March 2000

El Blazer> I HAVEN'T SEEN A SVS BURST FOR ABOUT 6 MONTHS!

I am waiting for the sun to go down

I'm impatient for the stars to change

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
31 March 2000

Tonights leetish event

Another run of SSPG Warzone West's Squad Wars event is set for 9:00pm Eastern time (same as last week) and will run about two hours. Zone sysop dude22 has been careful to point out that everyone is welcome, so if you don't have a real squad to play with just round up a posse and pretend to have one. divine has started an ASWZ squad, and on behalf of him, the ASWZ administration, and all its players I would like to challenge all you PUSSY WANNABE copy zones out there to show up and prove that you are half the men we are.

The WZW page recently moved to Subspace.Net. If you haven't played West before, the page features a short guide by Eeth Koth to the classic WZW map by rodvik. Rumor has it that Juan made all of rod's maps, but further rumor has it that Juan never existed in the first place, so we'll call it "the classic WZW map by rodvik" until you can come up with something better. :)

Subspace Planet is open

The new SS page announced earlier this week has gone up. For the moment it's just a quiet news page for the most part, but the structuring of it promises a site overflowing with all sorts of juicy content. Maybe. Watch this space.

And yet another Hyperspace site !

Hyperspace doesn't even exist yet and already it's more popular than Subspace. :P Touting itself as "The Voice of Hyperspace", Bombstar has kicked off to a good start with a decent size staff and a nice design. By the way, despite my kicking and screaming to the contrary, HS is apparently going into closed alpha fairly soon, as delays caused by a switching over of programming duties seem to have been minimal.

Mackieman is an ass

Not only is Pikapoo not an ass, but Mackie can't pronounce my damn name.

FOR THE RECORD!

    1. EYE neck sile'
    2. INE eggs isle'

Take your pick. :P

Sheepy Wonderland

Same sheep-time, same sheep-place, only now with more rubber tubing and twice the bleating! Tomorrow's event is Armada. Nuff said. Come early and bop around the Sheeprush map a little.


    With the proper research, binoculars, tear gas, chains, hemp ropes,
    and hidden dungeon basement rooms, NO woman is unattainable.
            - Dariakus

    Why are there so many songs about rainbows,
    And what's on the other side?
    Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
    And rainbows have nothing to hide.
    So we've been told and some choose to believe it,
    I know they're wrong, wait and see.
    Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
    The lovers, the dreamers and me.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
30 March 2000

Boy am I ever out of it

Okay, so we have't been able to run water since I think it was Monday. The details are too gross for an international audience but suffice it to say that if we run any more water, the flow of water is going to reverse in an unknown capacity and with consequences which we shall not consider.

Anyway, so there's a yellowjacket nest in the ground near the area where the one dude has to dig around, and part of what the diggy guy needs to do is make sure there's not a 40 foot drainage pit for the bee guy to fall into and die. The bee guy thought it was a wasps nest despite having been told they were yellowjackets, so he doesn't have a "bee suit". Get this. The nearest"bee suit" is apparently around 60 miles away.

What's the connection? These people all have that silly frog voice. I don't get it and I probably never will, but somehow I think that stuff like lying to people over the phone, not returning calls, and making up excuses as you go along somehow gives you the frog voice, the way certain activities will give you the gay voice, the realtor voice, and so forth. Or is it a selling point in some circles?

There. I've vented.

Nice nice shoutcast stream 216.32.166.79:12550 if you're fishing around for something new. Good evil drum n bass music and that sort of thing.

How many readers does this page have? Iknow it gets about 110 hits on a good day and since I usually update late at night and never update twice, probably most of those hits are from unique users. Could maybe a third of you email me and let me know when I should run my damned events and what they should have in them that would get you out of bed early enough in the late afternoon to come to them? Thanks. :P Seriously, it's just occurred to me that of 1/3 to 1/2 of the readership of this page showed up to these things, there would be some mad big historic fights to enjoy.

Or I can just run eight-man elims for the rest of the year. I'm fond of that also.

Anyway, so I haven't been playing much Subspace, and have tried not to be home much either. So if anyone needs me I'll be asleep on my parents' couch listening to the Magnolia soundtrack. This is your friendly neighborhood vowel, signing off.


I laughed, I cried - it was like playing Everquest while getting blown.
- spanky

Just when you think it's over

Just when you think it's done

Out of every nowhere

You never see it come

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
29 March 2000

Everything is falling apart

If I don't update, it's either because my ISP sucks now, because I fell into an undocumented 40 foot drainage pit in my front yard, or because I was stung by the wasps near there. Probably the ISP though. That's also why the rest of this update is probably going to have little or nothing to do with Subspace, or any other game for that matter.

Music

Okay, here comes the rest of my update. Sorry for the mess.

Magnolia OST. My God this is the best music I have heard in a long, long time. I now have a more acute understanding of how this movie about an old media mogul dying from cancer and a cop going out on a date managed to keep me at a level of suspense comparable to what I experienced in The Shining. When I learned that the composer Jon Brion had produced Fiona Apple's recent When the Pawn... I was hardly surprised. This music is that tight and that arresting, the sort of stuff Bernard Herrmann might have written had he hung around with Philip Glass. Unrelentingly Hitchcockian but at the same time melodic and gorgeous. Subtle though. Lots of nice stuff happening in the background with percussion and low bass, comparable to Gavin Bryars' more gripping music. Gavin Bryars rules, by the way. Check out Farewell to Philosophy sometime.

William Orbit's Pieces in a Modern Style. Sweet stuff. I don't much like William Orbit's music, from what I've heard. It's always bugged me just a little, but here he really really nails it. Composers like Barber, Ravel, and Vivaldi are reworked into quiet, beautiful ambient arrangements that avoid every obvious lameness one might fear from such an endeavor. Everything on the CD comes across as a loving tribute, but he usually does this without being overly sweet. Not for enemies of Brian Eno or other evil jaded types. Otherwise give it a listen. I think it's on the Isis stations right now.

Anyone out there keep a collection of rare Boards of Canada or Autechre tracks?

Amazing stuff on thedownbeat right now by someone called Crewmunity. I'm going to have to hunt this one down. It will be kind of sad but also kind of funny when all of the BUY IT! links that these services plaster all over the place to make it look like they aren't really about piracy have gone six feet under. The local record shop is raising its prices already...

And here I am looking at the modem to see if I am still connected. I need some sleep.


<Shanoyu> what a fashion statement
<Shanoyu> kaki pants and a blue shirt

It's no going to stop 'til you wise up.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
28 March 2000

Onei's graphics replacement

The shipset and bomb/icon replacements by OneIFreak, in the works for a few months now, has finally been released, with full rolling on all the ships. (He says the Shark isn't finished but it looks finished to me.) This is a unique replacement set because it isn't based on another universe (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) or even original designs, but rather is a loving reinterpreation of the traditional Subspace ships, loosely based on the VIE designs but with a certain Volkswagenesque cutesy flair. They rock, and traditionalist though I am I might just stick with these. Grab em here. Thanks Onei!

Black Cobra fesses up, quits again, returns again

With luck we have seen the end of this drama. Black Cobra gave up the fight and made some peace on the SSHQ boards early today, offering his apologies. I may have more to say on this topic later (hopefully most of it positive), but right now it's time to upload. But before I go, allow me to point out this telling self-portrait of RedMyst. Perhaps you'll want to refer to it next time you need a staff member or a sound minded collaborator.

In all the unpleasantness, a key news article got deleted from Subspace.Net after Cyberise had a change in heart, feeling he had been a little too harsh. Of course, that's a bit of history down the drain, and being Subspace's resident historian I am thus unhappy. If anyone has it in their cache file, I'd appreciate a copy. I in no way mean to dredge it up and post it here to embarrass anyone, but I never got to read it.

Technicality

It's still the 28th in Hawaii.


<saltygirl> were you serious about going to efnet?
<einexile> if you ask me that again salty im going to be on MSNBC tomorrow all day long
<einexile> with special followup stories for the next week

But there's got to be an opening

Somewhere here in front of me

Through this maze of ugliness and greed

Special Scandal Edition!
27 March 2000

Messing with the Wrong Guy 101

I'm not a huge fan of justice, because it tends to screw up some good things that might have gone according to plan had we only put up with a just little more BS than we already do anyway. I am, however, a medium-to-big fan of justice, because it gives me little tinglies. Don't worry though, the following is not merely a lot of indignant bitching and moaning. It's kind of an interesting story, if you can get to the end of it without having to run for the bathroom.

So, if you're not all caught up, read Black Cobra's posts at Subspace.Net. While you're there you will also want to take a close look at some posts by his friend Critical Condition. They'll be important later.

Next stop, this post to the SSHQ webboard. This is where we left off late last night on this page.

Oh, but what's that you say? You aren't sick to your stomach yet? Brace yourself, gentle reader.

Here is Critical Condition this morning lamenting the overworked and underappreciated Black Cobra. Later we have BC pretending to be shocked that I called him a liar.

From an ICQ conversation with BC yesterday around this time:

    einexile the meek:
          well i meant what i said on the ds98 board
          i prefer that you lied about planning it as a fake retirement than for it to
          have actually been a fake retirement, if that makes any sense


    Black_Cobra:
          I dunno anymore....I really was retiring but then I decided I shouldn't leave

So I guess it just took him 24+ hours to figure out what I meant by "liar".

Oh, but wait a minute. Here's his friend Critical Condition again, trying to calm BC down. The voice of reason allowing that I was right in one way. Thanks for that, really -- your friend, Einexile.

Four minutes later, mind you.

Now I got to thinking about time, and about the fact that this morning I received another ICQ message from BC which I originally mistook as part of yesterday's conversation, because it was dated incorrectly to yesterday. Strangely enough, so was the authorization request I just received from Critical Condition, who identified himself to me as "a fellow Subspace player".

You can see where I'm going with this. Email accounts at the same ISP, a very recent ICQ account, created probably around two days ago. Two and two were almost put together and that's when I found out that BC had had his posting privileges removed at Subspace.Net due to his recent aggrivated and dishonest behavior. The hepcats at Subspace.Net confirmed for me that the IP information for both users was identical. That's right, this nitwit thought he could fool the guy who is running Pro League.

To say nothing of the guy who nailed Bolero.

For someone who appears to be obsessed with this game, Black Cobra would be wise to read up on his Subspace history, to know who runs the pages he works at, and to try suckering someone else next time.

Non-scandal type stuff

I finally quoted myself at the top of the page. Sorry, I know it's poor form but I can't help it. Someone dug that shit up and I thought it was funny. I've decided it's not vanity to quote yourself if you don't remember saying what you said. (Otherwise it's vanity, and also probably not actually funny.)

Sorry for screwing up the radio webcast link yesterday. Thanks to anyone who tried.

Speaking of various sorts of casting, I'll mention on this page when I've updated my shoutcast linked in the left frame over there, so once you are sick of my music it is pretty safe to not listen again until I actually mention dumping new songs into the playlist.

Penny Arcade always rules, but it especially rules today because they have succeeded effortlessly, where so many others have failed, in isolating the essence of Colonel Dave Grossman and his campaign against video game violence. Look here for the actual comic. (Yes, it's a web comic. Yes, web comics always suck, yet strangely Penny Arcade does not.) However, I'm going to have to quote a big chunk of the rant right here because, well, just because I need to.

    You've got America's latest tour-circuit ass-master with an axe to grind
    to thank for today's comic. Of course, we're talking about Dave
    Grossman - check out his website at Killology.com for loads of links to
    his (possibly very astute, hell if I know) written works. Look, I just write
    comics here - I've most certainly never invented a field and then claimed
    to be its foremost expert, or masked a marketing ploy for my new book
    as concern for other human beings - but on the face of it, I think this guy
    is a nut roll.

Right on, Tycho.

Just a reminder . . .

It would be so easy for you to just get this page's fonts right now. You'll be a better person for it, you know.


    Equilibrium defeats Eblana Space Police 12-1
    MVP: Crazy Imp- 6-0
    Nugaa & Toffe> crazy ignored
    Nugaa & Toffe> crazy stole all the kills
    Nugaa & Toffe> wtf wtf
    Nugaa & Toffe> appeal!

You look like the perfect friend

for a girl in need of a tourniquet,

but can you save me?

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
26 March 2000

Coming and going, going and coming . . .

Will it never end? DS98 is going away...no, DS98 is just putting on a new hat. Oh, but Mackieman's leaving. But wait, there's Mackieman now! Hi Mackieman! And there goes Black Cobra. Good riddance Black Cobra, GG fucker, EZ $$$ -- oh hey BC! How's it going? Welcome back. And now there goes XDOOM. Well, man, it was nice not getting to know you I guess. Have a good life until you get back. Which one of these people is Critical Condition? Your guess is as good as mine.

For the whole saga, look here to read BC fibbing about his retirement, then read this to see him fib some more about his reason for coming back. For the first time in my life I respect somebody more now that I know he's a liar. Hey, at least he's not . . .

But I've said enough about that. Haven't I.

i88Gerbils' map

By now you've probably read about the new map that has been running in A Small Warzone lately. (It's in the ?go test arena.) For now I would just like to say briefly that this map pretty much rules. It has a few problems, but then again those problems seem to be what most people like best about it, and there are many strong and very fun aspects which are original, especially the strategic relaltionships between the bases.

While you're there, be sure and complain about goofy 19th century era max arena setting.

Radio Mrs. Vowel

moon bee's excursions, the only radio program in the world you can't miss that comes on at four o'clock in the morning. That's Monday morning, pacific time. Never miss it.

I need a short nap

Part of the radio show thing is I get to wake up at 2:45am. But at least the coffee's good. Sorry for the tiny update. Not that Pikapoo could do any better!

And while I am linking sites I'll never actually read, have a look at Target Lock, Flippmode's new (revamped?) predictions site. Now, that's not to say the page is bad. If I were to read any such page it would be FlippMode's. The problem is that if I did read it then I'd be a hypocrite, and I'd have to go back through the news archives here and delete the dozen or so instances in which I made fun of prediction sites. Hey Flipp, how about since I linked your site now you have to read my page. ;) Keep putting me in that Players to Watch section when you predict my squad will lose and maybe I'll do it again!

Thanks for the extra two points, by the way.

Hey, look

This is getting pretty fun, I like to think.

Musical numbers RULE

Paul Thomas Anderson should have won that screenplay award, but American Beauty rocked anyway. Poor sad Fiona Apple though. :( Spielberg rocks, Angelina Jolie rocks, Thomas Newman is a demigod, Kevin Spacey, Aimee Mann, the Wachowski brothers, etc. etc. etc. Billy Crystal, Nicholson, Beatty, etc. Nice show that was. By the way, The Red Violin is better than all of those movies. Shanoyu thinks so too. Oh, and respect to the Wall Street Journal. eris> you can't take credit for inventing intuitive lameness :) Come on now, why don't you follow my words? Because we're almost done. I'll make it easy at first. I wanna see if you wanna see what it means to be the man with the master plan. Are you the man now? Here we go!


N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y 25 March 2000

 Black Cobra retires - All Out War ends 

Black Cobra posted to Subspace.Net late tonight with the unfortunate news that he has quit Subspace and canceled the All Out War events. This came about as the result of an incident in A Small Warzone about 45 minutes into this week's run of AOW. From what I am hearing, it became very ugly over a short amount of time, and ended with BC finally blowing his top, retaliating against ill treatment by the players with a barrage of cursing and inappropriate mod commands. This game is getting more popular right now, but the truth is that it is always going to be at odds with progress and always fighting to keep a population.

More importantly, where Subspace shines brightest is in its really big games. This is where the depth of its design becomes apparent and players can really be individuals and carve out identities and communities for themselves. Such games cannot happen with a small player base, and it harms the player base when we lose creative and driven people like Black Cobra. The game becomes that much less interesting and that much less dynamic.

We also stand to lose players who develop a distaste for the game as they witness these incidents. What Black Cobra did was reprehensible, but it is possible--and frequent--for Subspace players to deserve behavior that is reprehensible, and to bring it on themselves. The problem is that a lot of stuff gets ruined in the crossfire. People need to treat each other better than this, whether they deserve it or not. Sheepy Wonderland I have no time to discuss my own event this update, but I will say that although a lot of stuff went wrong people were very patient and it made the event fun for me despite my frustration, so I want to thank everyone who came.

Although things were kind of a mess this week, the infrastructure is now in place to (with some luck) make the game super smooth next week. Oh, and I was right about one thing. Thrull's elimination map does rock ass. Try it out in the ?go sheepy3 arena. FFA settings are up. Enjoy.

Oh yeah After almost three years of life, my squad, the Eblana Space Police, have our first ever league match tomorrow. What a sellout am I? Anyway, wish us luck. :P

<Shanoyu> I am not having a microsoft discussion today. All you ever need is to be nice and friendly.


N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y 24 March 2000

Sheeprush !
My apologies to anyone who might have gone into the SCF wondering at the state of the Sheeprush map which I mentioned yestrday I would be updating this afternoon. The map simply wasn't ready. It is close to being ready now and I will be putting it up in the SCF a hour or two before the Sheepy Wonderland event, which is at 1:00pm eastern time. Anyone with a last minute contribution should get in touch with me as soon as possible. Presently I have bases or arenas for Mine GO BOOM, Mackieman, A Small Warzone, GameAddicts Network, Capt Yummy, Pikapoo, and Dead-Fish, plus the SCF lounge and a very special homage to the bottomless well of lameness that is SilentDragon. ;) Regrettably there is no contribution from ZetaSquad because they are very busy pursuing mediocrity in a similar online game whose name we shall not recall. :P Oh well. Sheepy Wonderland should last about two hours, and after that I'll be putting the Sheeprush back up again, so announce your elaborate housewarming parties for around 3:00 in the afternoon. ;) All Out War reminder In case you somehow missed out on Black Cobra's staggeringly massive publicity campaign for this weekend's AOW event, I feel I must point out again that it is NOT a closed game and will begin with a big turret fight that is open to the public. After this there will be a closed match in which previous winners will face off for the title Master of All Out War. This championship match is apparently going to happen at the end of each month. Lord Tsura's event In all the fuss about AOW and the Squad Wars game, I completely forgot about the 100 Flags of Hell game which Lord Tsura ran tonight. Anyway, sorry about that. Hopefully we can soon work out a partnership among this new wave of special events and I won't forget about some of them. :( Minefield Radio The Winamp button in my left frame now points toward my own Live365 stream instead of whatever random stream I happen to be listening to. I tended to leave dead links up for too long anyway. My stream has been going for about two months, actually, but I didn't really have the time to put new songs into it. Some of the songs are a bit buggy, so if anyone has some good pointers about cd access and encoding normalization that would be nice. :) Right now the stream is only about an hour long, but I'll be expanding it over the next few days. There is no set genre; the music is basically a mix of guitar pop, trip-hop and electronic music, the guiding aesthetic being that they are all fairly short and either very catchy or very pretty or both. It's 56kbps so you'll need a cable or DSL connection (sorry). The links list is finally up That's right, kids; Hell itself has frozen over and the devil fish are bumping their little noses against the ice. My links list is finished! Well, it's not finished. It's more like I gave up on the idea of a links "tree" in the left frame and just decided to do it as a full blown page. So it's part done, part not-done, but it's funtional and eleborate and oh so cool. Why would you feed your mouse anything else? Subspace: The Essential Newbie This is a beginner's guide I wrote two years ago. It is unfinished, but I'm posting it as-is just for the curiosity of being a newbie guide written by a newbie, if that makes any sense. I'll update it into a new version sometime in the future. Why I did not post this three years ago when I wrote it, I have no idea. Anyway, here you go. Scenarios section updated . . . maybe I'm actually going to "complete" the Scenarios section of this page because I am pretty much retired from the whole scenario thing. I'll be adding information about the last three or four scens that I did, and eventually include the maps and settings plus instructions in case anyone would like to use them. This won't be for a while, but I'm going to try and get the scenario descriptions done tonight. Another project I am considering is a guide to the VIE scenarios. I never attended any of these and know few people who did, so it will be an interesting research project. If you did attend these, or worked on them, or just know a great deal about them, please get in touch with me so I can pick your brain. I'm offline . . . . . . so it may be that today's update is posted tomorrow, but I don't feel like breaking this track record that is so impressing everyone -- OMG E UPDATED THREE DAYS IN A ROW!! -- so kindly blame GTE for this and not me. ;)


<Oswaldo> Will you have sex with me via the internet? H to the E to the R to the O, and here comes your here HO! Here we go! P to the A to the R to the A, Parappa's the name I rap everyday. 

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y 23 March 2000

The definitive Subspace manual After months of painstaking work, Crummand a.k.a. Zerx, also known to some of us as the infamous sync turret :) has completed his Subspace Manual, an extensive, elaborate guide to the operations of the game that is probably the most comprehensive ever put together.

Partly culled from various sources and fleshed out with original content and illustrations, it is the page many of us always wished we had to refer to but instead resorted to rambling in chat about the workings of the game.

He's even captured the miracle of the minerepel on beautiful 35mm film. Hey, it's Zilla! GG Zilla! EZ$$

Seriously, have a look at this thing. It is bad ass. Squad Wars correction Eeth Koth wrote in to let me know that the flag timer in tomorrow night's Squad Wars event, planned for 9:00pm in SSPG Warzone West, will in fact be 60 seconds as opposed to 90, which means it will apparently be full 100% SVS (unless of course there is circular shrap and a mine limit of 2, heh) so all your angry WZ types have nothing to fear for your sacred cows.

I assume the time to be EST, but I guess we'll have to find out then. If no one's there, come back three hours later. ;)

BREAKING NEWS!!!! 

This just now crossed my desk! Are you sitting down? Are you? Are you sure? Get ready, here is the breaking news. The event is in fact at 9pm eastern time. Well there you have it folks, breaking news right here on the Minefield. It doesn't get any better than this.

All Out War correction, or something I missed this one yesterday. Black Cobra posted to Subspace.Net with news that this weeks AOW event, set in SSCX A Small Warzone, will *not* be solely a closed game for winners of previous games, but will begin with an open turret wars event then conclude with what Black Cobra is calling Masters of All Out War, a showdown between the seven previous winners plus someone else who snuck in because he knows the mods. ;)

As usual, the game will take place Saturday at 9:30pm EST in the ?go AOW arena. Sheepy Wonderland 2 I've decided to number the Sheepy Wonderland events, because why not. The event time will be 1:00pm eastern time, Saturday afternoon. That's 10:00am for you left coasters. (I resent that term.) The base building thing is delayed until there is sufficient interest in the idea, if ever.

For now we will stick with SVS elimination games and Warball, which is not really Warball but just a powerball game without ship restrictions, set in a huge base rather than an open map. We're probably going to use four new maps this weekend, one of them a kick ass elimination map which I just received from Thrull. If you have a soul, this map will give you goose bumps.

Also, assuming I can find the damned thing, we will debut a really nice PB map by sumirp. If he doesn't mind. Or if I think I can do it without getting caught. :)

Sheeprush upload tomorrow I'm updating the Sheeprush page again with a little more information about stuff to watch out for when making a base. There are still a few slots left and I might claim them for myself if no one wants them. Anyway I'll be uploading the map tomorrow afternoon, and right now it's looking pretty boring, so hurry and get your bases to me. :P Also updated the SCF page. Space Junk section is back up My space junk section (see the left frame) is back up after a long hiatus, thanks to SuperFly of the super cool GameAddicts Network.

(Disclaimer: In am their bitch.) This was actually caused by a server move I was warned about but didn't realize would have complex, mind boggling elements such as "consequences". ;) So it's back up for your packratting pleasure. Dig around there a bit and you're sure to find more than a few bits of bizarre Subspace memorabilia you thought lost forever.

<einexile> WOOHOO!! 
<berrie_> what e? 
<einexile> VICCA AND NIKITA LEFT VCA!!!!!!!! 
<berrie_> vca? 
<einexile> WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
<einexile> ::::DD:D:D 
<berrie_> what's vca? 
<einexile> Guess. :P 
<berrie_> a music group? 
<berrie_> a subspace squad? 

I never dreamed it would be like this 

I am the number one ruler of the seven seas 

n e w s  o f  t h e  d a y 22 March 2000 

Another SVS event Chesnut of SSPG Warzone West is planning an SVS flag game for 9:00pm (probably eastern time) Friday night. This will be a standard oldskool WZ game with 10 man freqs and 0 start bounty, with the only exception being a 90 second flag timer. Victory points will be tallied over a two hour period to calculate the overall winner. Players are expected to form frequencies with their squads, so if you don't have a squad find some friends and make up a fake one soon.

Visit the Squad Wars website for further info. Bad news I didn't get into the Diablo II beta test, so with that in mind I would just like to say these few words. Fuck life, fuck all of you, I hate the world, everybody should die, and there is no God. This has been an unofficial tantrum not to be confused with the Minefield's regular quality content. Thank you for reading. I'm in one of my moods again What a sad little directory this is. Zone news It's how this page got started, covering the happenings within different zones and between different players. I've been fighting the fragmentation of Subspace for long enough and I give up.

When in the Balkans, do as the Balkanese do, or something. So I'll probably be a little more focused towards that sort of thing, which means feel free to send me your local zone news, since other news is not usually interesting anyway. ;) Sheeprush I'm going to update the Sheeprush page before you read this, I promise. Blind Io is mad at me . . . . . . for being so nice to Hadar yesterday and not mentioning how great a job the Vangels of Chaos East (known to newbies as Chaos Expert) have been doing since, uh, a few weeks ago, I guess. Just kidding. ;)

In all honesty I do consider CZE to be arguably the best run zone due to the longevity of its staff and the zone's successful holding out against an otherwise anti-SVS trend in the server community. If we could only get them to dump the Battle Drone once and for all. Sigh.

Anyway, visit the CZE homepage sometime, if only to massage Blind Io's horrifyingly inflated ego. ;P * Pikapoo feels dumb because he said SFC

You're all I need -- and maybe some faith would do me good.


N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y 21 March 2000

Hadar . . . still gone 

My favorite retiree recently (alright, it was a month and a half ago) made a long awaited (if low intensity) update to his homepahe, The Wormhole. This was the first real Vangel homepage, set up almost two years ago for Chaos West, and later became more of a personal Subspace page after CZW was closed that September. (I like to think of myself as one of the CZW Vangels although officially I was not.) Hadar pretty much inveted the map vote (although proper credit may go to The^Bone; does anyone remember the chronology here?) and later, in an attempt to compete with Chaos East, risked the zone's skin a number of times in running maps by myself and Mafia and using a modified Shark. It made CZW one of the more enjoyable VIE zones up until its closure. We've apparently lost Hadar to the cruel gods of EverQuest, but his homepage remains as an interesting document for anyone interested in this game's history, and a model for what ought to be done with a homepage when it closes. Have a look at the file section also for a pretty graphics replacement pack and a utility that allows you to bind the F8-F10 and F12 keys in Subspace. For another curiosity, visit BountyBoy's Safe Zone, whose name was the original inspiration for the name of this page. All Out War special showdown game The fourth installment of Black Cobra's Saturday night event series will be a close showdown between the winners of the previous events, and will be held in a subarena of A Small Warzone. With a little civil disobedience, though, maybe we can bully him into running an open game afterwards. :) Black Cobra and I have been discussing a possible replacement of the now defunct Slayfest page at Subspace.Net with a joint page for both All Out War and Sheepy Wonderland, so keep an eye out for that maybe. Speaking of which . . . Pull your damned weight in this game and send me some elimination maps. :P

A bit of new material each week keeps stuff interesting, and I don't always have the time to cut together a new level. Some quick guidelines for anyone interested in making an attempt: Use a nonlinear design (few or no dead ends). Keep to symmetrical design or carefully tested balance. As a rule, you need about 2-3 sectors per player. At every important point, have two approaches and an escape. Carefully vary and balance open and tight spaces. A good doorway is 6 to 8 tiles across. Never narrower than 4. Good tunnels are 8 to 15 tiles across. Never narrower than 6. If you can't fly through without hitting something, open it up some. If you use force gates, make them level 1 (the first tile) to keep the action fast. The bigger a map is the more important recognizable landmarks become. You are using the wrong diagonal pieces. Look again! What the hell, let's call it a contest. Anyone who comes up with a decent map for next weekend wins a prize or something. I don't know what. Someone donate something. :) Sheeprush The first bases in the Sheep Cloning Facility's homesteading project will go up on Friday, so if you are involved in this please get your work to me by Thursday. At present spots are reserved for

Wizard 64

ASWZ

GameAddicts

Capt Yummy

 El Blazer

King Brad,

SQ>Dead-Fish

Mine GO BOOM

and one for the SCF staff.

If I forgot you, be sure and get in touch. Otherwise, that leaves eight spots remaining. I will be putting up some more information at the Sheeprush page soon, so check there if you are confused or don't know what any of this is about and are curious. Meanwhile there is a pretty fly sorta warballish sorta PB game running right now, even if I do say so myself. Map Vault starting up again For the last couple of months I have taken a long break from Map Vault to think about the page's future and because of my increasing disinterest in the subject matter.

I've finally decided to keep the page going and to restart work on it, but it is a job I am unable to do alone given my increasingly narrow involvement in action and strategy gaming. If you have an interest in the mapping scenes for either of these types of game and would like to contribute, or you'd like to be involved in some other way, please contact me.

<Shanoyu> If they aren't civilized people you can show their titties

 no ordinary sin was perfect working order i'd rather sink than swim if i can't walk on water 

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y 20 March 2000

The quiet death of DS98, SNC, and SSHQ Mackieman's apology today at for yesterday's string of events did not go unappreciated, but I cannot even begin to react to the newer post dated the same day. Not 24 hours had passed since the "DS98 is closing" maneuver, with my criticism apparently having had its share of impact. That criticism was not based solely on some doctrine about good form, but had practical considerations tied into the equation. I'm going to be frank here. I don't like or approve of press releases being sent to multiple news sites. I can accept that other pages are willing to pass them on, but I seldom have, and in keeping with that sentiment I feel an obligation not to send out the same stuff to multiple pages.

In this case, I decided to send news items throughout the week to DS98 only. I did this for several reasons, and discussed the strategy openly with Mackieman before. Thus one of the causes of my distress Friday night was that although supposedly DS98 had planed to close down, no attempt had been made to warn me that the only site I'd gone to for help with publicity was no longer going to exist. Surely there are more important things to worry about than a couple of twenty player elimination games, but we'd been in touch every day since Monday of last week. I've accepted the apology and I honestly don't mean this as a slam against Mackiema's character, but I can't help myself. I love that Mackie turned around and did the exact same thing to Minbari. I wonder if he secretly planned to quit Subspace HQ for as long as the DS98-NMEBase axis secretly planned to falsely end DS98.

Maybe that's perverse on my part, but let's take a closer look at this "merger of SubSpace.DS98.Com, SubSpace.NMEBase, and SubSpaceHQ.Com." SNC was dead. Dormant as I have been over the last three weeks, I claim no right to criticize its staff for this, but the fact of the matter is that an increasingly prolific Infantry.NMEBase argues for a lack of interest in Subspace by the NMEBase administration, as opposed to a mere absence comparable to my own, to CybeRise's, to QA Man's, etc.

I also compliment and thank them for not posting a false goodbye in the way that DS98 did. I enjoyed that page and will miss it, but I reject the notion that it is to become a part of SubspaceHQ. In my opinion it has dissolved and will at best have its content salvaged. SubspaceHQ.

What was SubspaceHQ? I don't exactly remember, except that it seemed to change purpose and design every few months, was not intended as a reliable resource for news, and was largely a content page. In some ways it was redundant with DS98, and this was largely by design. The original vision of this page was to act as a community center, but DS98 already functioned as that.

What has really happened here? DS98 has changed its name to SubspaceHQ and will absorb what minimal unique content which that page previously offered, perhaps sacrificing some of its own. Maybe this fits the casual definition of a merger, but it is a depressing and silly merger. A failed attempt at a community center and a dead Subspace page have been absorbed into a long time pillar of the community, and that pillar has taken this as sufficient cause to change its name and start over again. I will not deign to predict its result, but suffice it to say the arrangement lowers my spirits. And now what has happened? The individual who was by far the most prolific writer on the staff has now quit on a dime. The ironic thing is that he appears to have done this exact same thing on Friday at Subspace.PCGaming.Com.

I honestly have no anger towards Mackie, and I wish him luck in what will no doubt be a more worthy pursuit than taking over imaginary gaming networks, but I find it ironic and sad--and perhaps just--that such a large segment of the news community seems to have blindly thrust most of its eggs into one basket, and that now this segment is pretty much history. Who would have thought, six months ago, that by March of 2000 I'd be thanking my lucky stars for Subspace.Net?

The Mapfolio to End All Mapfolios

<Coventry> Still, without the ship sinking, no movie made, no getting to see kate winslet's tit.
It's not going to stop 'til you wise up.

Hi

Well, I told myself I would not let two weeks pass and there I went and did it. Sorry. I do have an excuse though, sort of, that excuse being that I was winding up to the end of school. I am finished now, so I will either have more time to spend on this page and other idle pursuits or less, depending on whether my education actually pays off or was merely a first step on my journey into obscurity. ;)

It helps that I've totally lost interest in both Subspace and Infantry and have been playing Counter-Strike almost exclusively for the last month. (The only exception being TeamFortress Classic; how's that for an exception?) I have actually made my long awaited leap into editing for 3D games and will probably be cranking out some maps for various Half-Life permutations sometime soon. Which reminds me that GiGaKiLLeR, probably the last active SVS mapper for Subspace other than myself and anna-puma, has been getting hardcore into mapping for Quake III Arena. I've not seen his work yet because I lack drivespace to reinstall the game, but will be making space for that soon and getting back to y'all with some highly biased reviews. ;)

And speaking of reviews, Map Vault is obviously quite dead. At least grant me credit that I finally got around to declaring a state of hiatus there. I never intended to be the only writer for the page and would gladly accept any competent help if anyone out there is interested. That aside, it will probably be only a few more days before I restart work on the page.

Hyperspace

I posted a questionnaire to the Hyperspace forums at the HS Dock. If you're interested in mapping for the game, or in the effects the mapping scene will inevitably have on the game's general health, have a trip over there and chime in. The server is usually down because the host sucks, so keep that in mind and check back later if so.

All Out War

I played Subspace today for the first time since the final Slayfest took place at the end of January, and aside from the fact that I have decided ALL NON-SVS ZONES SUCK SHIT, much fun was nevertheless had by all concerned at the kickoff of Black Cobra's new event series, All Out War. I wasn't really expecting a whole lot but was happy to have a somewhat progressive event to go to run by someone other than me (heh) and was pleasantly surprised by how well it was run and by the number of people who showed up. I spent the entire night vulching and otherwise laming, but there's nothing like a good minerep to bring honor to a game, right? ;)

This event series is unique in that it doesn't inhabit any one zone but will be invading different zones each week. This week's event was in SSIA Dooms Day, which I had not been in before. (Nice map there, a little laggy but generally a nice area to fly in.) The next one will be in SSCE NuMuS. Oh, did I mention I owned the little bitches 9 to 1 during the pball game and Evaugh didn't even bother mentioning it on the henceforth-unlinked NMEbase? Screw you Evaugh. :P

The Mapfolio to End All Mapfolios

I've pretty much retired from mapping for Subspace and am working on a final mapfolio for the game. If anyone has last minute requests, this is your final warning. ;) Going through my directories I was actually quite surprised by just how obsessive I've been about this game over the last three years. Shit, I made a LOT of maps. Anyway so it may take some time polishing them all and finishing up the stragglers, but when I'm done there will be a nice big resource in the mapping section here for anyone wanting to use them. Meanwhile, I may be working on some other aspects of that section so have a look in there sometime soon.


Honesty
See you in two weeks. :P


By the way . . .
Thanks much to OneIFreak for the new title image, one of my favorites so far.

Bloodflowers

    <zaurg> YEAH MOTHERFUUCKER. i just killed a big bug that flew in here
    <zaurg> with a sock
    <^PMS> zaurg, you are a mighty hunter
    <zaurg> yes 

"This dream never ends," you said.
    "This feeling never goes,
    the time will never come to slip away."
    "This wave never breaks," you said.
    "The sun never sets again.
    These flowers will never fade."

I spent about ten hours this weekend trying to find the new Cure album in its entirety on Napster. Why? Hell if I know. It's not as if I wanted much to do with them after their last album, and especially after "Wrong Number". But I was curious, and "Maybe Someday" had whet my appetite. I kind of liked it. It sounded like a Cranberries song, but it was growing on me.

Now I know where I'm going to be at 11:59 on Monday night. Bloodflowers might be the best album The Cure have ever recorded.

I say that with no small amount of caution, since I consider Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Disintegration, and Wish all to rank fairly high on that mythical global list of great albums. Without copying the style of the album, Bloodflowers matches Disintegration in depth, honesty, and emotional impact. What's happened here is that The Cure have finally managed to incorporate the pained sentimentality of their sappier Wish and Kiss Me tracks with the anger and confusion communicated by the better songs on Disintegration. Bloodflowers is all rumbling basslines, twisty soaring guitars, emotive chord progressions and harmonics, against a background of untreated guitar strum and rawer drums than the band has ever used before. Robert Smith building on motifs throughout his songs as his vocal melodies change to fit the tone of the section, each verse expanding on the ideas of the last.

Consistency isn't always a good thing. Sameness worked on Seventeen Seconds, but made Pornography something of a torturous chore except to those unfortunate enough to share Smith's 1982 mindstate. That album may be a work of unparalleled genius, but it's as far from cathartic as music can get. By contrast, The Cure's best albums have often divided themselves up internally with songs like "Lovesong", "Primary", "Why Can't I Be You?", and "Wendytime". These tracks provided a rest, and gave the greater album a sense of structure.

Like Seventeen Seconds and Pornography, Bloodflowers refrains from this device, and achieves that magical consistency which marks a truly great album. Seventeen Seconds avoids oversaturation through subtlety; Pornography just doesn't care. It kicks you in the teeth and doesn't waste a second apologizing. Bloodflowers is a more sophisticated album than either of those, and perhaps moreso than any of their albums, because its consistency is modulated with what I can only describe as color shifts. While a single style is maintained throughout the album, the feel of it changes dramatically from one song to the next. Because the album is so carefully and passionately structured as a single work, it achieves that rare wonder of amounting to far more than the sum of its parts. A listener invested in the music might finish the album simultaneously devastated and uplifted.

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I have been rabid to hear the new U2 material for some time now. Aside from my borderline worship of the band, a major factor in my excitement about their upcoming album and soundtrack work came about largely because of comments made by producer Brian Eno at the Belfast festival this last November, as reported in the NME. (Thanks @U2.)

    It's actually dead easy to make melancholy. It's easy to make energy, its easy to make cleverness, it's easy to make intrigue, it's easy to make glamour. But it's very very hard to make joy. To make music that really grips you and lifts you in some way. That's hard. So that's what we're trying to do in some way.

Not for a single moment have I doubted U2's ability to pull this off, especially given their past work with Eno and Daniel Lanois. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" confirms this, and I've been dying to get ahold of the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' The Million Dollar Hotel to hear the other songs they've recorded for that movie. But it's another thing entirely for The Cure, a band with a history of overwrought darkness and inexplicable mirth, out of nowhere after seven years of abject smugness, ugliness, and sarcasm, to emerge with an album as heartfelt and pretty as I had hoped U2 would accomplish. Never, I think, has such a harsh, dark album been so full of joy. Because of this, its beauty isn't restricted by pessimism or sarcasm, as Disintegration and Wish were.

This is not to say that Bloodflowers is a happy album. It's fairly tortured. It's really quite a rocky ride. But there's something about it that speaks to love and hope as The Cure have rarely done before. It should bring tears to the eyes of anyone possessing a soul. All apologies to U2, but I believe may well be the best album of 2000. We've probably no right to hope for another like it.

January 2000

<Golbez> if there's anything we can do, porn, whatever, just ask

How lovely, how sad.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

31 January 2000

Slayfest addendum
Somehow I forgot to thank my new kick ass wife, who spent just about every Saturday night at home with me for a year so I could run those silly events,.and who has always put up with my endless bitching and moaning without ever spitting a single molecule of it back at me where it probably belonged. You'll probably never read this, but thank you just the same. :)

And OneIFreak, jimbobwey, GiGaKiLLeR, and especially Harloch and Mackie and hed1 for the news. You guys rock.

I must back up what Harloch said about Xalimar. The man may be impossible to reach under normal circumstances, but when we really needed him he was there in a flash. Just one of the many reasons I consider SSX to be the best server bank of all time.


Please take note
I realize that SSCE Resistance SVS is very, very screwed up right now. The zone is having some truly anomalous problems which I haven't had time to properly troubleshoot, and because of them the zone is essentially unplayable right now, plus I am unable for some reason to assign sysop powers to anyone including myself playing under another name. I appreciate that people, especially Black Lotus, have tried to play and did eventually alert me to the problem. I have simply been too busy lately to do anything about it, but this will change soon. I intend also to simplify the game some, and to have a traditional style map back up there instead of the goofy Extreme Games Arctos spiral 2fort thing that is in there right now. Just bear with me.


Counter-Strike
This mod just keeps getting better and better. The newest version has ironed out a ton of problems and two new game variants have just yesterday been promised for an upcoming version. One is rather like The Hunted for TeamFortress Classic except without all the silly rocket jumping. ;) The other sounds much more promising, with terrorists starting pinned and required to reach one of several pickup points for safety. To make things more exciting they'll have to decide between a fast break or a more roundabout path which will take them to an armory en route. The CS team released mapping information for these scenarios at the official Counter-Strike page for those interested.

In case anyone still doesn't know, Counter-Strike is a slow paced, team-intensive modification for Half-Life with all the quirkiness you might expect from HL but a level of professionalism and polish comparable to LMCTF or even TeamFortress Classic. It balances highly realistic tactical gameplay (including almost-realistic damage and weapons that actually exist in real life) with somewhat abstract game types and an interesting, effective buying system. It is also just damned cool.

It bears mentioning that one of the people behind Valve's intense support of this mod is Art Min, formerly of FireTeam. This game, from around two years back, never became very successful, and I personally didn't enjoy playing it, but I do remember dealing with Art Min, especially after I decided I wasn't being a good tested and wanted to hand over my beta account to a friend. He was the most receptive and on-top-of-things member of a dev team I have ever come into contact with, and it didn't surprise me for a second to find that he has become so instrumental here.

I still can't make myself play single player Half-Life. It just scares the shit out of me.


Space Junk
I think it was Mackie who mentioned me retiring from Subspace in a slightly more grim light than I had intended it to sound. The simple fact of the matter is I just can't find SS games anymore that capture that huge feel, and increasingly I find that massiveness to be a phantom pain that ruins what is actually fun about the game. I was in Star Warzone this afternoon and found myself oddly having fun and getting bored at the same time. It might have been that I hardly knew anyone in the zone, but then there in itself is a compelling reason to move on. I'm getting an urge lately to put a lot of work into the Space Junk section, so keep an eye out there. If anyone would like to help, give a buzz.


You missed the moon bee show damn you
Every Monday morning at, err . . . well, 4:00am Pacific, actually. Yeah. I'm serious though. Best program in the history of radio, and there is no conflict of interests there or anything when I say that. It's totally unbiased and objective. Bookmark this.


Typos
Too damn tired to proofread this. Sorry. :|


    <Maduin> You see, though, I have this idea that Canadians and Americans
            are exactly alike, except that you can make bacon out of Canadians.

    The Last Dictator to the station crept

    In tattered clothes, he lay down and wept

    Shooks his fists at the world and hissed

    "Is this it? Is this it?

    My farewell delegation

    These few trees, this station that is no station

    That is left, that is mine

    I could have saved you all

    You gave me so little time"

GG

30 January 2000

Captain Harloch's Saturday Night Slayfest
R I P
6 February 1999 - 29 January 2000


End of an Era
With its 50th game running this weekend, Saturday Night Slayfest is officially retired. I no longer have the time or patience, it's become clear to me that the players no longer have the enthusiasm or temperament for the event, and 50 is a nice round number. Also, when you consider that there was no SNS on Christmas or New Years day, these 50 Slayfests amount to a year long series.

Slayfest started a year ago when I approached Captain Harloch about running his Star Warzone events in the SCF. I had become increasingly unhappy with poor turnout and lack of involvement in the TurfNight and Philosophy Club events there, and the War Zone vangels, content to play their game once every five months in their own zone, had overwhelmingly rejected my proposal that they instead play once a week in mine. (Karma, bitches.) Captain Harloch was quite pleased about the offer, because unbeknownst to me, the Dawn of the Dead event held in SCF over Halloween weekend had been his inspiration for the Star Warzone events in the first place. He got right to work on the first scenario, and combining his captive audiences in SWZ and Zetasquad with support from the Subspace news community (which at the time was very healthy), the first Slayfest kicked off with a massive game. I think we had nearly 80 people present that night.

The event was called Clockwork Chaos, and must have been the simplest and most popular regular game we ever did. Eight different teams, each confined to just one ship, in a giant, empty, octagonal arena. This wasn't so much fun if you were a Lancaster or one of the cloaking ships, but it was bigger than fairness. We were there representing our ships, dammit! Because even teams were forced, sooner or later everyone got stuck in a ship they didn't like. I like to think that the one time (at a later date) we were allowed to choose any ship we liked, more than half the arena ended up on the Leviathan team beause a certain mine repeller brought that ship back into vogue. ;) But think what you like.

Each week brought a new scenario, always thrown together in a crazed configging and mapping frenzy on the night before. A few weeks into the series, we settled into a format. I would help Harloch run a big scenario, then Harloch would run Braveheart, and for a while Captain Cohn would run some elimination games after that. These would be my inspiration for the elims I later ran during my own stint at Slayfest MC.

Braveheart was a mad dash down a long tube--everyone in the zone--usually leaving no survivors. We would slam into each other at the center, and everyone's framerate would drop to 0 fps. I'm not kidding when I say that. Just in case anyone tried to survive the mess, Harloch made it so that the first person to die was the winner.

In time, games were added to this, and the map collected more and more weird little arenas. A narrower tunnel, a grid, a giant X. Braveheart evolved into what became known as the Circus, and we'd spend upwards of five ours moving between the different game arenas and playing any number of game types in them.

I think this was when I started making the maps for these events. It really began with the Wormhole Surfing event, which started with a simple enough idea. The flags would spawn at center, surrounded by wormholes which would warp the flag carrier and his pursuers to an unknown space and possibly great vulnerability. I really liked this idea, and set about making what remains one of my favorite scenario maps. To get between the fortresses I placed in the corners, one either had to brave a long vulch tunnel or navigate through a giant structure at the center. Doing this required careful slingshotting and bouncing around the wormholes, and was fairly difficult (a least for me), especially if a fight broke out there. We did an unprecedented number of large scenarios like this one throughout the Winter and Spring of that year. The highlight might have been Harloch and Cuervo Muerte's amazing Micro Machine races, with all its crazy pencils and coins and lego blocks. These races lasted an incredibly long time but people kept coming back for more, for hours on end. I think Pikachu won all of them.

I did a few more of the scenario maps--the zombiesque Necronomicon probably being the best of them--but it was the Circus events that more and more went the way of true collaborations, and for a long time I was making small arenas specifically for the different weird little events that Harloch designed, organized, and ran. He kept adding more of them, and new suggestions came from the players, until there was a large catalogue of these games.

In late June, Harloch first became busy with school obligations, and then got very involved in Subspace Amateur League. This meant that very few member of his squad continued to come to the games, and the same went for other regulars from Star Warzone and Extreme Games. This was fine to a point, because by then it was clear that I didn't have the patience or thick skin required to run large games anyway. With the exception of some of the really big scenarios Harloch ran, this was perhaps the most enjoyable time in the series' history for me, because it meant I could run a lot of small games with simple objectives and fast action, with minimal waiting between matches.

For a few weeks I experimented with different styles, most notably one night when we ran Arctos' trademark Warball game--fully armed ships playing Powerball in much tighter spaces than Powerball was probably ever intended for. We played in his maps, we played in a 2fort that I'd made out of the giant spiral from old Chaos West. I made a map that looked like a giant throwing star and Pikapoo made a map that looked like an H.R. Giger painting. This was also when Khris Kruel first became a really essential part of Slayfest, starting with him patiently keeping score because I could not figure out the propet powerball settings. He would later become a pillar of Slayfest and the reason it ran so smoothly for so long. These Warball games were a lot of fun, but they weren't meant to last. Starting in early July, team elimination became the official Summer "light fare" for Slayfest.

This gave me an excuse to make a bunch of new maps, which is a nice thing. By the end of the Summer I had a cycle of four regular elimination arenas plus was using other people's stuff now and then when it seemed right for the game. With the whole disaster of Running Zone happening during that time and the disappointment of the War Zone revival, these elims were the only things that kept me involved in Subspace that Summer, and I kept them up for quite some time. In fact, they continued into early October, and the last of my eventual six elim arenas was actually only completed a week ago after languishing in a few prototype versions. If nothing else, it was good training for Hyperspace.

The one full blown scenario game we did during the Summer was a real fluke, because it went off perfectly, had a large turnout, and I actually had fun at it. The best and most complex map I'd ever made for the game had been cranked out in a fever-dream nine hours that day, and the action was like nothing I had seen in a long time. It was called Big Bloodbath, and it was the start of what I came to call the bloodbath rules elim, which dominated the remainder of the Summer elimination games. One life per player, each team with a Hunted-style "king" to protect, he powered up with a rabbit flag and thus a tempting offensive asset, all in a nonlinear map with lots of potential for deadly outflanking and narrow escapes.

Things reached a head in mid-October. If Slayfest had become the only reason I stayed in Subspace, Khris Kruel had become the only reason I kept Slayfest going. While it was me who designed and planned most of these events, it was often KK who ran them and it was nearly always KK who kept them running with minimal friction. In late October he announced that he would be leaving the internet. With him retiring, the staff becoming less and less active, and myself increasingly frustrated with the games, I replaced myself as MC with conspiracy theory just in time for my trip to Las Vegas.

The last game I ran in SCF for quite some time was Dawn of the Dead 2 on the weekend of Halloween. Although turnout was good and I enjoyed much of the game, the behavior of the players pretty much sealed my decision not to run Slayfest anymore. The next weekend I was going to be gone anyway, getting married and occasionally looking around Las Vegas for the Subspace Convention which I never did find. conspiracy theory's adoption of Slayfest meant that we had not missed a weekend since the event started in early February.

Then a funny thing happened. With conspiracy theory in charge, I actually gained back some of my enthusiasm. One of the incidents that triggered me handing over the reins was the total failure of a scenario that had been both adequately advertized and run smoothly. This had not happened before. Events had bombed, but usually there'd always been a clear reason for it. I'm not sure of the timeline, but the incident was a major part of me throwing in the towel.

I returned from my honeymoon having missed two reportedly dismal Slayfests. I realized that I had expected of conspiracy theory something that I had always resented having to do myself: both design the game and run it. Long before Slayfest was even an idea, one of the things I considered important to a healthy scenario scene was for the people who designed scenarios to be able to play in them. Likewise, I felt it was not a great idea for the person who had designed the scenario to have to deal with making sure they ran well. This philosophy never came to fruition in that era but was in my opinion an essential factor in the best of the early Slayfests.

Plus I was in a better mood. I had Sasha Vinni's autograph.

So I figured what the hell. I'd had my helping of cold turkey. What harm could it do to simply make scenarios for someone else to run? So I put together something fairly elaborate. We had the Subspace.Net propaganda machine on our side. We were a team. It was going to rock. Well, the same thing happened again. My theory, since I personally received no criticism on this one, is that no one really reads web pages anymore or cares what goes on in other zones. The scenario didn't suck, but about 12 people showed for it, so I found myself running elims that weekend and getting out of the scenario business yet again.

December came, and our propaganda machine had collapsed. I found myself slowly becoming the de facto fourth MC of Slayfest as conspiracy theory increasingly was involved in Infantry. After running two of these with little or no promotion save my own billing messages (for which I am NOT sorry, you jealous league-playing spunk eaters), it actually was returning to being a little bit fun again. The game needed a change, though. I didn't like the fact that I was running it once more, and it was becoming clear to me that the SCF was no longer a useful zone to Subspace, but had become kind of a sad little monument to SVS and to events in general. I decided then to transform the SCF into a test zone for Hyperspace and to move Slayfest into A Small Warzone. ASWZ had been suffering from a low player base in recent times, and it was as close to a sister zone as the SCF ever had.

The first weekend of this new venue--one week ago, that is--proved problematic. It was not going to be possible to change settings without kicking everyone off of the server. This meant that if we wanted to remove elimination mode, we either had to clear the arena or tell everyone to use ?scorereset on themselves. A lot of people lost their scores in the main arena because of this. That game was run by divine.216 and was quite a bit of fun, but my impression overall was that this would not work out in the end. This weekend, the problems caused by how the subgame is set up, plus general reactions to those problems (which would have barely been noticed a year ago) started me thinking that Slayfest's time had really passed in more ways than one. This was cemented by very immature behavior from a number of people who had been around for a long time--long enough to have run their own scenario instead of mine--and who really should have known better.

In my opinion, Subspace has continued a trend I saw growing a long time ago. I realize that this is an ugly opinion--it is not one I formed brashly--but as time passes, I believe a larger and larger percentage of players remain loyal to this game not because of its quality but because of the quality of their machine and its connection to the internet. The result is a whole lot of people who are bitter, immature, and lazy, and who don't care enough about online gaming enough to spend any money on it. I do not claim that this is true of everyone, but I cannot help but conclude that I see it growing, especially when it increasingly rears its head among players I thought I knew.

So to those of you who said that tonight's event killed Slayfest, feel free to consider yourselves right. Know, however, that this was your finest moment. Fifteen seconds of fame before an audience of maybe a hundred Minefield readers. You can take that to your grave, knowing that in life you DID make a difference. It is not in spite that I end the Slayfest series, but your kind certainly don't make the game an ounce more fun for anyone that tries to contribute something to it on occasion. Die soon and come back as someone willing to pull your own weight.

I want to thank the people who helped me all this time, especially those who stuck it out until the last. Khris Kruel, Capt Yummy, Pikapoo, mdK, i88gerbils, divine.216, DEATHMACHINE even though frankly he's an ass (at least he's a loyal ass), and anyone I've forgotten to mention who can't think of a reason why. And of course Mine GO BOOM and Xalimar, without whom we'd have been up a creek on many an occasion. I would also like to thank everyone who ever came to one of these events and contributed to other players' enjoyment of the game, even if it was just by being a good sport. I think a lot of you don't appreciate how fucking rare that is, and I wish you would more actively influence this game. We'd all be better off for it. Lastly, anyone who cared enough to read this entire history. Thank you.

This essentially ends my relationship with Subspace as well, although I'll make an effort not to retire from the game completely, at least not yet. Maybe it'll give me a bit more enthusiasm for the various zones I probably should spend more time in but don't. Meanwhile, I will be working on the Scenarios area of this page to give it some closure, and will be supplying the necessary files so that anyone wishing to run them can do so.

*arena Thanks for coming, see you all next week. %24


    <Shackled> e's everything you want, e's everything you need
    <Shackled> e's everything inside of you that you wish you could be

    In the morning you go gunning for the man who stole your water,

    and you fire till he is done in, but they catch you at the border.

    And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your feet,

    but the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the street.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

29 January 2000

Slayfest blurb
Have you ever wished you could live as a mutant in the radioactive sewers below a ruined city? Have you ever wanted to hunt your fellow human beings for food and clothing? Now you can! This weekend's Slayfest pits your hive of slime-oozing, eyeless, humanoid monsters against a wiley band of slack-jawed, hairy-chested, leather-clad marauders. If they skin your Queen there will be no plascenta to eat! You don't want that, do you?? Or, if you are into leather and chest hair, you can play as one of the marauders. "A Small Blastradius" starts at 10:00pm EST tonight in SSCX A Small Warzone.

(I'm going to go work on the map now.)


GiGaKiLLeR
I dunno if this is common knowledge, but Turf Zone's mapper laureate, who retired from Subspace mapping about half a year ago, has started designing levels for Quake III Arena and has a few of them near complete. To my knowledge none of them have been released but maybe he will let me see them when I have room to reinstall Q3A. ;)


Realism and Counter-Strike
This is rewritten from a letter I sent to someone that couldn't be bothered to either post it or respond intelligently. I thought I'd put it up here for the hell of it. Forgive me if the rewrite leaves some of it a bit awkward.

A few days ago, CS Nation posted a couple of rants on the topic of Counter-Strike's nature exclusively as a team game, and tossed out a blanket condemnation of those who use CS servers to "play deathmatch". Specifically, these rants concerned rushing, claiming that it is totally counter to the team aspect of Counter-Strike, and that furthermore it is an unrealistic act, especially for terrorists. The assumption here was that in a realistic situation the counter-terrorists would greatly outnumber the terrorists, and thus the terrorists ought to pretend going outside their hideout means instant death courtesy of a dozen different computer-controlled snipers.

While CS Nation made a good point about teamplay in these pieces--a point which is somewhat obvious but unfortunately needs to be restated constantly--the assumptions made about rushing are incorrect, and they runs totally counter to the actual nature of CS.

In a realistic situation, indeed there would be another team of counter-terrorists set up outside with snipers, surveillance equipment, and so forth. The last counter-terrorist alive would also be able to radio for a pickup, wait for reenforcements to arrive, and so forth. If we were playing Quake II no one would think of this, because Quake II is not a realistic game. Even traditional Half-Life doesn't get the players thinking: gee, can't I call up the FBI on that phone over there? Shouldn't I be able to set off the fire alarms? blow up a gas main? and so on.

It is precisely because of Counter-Strike's extreme realism, or at least its attempt at extreme realism, that it is much less natural for us to suspend disbelief. The more realistic a game is, the more its flaws stand out. Take Tribes as an example. This is quite possibly the most surreal game that is popular today. While it isn't exactly appropriate to think of its elements as "symbolic" of something else, it resembles a board game, or a classic arcade or Nintendo game such as Zelda, in that you accept the premise, scenario, setting, and visual effects as representative of something else, and suspend disbelief from there. I doubt anyone playing Tribes has ever thought to themselves, "I shot him right in the visor; his helmet shouldn't have protected him." But in Counter-Strike, it is a little irritating to shoot another player in the face and hear the bullet impact against Kevlar, only to watch that player keep firing on you.

Since there are so few such complaints about Half-Life (and a mature player would not make that complaint), it is only natural that instead of suspending disbelief by making excuses for the game, we take the game at its word in all aspects. Counter-Strike is already about extraordinary situations, and an assumption that goes through all of the scenarios is that for some reason neither side has any backup. In the end, it is assumed that the survivors will have all the time in the world to bomb the target or rescue the hostages. Perhaps the crisis is an embarrassing secret; perhaps no reenforcements can arrive for quite some time and the situation is too dire to wait. Is this how the world really works? I don't know, and unless you have top security clearance at the Pentagon neither do you. But it is certainly a long-accepted tradition of the action genre in fiction, in movies, and more recently in games. One can't rationally have a problem with the situations portrayed in Counter-Strike without also condemning the entire action genre.

Whatever the case, this makes things more interesting because, if you can accept that premise of limited time, limited resources, and a secret situation, the terrorists do stand to gain by risking a rush, and likewise the counter-terrorists might do well to wait and see if the terrorists might try such a tactic. Since neither team knows the other team's strategy, each must be more cautious, and this contributes to the spirit of non-recklessness that is why most of us play Counter-Strike instead of CTF or some other team game.

The problem, then, is not rushing or other "unrealistic" acts, but individual players acting recklessly without the support of their teammates. The problem is that Counter-Strike in theory is entirely a team game right down to the endgame, but in practice is is still to some degree a deathmatch. Say what you will about reckless rushing being unrealistic, but it wouldn't be so damned annoying if it never worked. The problem is that, for an LPB who knows how to exploit lag, it can. work. Newbies see this behavior, and sometimes see it succeed. A careful player is, after all, less fun to spectate.

The game's premise and level design can only do so much to enforce its ideals, and I would personally like to see the CS team at least experiment with realistic damage and an enforceable team hierarchy. In a realistic situation, a member of your team who behaved in that way would be fired if he were a counter-terrorist, and probably taken out back and shot if he were a terrorist. Obviously a situation where the team leaders can kick other players off of the server would be a little extreme (not to mention harmful to the game's reputation and fun factor), but I can see where a balance might be struck between realistic punishment and no consequence at all. For example, the team leader might assign subteams, and the leaders of each subteam might have the power to force a rogue player to sit out a match, to forfeit half his money until he shapes up, or to change teams.

This suggestion may sound like one that can't be implemented, but it is indeed the implementation that is an issue, not the principle, and some experimentation with rules and interface for these functions might well result in an efficient and intuitive system that doesn't lend itself to abuse and won't offend players who understand and love the game.

In that same spirit, I think more could be done to make players fear for their own lives in the game. As I said before, the main reason watching someone run in with guns blazing is that realistically he should go down in seconds, but he does not. I personally would like to see this tactic simply made impossible. In the early stages of the game, it should be made literally not possible for a one man army to inflict any damage whatsoever on a group of armed opponents who are entrenched. Likewise, I would like to see any hit at all kill him. Once a large firefight has broken out or the two teams have scattered naturally, it makes sense that such situations will arise innocently, and certainly in the endgame there is nothing more exciting than watching the match decided by one man's heroics. So once the conflict is in full effect, this bias should be dropped, but for the sake of CS's team spirit and overall fun factor, I think that for these Rambo style players to fail in their attempts without exception would teach them some humility, some caution, and the value of their own flesh and blood.

Likewise, however much enjoyment everyone is getting out of choosing between two dozen different weapons and then jumping around seeing which asshole can get four or five bullets into the other asshole first, let's be honest here. Kevlar may save your life, but it might not, and it will not turn you into the Heavy Weapons Guy. Realistically, any terrorist or counter-terrorist is going down once they are hit. We all watch too many action movies and probably most of us can stomach the idea that, when shot, the hero needs to go hide in a safe place--at least until he stops panting and grimacing--before he can fight again. I can accept that it's a game and that too much realism spoils the fun, but it also spoils the fun for people to abuse a lack of realism. I'd like for players to fear being hit once, by any weapon. Let the weapon used and the presence of Kevlar influence their chances of ever recovering from that first hit. And let's have two hits take you out of the game for good. To my mind, if we accept the notion that a person can take two bullets and still run around jumping, climbing ladders, and kicking ass, then we do not actually want realism. There are plenty of other games out there for people who want that.

Of course some of what I've said here is idealistic in theory, but it's not theory I'm after. What I want to see is a game very much like Counter-Strike, but a little less friendly to those who wish to play as though it were Quake. My suggestions are specific and extreme, and probably well off the mark, but I believe some experimentation along these lines would prove fruitful. In the meantime, it's best to just enjoy the game how it is and accept that some individuals are not going to take it seriously. If a person can't recognize Counter-Strike for what it is and respect it, then they certainly aren't going to read and consider philosophical debates on the topic.


    <_ct> being a hooker is a regular pacific rim job eh?

    Old black water, keep on rollin'

    Mississippi moon, won't you keep on shinin' on me?

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

21 January 2000

What's doing
People must have thought I had lost my mind. Sorry about that. The midi file is the Millennial Fair theme from Chrono Trigger. I had expected to update again before the 12th and take it down then. By the time the 12th rolled around I'd forgotten about it entirely. On that particular day my connection was hosed and I had to ask SuperFly to upload the page for me. For the same reason, I don't think I loaded the page until it was far too late. Ah well.

Chrono Trigger is on a level with the best console RPGs ever made, by the way. It might be the best I've ever played, at least, neck and neck with Final Fantasy IV, not that I've played a whole hell of a lot of them. Well, not that I've finished a lot of them, at least. Wonderful game with an epic quest, reckless disregard for everything we pretend to know about time travel, lots of likeable characters, and a variety of settings with unforgettable atmospheres aided by a beautiful soundtrack composed in part by Nobuo Uematsu. The rest of the music is actually better than his, for the most part. Yes, Subspace, I am a recovering RPG dork. Sue me. :) Perhaps most importantly, to many people at least, the game is neither overflowing with random encounters nor weighed down with boring, time-consuming scripted events. Combat involves a lot of cooperation between the different characters, and you probably won't too often find yourself lying with your head back holding down the fire button until you hear the battle end. Anyway, there's my miniature classic console game review for the month.


Subspace
Fuck me, I just accidentally deleted everything I wrote about Subspace. Which wasn't much at that point, so no harmn done. Later, I guess.


Tribes
The four or five of you who are interested in my ongoing love-hate relationship with Starsiege: Tribes, simultaneously the best and most disappointing multiplayer game ever made, and who endlessly reread my heart stopping tear-jerker memoirs involving same, probably missed my rhapsodic whining over at the shoe-in Best New Gaming Page of 1999, the feared and hated Map Vault. Oh yes, not only have I actually started playing the piece of shit again, I've given up everything else. Go figure.


As promised
Subspace. What can be said of Subspace. I have virtually retired from the game except for mapmaking and zone administration, which leaves me uninterested in 95% of the news that is posted (no offense) as well as incapable of posting any of my own. Obviously. There is some stuff going on, however, which is interesting at least to me, if only because it's mainly of my own devising.

For starters, after yet another dud weekend, Slayfest is burning bridges and moving to A Small Warzone, where it will, to whatever extent possible, become an ASWZ event. If I have anything to say about it this will represent more than just a change of venue for Slayfest. My first game will use ASWZ's trademark weird settings and at least one scenario is in the works by a well known zone personality. One benefit of this is we have the opportunity to play in some classic ASWZ settings and bases that have not made appearances for a long time. Oh, and I get to count the best zone sysops in the history of the world as Slayfest staff, now. Apart from them, the Slayfest staff now consists of myself, Capt Yummy, and divine216. For the record, conspiracy theory has not been "let go" or anything like that, he just doesn't really play Subspace anymore. ;)

This Saturday's SNS is the 49th, by the way. The 50th will be the event's year anniversary, since Christmas and New Years Day are supposedly less important than Subspace or something. (Whatever.)

The second map for Resistance SVS is very nearly complete, and I'm going to get back to finishing the first. The zone seems to have this fucked up tiny little cult following made up of people who never join the server at the same time as each other. At any rate, with quite a bit of stuff behind me now and the maps completed soon, I may be revving up this zone finally after over a month of little or no activity. If you are an old SVS fan and would like to help out, send me mail and we'll talk some.


Hyperspace
We're getting close the alpha test, if you believe some people. If you ask me, it is still four months away. ;) So far there have been several hundred alpha applications, but it looks like we'll be limited to choosing only about sixty.

The good news is we've got two good servers lined up. Without objection from rodvik, one of them will be the Sheep Cloning Facility. The way I see it, the time for tests and noodling around in Subspace has pretty much come to a close, and Hyperspace's obvious heavy Subspace influences justify the throughline. The SCF has been closed to the public before. In fact, now that I think of it, the zone has been closed for a beta test at least once in its history.

For anyone who might be pissed off by this decision, it should have become quite clear by now that I dislike the zone not having much of a purpose. More than any sysop in the history of this game I have solicited ideas and involvement from other sysops and the players at large. At least twenty people have had sysop powers in the zone, and perhaps half as many have had full FTP access. At this late stage of the game it's only appropriate to acknowledge that the zone's usefulness has played out, and that it must either perish or move on.

As for rodvik, he did create the zone and make up the name, and I have contacted him about the move, so if there are any issues concerning Infantry he will have an opportunity to raise them, and a chance to reclaim the zone he started if he wishes. Hyperspace is not a Subspace clone if I have anything to say about it. In keeping with that spirit, and considering it potentially shares a user base with Infantry, I have no desire to use a Harmless Games creation without their blessing to the game's betterment.


The Moon Bee Show
No, I'm not starting a webcam. :) My awesome and alluring better half has completed her semester of training on the baby AM station that no one can listen to, and will begin broadcasting on UCSB's leet FM station this coming Monday . . . um, at 4:00 in the morning. It's a baptism of fire, or something. I mention this not merely because it makes me happy, but because you can actually listen to it if you like. This is a once-per-week show lasting two hours, and even if I didn't think of her scatterbrained babbling as a reason in and of itself to listen ;) it is a seriously awesome program, a mixture of electronic music, underground pop, forgotten alternative gems, and generally avant-garde music which you won't likely hear anyplace else--all of it either very pretty or a lot of fun. Yes, they do allow that on college radio stations. ;) Visit KCSB's homepage for . . . well, not more information Visit it for a desolate, forgotten wasteland plus the webcast. ;)


Too many fucking smileys in that story
But I'm going to leave them in there for the hell of it. Maybe someday they'll teach a seminar about it at Berkeley.


    <berrie> i think my morals are degrading again
    <berrie> i need to be put on a strict regimen of thundercats and pepsi

    Hello darkness, my old friend,

    I've come to talk with you again,

H a p p y  N e w  Y e a r

12 January 2000

This fortnight's update . . .
Yeah, I know. Well I finally caved to pressure when Cybrid nagged me and I realized I had become the same sort of monster he devolved into. O the irony.

I'm not going to rant about Sierra. Well, maybe a little. They let Dynamix neglect Tribes, they allowed Valve to use that horrid SafeDisc protection on Opposing Force which does nothing but cause inconvenience to the many people who bought the game only to find it was incompatible with no fewer than eleven different models of cd drives. Lastly they seem to have forced Homeworld into an incomplete release, with the second campaign unfinished and thus containing the exact same events as the first campaing, plus an unforgivable bug which prevented players from ever again building certain crucial units if they had captured enemy ships and joined them into their fleet. Then again, these are just about the best three games to come out in the last several years, so to hell with it.

I will say this much however. Every time a user like me is dealt the insult of a SafeDisc "protected" game ignoring his cd laser--which they have the nerve to blame on my drive's manufacturer because they have not released "updated drivers" for hardware that works fine as it is--they teach those of us foolish enough to buy games that pirating them really isn't that big a pain in the ass, and out of concern for our fellow law abiding netizens we link helpful sites like GameCopyWorld and Game Fix. These pages have supplied me with the tools I needed to play a game my wife spent $40 on for a birthday present, so I am grateful to them and I hope my loyal readers find them useful as well--and at least in Sierra's case I hope you find them useful in as many ways as possible.

Thomas Newman's gorgeous score to American Beauty has finally been released on its own cd, where it no longer need live as a footnote to a bunch of played out pop songs. If you missed the movie, woe is u. Check out this disc anyway though. Thomas Newman composed the music for The War, Meet Joe Black, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Three Kings, and a few dozen other movies. I consider him the best film composer working today.

In case there was any question, I am not paying much attention to Subspace lately and don't mean to pay a whole lot of attention in the future either. I've done all I can for the game and have obviously had about as much response as I'm likely to get got it, so I won't be around much from now on. Well, I'll finish work on Resistance soon and hopefully be playing more, but news and scenarios and maps are no longer part of this game, as I see it. More importantly, with Hyperspace coming up I'll be helping Kygva sort through the alpha applications plus I've been making some basic maps for it. If all goes according to plan the real deals are going to be far more interesting than anything I ever hoped to see in Infantry, not because I am this genius mapmaker but because the engine for this game is going to be a lot of fun and you're going to do things in this game that you've never done before in a 2D action game. Then again, maybe I live in a fantasy world. Those ship models sure are cute though. If you have no clue in hell what HyperSpace is look here.

Sorry for the short and kind of lame update but I have a bunch of crap I need to get done. Have a nice January.

Well, I was going to save this for tomorrow, but the odds against me updating tomorrow are pretty high. January 13th is Blackie's birthday. Blackie being the only VIE employee who ever really stuck his neck out for this game. Long after it became apparent that no one stood to benefit from prolonging the life of Subspace, Blackie not only put in a lot of time to meet with members of the community and carefully select members of it to take over operations in the VIE zones, but nearly lost his job over keeping the servers running. Some believe he may actually have lost his job for this game and its players. There are a lot of first things and great things on the internet, and in gaming generally, but there will never again be another first great multiplayer game, and Blackie's the guy who saved it. Don't you guys ever forget that. Happy birthday Blackie.


    <Shanoyu> I am the first mass kicker of the new millenium.

    And those who deny this world

    Is the soul of the unbroken one

    Lie

    This is indeed Paradise

H a p p y  N e w  Y e a r

1 January 1900

Rocket packs
I am pretty sick of hearing about how we were all supposed to have rocket packs by now. The people who make this complaint watched too much television or read too many comic books or something. In most good 20th Century (man I love saying that) science fiction, they didn't even have the internet until around 2150. Stop complaining and play Tribes. When you were little did you expect us to have Tribes by now? No you did not. Be thankful, and if you want a real rocket pack go study engineering.


OMG This is the third time tonight I have quit something without saving it. Argh. Ah well, I give up. Tomorrow I have a rant against Sierra for you and a rundown of the good and bad stuff from 1999 (which I try to do annually but never do), but tonight I have only the regret that I am scatterbrained like no other fucker on Earth, sorry. Oh For the record, since the top news thing doesn't count, Happy New Year. Back.