A pox on thee Luquado! No one misses a NC update! *Lightning Flashes* Well... now that i've vented that anger, we can go on to have a peaceful update. You may remember that copy of Unreal I bought, and I'm replaying the entire SP game for the first time in a little over a year. It kicks ass! I started this morning, and I'm on Terraniux. My advice for today will be: 'Dig out that copy of Unreal, and give it another go'.

I feel the need to share something with you, which I would have done tomorrow, but since this update came up unexpectedly, I'll do it today. This would be that we aren't doing big globs of Sunday reviews anymore. Reviews starting this sunday will come in daily, giving you, the NC visitor, a reason to visit the site daily to get your fix. Thus, you will have to forgive me for not having many reviews for you tomorrow, or there may be none, but I think every single one of you will like this new setup far better.

This is the best POTD I've seen since I began running NC. Hats off to $niPeRZ (Max Wong) for "John Woo's Faceoff":

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I'd like to take a minute to thank all of those who e-mailed sympathy messages and suggestions as to how to work around my Outlook Express problem. To my surprise, this appears to have happened to quite a number of people. While most of you suggested a complete reinstallation of Windows, only one believes it's a CIH virus a.k.a. Chernobyl. I'm pretty sure it's not. I've run a half-dozen worth of different v-scan apps, and in all of them report my system is clean. Even specialty virus finders. So I've accepted my loss and just got Pegasus Mail. Not quite as graphically flashy and as "newbie-compliant" as Outlook Express, but I like it more already, plus it works! Fortunately, all mail as of May 29 was held in Cyber-limbo until I got Pegasus set up, so the only casualties were the messages that were already in my Inbox before the whole mess began. With my 56k modem, it only took one hour to download three days worth of mail for two accounts...

The pics have been coming in fast and steady. Keep it up! Updating everyday really draws from the POTD folder I have set up for myself. Many of you are even sending in two or more at a time!

This picture of the day is of the realistically designed map, AS-Panama, which can be found at Realmaps along with more like it. An' if that ain't free p1mpin', then I don't know what is!

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Sorry about that topic there is no reason. Down here in New Orleans we (unlike maz) didn't have a drip of rain the whole month of May. We started off this month the same as last, no rain and there is no rain expected for at least 2 weeks. It is serious enough to have police giving fines to anyone using water uselessly (i.e. washing car, hosing gardens or grass). Mind you these are steep fines right around 100 dollars. So to anyone else who happens to live down here get one of those drip hoses and hide it in your grass or garden.(grin)

I am making my second call to all of you to send in pictures we are once again running low. This weekend I am going to sift through all of them and extract the quality ones. Mappers also send in pics of upcoming maps that you want to get pimped, if it looks good enough it will probably get on. Today we seem to have run into our first major slack of maps we only have 5. The sidelists will be fully updated with correct filesizes and scores very soon so please discontinue any mails you were planning to send. Well I have to go water my grass.

Today's pic was sent to us by Captain Gilette.

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A couple of you have written in, pointing out that all our updates here at NC are negative and downspirited. Today I shall attempt to resist talking about my problems. One thing you may find mildly amusing is that I picked up another copy of Unreal today. It looked so lonely on the "older games" shelf at my local game provider, and at the low low price of $8.00, how could anyone not resist taking it home? It's in a better place now.

I must apologize for the brevity of the update, but I have a project do to for school, thats due tomorrow. Being me, I put it off until today. Why am I telling you this? Because it's about NC. I have to write some kind of short fantasy/fairy tale story, and I'm writing one based on Nali City. Perhaps I'll post it here later in the week... Should be pretty funny for the "regulars" here.

OK, quality pics are becoming very scarce. This was among the non-ridiculously lame ones, entitled 'Coincidence? I think not.':

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By now many of you should have heard about that...KILLER RESUME virus...(dramatic overtones), and I at first thought I had somehow received it because my Outlook Express has just decided to not open ever again. Ever since I aborted an incoming file since I didn't want to wait for it to finish, and I wanted to go into my super-secret undercover identity of Maz. Now I can't even get the splash screen. I've narrowed it down to where the problem begins at a specific .dll, but even after wiping them out and re-installing OE, nothing's changed. I update my virus scanner every week, and it still finds nothing, but it's as if something is still interfering with it. It's just one big flippin pain in the arse. At least I have M$N's Hotmail to fall back on. Great. A snail's pace is better than a stand still, I guess. Man, I hope it just starts mysteriously working again.

I didn't have access to most of my pics since I somewhat foolishly left them in the Inbox, but at least this is a gib-acious shot...oh, we, of course, also have the daily dose of maps for you.

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I have to say ever since I posted something about the lack of pics we were receiving there has been a flood of cool pics coming in. Thanks a lot to all of you who sent in pics and keep them coming in. There are quite a few maps in the sidelists with a size of 0K. This will be fixed but it takes some time to do each and everyone. So please be patient. Authors please do not use spaces or any odd characters in your zip file name, and also keep the names in ALL lowercase. Otherwise that daily updater needs to manually fix them before uploading.

I want to wish everyone a happy Memorial Day have fun on your day off. For all of those who do not have this day off sorry.

We would also like to hear error feedback about the new Database system. You can send your specific errors here.

We have 13 maps for you and a neat pick of jungle logo map from Fragswill.

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Above all other news today, the most important thing to share with you today, is the fact that the database system has been released for all of you to use. Look over there on the sidelist, notice the absense of the nasty javascript map lists? If you click on todays reviews (or last weeks), you will notice that they no longer take you to an HTML file, but instead they live inside the database. As will all other reviews from here on. What does this mean to you, the NC visitor? Well, if you look at a review, you'll notice that we've disabled the feedback system for now, but when its ready for public use (hopefully by mid next week), it should look similar to that.

What you say? The database is not complete? No it's not complete, but I felt the need to release it as soon as possible, in any form, since its been under construction for so long. Features we plan to implement soon:

And alot more, so I won't even go into them right now. Keep checking in over the course of the week for cool new stuff. The more observant of you might notice that there are some maps with strange file sizes. These will get fixed eventually, but it would help if you could send me an email with the specific error. The full UT Other map list has yet to be imported, but that'll happen tomorrow.

Anyways, now we need to get to the less important business of the day, the reviews. This week we have 40 or so new reviews for you. Enjoy!:

Finally, completing this all-too-long update, we have a POTD for you all and of course a lot of maps. A note to authors, please send your maps in .zip format, with a standard readme file included. Here's your pic, entitled "Good Morning Morpheus":

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Well... Titan was supposed to update today, but due to other pressing matters, he wont be able to. I learned of this a few minutes ago, so this update will be very very brief. Tomorrow we have alot planned for you, including the first release of the database system (if all goes well tonight, Maz and I are working like mad on importing reviews into it). That's it folks, tune in tomorrow for a real update!

In my frenzy to get this update done, I chose this, entitled 'Over my dead body', sent in by Batman, of the Dynamic Duo Clan

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Gee, out of the last 21 days here, there has been one day that had no rain. This really sucks. I thought Washington was the state that gets all the rain? My nephew's t-ball game was rained out a couple days ago, and to make matters worse, that was their make up game that was rained out from a couple weeks before! Aw well. What can ya do? At least today has turned out nice enough for me to finally get some yard work done. Yay.

As far as the new v420 patch goes, no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to crash UED! Another commendable job done by the guys and gals(?) at Epic! Still a couple very minor flaws, but is quite an improvement over the previous version, being in C++ 'n all. The interface is much, much better...heck, I could go on and on, but I gotta get this update done. =P

Speaking of the patch, it appears that it causes the fog in Fetid Sewers to have a hallucinogenic affect on the UT player in question.

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I am only restating this because a lot of mappers don't always get to come here daily and read, and when they do get here they probably don't read all of the news for the days they have missed. So again, please keep the name of you zip file in all lowercase with no spaces. This freaks cdrom out and makes whoever is updating manually check them, also use the nifty little readme generator for your text files. You can grab this proggie here. We are pushing forward ever so slightly to a fully automated system.

I have recieved multiple very nice e-mails from some of you. Thank you. It's glad to know our work here is appreciated. I have only recieved one hate type mail and boy it was nasty. I would like to also say something to that one person. Thank you it was just the laugh I needed (grin).

Anyway I have to cut it short today I have got a lot of work to do tonight. So I will leave you with 13 new maps and an interesting comic book style picture sent to us by Ed Thomas. Thanks Ed.

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Among other things, you know what's really annoying? These guys that drive around parking lots in loops, blaring loud music, attempting to look cool. Today I was at the mall, waiting for my bus to take me home to update this site for you all (Which of course I don't mind doing, in fact, I enjoy it tremendously). This guy comes driving past the front of the mall playing loud crappy mexican music. At first I barely notice, but then he comes around a second time, after looping around the parking lot. Repeat this about 5-6 times at it just gets plain stupid. What drives people to do this? Who knows.

Many of you loyal NC visitors have taken the time to write to me about 2 issues (Thank You!). The first and foremost is that some maps aren't downloading properly. I don't know exactly what happened, but this is the list of the faulty maps:

I apologize for the inconvienence (I'm starting to think its not our fault, but GameSpy's, given the large amount of CTF maps I recognize and could swear I uploaded them correctly), but the only way to fix this is for the authors of the above maps to re-submit. Thanks. The second issue is that the sidelists are not getting updated. We stopped updating them about a week ago, since the DataBase system is coming rather soon. If it's not up by the end of the week, I'll bow down in shame and manually update the side lists with every map missing.

Ok, one last thing I want to mention. A lot of you haven taken the time to thank us for running NaliCity, and I must say I do really appreciate positive feedback from viewers. Perhaps someday I'll post some of it, if you all don't mind.

For POTD we have a nice looking pic of one of the best, if not the best, custom player model for UT, Rumiko:

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To answer 8a, subtract line 3c from 2a if you filed a 1040A, or subtract lines 4c, 3a, and 7d from line 9g if you filed using 1040EZ. Then divide that number by the number of trees taller than 12' in height located in your backyard. If the total is equal to or greater than the number of two-engine passenger airplanes that have flown overhead in the past hour, then answer using '0'. False information will result in fines of $10,000.

After the credit card ran out on me, well my dad's, I had to file for Financial Aid for my schooling. I hate these things. I realize that they aren't quite as bad as say filing tax forms, but man, what a royal pain. Then they stamp a little message on the envelope saying to NOT send page 8. Maybe if the form was put together like a real pamphlet and not a 10' long unfolding paper nightmare, I would have seen that. Since I had already sealed the envelope, I promptly decided that because I had played their games and filled out this crap, they can deal with the page themselves.

A note about the "nonstandard readme" comment that you see following some of the map names...that's because they include a nonstandard readme (go figure). The most effective way to avoid this problem and give yourself proper p1mp@ge is to get the readme generator here. Accept no imitations.

This is another one of those disturbing Kodak(tm) moments.

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Well Today stunk. Not only was it 94 degrees down here but, I had to deal with so many people with of course all the questions I can not answer. I do like my work just not the people that come with it. While we are talking about me I would like to give a shout to my friend Kyle. He has to get a new job for the summer and happens to be going to an oil rig. He will be teaching people (idiots I'm sure) how to use programs on the computers. hehe. Have fun man and may you come back filled with knowledge about oil.

I have to say a few things about map submittions. First off please do not double submit maps such as e-mail and FTP just to make sure it gets here. Second please take the time to create a readme text file. There is an automated program written by Yoda to do this. The script we use to weed out author's names only searches for readme text files no .doc's no .html's. You can get the proggie here.

Caylo wanted me to mention that he is accepting review requsets this week. Just send him an e-mail with the map name. The map should at least 4 weeks old to be accepted. And please DO NOT send Caylo your maps just the name.

I have 21 maps for you guys today. Enjoy. Today's POTD comes to us from Tombstone Joe. Thanks

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