Today the groups and schedule for the ESL Major Series in Starcraft were released. After four qualification cups the best twelve players will fight in four groups. The best two players of each group will advance to the playoffs. The tournament features some of the best European and North American Starcraft players. It will be also featured by a weekly ESL TV coverage (always Mondays at 14:00 CDT) , which will be mainly in German, but some shows are planned to be in English as well. Replays of the matches can be found after the games on the ESL website and it’s obligatory for players to upload them.


Links:
- ESL Announcement News
- Rankings
- Schedule with Match Ups
- ESL TV

Update

The ESL TV broadcast will be in English on Monday, so tune in on 14:00 CDT, 15 September 2008 and follow the live cast for free!

- Link to the Show

Scheduled: 02:00 CDT, 17 October 2008
Schedule: Passed

Electronic Sports World Cup just announced the ESWC Masters of Athens to take place from October 17th to 18th and will feature Quake III and WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne competitions.

Both games will have a 15.000$ prize pool and 12 international participants as well as 4 Greek champions. The champions of the event will receive an auto-berth to ESWC 2009.

Those interested in applying to enter the event can do so here until September 21, participants will be announced the next day, seeding will be announced October 8th and groups will be announced October 10th.

Electronic Sports World Cup today announced the first pool of games titles for ESWC 2009 video games competitions worldwide: Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake 3, Warcraft III and Trackmania Nations Forever.

The first line-up of games selected as ESWC 2009 official disciplines are:

• Counter-Strike 1.6 (PC) (c) Valve Software
• Counter-Strike 1.6 (PC) reserved for women (c) Valve Software
• Quake 3 Arena (PC) (c) ID Software (the game version could be subjected to modification with the release of Quake Live)
• Trackmania Nations Forever (PC) (c) Nadeo
• Warcraft III : The Frozen Throne (PC) (c) Blizzard

All tournaments are open to male and female players except CS 1.6 Women. In the coming weeks, the ESWC Committee will announce further titles that will take part in ESWC global competitions, including most probably a football game and a RPG-like title. The 7th season of ESWC will start in October with National Preliminaries worldwide and a series of ESWC Masters tournaments to end summer 2009 with the ESWC Grand Final event.

source

Yesterday Mania TV's Arcade crew invited me along to a video shoot at a local arcade that has Street Fighter IV. As there aren't many (any?) hands-on impressions of the final arcade version out there, I thought it best to share a writeup with you guys as there are quite a few rabid SF fans here at ESR.

Excerpt:

To put it lightly, offense rules the day in SFIV, which is just the way I like it. As many previews have mentioned, there is no air blocking–if you hang ourself out to dry, don’t be surprised when you catch a Dragon Punch to the nads. This fits in with my personal philosophy for fighting games: Keep it simple and it’s more fun.

Head to GGL Wire for the full report.

The computer peripherals manufacturer Razer has announced in a press release that they will be release a mouse to celebrate Alexey ‘Cypher’ Yanushevsky's recent victory at the ESWC 2008 Finals.


The white 'serious.razer.Cypher Limited Edition Deathadder mouse' carries Cypher's signature and nickname and fifteen of them will be attainable alongside a signed Cypher shirt and a Razer Messenger bag through participation in online contests which are to be announced at razerzone and Razer's fan page at Facebook.

Five will also be given away at the Igromir Expo in Moscow from the 6th till the 9th of November where Cypher will be playing demonstration matches.

An interview with Cypher alongside more detailed pictures of the mouse can be found at the team razorzone website.

Scheduled: 14:00 CDT, 29 August 2008 to 16:00 CDT, 6 September 2008
Schedule: Passed

D3porte International Tournament is reaching its Grand Final on Saturday the 6th of September at 15:00 CDT:

Grand Final: serious/Cypher [2:0] [2:1] LaMz|question (fixture)

Update: The match is to be rescheduled!

GTV: 66.221.100.155:27960 & scorebot in #d3porte

Final Standings

1st.- - srs'cypher 200€
2nd.- - LaMz|question 100€
3rd.- - D&M/SombrA - 50 €
4th.- magic/Nike
5-8: LaMz/K1llmas, Fx.Rutt, Stalq3r, fnatic/Vo0


DEMOS: You can download the demos from D3porte VQ3 Tournament & Demos.

The first official online Quake Live tournament concluded last night with illusionS taking the championship in a well played match against karabas. karabas won the 1st map, tourney4, 20-16, but illusionS came back strong on the 2nd map, dm6, to win 33-8, and he maintained control through the tiebreaker, tourney7, to win 18-6 and win his first ever duel tournament! Congratulations to illusionS. A special congratulations goes out to Slasher who surprised everyone in the tournament by taking 3rd.

The tournament results can temporarily be viewed online, but Cup 2 is scheduled to begin next week, and when it does, the tournament bracket will be cleared, and the new bracket will be shown. If you'd like to sign up for the 2nd Coming: Cup 2, you can join #naql1v1 and message "2" with your signup. Cup 2 will be a 32 player double elimination tournament using the same maps as Cup 1 (dm6, dm13, tourney4, tourney6, and tourney7). As of right now, there are 18 spots left.

Here are some of the players we have signed up for Cup 2 so far:
EG|griffin
EG|chance
illusionS
bLt
EG|gellehsak
Slasher
twm|gillz
mojo
[id]SyncError
jp*TGM

Signups have CLOSED! We have reached our 32 player limit. The Cup 2 bracket will be up within a few days.

Scheduled: 11:00 CDT, 8 September 2008 to 16:00 CDT, 10 September 2008
Schedule: Passed

The Czech Quake clan R3spect prepared a special competition for the mid-level players. This Quake 3 cup is only for invited players.

32 players in this tourney, who will face each others in a Double Elimination Brackets.

This tournament will start on Monday 8th September and will continue until the 10th September. Every play day begins at 11:00 CDT and the official channel for this tourney will be #r3spect.quake.

Map list: pro-q3dm6, ztn3tourney1, hub3aeroq3, pro-nodm9, pro-q3tourney4

The LowLandLions community website decided to host a whole series of interviews with a player in each of the top teams across Europe and even North-America concerning the three big LANs during August.

Each interviews takes the interviewee chronologically through the events, discussing their performance in the most interesting games and how the teams handled defeat and victory. Besides that the interviews have been tried to keep as up-to-date as possible, by asking questions concerning possible line-up changes that happened after the event due to disappointing results.

MYM Morg
Pandemic - Nabore
TEK9.Stevy
Fnatic/LINQAN
Ravens fRiJeC
Infused.revoltz
eSuba.Mazarini
Dignitas.Mick
H2k.vazy
[R] rzE
LLL.doekoe
bb\mofje
EG.Wombat

Have fun reading the interviews, it surely will take up quite a while to read them all. Thanks to all the players who agreed to answer the LowLandLions' questions.

The programer arQon from CPMA has released an new updated version of the quake3.exe (CNQ3 v1.43 RC, rev 1702).
For details on all the changes until now you can read this.


Download CNQ3 v1.43 RC

Are you bored making Quake2 all the time step by step? Here is the Quick Quake2 installer for you. All what you need to do is to download Quick Quake2 installer, install on your disc and play the game!

Download Quick Quake2 Installer, install the game and enjoy it! Quick Quake2 installer have under Quake2 / Multiplayer / join network server, servers only for beginners. Of course this installer is for everyone not just for beginners. Are you asking your self what will cost you? What to setup? How long will it take to set/download everything? The only thing that actually will cost you is less then 10mins of waiting to download the game.

"If you have no chance of actually killing your enemy I advice you retreating when you can't survive a direct hit rocket. It's a easy enough rule to follow. If both are low, take a chance if you really need the frag. Don't attack a fully stacked enemy with only 100 health and no armor, and don't expect to kill a fully stacked enemy at first attack. It usually takes more than one attack/retreat series to kill an enemy in control. Be patient, your chance will come sooner or later."

More of "newbie guide to 1v1" you can find it in Quick Quake2 installation!


Quake2 is created with Q2demo + 3.20v. All files are legal.

The Electronic Sports League have relaunched their section in the United Kingdom with a £30,000 ESL Pro Series.

Featuring Counter-Strike: Source and Call of Duty 4, the ESL Pro Series will have the best 12 teams in the country compete over an 11 week season to qualify for the finals to be held in January. The winning teams will net themselves a grand prize of £5,000 - that's £1,000 per player. There is also a bonus of £100 for each match won during the season!


Three qualifiers for both games will be hosted in September in which the top 4 teams from each will qualify. The ESL Pro Series will begin at the end of September.

How to qualify for Counter-Strike: Source
How to qualify for Call of Duty 4
ESL Pro Series in the UK announcement

Sometime in February, subz' decided that he'll make a Q3 movie, because Q3 is so awesome to work it, and he was sort of getting into CPMA with #cpmpickup and so on. So he asked for a few demos, and he got a little bit, then a little bit more, and then fei from Shaolinproductions dumped the gq4 demos over his head, so all of a sudden he had this epic amount of very nice footage, and realized that this will have to be something more.

He has been sorting demos since then, thinking up scenes, and whatnot, and actually started working on it only in June. Thanks are mentioned in the movie, some in the readme, but some extra special thanks to wIz4 for his advice on quality encoding. More technical stuff about the movie you can find out in #unpredictables on irc.quakenet.org. Two audio streams are available for the video. The first track has VQ3 hit sounds while the second has CPM sounds.



Movie starring: funnyb, ahxnxa, beng, oblivion, griffin, bud, luke, mov9k, nekon, 2b, reptile, 5cared, amph, anima, ddk, dmlzr, fiend, gouki, krysa, liam, mantra, n0rz, ovo, ph1l, raziel, vamp1re, breeze, subz.

Along with the three different 720P versions available for download, there is a Low Quality & High Definition h264 Streaming Flash option.

ClanBase announced today that they have launched a separate division especially for Greece. This to encourage a lower entery bar for new users from Greece but also to localise more with new cups and ladders.

Mads 'MadUSA' Ehrhardt from GGL ClanBase said:

"We are excited to being able to bring news in local language to some of the countries that are not that strong in the English language. Content in local language always reach further than non-native language news, and also caters to a more local audience. I am excited about this new set up and expect there will be more to come."

It's not the first time that ClanBase separated divisions, a few years ago they launched ClanBase Italy for an experiment which was successfully enough to continue this tradition with Greece.