Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

A couple of days ago I got my hands on a PlayStation 3.  Boy, was that a wrong day of the week!  But let me tell it to you properly…

I am not much of a gamer.  I like games and all, but somehow I don’t spend all that much time playing.  Most of my gaming activities in the last few years were spent either in Quake III or OpenTTD (open source Transport Typhoon Deluxe clone).  There were also a whole bunch of simple games like mahjongg, Desktop Tower Defense, and the rest of the flash entertainment goodies.

I never had a gaming console.  A few of my friends had though.  And back then consoles were very different from PCs.  PCs were in the form of huge and heavy desktops, that were booting too long.  Gaming consoles were of a much smaller size factor, and they were booting faster.  All you had to do was put the game cartridge in, and you were in a game.  And that was fun.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago.  I get this huge laptop bag, which is pretty heavy.  I take it home.  PlayStation 3 is in there, with a bunch of cables, and a few games.  My first impression – PlayStation3 is not much different from a computer.  It’s large, it’s heavy, it’s noisy, and it’s blowing hot air to its side.  And, I guess, it costs pretty much as a PC too.

Then I connect this thing to my recently bought Sony Bravia 32-inch flat screen TV.  With HDMI cable.  When you hold an HDMI cable in your hands, you feel the solid quality.  You know that whatever comes through this must be really good.  It’s hard, it’s thick, and it’s long.  Like a coaxil cable or something.  And that was true – the moment I got the first picture from the game, I was stunned.  I was just looking at it speechless.  No television channel or DVD had the quality of the picture that I had in front of my eyes.  Absolute brilliant stuff.

So, I played “Need for Speed” just a bit.  I had to get used to joystick – form factor is weird for my hands that are used only to keyboards and mice; and it has so many buttons and controls that it takes some time to manage.  I like “Need for Speed”, it’s a nice car racing game, which I used to play on PC some years ago.  But since I got a Genius wheel and pedals for one of my birthdays, I don’t like playing car simulators without them anymore.  Joystick is OK, but not that much fun as having a real wheel and stuff.

I check the bag for more games, and among unfamiliar titles I noticed “Grand Theft Auth IV”.  Now that was something I wanted to try.  I’ve heard a lot about the game, but never had a chance to try it out.  It was Tuedays, 11:00pm when I started the game.  The next thing I know – Maxim woke up.  It was Wednesday, 7:30am.  Now if that is not a sign of a good game, I don’t what is then.

Coming back to that comment above about the wrong day of the week.  It’s a well known fact that no new games or gadgets should be opened or started on any day of the week except for Friday or Saturday.  Cause it’s too easy to get carried away and spend a night playing with the new stuff.  This time I forgot that, and a sleepy, half-focused Wednesday was a good reminder to me.  Gladly, the weekend is ahead of us…

I spent most of yesterday in Nicosia, playing Quake III with a few guys.  It’s been a few years since the last time I attended a LAN party, so it was nice to see some familiar faces after all these years of playing online.

I was a bit surprised by the fact that more people turned up for the Quake 3 party than they did the last time.  I thought maybe with more games being released each year, Quake 3 community is getting smaller and weaker.  I was glad to see that it is not the case.  The game is still popular and there are plenty of both seasoned players and fresh meat.

After a few hours of Quaking we had some pizza and then, shortly, moved to a bar for a couple of pints, where we met some more people.  Overall we managed to have some really good fun and enjoyed ourselves.  As we always say, we should do it more often…

P.S.: Thanks to all who helped with the trip and the party.  In particular, my brother, who was driving, and snoop, who was hosting the event.

P.P.S.: If you haven’t yet clicked on the picture above, here are some more photos.

I’ve been fascinated by chess for as long as I can remember.  This is one of those games that brings it all together – intelligence, suspense, entertainment, magic…  Unfortunately, I wasn’t ever any good at playing chess, or even understanding most strategies.  But that didn’t stop me from enjoying a game now and then.

I have recently came across two interesting bits about chess.  One is this post on the gaping void blog with the history of chess pieces.  It explains where from the names and looks came, as well as why the pieces move the way they move.  Another one is this Battle Chess web site (in Russian).  Battle Chess is a variation of the chess game, which, as the site says “is a war, not a game”.  What they do is let each chess player arrange his pieces on his part of the board any way he wants.  The second player does the same.  The trick is that they don’t see each others positioning before the game starts.  And then they start.  Sounds exciting. And innovative.  Which I guess isn’t very easy to do with a game a few centuries old.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m back to Quake 3 battle fields.  I am still trying to remember things, and adjust my brain to how it all works.  While major things are still there, and still important, there have been quite a few small changes.

Quake 3 is very much about mods (modifications).  There are many mods out there, and each of them takes Quake 3 into a different direction – different physics, different graphics, different gameplay.  When I used to play Quake 3 five years ago, the two most popular mods were OSP and RA3.   I never particularly liked RA3, despite its beautiful graphics.  All my time was spent in OSP.

That’s where I started now.  But what I quickly found out is that OSP isn’t as popular now as it used to be.  The mod of the new generation is CPMA, which stands for Challenge ProMode Arena.  It has OSP built-in as an option.  It is also based on the ProMode settings, which we also played sometimes.  But overall, it’s a different thing.

What is different?  Here is a quick overview as I saw it:

• CPMA is much much much faster than OSP.  It’s unbelievably fast.  OSP was never slow by any means, but CPMA is so much faster that I’ll need a lot of time to adjust.
• CPMA introduces more moves and enhances the old ones.  Double jumps are there.  Circle jumps.  Strafe jumps are there, but they are much faster now.  There is more in-flight control, as it was in ProMode.
• CPMA brings in more maps with more tricks.  With all those increased speeds, a new set of maps was pretty much a requirement.  The well-known pro-q3dm6 used to good enough for TDM and 1v1.  With CPMA it feels very small, almost tiny, even for a duel.  CPMA maps are bigger, but not more complex.  They also provide features for all those tricky moves.
• CPMA uses faster weapon-switching, like it was in ProMode.   Instantly switching between weapons in heated combat adds to intensity of the game.
• CPMA handles timing differently.  First of all, the timer doesn’t show seconds.  Players are forced into doing timing in their own head.   Although this is not a big problem for a mildly experienced player, it still feels a bit weird.
• CPMA handles health and armor stuff different.  I’m not sure yet how differently, but it seems that when hit, player loses more health even if he has armor, than he does in OSP.  Also, picking up armor is a bit different now.  Basically, you can’t pickup yellow armor after picking up red, without receiving some damage in between.  Oh, and there is a green armor there too now.  So it works out like this:   green armor is the weakest, then yellow, and then red.

There are probably a few other things that I haven’t noticed, but even these are make for a sufficient list.  How does it feels now?  Here is how I feel about it after playing a couple of times:

• Extremely intense!  I still can’t believe how fast this thing is.  It’s painful to watch.  It’s even more so to play.  I can’t blink once over the course of a whole match.   Two main components of this intensity are greatly increased movement speeds and instant weapon switching.
• Timing and movement is everything.  If you can’t move, you are dead.  Instantly.  If you can move, you are dead instantly anyway.  The only way to survive even a brief fight is to have you health, armor and weapons packed.  And for that you need timing.  Aim is a good addition to the list, but it’s not a requirement.
• Respawn points are much more important in CPMA than in OSP.  Respawn points are well known (CPMA even highlights in the special way).  When a player enters a game, he is not moving.  For a split millisecond he’s stationary.  That’s an easy target.  And when a player enters a game, he has no armor or weapons (except for a tiny machine gun and a gauntlet).  It’s like shooting fish in the aquarium with a shotgun.   Oh, and there is a sound that notifies your enemies at which point you respawned.
• Communications in TDM are less important now.  Things are changing too fast – items availability, players locations, etc, to notify team-players about them.  And there is  plenty of stuff going on on its own…

Stay tuned for more of these, as I get more practice…

I am back in Quake 3.  It all happened very fast and very unexpected.  I used to play Quake 3 about five years ago, and I have to tell you, we had plenty of fun back then.  But one thing led to another and I dropped out.  I haven’t heard anything about Quake 3, haven’t watched any demos, or haven’t even talked about Quake 3 in the last 5 years or so.

A few days ago I noticed a colleague of mine spending his lunch break chasing someone in pro-q3dm6 map.  I got a overwhelmed by a wave of memories and forgotten feelings and I asked him if I could play a round on his computer.  He agreed.  It turned out, he was playing against my own brother.  My brother, being a mean chap as he is, started playing Quake 3 too, with some guys from the college, but never pushed me to return.  Now that I was chased by him around the arena, I remembered that he mentioned his comeback once or twice.

Anyway, the quick match showed that my Quake 3 skills were gone.  All of them.  Even despite playing on somebody else’s computer, using half-baked configuration, and playing over 150+ ms ping, I still could feel how bad I am in the game.

In a quick chat after the game, my brother mentioned that my laptop should be fast enough to run Quake 3.  Of course, it’s not a gaming station by any means, but it should be sufficient to handle a game written a decade ago or so.  He was right.  I fetched a dusty CD-ROM and installed the game.  A quick Google search over my blog archives helped me to get back my old config file.  And I started practicing with the bots a bit.

Boy, was I ashamed.  Bots were killing me with any weapon on any map in any position on any level of difficulty.  It was almost unbelievable.  Everything was gone.  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t aim. I forgot the maps.  I forgot the controls.  My hands were getting tired after just a few minutes…  It was like I never played Quake 3 in my life, but worse.

Anyway, I got interested in getting back what I once had.  I was never by any means a top player or a particularly skillful one, but I could run around properly and kill a few people even.  I wanted my skills back.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one.  I quickly found another three or four people who wanted to play some proper Quake 3.  We played a few matches on our own server.  It was slow and laggy, but it felt good non-the-less.

I jumped on my connections to find out what happened to the old servers and old people that used to play.  Surprisingly, the server is still up, and there is another new one brought up just a couple of days ago, and there seem to be some interest – a few people play on a daily basis.  Wow!  That was much more than I hoped for.

Today I truly got back into Quake 3.  I played for three hours, and I played with some people who I haven’t seen for the last five years.  I was surprised to see that they remember me, and that they missed me and all that…  So, what have changed?  Here is a briefing:

• There are more maps and mods than I can remember.
• There are more servers around.  Back in the days we had like one or two servers with all proper maps and patches.  Now I have four servers in my bookmarks.  And most of them are faster and richer than those that we used to play on.
• People are more interested in the game.  Five years ago, Quake 3 in Cyprus was more of a fashion game.  Most kids were playing Counter Strike, and Quake 3 was sort of a “change of environment”.  Not many understood it, not many liked it, but many tried it.  With this, a lot of people were passing by.  Now, Quake 3 is a classic game.  Many games have been made since it was released, and most players moved on.  Only those die-hard fans are still around.  And some new blood, people who want to learn the proper game.

A few things changed.  But the main one is still there.  Quake 3 is still a lot of fun.   The years that passed by, the new technologies, the life changing experiences that happened, none of these changed the my attitude towards Quake 3.  And I feel that I am not alone… and it feels like Quake 3 is not just a game, but a lifestyle.

You will probably hear more about my Quake 3 adventures on this blog in the near future.  Until then, happy fragging!

[bofh]mokh returned back to Cyprus a few days ago. He’s going to be here with his family for a long time. He is still arranging for the basic needs – Internet connection, phone, and a place to live, so we didn’t have time to chat a lot yet.

But something tells me that my gaming days aren’t just over yet. It’s been a while since I had a railgun in my hands. I was living in piece for years now. But the time of war practice has come. We’ll be doing a lot of shooting soon.

Want to take advantage of me? Start your practice now… before I do.

Yesterday I made a big mistake. After I came home from work and found everyone sleeping, I should have gone to bed myself. But instead I went to see the list of things that I wanted to do, but skipped. And I found this post bookmarked there.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe is one of the most addictive games I ever played. Fromt the first sight it looks overly complicated. After an hour or so it looks oversimplified. And than you just lose the track of time. I knew that, because I played it many times before.

And even knowing that I still did the download. It installed easily without any problems what-so-ever. And I decided to try if it runs OK…

10 hours later Olga was trying to kick me out for a walk with Maxim. After a short battle she succeded. But I was back in three hours. And played for 4 more. Than I just had to go to sleep…

id Software has released the source code for its Quake III Arena for the public under the GPL. That is even before Quake 4 has been released! If you’re interested, you can download the source code here.

Now game writers all over the world can unite and produce some really cool games for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Yeah!