The French national rugby team comes to Landsdowne Road on February 6th for Ireland's first game in the five nations tournament. A more novel first, however, is scheduled for February 27th when the Irish national Quake team heads for Paris to take on the mighty French.
This will be the first time the Irish Quake team has travelled abroad to play an international. The Australians and New Zealanders have already staged a similar event but this will be one of the first "true" internationals. If the Irish team aren't expected to win they are going to die (frag) trying and are all fired up to upset the odds. Fired up indeed, with rocket launchers, BFG's, rail guns and anything else they can lay their hands on in an attempt to out-frag the French.
As in most sports, the Irish will be underdogs against the French thanks to the population advantage of the French. Ireland's manager, Tom Murphy, estimates that the French have 2-3,000 serious players, compared with Ireland's 150.
In the recent five nations Quake tournament, the Irish did themselves justice by convincingly beating Scotland, putting up a good fight against a very strong Welsh team and losing by only a small margin to England. This match was played from home over the Net, so the English had an advantage since the game was played on English servers, giving them lower ping times, and hence quicker performance. The French backed out of the tournament rather than play on the English servers, setting the scene for the forthcoming international. Following their withdrawal, the French invited the Irish to play in France on a level playing field.
While it is fine to have a kick-about playing Quake over the Internet, when a competitive match takes place it is essential that all players have very similar and low ping times. This is impossible to achieve over the Internet. To be fair, competitive matches must be played over a LAN (local area network) where all computers being played on are local to the server.
The Irish team consists of six players - three each from the Celtic Warrior Clan and Clan Trinity - Dave Wilson, Samresh Singh, Ciaran Byrne, Tom Burnell, Nicky Condon and manager Tom Murphy, with an average age of about 24. Samresh Singh will carry the flag for Ireland in the single-player one-on-one mode, while the rest will play in the team event.
Ciaran Byrne is responsible for pre-match tactics, and will assign players their duties for each match, while captain Dave Wilson will shout the orders during the match itself. Who knows, in a few years' time there may be pub-quiz questions asking who captained Ireland in the inaugural Quake international.
FOR the match, the teams will be physically separated to allow the respective captains call the shots in peace, while Tom Murphy and his opposite number will sit in with the other team to make sure everything is above board.
The Irish Quake team is just that and members don't play Quake 2, at least not competitively. They are considered to be very different games. Quake 2 looks better, but offers a slower, more tactical challenge, while Quake is much faster and more furious. A casual observer may not see much difference in speed between the two games but when every millisecond counts, it can be the difference between fragging and being fragged.
The winner of the fixture will need to win five of the nine matches if none is drawn. Each game is expected to be limited to around 20 minutes. After each game, results, feedback and even recordings from the matches will be posted instantly at the Spin Solutions web site: www.spinsol.com/quake. (Spin Solutions, a web design company, and HW Technology, an IT recruitment company, are sponsoring the trip.) The team is also looking for a cybercafe to host them for practice and to take challenges from the public.
For the international, the Irish players will be wearing a newly designed team strip, or "skin" within the game. Before the redesign they wore green, white and orange, but the orange made them far too obvious for moving about stealthily. If, as expected, the French beat us on the rugby pitch our Quake team might just exact some onscreen revenge. Come on you boys in green!
For further information, contact Tom Murphy at renraku@indigo.ie.
games@irish-times.ie