Greetings Ladies and Gentlemen and welcome to another exciting episode of the webmaster’s bi-weekly ramblings on this Monday, August the 9th. Today the webmaster will talk about Tool-assisted Speedruns (TAS), Quake Live and probably not much else. There may be a hint of StarCraft II: World of Liberty, but we cannot promise you anything. But enough of the introduction – Bagdadsoftware is proud to present: the Webmaster!

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“Driving a game to its limit” – that’s the title of the tenth and final (for now) part of my almost as famous as my Westwood-article Speedrun-special over at GamersGlobal. Fitting of course, as it is an interview with no other than Andrés “adelikat” Delikat. With more than 70 Tool-assisted Speedrun-records and five years of experience he’s not only the main developer of the NES-Emulator FCEUX – the most important and TAS-friendly out there for this system! -, he’s also the main administrator of the central location for everything about TAS: TASVideos. I guess only Bisqwit, the original founder of TASVideos, knows more about TAS than Andrés which made for quite an interesting and unnatural long interview. And still so many questions remain unanswered. Especially the whole feud-thing between Unassisted Speedrunners and TAS would be worth its own article although it has cooled down a bit since 2004. Perhaps next year I’ll get both sides in one (chat-)room and truly do something, no other magazine has done before. Although I guess now that my idea is public, someone out there will probably snatch it and don’t give me credit for it…damn!

At least I can rest assured for the moment that no other magazine – German or international – has taken such an in-depth look into the subject and hopefully I introduced new faces to the scene thanks to it. Of course some magazines did actually try to cover the subject over the years. But at least the German ones failed miserably in my opinion. They mostly thought the whole topic was only worth a stupid click-gallery to increase page views. How wrong they are…

Oh by the way: For everyone who doesn’t know squat about German, the original and very raw English version of the interview can be found here on Bagdadsoftware.

There are of course other topics I want to cover so extensive. One is “Music in Games”. No surprise here for our regular readers of course. Still I’ve so many ideas for it and want to talk to so many famous people in order to show how much work and love goes into a good soundtrack and how high the quality of the products out there is. Essentially I want to show the readers why it’s worth supporting and bring them to stop turning it off and instead play Britney Spears in the background. Again, regular readers already know that. It’s not as if I hadn’t talked about it yet, didn’t already make a Top18-list or wouldn’t give a NOCA each year to the best soundtrack of the year. So hopefully, I’ll have the time to expand on that and create another, insightful special.

For now I’m still pretty occupied with the third version of my Starcraft 2 Mehrspieler-Kompendium which has to go live before QuakeCon 2010 starts at the end of the week. Didn’t help me much in my match against Jörg Langer though. Still lost against him, increasing his score to 2:1 (Blood Bowl – Jörg Langer, The Settlers 7 – me, StarCraft II – Jörg Langer) in the all-time ranking. Took him a long time to win however. He could’ve finished it right after my first attack failed but he didn’t seize the moment and didn’t make the push. So it dragged on a bit. But who cares. Lost is still lost :).

Perhaps match 4 will take place in Quake Live which, completely surprising to everyone, finally left the beta-status last Friday. There are now those who complain that there are two subscription-options (Premium and Pro) available which ruin the game and everything in their opinion. Those guys (and girls) are idiots! Even if you don’t pay, the amount of game you get for your non-existing buck is still greater than anything else browser-based out there. Hell, even Battlefield Heroes has way less free content – and there you have to pay much more to get the additional stuff! You still have access to the friends list, you still can join a clan, you still can play in more than 40 arenas in five game-modes and you still have access to match-making including the extensive statistics. Basically you get all the stuff which was already there in beta and kept me playing the last year not to mention that Quake III Arena never left my hard-drive since 1999 until Quake Live came around which had even less features. And that little bit of advertising before each game is more than tolerable. So quit bitching and go fragging! Or do what I did: go Pro! It’s more than worth it…

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Thanks Webmaster! And that’s it for today folks. We hope you enjoyed the show and come again! Good night.