The CPL have finally announced the World Tour stops for the The CPL: World Tour.

The CPL World Tour will commence late February 2005 and will travel to 10 (ten) cities across the globe. The tour will offer a US $1,000,000 cash purse, the largest cash prize ever for a computer game tournament. Over 10,000 gamers are expected to participate in the qualifiers, stops and finals.

The 10 stops for 2005 look like so:

Turkey – Feb – Istanbul
Spain – Mar – Barcelona
Japan – Apr – Tokyo (pending final confirmation)
Brazil – May – Sao Paulo
Germany – June – Düsseldorf
USA – July – Dallas, Texas
UK – Aug – Sheffield
Sweden – Sept – Stockholm
China – Oct – Beijing
Chile – Nov – Santiago

The official World Tour website will be launched very soon. You can check the official post where these stops were announced here.

I got bored, so I figured I’d do a little rant about how I’ve seen things change in the last few weeks.

We are all well aware of Painkiller being the World tour game by now (unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few weeks) and a lot of us have mixed views on it. Anyway, I’m not here to talk about that, I’m here to talk about the effect the CPL announcement has had on the game.

Just a month or 2 ago, Painkiller.euro was pretty much dead in the water. We have active IRC channels for all websites we run, and we noticed a huge drop in people on the Painkiller side of things. After CPL summer, a channel of around 250 people went down to about 15, which as you can see.. is a very very big drop. 🙂

Then came the World Tour announcement, which attracted a lot of gamers world wide to tune into the announcement which was broadcasted by TsN. Everyone was eager, and all hoping it was their game.. however, Painkiller got chosen. I’ve never seen such things in my life.. from the very same hour the game got announced, #Painkiller.euro went from 15 people to 100. It was amazing. The CPL had created a community within a few hours. The game was certainly dead before the announcement, then bam, suddenly everyone starts turning up. The website was getting all kind of hits, and new people signing up, it truely was amazing to see.

Ofcourse, we at Painkiller.euro were overwhelmed with what we had seen, we want nothing more than to see a very big community blossom with the help of us. We run the website for the community, and we run the IRC channel for the community. You all have your say.

We currently have about 830 unique members signed up at our web-site, and we get thousands and thousands of non-signed up people viewing the site every single day. I think it’s a very cool thing that has happened, and I’m glad to be apart of it. Whether people like the idea of Painkiller being the game for the World Tour or not, it’s still very cool to be apart of this community we have now.

We have a whole year to go through yet, and it’s still growing each day. I’m sure by the middle of 2005, we will have nearly double of what we have now, if not triple. Also, with BooH due out tomorrow, I’m sure that will bring quite a lot of new folk, as does every new release.

Thanks for your time, and help us keep the community growing. 😀

-The guys at pkeuro.

Noticed over at the BBC website, there is a nice little article about the upcoming Painkiller BLOODLINE tournament which will be held on the 3rd-5th of December to find 2 top Painkiller players from the United Kingdom who will win a year long pro-gaming contract from the ever-famous 4 KINGS clan.

The article describes the event a little and more importantly, lets non-gaming folk know about the event. Its good to see well-known media like BBC getting more involved with the gaming scene, especially the Painkiller scene. You can check the full article out here.

Its finally happened, Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell has gone GOLD. Heres the press release:

Paris, France – November 8, 2004 – DreamCatcher Games today announced Painkiller: Battle Out Of Hell has reached gold status. The Expansion Pack for the award-winning Windows® FPS, Painkiller, will begin shipping to North American retailers on November 11th and will begin releasing across Europe on November 24th.

A shooter in its purest form, Painkiller boasts truly inspired graphics and some of the most intimidating level bosses ever seen. Utilizing the Havok 2.0 physics engine, the game continues to achieve new heights of physics-based game play while the latest version of the “PAIN Engine” cranks out an unbelievably high polygon count, and exciting new features like heat and haze distortion, light blooms, spectacular pixel mapping, new shader effects, tweaks for the latest video cards and an improved networking core.

Wooooooooooo!! Let the games begin II. 🙂

The Painkiller.euro 16 player invitational tournament is now over. We have seen some brilliant games over the past 2 days, and some very memorable shots. The final just got played, which saw Stermy take on world #1 Painkiller player Vo0. Vo0 got off to a good start on DM_fallen2te, but as usual you cant keep Stermy down. He clawed his way back, and ended up taking the map 14:8. Then came Vo0s choice of map DM_Psycho, which for a few minutes looked like Stermy had run away and won the game.. but no.. Vo0 isnt #1 for nothing. He ended up taking the map marginally; 13:8. Last, but not least came DM_Sacred.. the tie breaker map. Vo0 was the favourite going into this map, as he pretty much knows it better than he knows his own home.. this proved to be true, as Vo0 took the map very very comfortably – 29:9.

I would like to thank everyone that participated, its been great fun. I would like to thank all admins that helped out, and ukgamer for providing us servers to play on. We couldnt of done it without you. 🙂

Finally, to all that keep asking.. and I know your eager.. demos will be uploaded sometime Monday, when I have them all, and can evaluate which ones to release. There is also a movie of the event already in production, thanks to our spanish friend cu3rv0. That should be released some time next weekend. Stay tuned.