Playback.dem

It is TIME for Playback.dem for August. It is delayed a bit, but we’ve got some hot scoops.

Site News

New Content

A few more game pages have been added. Pages for games such as Doom 3, ETQW, Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 to which we’re adding files soon. We’ve also added a bunch more magazine features! Go dig right in and revisit the past.

We’ve been organizing our archives and had to acquire a 24 TB drive. Stuff sure is expensive.

In other news related to content, staff member Maxwell has been getting the ZDTV/TechTV/G4 archive together over on this Internet Archive page. You can see we integrated some of it into our Quake III Arena page already. Collected from various sources, he stitches these episodes together to get the most complete archive of these shows. Comcast is not interested in doing anything with these, unfortunately. Please reach out if you have any recordings of these shows yourself that you can share. You know where to find us.

Gaming News

The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside

Monica Harrington writes about the early days of Valve from her perspective. Did you know that Sierra just wanted to move on from Half-Life after it shipped? Did you know that there were proposals for Valve to team up with Amazon to create a new online entertainment platform? If this sort of behind-the-scenes interests you, you shouldn’t miss reading this.

Game Releases

Marathon

You can grab Marathon Infinity on Steam, for free now. It includes Workshop support as well! Also make sure to grab Marathon 1 & Marathon 2 if you haven’t yet added them to your account.

Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon

The over-the-top modification for Duke Nukem 3D titled Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon has posted Part 1 of their two part update (with Part 2 scheduled to arrive in November). You can download it over here on ModDB!

Catacomb 3-D

John Romero announced plans for a new, proper big-box release for the early id Software game Catacomb 3-D, Blues News reports. There will be 3 differently priced editions available. Something for the collectors!

QuakeCon Doomed Out

QuakeCon was this month and there an update to the Steam version of Doom was released, which turns the Steam app for DOOM (1993) into DOOM + DOOM II. It runs on the proprietary Kex engine, which this time raises the bar to BOOM engine compatibility.
It replaces the version previously built on top of the Unity engine.
Of interest to us in this release is the id1.wad file which contains a new expansion called Legacy of Rust as well as a deathmatch wad with 25 maps. It’s playable with most BOOM compatible source ports.

They announced a new DOOM game that may have been a HeXen reboot at one point in time, or they’re warming up for one. That Activision acquisition took a while, and Xbox boss Phil Spencer is a big fan. Hey, it’s the best guess I got as to why it’s suddenly medieval. We’ll see how it performs.

Deadlock

The page for Valve’s game Deadlock went live on Steam, including not a whole lot of info.
We’ve tried it and have some opinions, but we’ll wait and see.
We do like a lot of things, and wonder about some other. We’ll keep tabs on it!

Mafia: The Old Country

Mafia: The Old Country was also announced, along with a teaser trailer. The developers at Hangar 13 are creating it. We’re sure it’ll be closer to a Mafia 2 than a Mafia (2002) in terms of gameplay, but that’s to be expected. Staff members here remind you that the first game is excellent (according to Marco it is one of the greatest games mankind has ever accomplished), but you need to play it with a music-patch if you buy it from one of the convenient digital marketplace stores.

Half-Life 25th Anniversay Update SDK releases

The updated SDK source code for the much appreciated update Valve released in November of 2023 for Half-Life has been pushed to GitHub, and then sometime after merged with the main repository which you can find all the latest changes at.

Tech News

Google Ruled An Illegal Monopoly

The United States Federal court rules that Google does in-fact hold an illegal monopoly on Internet Search, the Washington Post reports.
Google’s boss of ‘Global Affairs’ Kent Walker concludes right after that:

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine […]”

We just want to offer our counter-perspective by stating that even we’ve stopped using Google as our fallback, because it only shows a handful results now and completely unwanted SEO spam and AI slop.
As always, don’t believe corporate mouthpieces, because the ruling states that “Google has unlawfully used the distribution agreements to thwart competition” which has nothing to do with the quality of their product.

While we’d want them “to do better”, we do recognize that would require having to fire the people in charge. Oops. Guess that can’t happen then.

Intel Struggles

Leading x86-centric chip-maker Intel hasn’t been doing well. No staff member here has bought a product of theirs in a decade or so either so we’re partly to blame. Jokes aside, while we do not want to see them disappear, we do want their products to be better. Reuters reports they might be losing their status on the Dow. A lot of finger-pointing was done elsewhere on the web.
In case anyone at Intel is listening to the crazies over here at Frag-Net.com… put out a sturdy, no junk CPU. Our wishlist contains one without a management engine like yours, and non-buggy silicon - just don’t take any shortcuts this time - thanks!

I fear they may go try to catch the AI bubble and fail miserably. Let’s not take bets at this time.

NVIDIA Troubles

Unlike Intel, leading GPU chip-maker NVIDIA has been doing better than ever. However: they’re under scrutiny by the Unted States Department of Justice, and are facing an anti-trust probe - because they’re charging customers silly money over cables that connect servers, and bully people financially who considered buying chips from AMD.

An unnamed spokesperson replied to the reporting from CNBC:

“This anti-trust probe recognizes that NVIDIA offers the best GPUs […]”

Just kidding. They did say that the company “wins on merit.” which is the exact same PR message the Google boss in the monopoly piece above used. It’s almost like they all got the same playbook or something…

Misc News

FTEQW Updates

After almost a year, FTEQW has seen some updates. At the end of August we finally got a large push of commits we’d been anticipating. It contains some things staff members contributed to, such as assitance on the support for playing the Quake II re-release as a client.

We’re working throughout September to iron out issues and to make some more big announcements shortly. You can see a tease about what will be going down soon right here.

New binaries will be going live soon-ish. There’s more things to be ironed out before the team feels comfortable doing so.

#ShiftingTheBar happened

Over 3,000 players came together to play Half-Life: Blue Shift at the same time in order to break the peak player count on Steam. You can find the promotional website for this event here.

All in All

Wow! Quite a lot going on. September won’t be any less busy, so look forward to that months Playback.dem!