Chris inspired me, with his blog on Quake 3, to add a word myself. He also posted the video below.
I must say watching this does bring back memories although I cant deny that I have played a game recently, but it will never be the same as when I used to play more regularly back in school. Back when work wasnt a thought, and neither was school really, I was able to put alot of time into playing it and various other games, but Quake3 will always be my favourite competition multiplayer game. Its fast paced, pretty technical if you want to play like Fatality in the video, and can bring hours and hours of fun shooting the hell out of your mates. Best known I think for its 1 on 1 tournements, and of course there were team games, but the skill really shows in 1v1’s. Some people may just think that its a simple fairly low level gfx(back then it was top notch, i meen it was one of the main benchmarking games reviewers would use) game with fairly straight forward game play. But the true quaker knows what it requires to be a pro… alot of people try, and come close, but only the true dedicated mind player will lead the pack. I say mind because its classified as a mind sport. Quake3 requires you to really think about many things while still trying to chase the enemy down and kill him.
To add some perspective, each item has set spawn times, key being the armour (Red(100) and Yellow(50) and the mega health(100), with a base Hp base of 100 points, you can see why having armour is very very important. In fact if you dont have control of the armour, your will probably lose the game. Controlling the armour is key, knowing exactly how long it takes for the red and the yellow armour to spawn is very important. If you can effectively make it around the map to grab each armour as it spawns, you are doing a good job. And it can be done, takes practise and knowing the map inside out helps bundles.
Apart from armour control, mouse sensitivity and key bindings are a biggie. Mouse sensitivities will vary from mouse to mouse, so you need to adjust it as you see fit. Its important in my opinion to keep your sensitivity relatively low, you want to avoid spraying your pointer all over your screen as that is not going to help you hit the guy. Keeping it low will teach you to use smaller movements and be precise. In combination with sensitivity you need to have the correct acceleration. By that i meen the faster you move your mouse, the faster the pointer goes. IE: if you move the mouse very slowly left and right, the crosshair will only move very slowly, move it fast, and the crosshair moves faster. So when you need to quickly turn around to shoot, you learn how fast you need to move ur mouse to turn you 180 degress and so forth. A couple of commands to set that sensitivity up - /cg_mouseaccel = *, /m_yaw = *, /m_pitch = *, /sensitivity = * (* = what ever your value needs to be, usually start somewhere and decrease or increase until you have your perfect movement, takes time to perfect, better the mouse better the accuracy).
Key bindings are the next point. You want to make sure all of your weapons are bound to a key usually placed around your strafing movement keys, W A S D etc. The need for this arises when the player is on the other side coming for you, then suddenly hes right in front of you. The need to change quickly is key. You learn to master quick changing by fireing off a slug with the rail gun, then quickly switching to machine gun or plasma gun to finish off the rest of his health before he can get near. Obviously there are a ton of ways you can match weapons up to do damager, you learn your own.
Strafe jumping is something that takes time to learn, not everybody knows how to do it, probably because theyve never been shown, or they are just to un-co to pick it up. Strafe Jumping involves using a combination of strafing keys and mouse movements while running and jumping consequetively. Sometimes called bunny hopping, instead you arent going in a straight line, rather left then right in these kind of circular arching movements. Layman will try put it like, moving your mouse slowly left while at the same time jumping and holding the left strafe button and the forward button. Then quickly changing the mouse to move right and switching left strafe to right strafe, still while moving forward and jumping as you land. Sounds tricky, but really easy once you get the hang of it. Jumping in this fashion will give you more speed and distance to cover special jumps that could help put you ahead of your opponent.
Tying in with that is knowing and understanding the map, knowing the spawn points of items and players is important. If you are good enough, you can prevent the opponent from getting a shot off, every time he spawns. Cant always get it right, but it does happen that the spawn happens consecutively in the same area on two different points.
Wow well I think that sums it up, if ive missed something, well I apologize in advance, let me know and i can always amend 
My whole point thinking back to the reason why I made this blog, is that I miss those days. The days of spending weekends networked with buddies, duvets on the windows shutting out the light, and turning into electronic vampires for a few days. Eat junk, drink junk, and play more games than your eyeballs can handle. We used to have Q3 comps, that would go on for ages, have them over and over again right after one another, although we did try rather playing something else inbetween, which was usually a toss up between c&c, starcraft, warcraft, CS and im sure a few others we could muster up. Remember going to carnage and organise chaos back in the day, played with some of the pros today and of yesteryear, and just being proud I guess of being part of the gaming revolution that hit South africa, am still apart of it today, but not as I used to.
Well I hope you enjoyed the post
tx to chris for rekindling some memories… oh and dont mislead the public chris, i still own you :p
