Newsbits from Around the Globe

[CSN NewsBot]

A couple of newsbits to feed the evil little minds still up early in the morning:

• there is an interesting audio interview with natu from finland's powerhouse clan dskyline.samsung. it's over 20minutes in length and can be found at the esports entertainment associations website here.
  
  
  
  
• also coming out of esportsea is a cute ten of the best: north american esports figures which includes some notable north american cs players. read it all right here.
  
  
  
  
• flek0 dropped a line about the new cs:cz package which is shipping with a bonus disc of exclusive hl2 footage. also revealed in the sierra insider newsletter were plans for a limited edition trading card set and free shipping when you pre-order your copy of cs:cz. i wonder if steam will be delivering the hl2 footage (and the trading cards?!?).
  
  
  
  
• what happens when you send a wired counter-strike player on a quest to get milk? well young new zealand film maker matt hancock made reality strike, a short film which scored him a c- towards his degree. while it's no lord of the rings everyone has to start somewhere...
  
  
  
  
• finally game-on is running a major national tournament in australia. almost every major australian cs clan will be attending this vpn tournament held at 4 netcafe's across 3 states competing for $1000 in prize money. detailed coverage can be found at their event partner pantheones's website.

Hopefully these newsbits will contain enough information to keep you all out of trouble. If not, stay tuned for another round of CAL-i and some dangerously fun CS1.6 LAN Parties with the new Steam Offline Play function!

[^.j()$h.^]

Sierra Insider link doesn't work..

[DchozN]

good.

lord.

nice job!

[Mr. T]

yay, another new zealander in the cs community!



im thinking it got a c- because he editted it on macs. yuck.

[kerosine99]

exclusive hl2 footage!? valve's got some smart marketing directors...



i'd buy it just to see that!

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Yeah, the HL2 footage was a good idea, though admittedly there's a good chance it will be leaked very quickly unless they've figured out a good way to encrypt that kind of stuff, and require account validation to watch it.



As far as the Reality Strike deal goes, I haven't watched the vid yet (work computer on my lunch break) but the script is pretty terrible, heh. Ah well, I'll probably watch it anyway, might be good for a laugh.



And finally, while I love PC's, Macs do tend to do desktop publishing and video editing quite well.

[bullet_head]

dangerously fun CS1.6 LAN Parties with the new Steam Offline Play function!

SERIOUS!!

And finally, while I love PC's, Macs do tend to do desktop publishing and video editing quite well.

As saddened as I am I'm going to have to agree with nighthawk on that one, they tend to get better results over M$ powered stuff.

[JRules]

Edited by [user="97433"] @ [time="1078468391"]

lol I think this reality strike thing is on a 56k modem cause i am downloading at a whooping 1.4 KB/sec!! 3 hr 41 min till complete for 13MB!



edit: was pretty funny especially the hostage part. kept gettin disconnected from the download server though.

[HowlinMadMurphy]

I have the CZ trading cards. Amazon shipped them to me when I pre-ordered CZ a couple of months ago. There was an M4 card, a deagle card, a couple of Ritual model CT unit cards (GiGN and GSG9, I think, I've misplaced them so I'm not 100% sure), and a couple of maps. Very little information on them, they could have been a lot better. I love CS so much that I would shell out for a decent set of trading cards, toys, or any other related merchandise. How cool would it be to have some little Ts and CTs in a diorama of part of dust, aztec, or italy? Or maybe McFarlane could do some seriously detailed figures with weapons. I know you can get realistic figures of some of the real CT units from CS, but I want official merchandise!

[ePhemoL]

In my opinion, e-sports should have trading cards. There should be special cards, signed, serial numbered, and even pieces of "game-worn" materials while in matches.. I would definately buy a few boxes.. No doubt..

[Bruce Willis]

I'm going to preorder CZ just for the exclusive hl2 footage and trading cards! Collect them all!



fucking joke

[alien23]

josh (#1) thanks for that, unfortunately the validation is being tricky so i've just linked to sierra itself. soz for no superdooper insider linkage!

[l33t k1w1]

Hi. I'm the director of RS. I'll be keeping an eye on this thread over the next few days to get the general gist of things.



If you wish to mirror it/make torrents, feel free. Email me URLs and I will add them to the site.

[alien23]

hi matt - what are good film schools in NZ? I'm from Perth Aust. myself but family all in N.Z. was thinking about completing my degree there or getting further Film training....

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Alright, I finally watched the video. It was a bit worse than I expected, but so it goes. A few suggestions:



1) Background music is in order. Even switching between ambient noise for reality and action music for the "in the zone" scenes might have worked. The first 34 seconds have no audio whatsoever... that's pretty bad.



2) Audio improvement in general. The audio is really bad, cutting out to silence regularly, which rips you out of the experience. The footstep sounds shouldn't go back and forth in stereo as he runs, but pan correctly as he crosses the screen. There are also major syncing issues.



3) Acting. The guy isn't great, but he's not as problematic as the girl (maybe due to less lines). She doesn't pull off a single convincing line in the whole film, though at least her accent sounds neat. :P Way too much pausing between lines. If you have that much problem talking from a script, either modify the script to fit the way that person really talks, or just make it a loose script and let them naturally talk. Pausing for 2 seconds in between each sentence kills the flow.



4) Video editing. There are several places where the video is just frozen for half a second or a full second before resuming, often in coordination with the blank audio spots. Two weeks of video editing is more than enough time to take care of that kind of technical problem.



5) Plot setup. In the actual filming, we never even see what this fellow is doing on the computer. For all we know, he's trying to sell tents on eBay, and complaining about campers. All of the sudden he's visualizing guns? Is this man a psychotic killer? We don't know, because it's not there on the screen.



On a positive note, the radio command / lip syncing effect was interesting. I'm trying to imagine what this would appear like to someone not familiar with the game, however, as there's really no mentioned tie-in. Maybe if we saw a few seconds of game footage with some of the same sounds / radio commands on the screen, then the connection would become more clear.



Anyway, nice effort, I'm not for a second claiming I have the patience nor technical know-how to do better, I'm just trying to offer some constructive criticism. Good luck in future endeavors and all that. :)