ESL have got a couple of new competitions opening up for Quake 4 players. The first is the Vendetta d'Onore, a Davis cup style team 1v1, where each member of each team plays a regular duel, with three or four players per team. The signups for that are open from now until Tuesday night.

The second ESL league is a Amateur Series, a UK only league that will see the top four players face each other at a LAN final, and which features prizes from Abit and Steel series. The league is part of their "premium" service though, and will require paid access as such, though they say that will only be around £4 for the ninety days of the league.

Over in the .se, European Tournaments are threatening to do some TDM and 1v1 leagues in the very near future, with the signups open for their first 1 v 1 tourny (Thanks Q4Euro).

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Over on ESR, j0kers has interviewed Finnish dueler j4rno, who talks about his experience duelling, particularly in the recent Eurocup.

I hate playing online, where I have over 20ms, you have to change your whole style and start rail bitching and forget about the LG. Can't do anything with it, with a little higher ping. So I definately prefer LAN game.

GotFrag have also got a new interview, this one with SkQ4 creator SkorpSSS. Yes, the interview is mostly about a server query tool, but people don't get a lot of credit for handy utilities, so go and read. Personally I've not tried it (HydraIRC 4lyfe, so no mIRC), but it looks good.

At the moment, SkQ4 is rather similar to other Q4 server browsers like ASE, KQuery, and Echelon. I mentioned before all the features I had included in SkQ4 - it may seem that this tool is trying to do everything and will be weak in every feature. In fact, all those features are built together in a very linked way in order to provide the most convenience to the competitive Quake 4 player. My upcoming features to organize duels and pick-ups through IRC will make SkQ4 even more unique.

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Ice Climbers have won the Q4TDM Eurocup, booking themselves a place in the transatlantic finals in New York. GUNK didn't roll over easily though, and it took the Swedes five maps to seal their victory, with just four frags seperating the two teams on Q4DM2, the final map. GUNK of course get another chance at the LAN finals, which will be in the form of a game versus aCtion, who suprised most by defeating FOE 3 - 1 in the losers bracket final. I couldn't see any demos, but I'm sure they'll turn up on the CB match reports or on ESR if they're about.

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A win over Spain for the Netherlands secures their place in the playoffs with 3 wins and just Belgium left to play. The Belgian team is through as well, also with three victories so far, so their final group match just determines the order they go through in.

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ESR and GotFrag are covering the press release by Games Media Properties, on the formation of the WSVG, the world series of video games. The organisation, which has former CPL man Scott Valencia as an executive VP, is aiming to create a PGA like tour of events, each run by a company such as the CPL, or the organisers of Dreamhack, with standard rules and procedures.

While this is an interesting announcement, and Intel's hopping from the CPL to the WSVG is certainly news, there seems to be to be something missing from the whole deal...

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Hamstahue's UK Elite have defeated Slovakia in three close maps. The UK went down 116 - 145 on ospdm5, but recovered to win 188 - 142 on q3dm7, which gave them enough frag difference to choose ospdm6 for the third map, which they took 141 - 129. This leaves the UK third in the group, with only Estonia vs Poland remaining to played. This means that chances are Poland and France will go through in that order, with the UK, Estonia and Slovakia missing the cut. It is not, however, too late for the French to step aside and let the UK through for just being so damn good looking, and I think we can all hope for that in the coming days.

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Despite listening to the suprisingly good shoutcasting from ReDeYe at the time, a day off with some horrible lurgie prevented my updating on the state of the Q4 1v1 Eurocup until now. In the winners bracket final, Cooller booked his place in the finals by defeating Ooze in two maps, 22 - 10 on Phrantic, and 16-12 on Galang. Democasts can be found on ESR.

The other match that night was the all aAa showdown between winz and kazu, which winz took, also two maps to none, 23 - 18 on Phrantic and 17 -13 on Galang. As far as I know you have to grab the demos and shoutcast seperately for this one.

These two left a second place match of Ooze versus winz. There are shoutcasts and demos on ESR of a match that stretched to 3 maps, with Galang going Ooze's way 12 - 8, winz taking bliptourney 9 - 18, and finally winz bagging himself a ticket by winning Phrantic 9 - 12. While I missed these games, it sounds like a pretty close contest thoughout.

The net result is that Cooller and Winz go to New York to meet the winners of the Americup, currently cha0ticz and one of cl0ck, socrates, or scooby.

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First up is an interview with tox and gopher over on GotFrag that I didn't get round to mentioning on Monday. The questions are a standard sort of set on Quake 4 and the scene in general.

gopher: I could probably write a whole bible here but I'll keep it short. The most major thing that needs fixed are the enormous hit boxes; it's starting to get extremely frustrating dodging a rocket and still ending up with a facial.

Also on GotFrag is a more recent interview with mapper Lukin, the creator of Galang and the recent VIA/D3W contest winning Monsoon. Lukin talks about making maps, having them used in competition, and his thoughts on what Quake 4 needs (of course).

I'm not a fan of remakes, I don't enjoy playing the same level again and again. A good idea for those who miss classics is to create maps "inspired by...", not straight ports. Wviperw created something like this, a map called "Cobalt" - it looks fresh, utilizes some Quake 4 features, but at the same time it plays very similar to "The Frag Pipe" from Quake 2. I think it's a good compromise.

Over on Fnatic there's an interview with the BBC's second favourite Scottish tennis player, Deus. The interview covers UK duelling, his successes so far, and the general esports scene.

I wanna see China the most. I dunno what happened at CPL UK last time, heard it didn't run too smoothly though. I'd like to see Scotland have one, when we play everyone needs to wear kilts and have blue faces shouting FREEDOOOMMMMM :DD.

Finally, bruizes have interviewed moon faced US q4'er clamp-ok on his plans for future eSports Cyber-World domination, and his desires to equal The Wendell's success (presumably not including buggy mice).

Yes many people were definitely skeptical including myself after Doom 3. Echoes of "well anyone could be good at Doom 3" were heard but I knew that I would be able to hop aboard the Quake 4 wagon and at least be a very solid player. I surprise myself daily constantly perfecting my style. For victories, its definitely been fun beating x6/dj and vamp1re to win both Web2Zone tournaments so far, and I look forward to competing in the GGL TDM finals and also at Quakecon 2006.

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In a result that suprised me, if no one else, Poland have defeated France in the Q3 TDM NationsCup, putting them in pole position in Group A. After playing a defensive game and winning 73 - 59 on dm14, the Polish team changed it up to score a healthy 222 - 172 on DM7. Spain play Russia tonight in Group B, the UK take on Slovakia on Wednesday, and on Thursday Germany get another chance at moving off nul points as they meet Luxembourg.

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If you happen to be in need of $13,000, the ESWC Quake 4 tournament has exactly that as the first prize. The competition takes place in France in late June/early July, and the qualification spots have just been announced. There's just the one for the UK, but, to be fair, that is one more than Italy get. One of the comments by DJiTH on ESR does shed light on this situation though:

Correct, any random company can buy one of the ESWC licensing packages that the ESWC organization (Games-Services, prev. Ligarena) offers. These packages determine the amount of slots a country has for each game. If there are multiple companies wanting to buy a license for a country, the license is granted to whichever company bids the highest. If a country is not represented in the ESWC, it means that there was no company willing to buy a license for that country. The licenses are very expensive. To give an impression, the total cost of all national licenses is about enough to fund the total prize money of the ESWC finals.

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