More Sanity interview stuff going on at PCParadox.

Riva3D scored some new Giants shots. Hey look, nudity -- shot1 and shot2

Voxel based Outcast is previewed at ETime.

Some more AvP reviews going on: Fresh3D and GameArena

3DGaming.net is getting down again with a quickie of LithTech based Bank Heist.

Hope you guys are having a good holiday weekend. It's still boring as ever here at this ole Shack...I think the highlight of my weekend was seeing those Q3 scores on a K7.

Hey, anyone know how to clear or reset the regional/country code on a DVD-ROM drive? How about a set-top box? Send email.

3DGaming.net is at it once again with their quick peeks at upcoming games. First off there's the Deus Ex Quickie (impressive at E3). Second up would be Battlezone 2 (great looking game), and finally Duke Nukem Forever (super secret stuff).

Yeah it's still me, Marcus, in the saddle for now. Man, has it been a slow day or what? And I don't see it picking up at all seeing that it's an American holiday weekend, and most of you are probably not able to refresh Shack as much as you'd like (Steve included).

Ugh, don't you just hate it when your ISP's DNS screws up when you're in the middle of an update? What is this!? Everything was going well and all of a sudden everything just stops working. The problem is that you can't complain too much to @Home (yeah, I'm on cable) since it's "just" half broken -- Quake, ICQ, and downloads still work (all at the same time too), but not much else. Anyone out there have any stories about getting away with free months of service? Share your tale in the comments.

Once again @Home, this ------------->    (_o_)  <------------- is for you to kiss.

As always news, cash donations, and/or juicy gossip can me emailed to me here.

The Girl in sunny California sends word that GX has finalized the GX Quake 3 Guide. She describes it as something that "covers everything the serious Quaker needs to know including hardware, config options, weapons, items and advanced strats". This is the first GX Quake guide that wasn't written by FiringSquaders, Thresh and Kenn (formerly known as Spear)

So Canada day came and went...and I went to go see South Park (the movie). Heh, was quite the interesting choice it being Canada day. The reason being is that the movie was more or less (I mean aside from all the profanity ;-) about USA declaring war on the Canadians.

Some people have emailed in about being "carded" for buying Kingpin...and damn, I was carded today before I could get into South Park. What BS. The amusing part is that the movie satires that very thing in the first 10 minutes. I'm going to try to catch Wild Wild West and Big Daddy in the next couple of days...

Here's something to kill time: 25 Things We Already Know About Star Wars: Episode II. News, random musings, and cash donations can me emailed to me here.

FiringSquad has written up a pretty guide about tweaking Q3Test...it's the whole usual speed vs. visual candy kind of deal. All the way from all features on to "it-looks-like-soup" mode:

The key to getting more frames per second is to make everything ugly. We're talking serious "got hit with an ugly stick, fell off the ugly truck, and into the fugly lake" ugly. We have to turn off almost all the pretty graphics settings. Some may say the whole point of Q3 is the purty graphics, but here at FiringSquad, Q3's all about the gameplay. How else are we supposed to enjoy the networking code if our systems keep on chunking up on us because of all the nice textures and 32-bit colors?

CGR has gotten ahold of Mike Dussault and interviewed him about various things, most importantly about Lithtech2 and some video cards (NV10!). Here's a bit about the whole engine thing:

CGR: John Carmack has stated a few ways he sees game engines going, what do you see in future versions of LithTech?

Mike Dussault: I see it turning into a more well-organized online world database, similar to the web. The objects and game code would be the HTML and Lithtech the browser. Servers would be connected together and players could play in a virtually infinite space.  I think in a couple years image quality won't be the hot topic anymore. We've seen a dramatic increase in 3D acceleration in the past couple years that will only continue, but processor speeds aren't keeping up. That's not to say people won't be astounded by cool graphics, but I think it will be things like enormous landscapes with a lot of interesting things happening, not the fact that you're running at 2048x2048 instead of 1024x768. I think flexibility, ease of use, and most of all, networking will become much more important

Saw on Bluesnews that: ZDTV Interviews John Romero in both text, and in sound and pictures, as their recent conversation with the Romero, conducted at this year's E3, is available in three different RealPlayer (or equivalent) chunks. The conversation talks about progress on Daikatana, single player versus multiplayer, and John's general gaming interests.

Being the moron that I am I forgot to copy over my directory of images that people have been sending in for the IOTD stuff. That being said I'll try and get access to that stuff tonight when I arrive in Seattle via FTP. Here are all of the previous entries though for you to check out and fume at me for being a dumbass.

Another review of the just released Unreal mission pack from Legend Entertainment. Have a look at what the CGO guys think of the pack.

Fargo says:

GameSpy 2.12 has been released for registered users. The new version has support for:
  - Kingpin
  - Drakan
  - Descent 3 (updated)

Descent 3 support has been updated to work with the retail version of the game -- According to the readme you should be sure to run Single player and connect to PXO at least once before launching with GameSpy.
There are some other fixes (like better Tribes support for servers with passwords).
This version is for Registered users only! Registered users always get to check out new versions before they go Shareware.

Well this isnt exactly something I expected anyone to be saying. According to this ZDNet article the "experts" are predicting the possibility of bandwidth becoming free in the future. Check this stuff out:

The possibility that bandwidth could become free is based on the exponential growth in capacity on communications networks, being driven by technologies that allow more streams of light to be fit onto an existing pair of fibers, which push trillions of bits of data through routers every second and switch data more intelligently between interconnected networks.

I thought were were going down the tubes and running out of IP addresses and we were all gonna die with the whole Y2K thing though?

Well here we have it, the new news engine database thinga-ma-jigger. Since I'm taking off on a road trip this afternoon we decided to go live with it a couple of days early to give you guys something to play with. New stuff you guys should notice is the comment system for news items (User registration still in progress, everyone is Anonymous right now unless you have created an account on the Quake3 board) and also a nifty index of news items at the bottom of the page. Stuff like referring to individual news items here's an example is now also possible. The search engine wont be live for a week or so, but hell there isnt that much in the new database to search right now anyways eh?

Just about everything is automated now. Assuming Jack decides to finish FingerShack the .plan tracker thing should be rolling in a couple of days too. I'm sure some bugs will crop up, just drop me or Sander some email and we'll get it taken care of. Oh, and no I'm still not happy with the colors but at least it doesnt look like baby poop anymore. So whadya guys think?

I should have posted these yesterday but have been swallowed whole by trying to get this new layout and functions stuff presented perfectly for you guys. Oh well here you go, check out the latest edition of wack-ass links which should entertain and offend.

The latest new IOTD is fairly amusing. Makes a guy proud to be an American ya know? I know I feel good inside knowing that stuff like this is going on around the country. Think you're captain funny guy and got a caption? Enter the caption contest and win a big wet one from Huntsman!

The winner for the IOTD contest for yesterday goes is pretty much of a draw. It was an animated gif ok?.  Here is a list of all the enttries.

Previous IOTD's:  doggie.jpg (captions) gates.jpg (captions) parade.jpg (captions) hotcurry.jpg (captions) msteam.jpg & realmsteam.jpg (captions)  unfunf.jpg (captions) cat.jpg (captions) paint.jpg (captions) nuts.jpg keyboard.jpg theguys.jpg tattoo2.jpg aussie.jpg spears.jpg ms.jpg clint2.jpg drunke3.jpg q2chick.jpg fruit1 fruit2 fruit3 fruit4 and fruit5