NEWS

This almost beats the record of how long it has taken me to update this site!   It's not a record that I should try to beat unfortunately, but I've just been really busy finishing finals and gaming for about 6 weeks straight.  A quick rundown of what has happened in the last 2 months.

May 1st, GZ V.  Viper and Perish (me) take first place in the Starcraft tourney,   Nathan ties for first on the Quake 2 tourney.  The usual GZ goodness of being able to play 50 people locally and taunt people from across the room.

May 15th, VN Clan meeting.

May 22nd, Small meeting in honor of Mr. Spiffy coming home (he had to suffer 3 months without networking)

May 28th, Doomathon meeting.  Mr. T and Nathan won first and second respectively in the Quake 2 tourney (3 straight days of lan loving).  Thanks go out to the Doomathon staff for putting together a really cool environment to game in for the 30 total hours or so that I was there.  Halo and I also had some sweet ass sweet (that's right, sweet ass sweet) fun in the TFC hunted map were we both played assassins.   Sniping bodyguards left and right with powered up head shots was a blast.

June 5th, Overnight's meeting. VN won the 4 man Team Fortress Tourney, those men being Nathan, El Gato, Zummy and Perish.  VN also won the Half Life free for all, Mr. T in first, Nathan in second, Perish in third and Viperblade in Fourth.  Nate and T won 5 port 10/100 Mb hubs, Viper and I won Savage 4 AGP cards.  The prize for the TFC tourney was TF2 T-shirts.  The other tourney was in Motocross Madness, Mr. T took first, Perish took third, and I think El Gato took fourth place.  The booty for that tourney was 2 Intel any point network cards per winner.  I have to say that Overnight did a great job on putting everything together for their first really big network meet.   They also pulled through with some great prizes.

June 12th, VN open meeting.  We played a LOT of Alien vs Predator and a little bit of Mechwarrior 3.  I wanted to get into some Pod Racer but I'll have to wait for GZ VI :)  We rounded it out with the usual SC, Rocket Arena 2, Action Quake, and Quake 3 test.  Thanks goes out to Salsa, Bob1st, and Pat for showing up to their first VN meeting, maybe we'll see you guys at GZ VI. 

Ok, that makes out almost 6 straight weekends of network meetings.  I figure we can take a break between now and GZ VI which is held on June 26th.

The next meeting will be held on April 10th and will be a clan only meeting.   Registeration is required so click here to submit the form.  There are a couple of names on the list that aren't clan members that may show up to this meeting so check it out.  We are going to play a lot of the usual games, but special attention is going to be payed to rocket arena matches so we can improve for the next GZ tournament. 

I have had a chance to download and play with the beta Team Fortress Classic add on for Half Life.  I figure we can play with this at the next meeting because it has a lot of cool classes to choose from for team missions.  There are a couple of problems with it though, it still needs some of the bugs worked out and the frame rate seems to be considerably lower than normal half life games at the moment, at least from my experience.   There are only about 5 maps that come with it, but what's cool is that there are different objectives for some of them.  There is the standard CTF, and then there are specialized ones.  One map requires a person to make it into the other base, steal the access key, and go to a gas room to kill everyone in that base who doesn't put a toxic suit on in time scoring points for the team.  There is another level where one person is the "hunted" and has to make it to the end of the map scoring so many points for his team of guards who try to help him make it to the end safely.  The opposing team, the assassins, gets major points for killing the "hunted".

I ran across a funny compilation mp3 of the kingpin guy talking to a half life guy so I thought I would post it locally.  If you haven't heard this yet download it.  It's only a 1 meg but if harsh language hurts your ears like I know it does to most networkers (yeah right) then you might not want to listen to it.  I've updated the SC strategy page a little and will slowly be working on other areas soon too.

Last weekend the Ground Zero network meeting was a blast!  This fourth meeting put together by members of the KTFD clan saw a huge turnout of about 50 players.  That should make it the largest network gaming turnout that I know of in the Northwest.  All types of games were played there from Quake 2, Half Life, Delta Force, Motocross Madness, and Starcraft.  I'm sure there were other games played, but I spent most of the day in the Quake 2 tournaments or practicing for them.  The practice payed off because the VANGG took home first place in two of the three tournaments. 

The RA2 team that beat the other clans were made up of Mr. T, Nathan, and last but certainly not least Perish :)  We had a tough time taking out the <S>, [BC], and [KTFD] clan.  All of these clans showed great enthusiasm at blowing us up and we are going to have to practice to hold the title from them at the next meeting.   Nathan wasn't done yet though, he went on to win the 40 player quake 2 free-for-all tourney, tying with Gidon for first place with 149 frags.  I came in at 5th, but no one seems to care :( hehe.  Marius (that's Mar-ius god dammit), represented our clan in the Delta Force tourney.  If our whole clan can look past the non-accelerated 3d graphics (VANGG is kinda superficial that way :)  maybe we would could follow Marius's example by participating in this deamed worthy network game and do better at the next meeting.  Maybe we can do a Half life tourney at the next meeting so Peacemaker and Loki can show their magic, I thought I was good at that crossbow, Jeesh!

I apologize for the lack of updates, I have been spending most of my time writing research papers and taking finals.  It's amazing I even killed anyone in RA with how little time I've had to play with it much less update this page, oh well, enough of my whining.  I have also been slacking because Pipe has been doing such a good job updating his page on game updates.  That's right baby, I'm turning the responsibility over to you! hehe.  I remember hearing that the next GZ meeting is going to be on April 24th if I heard properly so I will schedule around that.  The next open meeting that anyone can show up to here is March 27th.  The next clan meeting only will be held on April 10th.  I will email out to everyone who has filled out a player form the details on the meeting on the 27th so you know what's going on.

The meeting on the 20th had a lot of different games being played.  The group didn't spend a lot of time on one particular game (except Rocket Arena), but dabbled in many different ones for a short period of time.  The games played were Half Life, Quake 2, Starcraft, Wargasm, Turok 2, and Forsaken.  Turok 2 didn't last long because it was hard getting used to the way the character moved without getting some type of sea sickness.  I'm sure if we had a copy of South Park for the PC we would have given it a try ;)  The next meeting will be March 6th and is open to anyone who has filled out a player form.  I will be emailing out to everyone sometime this week so I can start reserving space.

The games section is slowly being constructed.  If you are a Starcraft fan you might want to head over there and check out some of the testing that I have done with this game.  I plan on expanding on this game quite a bit by offering information that might not be found on the other hundred or so Starcraft sites.  Hopefully I can also recruit the talents of Nathan, Mr T, Viper, and Spiff to begin work on other game strategies like Quake 2 and Warcraft 2 since they know these games rather well and have HTML experience.

The meeting on the 20th is getting closer.  I urge everyone who is eligible to show up to this meeting to click on the registration link and tell me you can make it, it only takes about 10 seconds.  There has been a lot of talk about the BANGG meeting at the end of March.  I will bring this up at the meeting this weekend to get a better idea of who wants to make it, and who is able to make it.  I'm actually debating going to this meeting myself, I just need to mentally prepare myself to go on a 24 hour road trip (12 hours there, 12 hours back) and stay there for about 3 days. 

Viperblade and Mr T are both designing some art work for this site.  I'm going to be looking at what they have done at the next meeting and let the group decide what is most appropriate.  Right now GZ is deciding on what the two tournaments will be for the meeting on March 13th.  If you have any suggestions please either post them in the VANGG forum to help decide what our group would like to lean towards, or post it on the GZ forum if you feel there is a big demand for a certain Quake mod or other types of games.  I have also updated the FAQ page, Clan page, and link page.

There were 13 computers present at the meeting on the 6th.  The game that had the most play time suprisingly enough was Action Quake.  I was skeptical at first about how fun it would be, but after learning the rules and doing a team type setup for it like Rocket Arena it ended up being really addictive.  Other games played were Starseige Tribes, Need for Speed 3, Starcraft, and some rocket arena.  The next meeting will be February 20th.  This is a 100 Mb only meeting for members and invited guests.  The next open meeting that anyone who has filled out a player form can attend is on March 6th.  If you would like to see if you can make it to the meeting on the 20th then head over to the registration page and submit the form so I know if you are going to make it.  If you submit the form and end up not being able to make it, please email me saying so as soon as possible. 

If you can't make it to the meeting on the 20th or the open meeting on March 6th, then head on over to KTFD's web site and plan on attending their meeting on March 13th.  It's a great event to go to especially if you like to blow a LOT of people up =)  I'm writing up some new pages on strategies and tips for various games so I will mention them when they are available.

Welcome to the new VANGG home page!  It's not completely up to the standards that I had hoped (when is it ever :), but it is a good start.  There are a few pages that will be added in the future so I will mention them here in the news when they come online.   The news page as a whole will now be updated a lot more often.  I hope to pool with some other VANGG members to help provide a greater wealth of information.  This site can also be reached by typing in www.vangg.com. 

The next meeting will be on February 20th.  If you would like to attend this meeting and haven't been to a meeting in the past, please click on the join link.  I will post a registration page soon for each meeting.  This will help everyone tell me if they can make it to future meetings more conveniently.  Please check out the forum as well, new ideas and discussions can help everyone.