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Thursday, May 20, 2004

EGSC 2 - The Finalists

EGSC 2 - The Finalists

This year's EGSC finalists are Blood and RisinBlood. These 2 squads will make it a bloody good final (sorry, couldn't resist...).

Last week Blood had 2 completely different games. In the first one they did not take Downshift serious and had lots of individual chokes. They defended their flagroom successfully, but never managed to establish an attack before E00Z subbed in and changed the game. Suddenly Blood had a strong attack, a good flank at home and an amazing front (E00Z... as usual). It only took them a single attack and 10 minutes to take the enemy flagroom and end the game.
Their second game was on Sunday with a worse showup for Blood (Nerd, E00Z, Sooper and some more Blood starters missing). On the other hand they had a much stronger all-round performance and they dominated Downshift who were "damned to surprise the top squads", as a DS player metioned afterwards.
Blood goes into the finals with an amazing victory streak! 0 losses, 0 draws speak a language of its own.
GG.

The second semi final was RisinBlood - Mutiny. I can't report much because my connection died early into the match. From what I heard RisinBlood pretty much dominated Mutiny to win the semis 2-0. Risin goes into the finals undefeated as well, but with 1 draw against Downshift from the regular season.
In the end of EGSC, Mutiny may be the fourth squadron to dissolve. Big games take big decisions...

So the finals are
BLOOD - RISINBLOOD !

With some scheduling luck, we will see the top10-15 flaggers of Extreme Games there. If both squads get a decent showup, this will be one hell of a game.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Dungeon Siege 2 E3 Trailer

Dungeon Siege 2 E3 Trailer

Gas Powered Games released a short trailer of their upcoming Dungeon Siege 2 for E3. DS2 will find its way to the stores at the end of this year, most likely around x-mas of course.
The video itself is just 20mb so it's still dialup-compatible I guess.

Warcraft 3 1.15 released

Warcraft 3 1.15 released

Wednesday, 5:05pm, Battle.Net:
I just logged in to see that Blizzard released their latest improvements and fixes for their current top-title WC3. the 1.15 patch includes a long list of new stuff: unit re-balancing, a new matchmaking system and anonymous "Free for All" games.

And as always, there are a lot of crying noobs who spam the known WC boards (referring to the new matchmaking):
"lvl 24 vs. lvl 9"
"unfair solo games"
"0 exp for 30mins"

buya, if you cant handle it please go back to school, kids.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Guild Wars E3 Demo Download

Guild Wars E3 Demo Download

After I gave up playing Diablo 2 for the 98th time after its release last months it's time for a new sparetime-player-friendly click-and-point wanna-be MMORPG. And no, this is no real online role playing of course... my guess is that it will be somewhere between Diablo and World of Warcraft - it's more or less the old but successful action-based fantasy slaughter fest. All online - all free!! As you can read in various interviews and the Guild Wars FAQ, this game model tries to stand a chance without pay2play. After all, it just might be "my" type of game - login, play, logout. Parties and Guilds, Questing, Character Control and the obvious Skill System: It's all right there and it is easy to use.

The actual "demo" you can download from the Guild Wars webserver is just 62kb. It is a nice installer without anything fancy. I didn't like that at first - since "web installation" is just too fresh for my old mind - but at least their servers are fast (up to 140kb/s):


Overall it's a promising game and I'll keep an eye on it (did I mention its not P2P yet?!?).

Monday, May 10, 2004

Extreme Games Squad Championship 2 (EGSC 2)

Extreme Games Squad Championship 2 (EGSC2)

Sadly, I don't get to play any games besides my weekly SubSpace / Continuum capture the flag massacre with my brother. I'm so used to playing every Sunday morning now, been doing it for over 4 years without any real breaks in between... I guess "addiction" aint the right word for my SubSpace trauma anymore ;)

Especially in Extreme Games there is lots of heat and hate (as always):
EGSC 2 is nearing semi finals and the games look promising. With 3 of the powerhouse squadrons (Blood, RisinBlood, Mutiny) and 1 underdog (Downshift) I hope to see some interesting matches - especially since semi finals and finals will be best of 3!!

Semis look like this with regular season results in brackets:

Blood (5-0-0) - Downshift (4-0-1)
RisinBlood (4-0-1) - Mutiny (4-1)

Last week Blood slaughtered Zen (which btw had a roster of 60+ players) and therefore eliminated one of the "big 4".

Blood is playing a very solid defense in this league, I guess if "defense wins championships" becomes true they will pull it off. They dominated the Zen match even when they did not have all of their starters, but their second row is just as good.

RisinBlood has a stronger roster than ever before with new skilled player showing up and with the experience of oldschool players like sly, fc and sui chai.

Mutiny is a little bit behind my expectations. They lost some of their key players so they are forced to schedule at a GREAT time if they want to make finals. They better have all 10 starters online in semis...

Downshift is clearly the underdog with barely any names sticking out; autopilot is a decent player and great front anchor but that's about it. If they should make it, it will be because these newbies (DS, forgive me) practiced a lot and truely play as a team.

I will be able to watch ALL egsc games LIVE thanks to my brother who arranged to stream it on our LAN - hold your breath for some serious flagging ;)

Saturday, May 08, 2004

Sasser coded by 18-year-old german student

'Sasser' coded by 18-year-old german student

It's not like Sasser used any NEW Windows 2000/XP exploits and it still had a nice population this week since you could find it on public top10 lists.
Just by reading the 'features' on some tech news sites I could basically tell that it was written by a student... *sigh* If I had the time to not only THINK about ways to exploit security holes but to REALIZE my own little malicious code as well I would take that time and double my yearly income just by coding on a legal basis. In the end that's better than ending up arrested as well :)