The blizzard in Istanbul has made it impossible for the first CPL World Tour event to take place. According to CPL president Angel Munoz, a truck with the tournament machines and Scott Valencia on board was involved in one of the "700 car accidents" in Istanbul, which resulted in the destruction of the computers and a minor injury to Mr Valencia.

The only PK event that will take place in Istanbul will be a $20,000 qualifier to the Spanish World Tour stop, which leaves everyone disappointed one way or another. The Istanbul World Tour stop has been rescheduled to March 25-27 and the Barcelona stop to April 29-May 1. The only positive aspect of this is that hopefully, the demo recording bug in the new PainKiller patch will be fixed and PKTV will be ready by late March.

¶ 8:12 PM //

Team NoA is participating at the World e-Sports Games, which is taking place in Korea. NoA was one of the eight teams to be invited to the eight week long event. Siege, the manager of NoA will be bringing you a daily journal.

Day 3:

Remember that massive headache I mentioned, yeah well, there’s not a whole lot more to say today. Today was basically a repeat of yesterday, from team leader meeting to working out, basketball and the follow up practice sessions it was pretty much the same as Day 2 – except after my morning jog I found myself in bed well into the evening.

UPDATE: The score bots will be live in #gotfrag - also, the interview will be up tomorrow to give us a chance to check for translation errors.

Please click Read More for the rest of the Journal!

After being woken up for a final team leader meeting in the evening, I was asked by d0b0 of www.esai.cn (a Chinese e-Sports website) for an interview. This wasn’t a typical interview as he asked the questions in Chinese who a translator then talked to another translator in Korean who then translated it into English, etc. Interestingly enough it was done completely by audio recording so, it should be a good read… I hope nothing was lost in translation.

The sign outside of NoA's section of the house

Time to try and get some sleep in; we have a double header tomorrow, so it will be a pretty long day. Expect more pictures tomorrow such as Day 1 as we head back to the Coex Mall and recording studio. Also I was informed there will be live score bots in #weg on irc.gamesurge.net!


Don't forget to visit http://teamnoa.net for more WEG updates!

¶ 8:09 PM //

The Global Gaming League has interviewed Paul czm Nelson, the captain of the US team for the ESWC, Q3 TDM legend and Player of 2004. As usual, czm gives very good and interesting answers:

A player's skill on a map is mostly a matter of how much and how well they've practiced it, which is mostly a matter of how popular it is on the servers they frequent. When a game first comes out, players develop their skills to suit the maps that they play. After a game has been out for awhile and players have already developed personal styles, a newly introduced map will favor those players whose style it suits. This effect is temporary because eventually, other players' styles will adapt. The answer is that both factors play a role, but any natural predispositions are ultimately dominated by how much a map is practiced by a given group of players.

Last year, Paul was the runner up at QLAN2, took the American Q3 team to second place at the ESWC and won QuakeCon. If anyone deserved the Player of 2004 title, it was him. If you are interested in what he has to say and if the fact that he programmed a computer game gets you curious, head on here to read the interview.

¶ 8:09 PM //

Due to the postponement of the first World Tour Stop, the CPL announced the new dates for the $50,000 Stop in Istanbul, Turkey and the $50,000 Stop in Barcelona, Spain.

The first Stop of the World Tour will take place in Istanbul, Turkey commencing with a Cultural Event on Thursday, March 24, 2005 followed by the official Painkiller tournament from Friday, March 25 to Sunday, March 27, 2005.

The second Stop of the World Tour in Barcelona, Spain has been rescheduled. A Cultural Event will take place Thursday, April 28, 2005 followed by the official Painkiller tournament from Friday, April 29 to Sunday, May 1, 2005.

The CPL would like to express its gratitude to its Strategic Partner in Spain for making this change on a short notice, and therefore preserving the integrity of the World Tour.

Furthermore, the ground team at Istanbul, has been managing communications with the hotel, venue, airlines and gamers, and have done a great job.

¶ 8:08 PM //

A microchip so powerful that it could turn mobile phones into pocket-sized desktop computers was unveiled yesterday by Sony, Toshiba and IBM.

Ten times faster than its rivals, the new Cell microprocessor is being billed as the world's first "super computer on a chip".

	The new chip will be used in the new Sony Playstation 3

A single Cell processor packs such a powerful punch that only three years ago it would have been rated as one of the top 500 super computers in the world.

The chips, which are initially intended for the lucrative computer games market, will appear in the new Sony Playstation 3 games console due out next year.

They are also expected to be used in new high definition televisions from Sony and Toshiba and be added to home and office computers soon after.

Yesterday's announcement was one of the most eagerly anticipated in the electronics industry for years.

The Cell is expected seriously to challenge the dominance of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the world's leading producers of computer processors.

The three electronic giants, which have been working on the Cell technology at a laboratory in Austin, Texas, for three years, say it will bridge the gap between the cinema and video games - allowing graphics and special effects designed for the cinema to be inserted directly into computer games.

Details of the chip were released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Klaus Gottschalk, a senior IT architect at IBM, said the new chip was between 10 and 20 times faster than the best processors available today. He predicted that it would be widely used in electronics around the home.

"It is a super computer on a chip," he said. "In the beginning it will be targeted at the consumer electronics market - for game consoles and home computers."

But it would soon start to appear in personal computers, he said.

"If it was embedded in a mobile phone, it would run everything that you have today on a personal computer," he added.

The chip's specifications have astonished computer experts. The size of a postage stamp, it contains 10 separate processing units, compared to the normal one. That allows the Cell to carry out 10 tasks simultaneously - copying the "grid" system of super computers. It runs at 4 GHz - twice the speed of the Pentium 4 processor.

When put inside powerful computer servers, the Cell consortium expects it to be capable of handling 16 trillion "floating point operations", or calculations, every second.

Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said: "A new chapter in computer science is about to begin."

¶ 8:06 PM //

¶ 8:04 PM //