Tonight we had our week1 CAL-i match against Ahriman Corps. It was a close game, as have been most of our matches as of late. Week1 for CAL-i was on one of our favorite maps Hong Kong1, we started out quite sloppy, losing some of our red rounds right off the bat. Once we started clicking we were able to start winning rounds comfortably once again. It should be said that the team AC fielded last night seemed quite a bit different than the team we faced last CAL season. They seemed to make key kills much better than before.

The next map side was a little sloppy for us, blue being our favorite side, we started off to an explosive 6-1 lead technically winning the match. But before we could seal the deal, AC manhandled us for 4 rounds straight, most of it was really good teamplay by AC, some of it was just plain sloppiness on our part. The closeness of this match signals two things to me, there will probably be less blowout wins for us in CAL-i, and secondly we really need to get on the ball and start scrimming more.

14-9 Hk1 -- ZFZ 7-4 as red -- ZFZ 7-5 as blue.

GG to Ahriman Corps, well played.

Tonight we had our first Squadgames match against clan Corrupt, a clan made up of ex-atu, sr, and hfh players. It was a close game, with c2's strong performance on Finca's defensive side stopping our offense out 5-2. We answered with our own strong performance defensively stopping the c2 offense in its tracks.

The next map was shop, we started off with a strong 5-1 red side playing very basic defense strategies, I was not in the second half of shop, but I know c2 played very well, getting in a roof rush that we completely missed. All in all c2 has shown that they are a force to be reckoned with, and will probably do well as they refine their offensive strategies. GG's c2

7-5 Finca -- C2 5-2 as red -- ZFZ 5-0 as red.
10-4 Shop -- ZFZ 5-1 as red -- ZFZ 5-3 as blue.

Last night we defended our #1 spot in TWL against the Nephilim in an exciting match. When NPH took their blue side round 5-4 against us on Kam3 we were a little stunned. We knew what we needed to do on the blue side to win the map, and took our time making sure we got as many rounds as we could, fighting hard to win it 5-1.

We felt a lot more confident going into the second map was hk2, starting off as red with a nice 5-1 lead. Many of the rounds were very close and came down to 1 on 1 or 2 on 2 situations, which is where we were able to picked up a lot of wins. As blue, we pushed nph relentlessly and took the side 5-2. There is a lot of talent at NPH, and they gave us one hell of a match tonight. Good games nph, thanks to The One clan for letting us use their server tonight!

9-6 Kam3 -- NPH 5-4 as blue -- ZFZ 5-1 as blue.
10-3 Hk2 -- ZFZ 5-1 as red -- ZFZ 5-2 as blue.

On a seperate note, I have recently become aware of the SOF2 community in Europe, although neither side has anything to prove I'm sure there will be some international pickupgames or scrimmages in the future. Shoutouts to anyone from europe reading this.

CAL SOF2 SEASON 1 CHAMPIONS!

Tonight we faced off against the undefeated Full Effect for the CAL Season 1 Playoff Finals! The final score does not reflect how close the match actually was. ZFZ started off on Blue doing our usual hard rushing strategies taking the side 7-4. Full effect would answer that strong Blue performance going 3-1 before [Fe]ss timed out. Turk was brought in to substitute and the match was resumed. At this point either team taking 4 rounds would win the day, both teams took their share of rounds until match point where it was 6-3 Fe. If Fe took the next round, they would win.

At this point we really had to buckle down and win the round, or it was over for us. We won the match point round by knocking two Fe's out early, and swarming the remaining 3. The score was 6-4, we forced the tie but we wanted to win it, which we did the following round by sticking to a basic defensive strategy. It seems funny that all our elaborate strategies got tossed aside, and we were forced to stick to the most basic strategies to win rounds. GGs to Fe, it was a blast! The shoutcast for this match is on the files page.

14-10 Shop -- ZFZ 7-4 as blue -- ZFZ 7-6 as red.

As season 1 comes to a close, ZFZ would like to thank TSN and Wonderdog for shoutcasting almost all of our matches, CAL for running a great tourney, and all the teams that participated in season1. A post-game locker-room interview was conducted by QGz|Trillian and QGz|DeeAy for TSN, amongst the usual jibber jabber we talked about ZFZ's clan preference for boxer shorts. Click here to listen.

We had our semi-finals CAL playoff match tonight against the Puppet Mowers, we had a tough fight as the attacking force. Many things went wrong, our offense was completley out of sync, and basically turned into a free for all. Some rounds we broke their defense and won, others we just got killed off. Some mistakes were made, but this is only the third match with this lineup and it is still taking us time to get used to it. GG's Pm

14-8 HK2 -- ZFZ 7-6 as blue -- ZFZ 7-2 as red.

We also had a TWL match earlier this week against Revenge of the Nerds, maps were mp_raven, and mp_hk1. This was a fun match under the new 5v5 format. GG's RvtN

10-1 Raven -- ZFZ 5-1 as red -- ZFZ 5-0 as blue.
10-0 Hk1 -- ZFZ 5-0 as red -- ZFZ 5-0 as blue.

We played a CAL playoff match tonight against the Nephilim which turned out to be a very close match. After losing 3 rounds as red, we knew we had a tough time ahead of us as blue. Nph seemed to have locked our offense down and it looked we might lose the match because we were down 2-6. Just like our AIT match against PCI, we were able to rally on nph's "game point" round, bringing the score to 3-6 forcing a tie. We rallied again, the following round winning the match by scoring 4-6, nph decided not to play it out stopping the match at 11-9. GGs nph!

14-9 Finca -- ZFZ 7-3 as red -- ZFZ 7-6 as blue.

I think all of us felt this match was a bit too close for comfort, it is always difficult incorporating a new player into our starting lineup. I think Asus is doing a good job and we're hoping with more experience our team will become even stronger. Our first CAL playoff match was against Night of the Wolf, which took place on the 13th, which was a little more one sided, but a good game.

14-1 Hk1 -- ZFZ 7-0 as blue -- ZFZ 7-1 as red.

We played a TWL ladder match tonight against the Living Legends, in a fairly close match up against an emerging SOF2 team. We had to bring in the HPB zfz.lagbeast back into action for this match, there also seemed to be some problems with a Phoenix router, Kev and two LL's had 150+ pings. Que malo! Guess it has been a crappy week for pings in general.

8-2 HK1 -- ZFZ 3-2 as red -- ZFZ 5-0 as blue.
4-6 Col1 -- ZFZ 3-2 as red -- LL 1-4 as red.
8-2 Finca -- ZFZ 3-2 as blue -- ZFZ 5-0 as blue.

We played our OTB match against the Deviant Objectives tonight for the IGL : Only The Best tournament championship. We prepared all week for this match, with multiple scrims I knew we were good to go. Unfortunately Deviant had some connection problems but opted to play lagged rather than forfiet. See match page for screenshots.

10-1 Shop -- ZFZ 5-0 as red -- ZFZ 5-1 as blue.
10-1 Finca -- ZFZ 5-0 as blue -- ZFZ 5-1 as red.

Big win tonight, we played our AIT match against the formidable Deviant Objectives for winner of the Upper Bracket Championship. I don't know about the other zfz's, but I was a bit nervous for this match. I knew I was at the top of my game, but still managed to blow myself up with a m4 nade in the first round of the match. See match page for screenshots.

14-4 Shop -- ZFZ 7-2 as blue -- ZFZ 7-2 as red.

I think one of the big advantages is that this is our same 5 man crew that has played shop many times together and we had a pretty good gameplan. We knew what we needed to do to wrestle control of rounds away from Dev, and just stuck to it. We wish both Dev and Fe luck in their upcoming match, and will spend our week off (next week) to prepare for the the AIT finals.

Since the last update, we've had another one of our memebers recoil go inactive. He told me that pressures from work just did not allow him much room for competitive play, and he would be inactive. He also took down his sof2 servers, which prompted us to get our own box, which we split with 3 other clans. The new server ips is: Zero Five Zero - Public 1.02a W/Stats - 216.127.94.130:20100 , I'll fix the stats link as soon as they are up.

I've spent the last few days helping kev move over much of the files and webpages over to our new box, we now understand how much work is put into maintaining these boxes and servers, and want to thank recoil for doing it for so long. We have some upcoming matches that should be very close and exciting, stay tuned.

Since the last update, we've added two new members, asus and oneshot(TimS from CAL). Most of us have know asus and with some of our players going inactive he's exactly what we need to bolster our roster. Most of us have known oneshot since the start of sof2, and after meeting at qcon we decided to recruit him.

We had a big match with Deviant Objectives for OTB which was shoutcasted by TSN Wonderdog. The match was very close, and it really was anyone's game on mp_hk1. Click here to listen to the teaser, and here for the full shoutcast. Thanks go out to Wonderdog for the great shoutcast, I've archived his TSN shoutcasts for our matches on the files page. GGs dev

Last week we also had a CAL match against atu, that had some connection problems, but that's the net :<, and this week we faced off against se7en for CAL which was also a good match for us. GGs to atu and 7.

I recently met Pwk^Ap0stle and Pwk^Lotek in person at the WCG California Qualifiers in Pleasanton, CA. I had a great time hanging out with them and talking to some of the other players at the event. Click here for some pictures Ap0stle and I took of the event.

Lastly some more Quakecon 2002 news, I wrote a recap of the event for the sexy Anouc at BadGirlsClan, There are two copies of the recap, one local, and one on BGC's server. You may want to check out their page for some info on one of the biggest international female gaming organizations out there, lets hope they start a sof2 div eh?

Back from Quakecon 2002, and ZFZ is back in action, two of our members Penguin and Isaac have been forced to go inactive. Penguin will be back to activity when his connection and computer issues are resolved. In other news our very own Kevin Atkison was featured in a case mod story on cnn.com, click here to take a look.

"The specs on Kevin Atkison's latest computer could just as easily be for some newfangled street cruiser: Blue neon light tubes, Corsair XMS 3200 DDR memory and a GeForce 3 video card, all wrapped in a shiny aluminum Lian Li case with a clear plastic side window for easy viewing.

The 22-year-old Phoenix resident was among the thousands who recently hauled their systems to QuakeCon 2002, the annual gamer festival held in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite."

Today we had a big match against Vanguard for AIT. A very close game with strong performances by zfz players. This was one of our first matches that was shoutcasted, you can listen to a cached copy of the TSN shoutcast here. Good Game Vanguard. Scores:

14-8 Kam3 -- ZFZ 7-4 as blue -- ZFZ 7-4 as red.

Yesterday, we took a close match against the formidable PCI, Kev had a connection problem, and Solicitor killed himself two rounds to make it even. PCI have always shown themselves to be classy guys, we thank them for keeping teams fair. GGs PCI. Scores:

8-5 Kam3 -- PCI 5-3 as red -- ZFZ 5-0 as red.
10-8 Air1 -- ZFZ 5-4 as red -- ZFZ 5-4 as blue.

I finished work on the Picture Gallery of all the pictures I took combined with the pictures I got from Supra, dvs1, and TimS. Check it out, I put a lot of work into it.