qcon games were better, where it took him two goes to beat an out of shape zero4 even though czm happened to have the deadliest rail aim going at the time
i never liked that game, cause z4 was so fucking out of shape ... that really made the game totally uninteresting and not showing, what normally would have happened.
Who would win if they were both in top shape and their games were at the same evolutionary stage. Thats a tough one to call, personally I think that z4 would take home the bacon.
Always thought czm cracked a little under pressure and made silly mistakes. It would be different now as he is a lot older but z4 always seemed to be relaxed and could bring his A game to the table.
he may have had some private or lan practice, but z4 really did not seem to be playing all that much in the weeks before qcon 04. he seemed to be online consistently around a few times a week, mostly playing guys like gator, griff519 (not D|S-tom) and some of the other people who were just on servers. i mean, if i personally wanted to be in top shape for something i would have been playing more... but who knows. he may have actually played a lot more... this is really just what was obvious on some of the more common servers.
one funny thing that happened a few days before qcon was an online cooller vs z4 matchup. cooller i guess was in the usa and staying at carnage's house. i think the map was on t4, and gator / z4 were cleaning house. cooller got in, and virtually all the specs seemed to root for him, hoping for an upset. cooller lost, but then somehow ztn was demanded by the spectators, and it was voted. cooller won ztn, and the specs demanded dm6, but both shied away from playing it. cooller and z4 both won their maps pretty decisively, although they seemed to be low-stress games. someone then commented about hub, and i don't think it was voted, but cooller said something about not having played it much at all. gator then commented along the lines of "gl when the chips are down and it comes up against you 2x in a row at qcon," which as fate would have it is exactly what happened (against z4 in wb and czm for lb final.)
in retrospect, i think carnage was just translating / typing chat for cooller, since they were lanned and cooller may not have had good english skills at the time, or something.
throughout the games cooller was also testing out a new bind that said "without rail i'm nothing," or something of the sort.
this has been an ESR history lesson. there are demos. i think they're on esr somewhere.
cant find any of these demos. i just remeber, that some guys did a few cooller-zero4 fakegames back in the days. but duno if it was before qcon2k4 or any other event.