R Jason Valentine writes "Before Ogg was an encoding standard it was a verb. Before the internet enabled the masses to play against each other in Quake and Ultima Online, there was a cross-platform multiple player interactive online game called Netrek. Netrek can trace its history back to 1972. It's an interesting, though incomplete, read, that includes travels through places like Berkeley's XCF. Netrek generally peaked in play in the early 90's, from about 1992 to 1995 or so, and was popular enough to even get an article in Wired. With this explosion of players, several variations on the original style, called Bronco, emerged. These were Chaos (similar to bronco), Paradise, and Hockey. The Chaos and Paradise variants are all but dead, mostly due to lack of players and an expired Paradise-capable client for Windows. A Bronco pick-up game still occurs daily, and usually once or twice a week, there is a hockey game. League games still exist, and this is the 10th year of league play, with around 200 players registered for the 2002 draft league."

Mad.Scientist writes "This article at Space.com is about mavericks who are trying to lessen the cost of going into space. One of the companies, Armadillo Aerospace, is founded by John Carmack, who is also a founder of Id Software, and the brain behind games such as Doom or Quake. I just have to say, godspeed to all." Carmack is only one of the people mentioned in this story, but see our previous story for more on Carmack's rocketry habit.

Jacek Fedorynski writes "The end is near. First, id Software's site is updated for the first time since the Quake II times and now they officially announce Doom III!" If you recall, there were some screenshots released last year, but I don't think there's been much since then - these are probably out of date.

Mike Chambers writes "Hi All, I've completed a preview of NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics chipset. Although the preview contains your typical benchmarks, it's centered around game play and antialiasing image quality. Here's a list of the games involved - Quake 3 & Team Arena, IL-2 Sturmovik, Nascar Racing 2002 Demo, Jedi Knight 2, Serious Sam 2, Max Payne Demo, Comanche 4 Demo, Dungeon Siege and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 Demo. Since antialiasing image quality, especially Quincunx and 4XS, was an important aspect of the preview, all of the screen shots were saved in high quality PNG format. For those Slashdot readers that are avid gamers, you might want to check this out."

LEXI writes: "Accompanying our recent first set of Q3Radiant Tutorials I had the chance to interview one of the programmers behind the editor and the new engine, Mr. Robert A. Duffy of id software. 10 questions asked, 10 answers given. Topics range from personal details, education, job description, over to the new engine and the new tools, to violence in games and George W. Bush. The English original can be found here; the German translation resides at this very spot. The interview should be interesting for as well the quake player desperately awaiting the new engine, as the fresh or old-school mapper."

Ant points to the new release of amor, called: amorMD2, "Amusing Misuse of Resources -- MD2 edition, which "reads Quake 2 character files and makes them dance around your desktop for your amusement. It will run on any Posix system which has KDE/Qt installed (ie, most Linux distros, BSD's, etc)."

Artemis writes: "Following the Quake 2 source code release under the GPL, here's the follow-up of the famous ttyquake, it's a text mode Quake II called aaquake2 which has just been released. Time for more 3d text mode gaming fun! The site includes screenshots for those of you who haven't seen Quake-turned-Text before."

linugen writes "How do you avoid those sweaty mouse hands after playing a game of Quake for a couple of hours? Sure, you could use the keyboard, but this site has a 'cool' alternative. It's in Finnish (I think), so the fish won't be able to help you. The pictures speak for themselves."

szcx writes: "Two days after the code release, Dan East has ported Quake II to the Pocket PC. With NeoMagic's 3D chipset for handhelds and XScale on the horizon, how long is it going to be until we're playing Quake III: Arena on the train into work?"

Masem (and many others) writes: "The source code for Quake 2 is now available until the GPL license. The .plan file for John Carmack has the details." The Id Software site is of course slammed with demand for the code. Hopefully other mirrors will be available.

Robert writes: "If you didn't like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Electronic Arts has released the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault demo (133 megs) which is another game that uses id Software's state of the art quake 3 engine. MoH: AA is more realistic in nature than RtCW, and even has Steven Spielberg listed in the game's credits as it draws heavily from the movie "Saving Private Ryan.""

zebziggle writes "The dashPC has Global Positioning (GPS) and Navigation, DVDs, Games (Quake 3, SoF, UT), Address book database, etc. It can run any programs that will run on an Intel/AMD i686 class computer. There is a Basic Stamp micro-controller that interfaces the Linux box to the car ignition for controlled boot/shutdown." The article says Linux, but that screenshot tells a different story. The website has other stuff and a lot more pictures.

ajs writes: "EverQuest isn't a book or a movie, but a work of fiction that's kept a 400,000 member audience enthralled for months is worth a closer look. The most recent update to EverQuest, Shadows of Luclin, is out and of course much of the subscriber base is flocking to be the first to kill the big bad ... whatevers that lurk in the long-lost moon of Norrath. My review touches more on the release than the software, since I think that's what's truely interesting about this industry right now. But to sum up: if you play EverQuest, wait a few days or weeks and then give this a spin ... it's a ride." Read on for the rest of his account.

Bill Kendrick writes: "Thanksgiving was a great day for Linux PDA gaming. Not one, but two classic id games were ported to not one, but two different Linux PDAs! Quake (screenshots) is available for the Sharp Zaurus and the original Wolf3D is out for the Agenda VR3. Now if only they could do Unreal Tournament over IR ports..."

Mentor asks: "Recently, a very promising young architect asked me to give her some ideas for a design presentation she has to do concerning a new building in Germany. Instead of making another dull non-interactive flyby-drivethrough 3dmax-movie, I suggested using the Halflife or Quake engine to precreate the whole building, and let visitors of the exhibition experience the building firsthand, being a player in it, and interacting with the building (without any actual weapons of course :)). I was wondering whether this has been done a lot already . Does anyone have any tips?" I would think that most 3D engines have evolved enough where something like this might actually be practical. Thoughts?

loteck writes: "Tom's previewed this latest toy that allows health savy gamers to peddle their way through flight simulators, racers and even first person shooters. Someone is providing a plethora of compatible games by which to Quake or Carmageddon yourself to that six-pack that you've always wanted." I wonder if this would burn more calories than the floor-pad from the old Nintendo system.

doormat writes "AMD releases their AthlonXP 1900+ Processor today, thats 1.6GHz. And it seems like its enough to topple the P4-2.0GHz, even in Quake 3 Arena!! AMDMB has a review of it." Ian Bell points out an AMD press release on the new processor. I love watching my old Athlon get slower every day ...

alrz1 writes: "HardOCP has posted an article wherein they accuse ATI of writing drivers that are optimized for Quake 3, just Quake 3, and only Quake 3. Apparently, using a program called quackifier, which modifies the Quake3 executable by changing every "Quake" reference to "Quack" and then creating a new executable called "Quack3", they have demonstrated to some extent that the Quack3.exe benchmarks are around 15% slower than with the original Quake3.exe (same box, os, drivers, etc). The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers, if in fact this is what ATI has done. I think this is perfectly acceptable: Quake 3 is the biggest game out there on Windows, and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?"

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I have a home network, and my wife and I each have our own computers (plus a few extra). My wife has a fear of computers, and uses hers as little as possible. In an attempt to get my wife in front of her computer more, I am looking for games we can play together. My question is, what networkable games out there appeal to the female gender? Quake-like games are definelty out. Too bad Sims isn't multi-player..." I've gotta echo the sentiment about the Sims not being multi-player, however lately I've noticed a few husband and wife couples out there on a few MMORPGs. Are any of you couples out there playing games together? If so, which ones?

Dave Robillard asks: "I've been looking at new laptops recently (hooray for disposable income) and I can't find a single one that has what I want: relatively 'slow' processor (I do not need a Ghz PIII in a laptop), networking, and most importantly, loong battery life. The real reason I want a laptop is for coding on the run. I don't need to play Quake @ 100fps. Are there any laptop manufacturers out there that machines like this?" Any laptops out there that have a battery lifetime that exceeds 2 or 3 hours of usable lifetime?