<berrie> e's away
<SoSD> Oh, damn.
<berrie> wasting raiders or somethig like that
<SoSD> I wanted to smirk at his tendency to slaughter innocent villiagers.
<SoSD> Oh well,
<berrie> they're not innocent!
*** SoSD is now known as MostyAway\SoSD
<MostyAway\SoSD> I bet he killed the COWS, too.
<berrie> they elected a dumb sheriff
<MostyAway\SoSD> Murderous whore!
<berrie> slaughter makes you hungry
<MostyAway\SoSD> I bet he killed the poor beggar that watches the cows.
<berrie> damn homeless
After the flood all the colors came out.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
22 September 2000
Saturday . . .
This is going to be fun if it works out even just a little. I'm keeping it simple to start out with, but we can always make it more complex and involved if there's interest. I think I'm going to call it Imperium.
See, I've been playing a lot of world building / resource management type wargames. Civilization, Dungeon Keeper, Starcraft, even a little Dune II. (Alright, it was Dune 2000, but only because I can't find my copy of Dune II.) So some of this may ring familiar...
What I intend to do is split up the players into as many teams as is reasonable, and at the beginning of the game, each team will claim one of several outpost-style bases situated around the the map. This by means of a Turf flag located inside.
After you've secured your own base, you'll want to start thinking about taking someboy else's. Should you succeed in gaining control of an enemy team's base, that team will humbly join your empire. And so on, until only two teams remain--at which point the two empires will have a showdown.
To avoid an anticlimactic final battle, a timer will be set once the losing team has been pushed back to a single base. If they can hold their last outpost for five minutes, they win the game.
If I don't show up, call Verizon up and yell at them for selling shitty DSL service. I'll upload a prototype map early so the game can be played anyway should someone decide to salvage it.
Cats . . .
Please don't declaw them. Your furniture is not that great, and those are their fingers. Not nail, but bone and muscle cut off behind the first knuckle, and it's believed by many that the pain never really goes away.
To say nothing of the fact that the poor sucker who winds up adopting the helpless creature because it had the sense to run away from its previous owner ends up paying for a second operation to remove new, evil bone and nail that grows out through their poor, fucked up little paw pads because the first veterinarian screwed up the initial operation.
<einexile> Golbez, want to help me and berrie overthrow the hegemonic imperial american seven headed beast?
<berrie> seven?
<berrie> hey
<berrie> i only agreed to take on a six headed beast
<berrie> where'd the 7th come from?
<Phyrian> It was just created by an executive order
Sky falls; you feel like it's a beautiful day.
Don't let it get away.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
15 September 2000
My absence . . .
. . . has to do with my sudden, unconscious lack of interest in maintaining a web page whose hosting may may or may not depend on a certain individual's personal opinion of the content here. Long story very short: For the record, there is no bad blood of any kind between myself and hedcase1, who was the target of my JOKING accusations about Subspace.Net this last Sunday. And to anyone blind enough to miss the gratuitous and utterly obvious pro-GameAddicts sentiment overflowing from those remarks, there is no nice way to say this, and I'm not going to waste my time looking for one: blow me.
I remain a charter member of the GA Network Rabid Fan Club, minus the individual in question.
SCF tomorrow
Fun scen type contest in a nifty Anna-Puma 2Fort thing, which should essentially be a very, very nasty powerball game...and a bitchincool brand new GiGaKiLLeR map for the new week. Oh, and other stuff if there's time. 3:00pm Eastern in SSCX SCF West, like the top of the page says. And by "tomorrow" I mean Saturday, so to you that might be today. Open to everyone, as always.
<berrie> the us gov't will not collapse
<berrie> it must be pushed over!
<berrie> like cow tipping
Cool water runs through the ground.
The ocean blends with the air.
Throw yourself in the fire.
There's nothing solid around here.
N e w s o f t h e D a y
10 September 2000
Not my fault
Either Verizon sucks or Japanese hardware manufacturers suck, but somewhere between my notepad and your browser something is broken and I can't get online much. Read in 2600 recently that Verizon registered some 700+ anti-verizon domain names. When 2600 came up with one Verizon hadn't thought of and registered it, Verizon accused them of cybersquatting. Yes, that's cybersquatting exactly. How are we supposed to start hundreds of web pages that criticize our own company if you troublemakers buy a few of them?
Anyway, I'm neither here nor there, nor something. Will post when can.
Scenarios and maps
I'm designing a ton of new scearios (okay: three) but the problem is they all need bots to moderate them, so you may never have the opportunity to forget about them and/or spec in Pro League instead of showing up. News as news develops, or something.
The thing I was planning with Puma will happen next weekend if all goes right. I simply could not make it on this weekend to discuss it. His map will remain up in SCF for another week. Words has it Chaos might pick it up soon.
ZippyDan tells me he's uploaded about a thousand maps to various subarenas of Powerball. (A few of them of them are mine.) If your travels take you to PBZ be sure and have a look at sumirp's kick ass (unfinished?) map as well as the rather ingenious diagonal map by The Romulans, who authored the official map.
RPG stuff
Fallout increasingly reminds me of Legacy of Kain. Incredibly fun, possibly the greatest game ever made, but DAMN is that game stupid and annoying. A posse that joins me at the entrance to an enemy installation, but without explanation refuses to enter. A dog who will not leave my party, follows me even if I lock it in a room, and insists on running in and out of deadly force fields. All this and more, yours free with the best entertainment value outside of the Bangkok red light district. (It lists for like $12 or something.)
Speaking of which I'm getting pretty sick of gaming sites (and sometimes even magazines that should know better) writing of three and four year old games as if overwhelmed by nostalgia. As if we have come so far. Why, remember Quake! Way back when! I just did a Google search on +fallout +dogmeat +annoying (53 pages returned) and came up with a column entitled Look Back which offers "a trip down memory lane" regarding a game that came out, when, October of 1997? Pffthhh. Good column though anyway. The nostalgia thing is just running a little thick these days for some reason.
Corrections and omissions
I recently posted wrong information about both hallu and Mackieman, but for the life of me can't remember what exactly. Anyway, whatever I said about one or both of them was either not true or only sort of true, or it was true but you either weren't supposed to know it yet or weren't supposed to know it ever. It's a Subspace thing. That, and there are actually sometimes two powerballs in Powerball. Their sexy bot spawns and removes them at will, and that's a fact.
Another goofy merger-thing
Well the NMEbase-DS98 fiasco was easy, but this looks like a little bit more of a challenge. Let's see if I can translate here....
I am very pleased to announce that Subspace.Net will be joining the PC Gaming Network effective immediately. I will also be joining the staff there at PC Gaming to help develop and build that site and the gaming network itself.
I quit, and Subspace.PCGaming.Com is closing.
Due to this new role, I will be handing over day to day operations of this site, Subspace.Net to the one and only Yazour... [snip] He will be responsible for maintaining the site, adding new accounts, new features and continue to keep Subspace.Net the successful Subspace site it is.
8025: A Spec Freq is closing and/or moving back to GameAddicts Network, and Yazour is bored out of his mind. Did I mention I quit?
Subspace.Pcgaming.Com will be merged with Subspace.Net to increase our content and features and to be able to provide the best possible Subspace site we can.
Subspace.Pcgaming.Com is closing forever, and Subspace.Net will be replacing it simply by continuing to exist.
I am very excited about this opportunity, especially for Subspace.Net itself as it will only help increase Subspace's exposure to the gaming world and hopefully this new partnership will enable new gamers to come and check out this game.
GameAddicts Network sucks donkey balls and we at Subspace.Net hope everybody there dies. So long, fuckers.
By the way, just so you know, I am only joking. In all honesty, I would not compare this to the DS98 mess at all except that I think it's kind of sad we'll probably just lose an old standby Subspace page without really gaining much else in its place. Hopefully I am wrong, and knowing hedcase I probably am. At any rate I do wish you hepcats the best of luck but I couldn't resist taking a jab at ya, sorry. ;)
C 5:hallucination> did you put something in Anna Puma's water?
C 5:hallucination> he made a rational post on the cze board
Is it written in the stars, upon the Milky Way,
we must burn bright before we fade away?
Special Boring Update
6 September 2000
The last great rock band of the 20th century
Well, some people have said that anyway. I don't really agree with them, but they're not too far off the mark either. godspeed you black emperor! are a collective of something like 20 (I am serious) musicians from Montreal, Quebec who record some unbelievable crazy and beautiful music. Crazy epic guitar-based monstrosities full of weird found sound and mini-songs. Just take my word for this and put aside an evening to nab one of their tunes from this nifty page at the University of New Mexico. (Everything on it is live or otherwise rare and not available for purchase.) I emphatically recommend the second track from the bottom, Hung Over. Be warned: It's 25 megs. Then again, so are most of their other songs.
I played Subspace two days in a row
I swear I did. Yesterday I played Powerball. Powerball is fun! I always enjoyed it a great deal but it was especially refreshing since all of the other fast paced VIE zones are dead. Not that War and Chaos can't be fast paced, but they aren't unrelenting in the way that Powerball, Running Zone, and (less often but more severely) Turf Zone were. The zone suffers a little from the absence of a second powerball (which I had always considered a stroke of genius) but benefits from one hell of an elaborate scoring system. I should know more about this before writing about it, but I don't. I just thought I'd mention my knee jerk reaction here since my impression is that a lot of people think Powerball is either dead or entirely about ultra-serious league play, and neither could be further from the truth.
On a related note, I visited A Small Warzone and found it healthier and more fun than I've seen it since its very early days. Increased freedom of team size & organization, added to what may be the best small flagging map since Scenarios of Irony kicked the bucket well over two years ago--roomy for combat but full of the traps and bottlenecks that make ASWZ what it is when it is at its best--these things have done the zone a world of good. A great number of factors which I feel have spread too dramatically and negatively affected the feel of Subspace overall, are gone now from this zone. Not that ASWZ was ever a bad zone since mDK took it over around two years, ago, but God bless whoever cut out its controlling little heart and set the players free to make all the trouble they want. Trouble is the whole point.
Oh dear
I wrote past midnight and so have technically missed yet another update. Bah. Oh well, I had a little more to say anyhow.
An eternal state of flux
Anna-Puma has sent me the 400th draft of his Chaos map (which he alleges, once again, is the final version) and I'll be putting it up in SCF tomorrow for your camping pleasure. I say camping pleasure because I successfully talked him into burrying a soccer goal deep in the treacherous bowels of the maziest of mazes, which happens to be a kick ass but out-of-the-way corner of space you're too lazy to fly to in a normal zone that doesn't have cool powerball bases.
More music
The new U2 song owns. I mean, it's just really really solid. That stuff that Brian Eno was saying about joy and moving forward towards simplicity and beauty? They pretty much nailed that. It's called Beautiful Day and is on the radio and here and about. The new album is scheduled for a late October release. Ohh, that hurts to type. October. OOH.
Speaking of U2, an ignorant and pretentious would-be asshole Rock Critic referred to Achtung Baby as "cut-and-paste post-modernism". Are you just going to sit there on your ass and let him get away with that?
Other pick of the week or month or whatever. A song called Voyage of Bran, by Brendan Perry (formerly of Dead Can Dance, opposite Lisa Gerrard of Gladiator and The Insider fame, among other things). It's a bit of a pansy song, but it has a lovely, quiet grandness to it that makes me want to see Gladiator again, except for the war part and the gladiating part. Meanwhile if you're curious to hear what Lisa Gerrard was up to back in the day, look for some of her early DCD songs. Cantara and Summoning of the Muse come to mind as particular standouts.
<cov\bla> e rules
<cov\bla> he will be an excellent cranky old man
Now some of us are weak, and some endure
And some people live their lives with a violence that's pure and clean
But I saw a man cry once, down on his knees
In the corner of a darkened cell, and his pain meant nothing to me
But I was younger then, and young men never die
When I walked out in the sun I was strong, clear minded, and blind
N e w s o f t h e D a y
4 September 2000
Saturdays
It seems that a whole mess of different events are starting to be crowded into Saturday nights these days. I'm not a big fan of conflicting event times plus I'm not certain of what Mine GO BOOM's plans are lately, so let me just say this. Come to the SCF on Saturdays at 3:00pm Eastern time, and your wildest sexy dreams will be made flesh before your very eyes.
For the neat future, I am planning a scenario which is technically impossible to run or play, so that should be fun. This weekend I'm putting up the revised version of my new map for the morning, then there will be some more amazing crazy Anna-Puma stuff. I guess you could call it a scenario. Maybe not. Watch this space for details.
Anyone want to help out? Bunch of lazy shits.
Addendum
I neglected to mention yesterday, that it's too bad Abso's such a flaming lamer. His heart is calloused from the constant chafing caused by all the memories of the rivers of neg blood he has spilled. That part slipped my mind for some reason. It won't happen again. ;)
Sagely advice for this week
Please remember to love one another. Love your brother, love your sister, love the man on the street. It's the only way we as a society, as one Human Race if you will, can hope to efficiently spread disease. Thank you for listening.
<OMORFOS> then mporo na mpo tora xeris kanena kolpaki
<OMORFOS> ?
<jim\work> truly morfos, I agree
<jim\work> I can't believe it's not butter either
Where has all her life blood gone?
Will you ever seen?
Even if she understood, is it written that she should?
N e w s o f t h e D a y
2 September 2000
Ownage
Anna-Puma's new map is superb. It's up in the SCF and we played in it some. Super Chaos material; too bad Chaos Zone will NEVER GET TO USE IT, since I now claim it as my personal property. ;) It'll be up for the next week, plus many weeks in the future. (I'm switching off every week from now on.)
I think the best thing about this map is actually something that never occurred to me as an important element of good mapmaking, unfortunately. Namely, the best stuff is in the outer areas, thus discouraging a concentration of action near the center. Because of this, the map has some of that old feel of roving around a very large area and hunting through the outer sections of the map. Hopefully we can get some more people in there throughout the week and have some base wars in the extreme outer regions.
Masters of Chaos
I'm real sorry, I used to think this was a cool event, and maybe it was, but I was there today and it was lame. No, the contest is not innately lame--it is a very good idea and a well designed system of rounds. It may even be that there's nothing especially wrong with letting people go and hide in a safe zone after they've acquired a kill--but there is indeed something wrong with that aspect becoming a big part of the game, with some really undignified players lasting into the final rounds while the ballsier participants either took on an unequal risk in fighting even though they'd already gotten their kill, or found themselves unable to find someone to fight.
This was made worse by the fact that some of the people who had acquired their kill for the round (and could thus legally sit in safe doing nothing) would come out of the safe zones to start shit and then head back to the safes after having wasted the time of someone who needed an opponent. It is a bad setup which whittles the participants down not to the best, but to a few of the very best pitted against a bunch of lamers who aren't fit to polish their shoes but can survive on sheet cowardice and luck for the better part of a game.
As a result, the game ended with an uninteresting duel between a superb player and a hapless coward, and was not fun to watch. Having said that, I will say that though I haven't been to a lot of MoC events, I envy the quality of the arena in general as it seems like a far less hostile crowd than I've dealt with personally or seen other people deal with in their own events.
No doubt much of this is owing to the fact that Absocold is the quintessential "people person" and frankly walks on water, but part of it is also the fact that Chaos has an uncommonly agreeable player base. Even the shit talkers and general purpose assholes seem like swell people when you cut through it all. Maybe that's why the zone continues to lose popularity.
Politeness and class are passé in the outlying sectors of our crumbling empire, and it's only a matter of time before the heretic rebels lay seige to our shining capital city. Or something. Anyway they can have Anna-Puma's map if they want, but only if I get the Battle Drone in return. I mean, FOREVER, so that I can lock it up in my sheepy dungeon and throw away the damn key. :)
Okay I keep trying to think of something else to say after my two entries but I guess I'm never going to be able to do that again. I'm excited by the notion of a Fallout MMORPG as discussed briefly in this recent interview with Chris Taylor at Vault 13. Oh yeah, there are new screenshots from Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel up at GameSpy. Yummy. And now, a few friendly reminders. The SSC is not hosting new zones. Hyperspace is not coming out soon. No one is releasing the source code to anything. Infantry is not dead. And no, he's not cheating; you're lagged.
<berrie> all the stuff i own will conveniently fit into a small suitcase
<berrie> except for all the big stuff Love will save you from the evil and greed of ignorant men
And love will save you from the guilt you feel when you betray your only friend Love will save you from yourself when you lose control And love will save you from all the lies your lover told you But it won't save me
N e w s o f t h e D a y
1 September 2000
Mappy Saturday
Brand new ass kicking map by Anna-Puma is makes its debut run in SSX SCF West tomorrow afternoon. Show up around 1:00pm Eastern time and help us break it in. Rumor has it this map may be destined for long term Chaos use, but you didn't hear it from me.
Mine GO BOOM was not available to do an event last weekend and has not mentioned doing one this weekend, so there will be no organized event, but pretty much anyone who knows what they are doing is welcome to give it a shot.
Talk to me early in the day if you are interested. Next weekend I'll have the semi-final cut of the long awaited Lunar Subterrane map ready for y'all. Maybe. I'll be good, I promise I'm going to keep these updates short in an effort to prevent myself from dreading work on this page.
I don't have much to say anyhow as I'm still spending the bulk of my game time chugging along through the greatest work of art in the history of Western civilization, Fallout. Speaking of which, I have a date with The Glow. Goodnight my tiny spaceships.
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