Well, I'm updating earlier than I said I would. What do you want?

Well, I'm updating earlier than I said I would.  What do you want?

Warzone Armada! I've been playing here just a little. It's not official but it's going to be fun. The Romulans made the map. If you dunno what that means...well, it means it is a very nice map. There are going to be some interesting base wars here. I've only done small fights so far but sooner or later I think this is going to be a really fun map. There are two huge bases, each a mirror image of the other. They are designed for thirty man teams. This is NOT a wazky settings zone. In fact, the settings are tweaked to make the ships even more individual and specialized than they are in the normal game. While the map is obviously made for big teams, it is nonetheless--save for the scarcity of greens--playable with as few as four people. I suppose this is the case with War Zone style games in general, and my view is obviously colored by the fact that this is the only real new map we've seen open up on a server in a couple of weeks...still I recommend getting some friends and playing in it before it fills up. All these new zones and they are all running the same old maps. 

With all due respect to the views of the MMG, I think it would be wiser to make all maps explicitly public domain and instead of going after the people who use them without permission, go after the people who take old maps and cut them up and splice them together without credit to the original artists. Let's *play* in some of these damned things.

It has occurred to me that I can make mp3s of some of the music on my Playlist page, if it interests anyone?

I haven't changed anything so you can stop reading the page now. :) Actually I might add a new thing in Playlist about a certain Lull album I have been listening to, but I'm kind of tired. I think I may write some fanfic soon. It always seemed like a bad idea to me but I think I've come up with an interesting take.

Let's not jinx ourselves here, but I think I might get my Dueling Zone map hosted in a zone. :D

Well, I'm updating earlier than I said I would. What do you want?

Sorry about the delay. I spent the weekend deprocrastinating. If someone ever asks you to do shot breakdowns for a script, never make the mistake of assuming that it's going to take less time to do this than it did to write the actual script. Jesus Christ what an awful experience. That and I spent several days working on some other stuff and just haven't been able to update much. Strangely enough, Idid play a lot of Subspace, but then I also took time out for food and other important biological needs. The fact of the matter is that about 10 people read this page anyway and I talk to half of them on IRC anyway. ;P Anyway sorry to be a flake.

I finally reviewed the new album in the funkydesertbreaks series, a great and unusually classy DJ mix which I like to listen to in Speed Zone. You'll find this and a short review of Etnica's Alien Protein in the Playlist section. Leo ripped some sounds from the new verssion of Subspace and there is a new Files section for that, or just get it off of the main page pointer. I haven't worked on my map and haven't been doing much playing in the new trippy zones but may have something up about them later in the week.

That official review of the retail release of the game is coming, still, and expect a little guide to Alpha Zone H2, which I have discovered recently. :)

Starcraft isn't out. Fine. I'm going to play Doom. I mean Quake. Mlah.

Next major update will be Tuesday. Sorry to flake on y'all but I got work to do. :[

Next major update will be Tuesday. 
Sorry to flake on y'all but I got work to do. :[

I'll put up a full review soon, mainly for the purpose of explaining the game to my friends but also just for the record.

Also coming, a review of Moonshine's newest DJ mix which is a companion to DJ John Kelley's series and also makes for great Speed Zone mood music.

And I hope to have the map for my upcoming Tiny War Zone up soon.

It has a title now: Green Sun. :)

Also, a bit about TimeTrip's new zone and map.

It's been a bad few days

It's been a bad few days

It's been a bad few days, if you'll excuse the lack of updates. My li'l online community lost a good friend in a horrible pointless tragedy. Rydia would have been a member of our squad...so if I may be so bold, the game has kind of lost something too. None of this really matters, though. The point is that the sweetest person I've known in eight years online has vanished from the earth for no reason at all. What a fucking waste.

All thanks to Leo for ripping the mine sounds I'm using here. I really wanted them badly. Leo is not a good pilot but he is a great player. Too bad he doesn't listen to me and is so interested in being a great pilot. A lot of great pilots are terrible players. All is forgiven, however, because I am in love with these L3 wavs. :)

I finally got my retail copy of Subspace. I don't know who I was talking to who had said it was a shoddy package. Some fool in a Terrier, I think. It's the nicest package I've seen for a game since the Golden Age when Infocom put everything in some special souped-up packaging. A slipcase with nice cutouts and the ships showing through from behind. Nice blurbs all over it, a pretty paper wallet for the CD not unlike the packaging for Titantc: Adventure Out of Time, *two* instruction books, the first being a well organized guide to the game in general, the other being a nice big strategy guide taken largely (or maybe entirely? i haven't looked at it carefully yet) from Rincewind's guide. This could have been left out entirely and no one would have been upset because the cd-insert manual is more than adequate. Anyway, I had gotten it into my head that I was going to be getting a cd between two pieces of cardboard, no box at all, blah blah, but it's clear to me that it was put together with a lot of love in mind. Go VIE.

I'll put up a full review soon, mainly for the purpose of explaining the game to my friends but also just for the record. Also coming, a review of Moonshine's newest DJ mix which is a companion to DJ John Kelley's series and also makes for great Speed Zone mood music. And I hope to have the map for my upcoming Tiny War Zone up soon. It has a title now: Green Sun. :) Also, a bit about TimeTrip's new zone and map.

I didn't do much to the page today.

I didn't do much to the page today.
I didn't do much to the page today. I was gone a lot, plus a friend of mine from the Cafe Eblana is in the hospital after a bad car accident and we've all been occupied worrying about that. =[  I'll probably start work on a few things tomorrow plus increase the size of the Playlist section. I'm pulling teeth in my Tiny War Zone map, so that should be done soon. I need some more editorial pieces about the game...send em to me. ;)

The Dark Zone has gone through an interesting change; the map is now much like that weird level-detail museum we saw at Warzone for a while, only this is full of some nice choices of map elements from various zones, and they are arranged somewhat logically. The balance still seems pretty much the same and this is still probably the most enjoyable weird zone open right now.

Last time I checked, Shine World was still gone and I have no idea what has happened to it but I assume there is news on the boards or something. I will have to check that. The map that Starseed made for it is in Pure Hell now and it just doesn't work there. With Pure Hell's out of control settings, the neg game in the spiral which was once fun it just a pain in the ass, and the red chase isn't much fun either. I like Pure Hell but it needs to be toned down a little, especially with such a complex map.

The Minefield's first Lame Zone of the Week Award goes to Chaos Combat.. That's with two peiords. "Chaos maddness in a firepower Chaos Style zone. What the hell is Chaos Style? I don't know if Demo[GOD] was inviolved in this directly, but he was the only person in the zone when I entered and vulched me while I was typing something to him, so he *probably* had something to do with the rest of the zone. I don't like to knock on people who are hosting, but this thing had no thought put into it whatever, with bases obviously intended for War Zone but also unusable for them. Everything about the zone was bad, the host came in and had nothing to say to anyone. These are the kind of people you find on IRC, who you ask a question about their nick or channel and they say "?" and then leave. F18-Hornet^, one of the admins, came in, flew around for a while, and said nothing, the other one has a ^ in his name also; the map is by far the worst I've ever seen in the game--and I wouldn't make a big deal about this except that these people put so much time into making little designs out of the tiles; they even seem to have made a new tileset for this purpose.

Seldom Asked Questions

Seldom Asked Questions

• Seldom Asked Questions found and up. A very preliminary Playlist section is up if it wasn't already. Added new pieces to the Opinion page--lad stuff from me and Jarkom. The original posting of "You Know You've Played Too Much Subspace When..." by The Jolly Roger. News Archive is active now, though obviously all that's there is the BS from yesterday.Moved things around a little. Begun work on the Mapmaking section including some pics of my upcoming maps. Enjoy.

• Dark Zone is awesome. :) Shine World has been the best of the new privately run zones, and arguably still is, but is on one hand a pretty traditional game and on the other hand a little bit too wacked out for my tastes. Dark Zone has achieved a nice balance where most of the euphoric crazy-settings zones are frustrating in one way or another. It's not *all* blown out of proportion; the Chaos West map is there and, though little of it is being used, turning out to be a great arena for super momb games. Plus I get to mine a lot. :) The mind limit is like 30 or something. Initial bounty is high but green is scarce, so staying alive at higher bounties becomes increasingly difficult. While I'm not a huge fan of tweaked settings and prefer to green up from 0, there's a nice dynamic here that may make it the answer to the dying Speed Zone.

• I am considering maintaining small pages on individual servers once they go up. Any thoughts? I also need some sounds and images of L3 mines. Any help would be much appreciated. Anyway, it's my birthday today and it sucks so far. =P I've messed around enough with the page for now. Please write or IRC memo or ICQ me or something if you like or hate the page or have suggestions or submissions or can help. And I don't suppose it's too late to say welcome to my minefield. >:)

Welcome to my minefield. :)

Welcome to my minefield. :)

This page went up unofficially on December 1st, 1997 at 3:00am PST.

I didn't play Subspace today or even talk much about it, just did this, and not for very long, so I guess I don't have too much to report. Welcome to my minefield. :) Oh yeah, tomorrow is my birthday! :)

I need an apostrophe made out of L3 mines, please. Against a white background. You get the idea. Thanks. ;)