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"Welcome to the official interview of the most intense Quake III Tournament there is! The Legion of Doom Invitational Cup is a truly unique Tournament that uses the FIFA World Cup (soccer) style to determine a champion! This type of format provides for some of the most intense battles, organized structure and most fun game play. LIC is a Ultra Freeze Tag Tournament involving at least 22 clans from the Ultra Freeze Tag community along with several invites from other mods. If your clan is interested in testing your skill against some of the best clans in Freeze Tag, be prepared to be LIC'd!" I got a chance to talk to L0D|ALIEN (one of the tournament coordinators) about his Quake III Arena history, the LiC2 Tournament and the latest happenings with the Ultra Freeze Tag community. [BiTTeR_IvY]: How did you get your start in Quake 3? [L0D|ALIEN]: Heh… that’s a good question. Well the short version. Almost, umm.. on 9.9.99 Dreamcast was launched and a few months later Quake 3 Arena for Dreamcast was released. Well, I had seem my younger brother playing Quake 1 on the pc a year or 2 before and when sChizm asked me to check the new game Quake out, I was totally against it. I was not into anything but sports games and this looked nothing but satanic and stupid to me. I went to his house anyway, and within 20 minutes of playing “online” I was hooked. “So you can actually talk to other people who are also playing”.. I remember asking…LOL. I loved it. We used a controller only for almost 2 years on those wonderful 4 person Dreamcast servers! We both tried the mouse once, but that was like pulling teeth and stuck with the controller. At some point during all this Dreamcast released the map pack for people with PC’s to tap into Dreamcast servers. Well they came and many owned us noobers on our Dreamcast systems. Soon though.. I was one of them. I was starting over.. sChizm (tym3us at the time) got the PC version and I was hooked again! Yep, that’s right I started playing this game on a console using a controller only.. with 35 max fps too..LOL. [BiTTeR_IvY]: How long have you been playing? [L0D|ALIEN]: I started playing I think in April of 2000 and have not looked back. I would not call it playing really..I mainly run my clan and help with the community of UFT (Ultra Freeze Tag) now. [BiTTeR_IvY]: Who came up with the idea for the LiC Tourney, and how was it conceived? [L0D|ALIEN]: I did mostly, but it really came from years of playing and watching soccer leagues, and what not, with sChizm and others. We were kinda new to the UFT community and we missed the deadline to join the current tournament by about 3 days. So, we watched as it went by. There were some issues with different things, and I figured that I enjoy organizing and running tournaments, and what not, that I would run one myself. I knew I needed to come up with a good name for it first and would need to get all my ideas down first. All of that took some time, but one day it just came to me to name it the Legion of Doom Invitational Cup or LIC. I also knew at that point that I wanted it to be set up almost exactly as the World Cup of Soccer is set up, with random groups of teams that play within their groups only to decide who advances to the playoffs. I talked it over with sChizm and we started hashing out ideas and coming up with maps and going over rules and I started work on the site and before we knew it we had LIC 1 ready to go! The LIC 1 site is still up here, and the schedule page shows as many of the screenshots from those matches as I had. [BiTTeR_IvY]: What is the difference between Freeze 1.51b and ufreeze? [L0D|ALIEN]: That’s a great question, and I would love to know the full story on it. I do know a little bit about it though. Freeze 1.51b was what we started playing on with no lag compensation and not many bells and whistles. After a while, Haste came along and decided the mod needed some additions to it, and he added mainly lag compensation. Which is perfect for any quaker with crappy pings or no good server to play on. Haste has added a lot of nice features and graphical enhancements. I guess, one day it just started showing up on the servers and we have been playing it every since. Since that initial release though, Haste, and now Borland, have added so many option to UFT, it’s a wonder quakers play anything else. Lag comp on/off, Friendly Fire on/off, many options, some of which were catered for the LIC tournament even by those wacky euro coders! [BiTTeR_IvY]: Do you feel that the community at large has lost interest in Quake 3, or that Quake 3 is dying? [L0D|ALIEN]: Ha. What's funny about that is this, about 1 year ago today almost, even before LIC1. I heard, left and right, that Quake was dieing and that UT2k3 was where it would be. Look at it today! At least within our community, which continues to grow, people are still playing Quake 3 and less and less of that “eye candy” of a game UT2K3. Yes, not nearly as many now as there once was 4 years ago or so, but I think those that thought it would be dead by now, are still playing. LOL. NO, Quake will never die! I will tell you why. Until a game comes a long that can offer as much as far as pure game play and still have all the elements of true competition, Quake will always be considered the top game IMO and the minds of many many others. Unlike many other games, Quake offers a sports feel, a nerdy feel, a coders delight, a tweakers heaven, a statisticians touch, and all that other neat stuff. [BiTTeR_IvY]: Is there a plan to hold a LiC3 Tourney? [L0D|ALIEN]: Absolutely! I have taken mistakes and success from LIC2 already and have started new ideas for drawing teams, for setting up matches, for posting scores, etc! LIC3 will not be for a while, but not too long and will be bigger and better once again! Its serious stress, and LIC2 has been a huge success for this community, but I have had some great help and unlike the first LIC tournament, this one is sponsored by community leaders who are dedicated to helping make UFT a serious mod to gamers outside of those of us that already know its serious! [BiTTeR_IvY]: Do you believe there is a large enough following for ufreeze, to warrant it’s own OGL ladder? [L0D|ALIEN]: Yes, I do. However, organizers of a ladder like that would definitely want to contact the AZFL admins (same as for LIC2) and discuss timing and such.. because other “outside the community” organizations have tried to get a foot in and have failed. Not because what they offered was not better, in some cases it was much better, but because this community is a tight community and a lot of what we do here centers around some of the leaders within the community and some of the clans that have been staples within it. Its not to say it’s a snooty community, but rather a community that wants to make sure it looks out for its own. With the AZFL coming and set up as a “governing body” per se, there will be more marketing and greater support for any organization that is looking to help bring this community the recognition that it deserves. [BiTTeR_IvY]: If the ladder was created, should it be all weaps or insta, or should there be one for each? [L0D|ALIEN]: Honestly, I will never understand insta or if there is much skill behind it, but I suppose the same can be said about all weapons compared to having to pick them up. Hmmm.. Yes! It should include both, because at the end of the day its still Freeze Tag and there is no reason why those 2 factions of the same mod can't band together a little more and have a little more cross over. In LIC2 we were able to get several clans straight from insta servers to come give it a shot and this was very important, to me at least. One of the main reasons for putting this on was to bring new people into this community, besides giving back to it. [BiTTeR_IvY]: Where can anyone find information pertaining to the LiC2 Tournament? [L0D|ALIEN]: You can find all relevant information about the Legion of Doom Invitational Cup at http://lic.azfl.us. Related Links:
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