d.Mirage - [xeno]emplate - a|lantern

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