SphericalCrusher asks: "I have been using Comcast high-speed internet for the last three years. Before that, I used Bellsouth DSL and then random dial-up services — but I have to say that overall, I love Comcast the best. Now that my parents are moving, to a new house some 12 miles away, and having no money for my own place, I'll have to move with them . The thing is, the road that it is on is pretty far off the highway, and after calling all broadband providers in the area, I've found out that broadband is not available at my new location. Charter Cable Communications covers the entire area of Summerville, Georgia except mine and neither Bellsouth or Alltel offer DSL. Now, I'm forced to either go back to dial-up or try out a satellite broadband service, which is what I want to do. Has anyone here had any success in gaming online with satellite internet?"

1up has a feature up looking at videogamers that have become pioneers. They profile several folks who have made an impact on gaming as a hobby, and the view of gaming in the world at large. The piece includes people like Patrick Wildenborg (the Hot Coffee whistleblower), Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe (makers of Counter-Strike), Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, and (most infamously) Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. From a more upbeat part of the piece, on Counter-Strike: "[CS] is one of the most ubiquitous and popular games ever made, period -- Valve's Steam distribution service calculates that nearly 120 million man hours are lost to various versions of Counter-Strike monthly. Such a statistic is even more mind-boggling considering the humble roots of the game -- both Cliffe and Gooseman were college students at the time of the project's inception. They had some amateur experience in the disciplines they brought to the mod; Cliffe had previously mastered several gaming websites, and Gooseman had done programming and modeling work on other fairly popular mods like Navy SEALs and Action Quake 2."

simoniker writes "As voted by game industry professionals, the results of the Quantum Leap Awards for the first-person shooter genre have been revealed, honoring the titles which 'brought the FPS genre forward' in the biggest ways. The winner is a truly classic title, but there's at least one seminal FPS that, surprisingly enough, didn't make the top 5." The top 5 are, from 1 to 5, Half-Life, Quake, GoldenEye, Wolfenstein, and System Shock 2.

Penguin Lover writes "Linux Hardware has just posted a new story on how Intel's new Conroe performs under Linux. From the article: 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping because no matter which side of the isle you look on, you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards. Along with Intel's chipset offerings, keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs.'"

dsmith3689 writes "Researchers at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario have explored the use of an eye tracker as a control device for a handful of commercial video games. To do this, they integrated a Tobii 1750 desktop eye tracker with Quake 2, Neverwinter Nights, and a flash adaptation of Missile Command called Lunar Command. A study was performed that indicates the use of direct feedback from eye movements can drastically increase the feeling of immersion (pdf) in the virtual world."

Built with the Doom 3 engine and touting numerous innovations on the First Person Shooter genre, Prey is a study in contradictions. While it delivers on many interesting twists and environmental elements, the low difficulty and hackneyed character design drains some of the novelty from the experience. Despite frustratingly similar corridors and brain-dead enemies, the quality of the innovation somehow combines with the touchstones of retro-gaming to create that ephemeral quality: fun. Much better than Doom 3, and with the new-car smell that Quake 4 was lacking, Prey is a fully functional refit of the corridor-shooter genre. Read on for my impressions of Human Head's latest.

cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."

gatzke writes "Some interesting developments have been coming online with new technology being developed that may lead to new and exciting gaming outside the home. DisneyQuest in Orlando mixes classic / modern video games with virtual reality and interactive games. MagiQuest in Myrtle Beach is an immersive interactive treasure hunt environment with a simple wand interface."

At last year's GDC Nintendo President Iwata made the claim that the company was reaching out to everyone, in an attempt to expand the gaming market. They were planning to appeal to hardcore gamers, folks who used to play games, and folks who have never played a game in their lives. At the time, it sounded like a tag line. Today, I have impressions from three titles which suggest they've got what it takes to make us all into gamers. Hardcore players can sink their teeth into Metroid Prime Hunters, and have one of the most intuitive FPS experiences ever to come to a console. Folks looking for some nostalgia can enjoy Tetris DS, blockstacking like it's 1985. Even your grandmother can try Brain Age, proving to her bridge club that even though her license says she's 80 she's got the brain of a 20 year old. Read on for my impressions of three titles that give powerful evidence to support Iwata's grand claim.

Console First-Person Shooters have come a long way in the last few years. While titles like Resident Evil 4 and FarCry Instincts were moving the genre forward for gamers with joypads, Criterion Games was working on the FPS title simply called Black. Touted as 'gun porn', the game offers a fully destructible world where every bullet's trajectory is a story of its own. While such precision is laudable, the focus on the game's physics and mechanical feel has resulted in mediocrity elsewhere in the title. Read on for my impression of the good and the blah in Criterion's Black.

gnarlin writes "GtkRadiant is now available under GPL license, along with some Quake II tools which never got a chance to be put under GPL before. Head over to the qeradiant website for all the details. GtkRadiant is a level editor developed by id Software and Loki Software. It is used to create maps for a number of computer games."

elbazo writes "Nvidia today launched their new mobile chip the GoForce 5500, which provides a massive jump in graphics technology for handheld and mobile devices. Capable of 'easily' rendering Quake 3, support for 1024x768 graphics output and real time playback of H.264, WMV9 and MPEG4 movies at high resolution the chip looks set to rock the mobile world."

Wired has an annual list of high-profile vaporware projects and the number of games on there is just depressing. Numbers 7, 6, 5, 2, and 1 are all videogame projects. When the Phantom is only #2, you know what has to be number 1. From the article: "Announced in 1997 and promised every year since, this game takes vaporware to new heights. Think about it, in just 13 months this game will have been in one form of development or another for a decade. This project started with a game based on the Quake 2 engine, then in 1999 it moved to the Unreal engine and has been stalled ever since."

The Guardian Gamesblog had the chance to pick John Carmack's brain about mobile gaming's first official doom title: The Doom RPG. From the article: "Q: On your blog you talked about getting into Java programming as a means of resetting some assumptions and habits after working on Quake III. So did Doom RPG help? How? A: It wasn't so much the Java aspects as the mobile platform that is the diversion. It has been worthwhile, but I didn't get to go all that far down the detour before my primary responsibilities asserted themselves. I did three major blocks of coding on the project and regular design review meetings, which was all I could spare the time for. The crew at Fountainhead did a great job of following up on the direction and turning my rough project into a polished product."

wwood_98 writes to tell us that Wired is running a story about how GPS could serve more than its traditional role. From the article: "International organizations like the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, or PTWC, in Hawaii currently depend on coastal seismic stations to record deep-sea earthquakes that could cause giant waves. But according to Jeff Freymueller, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, data from GPS receivers could provide quicker, more accurate estimates of the magnitude of a tsunami-causing quake, buying time for evacuation. Freymueller presented his findings at this week's American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco."

Gamespot reports that the much-discussed launch title list for the Xbox 360 is now available. The list, from the article: "Amped 3 (2K Sports), Call of Duty 2 (Activision), Condemned: Criminal Origins (Sega), FIFA 06: Road to the World Cup (Electronic Arts), Gun (Activision), Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft Game Studios), Madden NFL 06 (Electronic Arts), NBA 2K6 (2K Sports), NBA Live 06 (Electronic Arts), Need for Speed Most Wanted (Electronic Arts), NHL 2K6 (2K Sports), Perfect Dark Zero (Microsoft Game Studios), Peter Jackson's King Kong (Ubisoft), Project Gotham Racing 3 (Microsoft Game Studios), Quake 4 (Activision), Ridge Racer 6 (Namco), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 (Electronic Arts), Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (Activision)"

While console shooters like Halo have gotten a lot of press in recent years, I will freely admit to being a PC man first and foremost when it comes to the genre. Getting the chance to use mouselook and engage in some old-fashioned shooter action is a wonderful nostalgic thrill. While stories are nice, brainless, shiny, visceral action still has a place in modern games. Proving that tried-and-true formulas are still enjoyable today, Star Wars Battlefront II and Quake IV deliver visually impressive violence-fests that uphold their series pedigrees with distinction. Read on for my impressions of these two new games with thoroughly familiar experiences.

An anonymous reader writes that "Village Voice has a small article by Julian Dibbell about the Machinima Film Festival that takes place this Saturday (Nov. 12th) at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. The festival is also holding their annual awards on Friday night. For me, the highlight is their honoring David Wright for creating Keygrip (the program behind the creation of Quake movies like Blahbalicious and Operation Bayshield) - which is a nice nod to machinima's roots. "

Timmus writes "nVidia's huge lead in OpenGL performance is apparently gone. According to Firingsquad, ATI's latest hotfix driver brings major performance improvements to ATI's RADEON X1800 cards in OpenGL games like Doom 3 and Quake 4. The X1800 XT is now faster than GeForce 7800 GTX, while the X1800 XL is faster than the GeForce 7800 GT in most cases. The article also includes GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT scores, including both in SLI. It's a pretty interesting read if you like graphical benchmarks." From the article: "A little over a week ago, rumors began spreading that ATI was working on a new tool that delivered substantially improved performance to their recently launched X1000 cards in OpenGL titles such as DOOM 3, Quake 4, and many others. Some reports claimed ATIs performance improved by up to 35% in these titles in 4xAA mode. Then, posts on Beyond3Ds forums and sites like Guru3D confirmed these rumors. So how did ATI pull this off?"

Crusader writes "id Software has released the Linux client and server for Quake 4. There's a FAQ page with installation instructions, notes, and download links."