Evil Empire Gaming

My next Rig is on its way. Lots more to do so this is all I can show you for now...
More to come!

Here's something than will turns head and brings smile to the faces of many underprivileged gamers in the world who face the daily agony of low resolutions and medium quality graphics. Who suffer in silence with underpowered software and thrashing hard drives. Who face humiliations galore turning up to LANs and try to shoot at blury, malformed blobs while all their mates are enjoying high-poly, bump-mapped, dynamically-lit opponents.

Sharky has run a few tests and discovered that the golden era of the Celeron 300A has indeed returned. The new batches of Celerons and AMD Semprons overclock a treat! And their gaming performance is right up there with the Pentium 4-3.0E. They overclock a 2.8Ghz CeleronD 335 to 3.55Ghz and a 1.8Ghz Sempron 3100 to 2.1 Ghz.

The Doom3 benchmark sees these 2 budget screamers, the P4-2.8E and P4-3.0E all within 2 fps of each other and the Sempron coming out on top!

YESSSSSSSSS there IS a gaming god after all and lo, he doth proclaimeth, "Let their be fun!".

Check it out here.

Well, I finished it today. The end run was very edge-of-your-seat kind of stuff, and the finale was awsome.

Fighting your way through wave after wave of bad guys was made very challenging with the Soul Cube. You had to pick the easier creatures to kill before you could dispatch the big ones with the Cube.

From the tense atmosphere of the first part, the game progresses to a mid-high point where you actually enter hell itself and search for the stolen Soul Cube. I must say I thought hell was superb. The continuous off-key wailing, howling, sobbing and moaning made the whole thing creepy as, well, hell! Of course the lakes of fire, gruesome scenery and cadaverous torsos used as torches added to the overall effect. After the hell level Doom 3 gets serious and the beasties really start coming out of the walls as the base is slowly taken over.

It's a great progression of the game and something a lot of people will miss out on if they get too annoyed with the tension of the first part.

Read on if you want to find out what was on the other side of this wall. If you want to wait till you finish the game yourself then DON'T CLICK it'll spoil it for you.

This looks promising; a new title from Monolith called F.E.A.R . This stands for "First Encounter Assault and Recon" of which you're a member. This preview at 1Up.com has a few details about the game and some tantelizing screenshots. Looks like a kind of modern-day-combat-secret-organisation-spy-thriller-science-fiction-horror style game. I know I don't only speak for myself when I say we can only hope it has Zombies.

Like to have a sneak peek at upcoming accessories from Microsoft? Right this way...

Some interesting gaming news tidbits for you tonight.

Gameindustry.biz reports that Doom3 has gone straight to #1 in Australia!

Croteam are not resting on their laurels, Serious Sam 2 is well underway with a new engine named, incredibly, Serious Engine 2! Which probably means we'll be able to get twice as serious making puns using the word 'serious'. I'm imagining some serious pun action.

There are some awsome looking screenshots of Battlefield 2 on the EA Games website. Yeah, Battlefield Vietnam is a cool game but it's not that much different to battlefield 1942. Yeah the graphics are much better, helicopters are cool, it just feels a bit limited in scope. Battlefield 2 looks like it'll be the equivalent leap to that of Codename Eagle to Battlefield 1942. 100+ player maps, 30+ vehicles, modern weapons, material penetration, persistant character skills & rank... it's gonna rock!

And speaking of similarities between Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam, here's a sneak preview at Planet Battlefield of the Battlefield Vietnam: 1942 MOD we'll soon be able to download for free. Man I don't think I've ever used the word battlefield so much in a sentance. Check out the flamethrower!

HomeLAN Fed has reviewed, would you believe, the sequel to Tribes 2, Tribes: Vengence. If you read the review you'll notice one glaring aspect of this new game; it sounds just like the old game. It now uses the Unreal 2 engine instead of the V12 engine (or whatever they were legally allowed to call it), but it seems to have less vehicles than Tribes 2 while us punters always seem to demand more damnit! It's not being done by Dynamix but rather Oz company Irrational Games. Lets all hope we don't die of screenshot boredom before it's actually released like we did with Tribes 2.

Haven't we all had days like these? Feel like your getting no where, trapped in a dead-end office job? No matter how hard you try you're always feeling like you're bashing you head against some invisible barrier?

Haven't we all had days like these? Gaping, bloody maw, necrotic flesh dropping off in fetid chunks, insatiable hunger for human flesh?

We've all been there!

If you don't have a good Bit Torrent client you should check out Azureus! It's very spiffy and offers more info about the torrents you are downloading/uploading than you ever thought you'd need to know! It even has it's own in-built tracker so you can host torrents yourself! In conclusion I give this software 10 exclamation points !!!!!!!!!!

Can anyone doubt this guy is a practical thinker? HomeLAN Fed has a few more case mod pics from Quakecon to see as well.

Remember what I said about Doom3 Multiplayer having that Quake DM4 feel? Well now you can feel it too! Doom3Maps has a Doom3 Port of Q1DM4 available for download.

After setting down some initial impressions of single and multiplayer Doom3 and reading some comments made on this site and others, here's my conclusion about Doom3.

Saw this originally over at http://www.overclockers.com.au/ who had an nVidia pdf presentation on their website. nVidia are due to launch this new hardware at Quakecon in a couple of days and overclockers got their wrist slapped for posting it too early. So you can't see it any more.

BUT, it was very exciting. This new chip has only 8 pipelines compared to 12/16 in the 6800 range. While this doesn't sound that exciting there are 2 flavours: 6600 and 6600 Ultra. The 6600 Ultra has faster memory than the standard 6600 and another exciting feature: it supports SLI in the PCI Express verion! So now you have a less expensive midrange nVidia card that can do SLI, which is pretty spiffy if you ask me.

Update / That overclockers link is up again.

Tweak Guides has a Doom3 Tweak Guide available. It's good as a reference to console commands as well as providing a few pointers for improved performance. I've done a minor tweak based on the Tweak Guides tips and have seen a small increase in fps on my nearly 2 year old hardware, with no decrease in image quality.

I have an AMD 2500+, 512 DDR333, 64 MB GF4 4200 Ti and saw fps in timedemo 1 go from 24 to 32 at Medium Quality 800x600 resolution. Here they are:

FROM                         TO

seta image_useCache "0"      seta image_useCache "1"

seta image_cacheMegs "20"    seta image_cacheMegs "64"

seta image_cacheMinK "200"   seta image_cacheMinK "2048"

It still astounds me how a game can run at medium detail/ 800x600 / 30 fps and still look and feel this good.

Just so you don't think this is a Doom3 Blog, here's something different. Saw these awsome screenshots of Half Life 2 on Shacknews. I'm hoping HL2 will be the gaming revolution people are looking for in this new generation of games. The graphics are certainly spiffy enough.

And for those so inclined, some pics of Counter-Strike: Source (CS with the HL2 graphics engine) at IGN. Will that game ever die?

Where the bloody hell is Team Fortress 2???

Beavertooth!

I've been waiting for Squishy (aka Cacodemon) to show up in Doom 3. The wait was worth it, he's awsome! You can even shoot the energy balls he spits at you and make them explode. Very cool.

Hmmm for a multiplayer game, Doom3 sure is a great single player experience...

Continuing on from my other pages (pt. 1, pt. 2) , here are my impressions of multiplayer Doom3

Following on from the previous page 'Initial Impressions', here are some more specific impressions including the annoying. Just so you wouldn't think I'm some sort of gushing Doom3 fanboy.

The original Doom was a revolution as a video game based virtual reality experience. And while Half Life may have raised the bar along the lines of immersive fiction, Doom3 takes it to a whole new level. Doom fans of old will love it.

Here are a few of my initial feelings about the game.

And part 2 is available here.

http://www.martianbuddy.com

If you view source on the page you can see how many Doom3 players have been:

Sat, 7 August 2004

Total unique visits: 170862

Unique visitors today: 24594

Here's a recent list of search keywords from the evem.org.au referers list. Lot's of people with various problems regarding the installation and/or running of Doom3:

radeon 9800 pro small dots while playing doom 3
doom 3 serial number
kazaa forum doom
doom 3 hacked download
doom 3 rar
doom3 rar kazaa
doom 3 help
doom 3 keycode
doom 3 crashes and freezes please help
doom 3 has encountered a problem
geforce mx420 doom 3
doom 3 encountered error
doom iii fileshare
error during initialization doom
crc failed the file is corrupt doom 3
doom 3 crashes
ati doom 3 error
error when installing doom 3

1. Download the latest video card drivers
2. Buy a legit copy you cheap bastard

Well, you can't be dissappointed about the level of gibbage in Doom3. Check out these screenshots I took this afternoon!

Yeah! Take that you stupid turkey hahaha. Oh another one? You want some of this too? Here you go, eat this! hahahahaha...

OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
First chance I got today, I screamed down to the nearest EB in the car ran into the store like a kid on Xmas morning :P

This Firing Squad article details a few high-end graphics benchmarks with Doom3. To represent the nVidia camp they line up 2 of the fastest GeForce cards currently available, the ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe and the eVGA e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, both pushing the adjectival power of the English language to its utmost, ultra, extreme limits. The eVGA card is so exclusive you have to enter a competition to win the oportunity to buy one and there's only 4 per week.

How good are they? At 1600x1200 Ultra Quality 4xAA/8xAF the eVGA card still makes 42fps!

Do I want one? Hell yes! Will I get one? Not a chance in hell unless I win Lotto or something...

On the Guru3D forums there's a thread describing a CD Key stealing exploit. It involves downloading a .pak file to enable co-op mode and joining an unencrypted server.

BEWARE....

Saw on Engadget that Disney is making their own range of kids PCs now...

... I'm sure there's something funny to say here but ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT IS DOOM 3 !!!!!!

Over the years, the members of Evil Empire have produced many banner images for the site, 142 to be exact. So as not to let all this creative juice seep into the festering swamp that is today's Internet, here they all are, for your viewing pleasure.

You can play a fun game while you're looking: Guess The Game!! You can find the answers by looking at the image alt text. No cheating!

Updated /
Forgot to mention EvEm ally, Mitsuhama Heavy Industries, also has a banner archive!

Well, I got excited about the site all over again and couldn't help myself. This new theme I call "The Dark Side". The old theme I call "Green Puke" or as a co-worker of mine put it "Colour Blind". I think it's an improvement (see old design pictured) , hope you like it. Nah, actually, I couldn't give a rats if you like it or not!

Saw this at PlanetDoom, a collection of Doom3 screenshots @ 2048x1536 in size with 8x Anisotropic Filtering and 16x Anti-Aliasing. Very drool-worthy!

Watch out for bogus, virus carrying emails coming from the "evem.org.au technical support team". I know most of you won't be fooled by such simple minded fraud, but I thought I should post it here anyway.

And for the record: DO NOT OPEN - DELETE IMMEDIATELY - It will most likely do damage to your computer or install virus/trojan software.

Return-Path: <noreply@evem.org.au>
Received: from evem.org.au (210-86-90-132.jetstream.xtra.co.nz [210.86.90.132])
	by nader.haymarket.com.au (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i74MBbe20468
	for <xtro@evem.org.au>; Thu, 5 Aug 2004 06:11:38 +0800
Message-Id: <200408042211.i74MBbe20468@nader.haymarket.com.au>
From: "Bounced mail" <noreply@evem.org.au>
To: xtro@evem.org.au
Subject: Message could not be delivered
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 10:12:13 +1200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
	boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0004_1DE48A35.97CEA8C1"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
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This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Dear user of evem.org.au,

Your account was used to send a huge amount of spam during this week.
Probably, your computer was infected and now runs a trojan proxy server.

We recommend you to follow our instructions in order to keep your computer safe.

Best wishes,
evem.org.au technical support team.


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[H]ard|OCP have produced a guide to how Doom3 is likely to run on various hardware configs. They start at a very good budget point (P41.5 GHz, GF4 MX440 64MEG, 512MB RAM) and proceed to the killer rig we all dream of. It's a very good read and you'll probably get a bit more excited about running Doom3 on your aging hardware after reading it. They make a point of stating that even at 640x480 low quality setting the game was visually stunning and engaging.

"What you thought you knew about resolution in games may not apply with DOOM 3. If you think games can't look good in low resolutions, DOOM 3 may change your mind."

At the very least check it out for the cool high-res screenshots. Check out the skin on the player model here!

OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!