Competitive FPS Gaming Documented, Exposed

Simon Bysshe writes "I've just released the latest freely downloadable film in my series charting competitive FPS gaming. This film, shot in more of a TV show style compared to my previous Slashdot-featured documentaries, features a Counter-Strike match between the UK 4Kings team & the French Armateam. This time, the film was sponsored by Intel, who also flew in the star Quake3 player Cyrus Malekani (aka proZaC) to present the show. The 24 minute, 185mb WMV movie includes in-depth interviews with the players, extended coverage of games with commentary & post-match tactical analysis covering the key rounds."

Comments

I am very pleased with this.

[GearType2]

His previous videos were very... amatuer at best. I remember one of my biggest peeves of them being the voice and music. It was always the blaring techno in the background that would be thrown in and the terrible mics used to get voice. You would hear maybe, 3 words and the rest would be muffled.
Another qualm I had with his earlier works was that these are supposed to be videos of how these events draw crowds and how that this is in fact a sport now, but what he would do is talk to the players and ask them *why* they are playing and how they like to play. Newsflash: they get paid for it.

But, this video is top notch. The sound is so much better. It's obvious he put a lot of work into making it *sound* better. The quality is very high, although I would like it to be nativly louder, as I had to turn up my speakers quite a bit to hear their voices, but that's not a big deal, as the background music was lower than the voice. The presentation of the entire video itself was very great. If I had not seen the earlier videos I would think this was done by a great studio. It looks like TechTv had a special on e-gaming. I am very pleased with this, and hope we see much more.

Re:Why Team FPS isn't a good spectator genre.

[Doc Squidly]

Its video games. Everytime I watch a video game match I loose interest, after 4 seconds, when I deside that it would be more fun to go play on-line.
Lets face it, video games are not a spectator sport. Especially when you can control the camera, which would at least give you some degree of intereaction.
Don't get me wrong I'd love to be able to play FPS's in a pro league but until they make it enjoyable to watch (on TV, with more corporate sponsors other than tech like Intel) it's not catch to non-gamers.
Also, I liked the video.

The future is not now

[ArcticPuppy]

Competetive gaming is still very young. Give it one generation and I think it will be as mainstream as some of the smaller media-covered sports. The penetration of games in todays youth-culture is massive. Most young people ( 18 years old) will have heard of (and most probably) played the most popular titles like Counter-strike and such. I dont think these people will quit playing when they "grow up", heck im 28 years old and i still play counter-strike 3-4 times a week. But the whole gaming thing needs to be assimilated into our lives like everything else. As it is today, only hardcore players can appreciate a good counter-strike match. Im sure if i were to watch an American Football match i would loose interest after about 5 minutes because a) I dont know anything about american football and b) american football is not part of our main-stream culture. In stead we watch people doing cross-country skiing for hours. Yes, we watch people compete in this incredibly boring sport where nothing dramatic ever happens, and we love it. Why? Because over time (i would guess 50+ years) this has become "tradition", we know a lot about cross-country skiing, we do it ourselves, and we love to watch it.

Re:The future is not now

[Webtommy88]

Ditto on that, I sometimes find myself inexplicably watching Curling for hours at a time and even into 3am once. For those who might not know, curling is almost like shuffle board except the rocks are alot larger and u throw these suckers down ice.

Along the same line as the parent, I think even Machinima will gain a greater following as kids grow up watching more CG in their films and completely CG films for that matter, it would not be as far fetched for them to watch films made entirely in a game engine. I'm thinking along the lines of the Militia films done by TFG, a film done in the Counter-Strike environment which had a decent story line and a great score. The focus on the film was never the game play part but always on the story and thats what made it so good. He's got two new projects in the works, Pre/Selection, a movie based in the Natural Selection universe and Clan Wars another CS film.

I recommend watching his stuff even if its just for laughs.

Re:Text script please

[Prien715]

Replays for networked games are incredibly simple, or so I'd think. If one simply stores the content of the packets sent to and from the machine, you should be able to reconstruct the game. The video method you suggest would require much more memory. However, the packets sent out by networked games are designed to be small.