Hi all. Nice lil turn of events here… in an alcohol-induced frenzy of activity and bad decision making, I have brought the Hardfought game server back into existence. Heh ;-P There was debate on whether I would resurrect the server either back in Dallas or here on the island of O’ahu here in Hawai’i… finally decided to setup shop in Dallas through a hosting company known as The Planet, they also do hosting for HardOCP and a few other gaming sites. They are a very professional outfit with some serious hardware and bandwidth to play with, all at a resonable price if you can believe that… looks like prices have come down over the past couple years. The game server is a P4 3GHz (w/ 800MHz FSB and Hyper-Threading enabled), with 1GB of DDR RAM, tons of hard drive space and a fat connection to the internet, with points of presence with UUNet, AT&T/Time Warner, Genuity, Internap, Qwest, and Cogent Communications. Not bad, eh? :-)

To kick off the server, I’ve setup another CounterStrike port, the IP address and other info can be found to the right of this news post… I set up a real-time server status display, it updates itself every minute. Always wanted to script something like that :-P Maintaining another CS port is not my main goal however, it’s just to kick things off and give all you old-time regulars a taste of what we refer to as the ‘good ol’ days’. This server is primed and ready to go when titles such as Halo (for the PC of course) and Half-Life 2 go gold later this year. Hardfought was on the forefront when CS got out of beta status, and I plan on being there at the start with Halo and HL2/CS2. Right now is a good time to be in the game-hosting business… so definitely stick around gang, have some fun, enjoy the CS port for the time being. Bigger and better things are just around the corner.

And speaking of bigger and better things… the Hardfought LAN #4 is almost upon us. Just a few days away… DAMN I wish I could be there. If I had the leave-time I’d hop a flight and do it. We’ll just have to have #5 here in Hawai’i ;-) Be sure to check out the msgboard for any last minute instructions and details on the gathering. Also, there are still two open sign-up slots, and a couple other people have backed out, so there is certainly room for a few more of ya… so go sign up already! Hope to see a lot of pictures posted of the event and stories told.

Before I wrap up, I’d like to take a moment to give a shout out to a long-time online friend of mine who went by the name of Nitrain. Met this guy years ago when Quake2 was all the rage, his clan and mine (Quake Sanitation Authority and Tejaz respectively) were allies and we played and scrimmed together for hours and hours on end on the then popular Dallas CTF quake2 public server. Several months later Everquest came about, and we had founded a guild together known as Vallis Scortor (loosely translated from Latin – Whores of the Vale). I quit playing, he kept the guild alive and expanded on it, by some form or fashion became known as ‘Vallis Aspectus’… anyways, we had lost touch over the past couple years as all online friends tend to do sometimes, people moving on to play some other game or join some other new and interesting online community. I had run into him online one or twice though every so often, I’d ask about EverCrack, he’d ask if I still played quake, etc…

Mark Lane, a.k.a Nitrain passed away a few weeks ago from a heart attack. I found out about it indirectly through my old quake clan website… most of us from the old q2 community didn’t find out until several weeks had passed. Better late than never as they say… here’s a heart-felt salute to Nitrain, may he rest in peace. We’ll miss ya.

K2