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Welcome to a new mini-feature on Frag-Net, where we try to have a round up of interesting news on the community along with a status report on our gaming network.

Frag-Net Status Report

And as we mentioned before we have been working on new site features, here’s a couple we’ve recently revealed!

New Games on Frag-Net

We added two new game pages, Hell Denizen and Nazi Zombies: Portable.

You may have seen these games show up on our tracker, and we wanted to provide some proper info so people could buy, support, and of course play these awesome titles.

Check them out now!

Preview of New Articles

It’s been a bit silent on Frag-Net, but that’s because things have been so busy in the background and our own lives! Don’t fret however, as we have been working on a few articles for the site! What can you expect in the next couple of months?

• Interview - Xylemon had the chance to meet in person with a living legend, we don’t want to spoil who it is yet, but let’s just say we got “demented”.

• Reflection - A look at the forgotten yet critical legacy of ThreeWave CTF, and why CTF’s past is so complicated. The flag wasn’t the only thing being stolen.

• Nobody Told Me About Visitors - Mentioned on our instance a few months back, it will be a look at how id Software’s relationship with fans grew from humble IRC chats and office visits, to full on conventions.

• Not Just Cheats - A first-hand account by eukara of what it was like to have Ultima’s Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, but for video games. All in the year of 1999. All without an internet connection.

Updates to Our Archive.org Page

For those of you who don’t know, we have an archive.org page where we try to build the ultimate upload page for a mod, like how our Scientist Hunt page has everything that was created by the authors and community (well at least what we have).

Anyway, we had a few important mods up with pages but in a Work-In-Progress state for quite some time. We decided that it was time to update these pages. Some of the highlights include:

• Complete archive of Quake THINGS!, Clan Cthulhu’s website, and the Quake Digital Trading cards!. These came from Xylemon’s cousin who created and ran Clan Cthulhu back in the day. A prominent member was Valve’s own John “Choryoth” Guthrie. You can check out Frag-Net’s own mirror of the sites here!

• Scientist Hunt, They Hunger, DMC, & Counter-Strike, Zombie Panic! and more all have community Addons and their respective official files!

• ThreeWave and other CTF mods now have descriptions and other important metadata.

• Description improvements and quality assurance on almost all uploads.

We hope you take advantage of our uploads! While they will also help power the Frag-Net network’s in-game addon backend, it’s ultimately there for the community.

Past & Manuals

Finally, we have started hosting copies of HTML versions of manuals for modifications and archived websites providing a ‘wayback machine’ layout for them (i.e. always prefix a site with https://www.frag-net.com/past/).

We also have a smiliar layout for manuals, with https://www.frag-net.com/manuals/ followed by the mod game directory (the folder for the mod).

As mentioned above, we are hosting the Clan Cthulhu / Quake THINGS! website along with Fantasy Quake’s amazing manual, check them out!

The latter is definitely a must for when you play Fantasy Quake.

Gaming News

Blue’s Stories of Note

Here’s what our favorite gaming news site, Blue’s News has listed as the top stories for March 2024 that you should be aware of, list is oldest to newest:

• STAR WARS: Dark Forces Remaster Released

• Embracer Sells Saber Interactive

• Alpha Protocol Revived

• US Files Apple Antitrust Lawsuit

• Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition Released

• Dragon’s Dogma 2 Released

Another remaster of a beloved classic arrives, Apple gets sued formally by the United States’ Department of Justice, and Embracer’s empire seems to be shrinking as fast as it was growing. What a month!

While those are some big stories, we have some more news in the gaming world worth talking about!

GDC 2024

The annual Game’s Developers Conference, Game Developers Choice Awards, and Independent Games Festival Awards happened the 18th to 22nd, here’s some highlights of the event:

• Baulder’s Gate 3 wins game of the year

• Alexey shows off a thought to be lost prototype “Tetris Reversed”.

• Venba wins the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game

• Velan Studios advocates for player control of dead live service games

• GDC survey exposes game dev views of GenAI and layoffs

Congrats to the winners of the award shows! To learn more about the GDC and related conferences, click here.

Thanks to Blue’s News and Slashdot

PAX East 2024

In addition, PAX East also had their annual event this 21st to 24th. Besides the hundreds of games showcased at the event, Games Done Quick also was there showcasing their bhoping skills!

Be sure to check out more and sign up for PAX West and next year’s PAX East!

LAN Parties - New Book on Deathmatch History

A new book called LAN Parties by Merrit K released earlier this year, but it was recently brought to our attention by some of the latest press on the book. Here’s a small blurb from the store page:

In addition to documenting the nostalgic era of LAN parties, the photographs are unique artifacts of the peculiar cultural and technological moment, when gaming was tipping over from niche hobby to mainstream obsession. They reveal not just the home decor and personal fashion styles at the turn of the millennium but also a different world, one that existed before the internet took shape and we started carrying it around with us in our pockets.

We thought it was worth mentioning here as fragging friends is one our favorite pass times, be sure to purchase a copy here.

Story sourced from CNN

Copyright Objection

Nintendo has used the legal system to shut down the popular Switch emulator, Yuzu. Alternative emulators, like Ryujinx were not affected by this.

Right away forks started appearing. First people flocked over to Suyu (which was removed by GitLab right away), others are observing the fork Sudachi. We can only wait and see to determine if any particular fork wins out or if they all diverge into their own niche.

Gaming News: Community

And of course we have to highlight what’s been going on in the community!

The Dark Mod 2.12 Releases

The Dark Mod, the famous Thief inspired fan game, has a new release! The news post on ModDB boasts of a few new important additions and fixes:

• Performance improvements
• Assets (props) fixes/additions
• Single pass shadow maps
• Uncapped FPS improvement
• Multi add-on support
• Less color banding (64-bit color depth)

Grab a copy here!

Call of Duty Mod Goes Retail, and 16 Years of Frontlines

It’s hard to believe that Call of Duty is over 20 years old now. While the rest of us are wondering where the time went, the modders and fans of the series are busy celebrating the 16th anniversary of Call of Duty Frontlines.

In addition to the milestone, a spin-off mod of Frontlines titled Call of Duty Rio is going to become a standalone game. The recently announced Commando Rio can be found here. As some of us have made the jump from modders to developers, we wish Hajas Game Studio the best of luck! Keep an eye out for more news from the team.

What Happens in CS, Stays in CS!

Fellow retrogamer and enthusiast ESCalation has put out a new video detailing the complicated history of de_vegas! Did you know that most people never got to play Vegas online when it released, or that the Sphinx used to be completely modeled out?

Check out the video here!

And for the classic port of de_vegas to Counter-Strike: Source that is mentioned in the video, you can click here.

New FreeHL Videos

Frag-Net’s own eukara did release two videos in regards to FreeHL:

• FreeHL Comparison May 2022 - March 2024
• FreeHL - Hazard Course (March 2024)

There’s more videos coming down the line, focusing on more mods, games and various internal improvements.

All in All

And that’s it! We hope you enjoyed our first entry in this new series. Writing these articles will help us document the things that are happening and select info will go right into our game event & anniversary calendars.

If you have any news you think we missed, should share on Frag-Net, suggestions, or even complaints, let us know. You know where to find us!

Happy Fragging