Just a small update. Its currently 23:30 here in Dallas/Grapevine and I have just returned to my room for a breather. We have worked as a team really hard through a lot of setup issues. Nothing major, just stuff that absolutely HAD to be done tonite.

In fact, the whole crew has been awesome. Trillian and her husband went and got food for all of us, wheat and I worked on getting the production images to the plasma screens in the Intel booth, Sigma managed to sort out not only our lan connections, but also the irritating signal display on one of our static cameras. Blankz continued to work on the production setup, kicking a few butts to get the lan sorted too and the rest of the guys Tosspot, Trav and Ed have all been busy doing stuff for everyone as well. Its been amazing to see the teamwork going into this thing.

As for tomorrow, we will be focused on ET mainly, which means Trillian and Toss casting via video most of the day. Though Trillian has agreed to cast in the Creative booth for fatal1ty during the week to. Too bad she only gets paid in creative hardware, how is she going to split an mp3 player with the rest of us? (only joking Trill :p)

Me? I am going to be casting some Q3 with wheat and probably some Doom3 too. Ed and Lun (not arrived yet) should be doing Q2. In a bit of inside news for those of you reading on ESR, we are trying to sort out a deal with the great guys from Activision whilst here, to broadcast some Quake 4 stuff out to you via video. So in essence you get to see live what its like. Still early days on this one, so its not 100% we will do it just yet, but we are going to try and get this for you.

On the subject of Quake 4 I have now had a chance to play it, all be it on a laptop with a highly sensitive mouse (we couldnt seem to get the mouse sens to alter). Early opinions are hard, but the graphics are great (as we expected), not too grey (ala D3) and all the weapons feel like Q3. The Q3 sounds were still being used (no bad thing), but the most noticable difference was that it feels slower in terms of movement. Not dramatically, but noticable. Its something new to get used to, but it does feel a little slower in the general movement. Strafing, jumping etc was all pretty normal as were the rocket jumps and boosts off other parts of the map.

The map we played (the only one in this version I think) was pretty good and nicely, wasnt that far removed from Q3. I am busy uploading the video as I type this, so won't be long now and you guys will be able to see some of this for yourself. I will be doing further movies as the week goes on, and as already revealed we are working on bringing you something special via our casts this week.

Off to see if we have anything else to finish off now, before I hit the pillows and crash. 'til tomorrow.

P.S. I uploaded the missing picture from the earlier journal entry for you. It shows the new Q4 logo with those small little bumps on the underside of the Q. Four of them ;)

P.P.S. Forgot to say. Fatal1ty came over to say hi to us when he arrived and invited us to his room. He explained that he has a huge suite and a big table, so if we wanted to come down and play some poker with him "thatd be great". He gave us his room number, which was pretty brave of him considering there are about 7,000 gamers staying here right now and I wonder how many would venture up to his room should they find out his room number was 6315...oops.

Note : That is not fats real room number of course ;)