As you all have heard, Deathmatch Radio was holding a CPM 1v1 Open Cup. Due to the number of sign ups, they have decided to split it into 2 different cups; one for North America and one for Europe. The North American Cup will still be held on Saturday, July 12th at 8:30 EST, but the European cup will be held on Sunday the 13th at 8:30 GMT +1:00. Information about both cups can be found at can be found at the Deathmatch Radio site .

For all the European players who have signed up on the North American page, please sign up again on the new European page and your entry on the American page will be removed.

The map pool is still CPM3a, CPM22, CPM1a, CPM15 and CPM24 for both tournaments, more rules can be found on the websites of the tournaments.

For more information please visit and idle #DmRadio.

ESWC COMPETITION SCHEDULE


Sunday, July 6 - Final Bracket

The "last invitation match" for ESWC Finals in San Jose between Czm vs Zero4 can be found here.

11:00 Semi Final: Avek vs Cypher
12:00 Semi Final: Jibo vs Fox
Demos

14:30 Semi Final: Jibo vs Avek
16:00 Final: Cypher vs Fox
Demos

Cypher showed amazing skills in this competition, won the maps pro-q3tourney4 and ztntourney1 in the final against Fox. Alexey "Cypher" Yushanevsky wins the ESWC Masters without any maploss in the whole tournament!

» Final Standings

1. Alexey "fnatic.Cyph3r" Yushanevsky - $2500
2. Magnus "LLL.Fox" Olsson - $1500
3. Maciej "srs.av3k" Krzykowski - $1000
4. Jibo
5.-8. sk-Zero4
5.-8. EG-Czm
5.-8. Noctis
5.-8. Fooki

Jibo, Cypher and Zero4 secured the three places/tickets to the ESWC Finals.


» Demos
ESWC site - All demos and configs from saturday
Cyberfight.org - Some demos & config pack

» Picture gallery by sk-gaming | Rapha & Fooki from behind, Zero4
The Second Batch
Sunday

» Coverage Articles
Paul "CZM" Nelsons Rough Ride by Gillz
Tom "griffin" Walls Cold Front! by Gillz

Thanks to all at ESR who uploaded demos of the earlier games, giving comments and do analyses on the games.

Source: eswc.com/masters

Here, results live from Paris:

ESWC France: Demos are available there.

ESWC Masters: Demos and cfg are available there.


Links: Official website

Yesterday the announcement was made that the swedish Quake star Magnus "fox" Olsson would be joining the Belgian multi-gaming team LowLandLions. Fox will be representing his new clan in multiple Quake 3 events this year such as ESWC Masters, GameGune and QuakeCon

The swedish Quake 3 and Quake 4 player has been clanless since his contract with Fatal1ty's free players organization ran out.

Source: Sk-Gaming

I grabbed my camera and went to DreamHack where the Swedish Quake 3 ESWC qualifier took place. I did some video interviews with the Quake players and you can watch them by following the links below.

Interview with Prozac - Go here for the video
Prozac has been away from the scene for a while. In the interview he explains what he has been doing these last years. He also talks about his games against the new school players Arrw and Spartie. You will also find out why he doesn't think practicing with fox is the best way to prepare for a tournament.

Interview with fooKi - Go here for the video
fooKie is talking about why he is going back and forward from inactive to active and back again. He is also talking about his preparation for DreamHack. He also thinks the Swedish players might have an advantage when playing in the ESWC Masters in Paris.

Interview with Arrw - Go here for the video
Arrw didn't want to play his brother Z4muZ when he was younger since he got raped all the time. Nowadays the tables pretty much have turned.

Interview with Spartie- Go here for the video
When all the other gamers started playing Quake 4 Spartie stayed with Quake 3. In the interview he is talking about how actively he was playing Quake 3 during this time.

* Update * If there are any QuakeWorld fans out there you can watch the interview with Locktar, the winner of the QuakeWorld tournament.

The Quake 3 groups of the ESWC Masters Paris are now public on ESWC.com. They will be as following:


More informations: Schedule - Brackets - Masters Paris 2008 - Streams

Update: We already know that Cyrus "proZaC" Malekani isn't able to come to France for the Masters.

Scheduled: 05:00 CDT, 4 July 2008 to 14:00 CDT, 4 July 2008
Schedule: Passed

Friday the 4th of July, during the "Mondial du Gaming" at the POPB in Paris, the French ESWC Qualifiers will take place. The qualifiers will be played before the Paris Masters event begin.

The groups for Quake 3 will be as following:


More informations: Schedule - Bracket - ESWC.fr - Streams

This Sunday on June 29th, the best North American Warsow players will yet again be facing each other in competition in the 3rd weekly wSwNA cup.

This time two cups will be hosted, one pro cup for the experienced players and the other being an amateur cup. The amateur cup will begin at 6:30 pm EST (GMT-5), and the pro cup will begin at 8:30 pm EST.

Video stream and shoutcasting for the entire pro cup will be provided by DM Radio (#DMRadio on Quakenet) at ustream.tv.


All the information on these cups can be found at wswna.tourney and wswnanovice.tourney.

#wsw.na on irc.quakenet.org
#DMRadio on irc.quakenet.org

Made by epitaph, Rogue Bagel is a short CPM movie featuring content mostly from duels and 2v2 TDM matches on the Southern Comfort CPMA Server.

The seeds have been released for the upcoming ESWC Masters event, held July 4th-6th at the Palais Omnisports of Paris. Players and are placed in two different seed pools (top and high) while others are placed in a challenger’s pool. No group may have more than two players from the same nationality.

Top seeds:
Alexei "Cypher" Yanyshevsky
Paul "czm" Nelson
Magnus "fox" Olsson
Fan "RazerJ" Zhibo

High seeds:
Karl "fooKi" Johansson
Marcel "k1llsen" Paul
Richard "noctis" Gansterer
Shane "rapha" Hendrixson

Challengers:
John "ZeRo4" Hill
Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager
Chance "Chance" Lacina
Maciek "av3k" Krzykowski
Cyrus "proZaC" Malekani
Grégory "falcuma" Ollivier
Jeffrey "Draven" Debipersad
Benjamin "Unity" Rovira
Thomas "griffin" Wall
Pierre-Emeric "link1n" Portier
Mateusz "matr0x" Ozga
Andreas "ArrW" Ihrfors
Daniel "ddk" Kapadia
Arnaud "slx" Lanoe
Dongkin "Dongjin" Suh

Update - the 24th player will be:
Ondra "Legie" Konecny

The group draw will take place on Monday, June 30th, from 15.00 CET to 17.00 CET. More info on http://www.eswc.com/masters/paris2008.

The icon of the CPL World Tour in 2005, Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager is back in action after a very long break from competitive gaming. Although Q3 is not his game of choice, the Dutchman qualified for the ESWC and got invited to the ESWC Masters of Paris.

In an interview with SK Gaming, Vo0 talks about his reasons to come back, his feelings about playing a game he does not necessarily love to play and shares a great deal of thoughts about his gaming history and competitive gaming. Mandatory quote:

I love to prove people wrong. I think I can be a great competitor in Q3 if I put my mind into it. I need a whole lot of playing hours for it, yes, but that is just because I have to catch up to other players. I will be going up against people who were playing professional Q3 tournaments in 2001, and for me that is very exciting. I feel like an underdog, and it feels cool.

Furthermore, I love competition. Q4 wasn't my first game choice either but I never played any tournament in that game. That was merely because I just had a crazy tour finished and I wanted to take a break and realized that Q4 wasn't really my cup of tea. When I think back of that choice now, it might have been a wrong one. Q4 was very different from PK and I had to start all over. My pride got in the way. Being a natural talent in one game that didn't automatically transfer to the next kinda hurt it. I felt like I was never going to be as good as the top players. Which was a dumb, though, as I beat [Magnus] “fox” Olsson and [Michael] “winz” [Bignet] in Eurocup matches, but I still wasn't happy enough about the overall performances. That combined with the fact that I didn't really enjoy the game made me quit the game entirely.

All in all , it's mostly the competition that has lead me to start Q3 again.

The entire interview with this fascinating individual is to be found right here. By the way, he's clanless! ;-)

Strategy Informer tries to give an insight of why UT3 fails again and again to spur significant interest, this time for the Xbox 360.

"Earlier this month, Epic Games teased Xbox 360 owners with some screenshots of the upcoming port of Unreal Tournament III. They failed to summon any interest. It's extremely unusual for such an event to occur. If we take Epic's track record, (let alone the success of the Unreal Tournament series), their games have been at the forefront of Shooter fans' minds since 1999. The Unreal franchise is a legacy, one that even commands a widely accepted graphics engine. Is the reason simple ignorance or is there something more worrying at work? We attempt to find out."

Read Full Article @ Strategy Informer

Id Software's John Carmack, one of the worlds most celebrated game makers, projects that Quake Live will have "hundreds of thousands of players, if not millions."

"Early on, we were tossing around two different orders of magnitudes - anywhere from 50,000 to 5 million people playing. We have no idea where it is going to be in there. The fact that 70,000 people have signed up in a week means that we’re going to be looking at hundreds of thousands of players, if not millions. We hope that that can be a sustained critical mass of a community that can play this type of game, and be self-supporting."

Further in the interview, Carmack mentions the ever present discussion of whether or not PC gaming is superior to consoles and takes a dig at Crysis, saying that a game like that is "not necessarily that exciting of a direction for the PC to be going in the future." He mentions World of Warcraft as an example that the PC games have a lot of potential and says that id Software will stay true to the PC platform:

"And even though the PC doesn’t get the focus that it used to, in many ways our hearts are still there, and we’d like to do things where the PC is the appropriate platform. [We’d like to] do something that really speaks to the future of where the PC can be superior to consoles."

Carmack plans the introduction of Quake Live's counterpart of the BattleNet match-making system known from StarCraft or Warcraft 3 so that inexperienced players are not discouraged:

"Skill-based matchmaking is extremely important, so when you jump in, you’re going to be someplace appropriate. But we’re also adding things like bot-guided training levels offline. When you initially set up your account, you get to give the system an indication of what your skill level is. After a few matches, the game will see how you’re performing and adjust your choices."

The full interview can be read at GamesRadar/PC Gamer.

Quake Live beta signup page