Snap to Grid, our regular look at up-and-coming user-created content for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, series is back with another installment! This week, ETQW Mapping's lead singer Terry 'Salteh' Seidler focuses on Spirit Speedway, a map for the hotly anticipated Wheels of War mod for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars, and its objective-driven twin Free Spirit City. To top it all off, Salteh also manages to update us on the progress of three of the most popular user-made maps currently in development for the game.

Without further ado, here's the latest edition of Snap to Grid:

Like a scorching David Beckham free kick, the finals of the MCV & Xbox 360 Games 5s Football Tournament have flashed past our flailing arms and smacked into the back of the net of time before we had time to fully register it/them. Blink and you missed them/it. But fear not, if you didn’t happen to be on or adjacent to the pitch at the time, I am here to recount tales of foot-to-ball glory.

Summer and the associated drought of games are still in full swing (as if you couldn't tell by the gap between this installment and the last one), but we're now back in action! We've had a few games come out in recent weeks, with Xbox Live Arcade serving up the excellent Braid alongside Geometry Wars Evolved². Soul Calibur 4 appears to be the only notable retail release to hit lately, but September (and with it a fresh crop of games) is drawing ever closer.

In any case, let's see what we're playing, shall we? We've actually got several new faces in this installment, with recently crowned Audio Director Chris 'peaceful warrior' Sweetman and freshly spawned Lead Programmer Dean 'Deano' Calver hurling peripherals for the first time.

Engage:

Out of the wondrous depths of the internet comes this piece of what some might consider to be pure awesomeness. Exactly how it came into being will forever remain a mystery, but when the end result is this magnificent, does it really matter?

The video stars Ben 'Randles' Hopkinson, Dave 'ducks' Johnston, Ed 'BongoBoy' Stern, Tim 'spacemonkey' Appleby, Tim 'Huntle' Rose in what is quite possible the finest performance of their lives. Look for an extended cut to come to a theater near you at a completely unspecified time in the far, far future.

With both Jared 'jRAD' Hefty and Dave 'ducks' Johnston out at QuakeCon 2008, we'll try and bring you regular coverage from the event in form of riveting and highly emotional blog updates and photo galleries. Find below the thrilling conclusion that was Day 3 of QuakeCon 2008!

It's all over!

In the morning, we stumbled over to the ET.tv guys, hoping they'd have found a spot in their busy schedule of shoutcasts and live matches to handle an interview they wanted to hold with us. Surprisingly, they were free, so off we all set back into the main hotel, found a spot, and spent about 45 minutes discussing aspects of ETQW, the console versions of the game, Splash Damage, our new partnership with Bethesda, and jRAD delivered an interesting analogy involving various kinds of fruit.

With both Jared 'jRAD' Hefty and Dave 'ducks' Johnston out at QuakeCon 2008, we'll try and bring you regular coverage from the event in form of riveting and highly emotional blog updates and photo galleries. Find below the shocking truth that lies beneath Day 2 of QuakeCon 2008!

The morning started with a quick wander around the BYOC area, in a hunt to find the finest PC cases and systems to ever exist. Amongst our favourites was the Spongebob Squarepants PC (it doesn't take much to entertain us SD staffers.) We also spotted a number of groups attending QuakeCon, from Something Awful goons to Shacknews shackers, each with their own enormous placards, tables, and pizzas visible from across the hall. By the afternoon, the BYOC area was practically full, awash with an even greater selection of games.

With both Jared 'jRAD' Hefty and Dave 'ducks' Johnston out at QuakeCon 2008, we'll try and bring you regular coverage from the event in form of riveting and highly emotional blog updates and photo galleries. Find below the pile of excitement that was Day 1 of QuakeCon 2008!

Captain ducks' log, stardate 123456789111!!11eleven. At about 08:20 GMT on Wednesday, myself and Jared 'jRad' Hefty left for Gatwick airport, and despite some attempted stunt-driving on the part of other road users (skilfully avoided by our cabbie), we got there in one piece and set off on our 16 hour journey to Dallas. We can only say one thing about it: discovering there's in-flight entertainment is the best news anyone boarding a 757 for a trans-atlantic 8-hour flight could possibly ask for.

Admittedly we've been a tiny bit lax on the football update front, so we've got quite a bit of stuff packed into this final blog before the big Games 5s five a side football tournament. There's a sneak peek at the team strip design, and, at last, the reveal of the winning team name!

Over the past four weeks we've had a variety of training sessions to help us get ready for the inevitable and merciless crushing of our competition that's sure to take place tomorrow. Unfortunately, the injury count during practice was often quite high, which usually resulted in the office being half empty every Wednesday.

With Metal Gear Solid 4 (mostly) behind us, we're slowly starting to feel the gaming lull of the Summer months. The appropriately named Buzz! probably made the biggest splash here in the office in these past two weeks with impromptu 8 player quizzing sessions spontaneously forming during lunch time and after hours. Aside from that there aren't that many new releases sprinkled throughout this update and if you ask anyone what releases they're looking forward to in the next four or so weeks, you'll usually be greeted with one or more shrugs and a distinct 'ummmm....'. On a side note, animator Chris 'Hauser' Bull untangled his hands recently and makes his first ever blog appearance in this update. Words:

Snap to Grid is back and this time it's personal! This week, ETQW Mapping's fearless captain Terry 'Salteh' Seidler takes a look at the alpha release of Donnovan's Retake of the Andes map for Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars and checks out the latest alpha release of the highly anticipated Wheels of War mod. To top it all off, the saltiest of Terrys even throws out a challenge to all the aspiring zombie crushers / destruction derby participants out there in the form of Wheels of War's freshly added global lap times leaderboard.

On to the words:

Here it is, the latest installment of Things We're Playing. Metal Gear Solid 4 is undoubtedly the highest profile release since we last hurled controllers and/or mice and it's proving to be a rather divisive title. Fans of the series will undoubtedly love this latest installmanet while everyone else might say things like "What the cumples is going on?" or just shake their head in silence. Rather than trying to make sense of it all, let's just move on. We actually have two first time posters this week, with Programmer Arne Olav 'ao' Hallingstad and Production Assistant Joe 'Rex-TheGrunt' Gibson both typing up lots of words for our eyes to choke on. Here are this week's wondrous tales, then:

In a vain attempt to quench our merciless thirst for multiplayer competition, we’ve entered the upcoming Games 5s 5-a-side football tournament sponsored by Microsoft & MCV. The whole affair is in good fun, though we still intend to ruthlessly crush everyone else. This is not as wild a hope as it might seem: the tournament is only open to game industry folk who may well prove to be as wheezingly unfit as we, thus allowing our natural winningness/lack of moral qualm to prevail :) The best part is that the winning team will get a £1500 donation for a charity of their choosing, which in our case may or may not involve snortling and endangered perissodactyl animals.

To kick it all off (Hooyah!), we’ve decided to run a little competition of our own: what should our inevitably victorious team name be? Our heroic imminently-all-conquering foot-to-ball squad currently toil and flex without label, monicker or title - will you be the namegiver? More details on this unique title-bestowing opportunity near the end of this blog entry, so keep reading!

We don't often hoot and holler about books about games, mainly because they don't crop up with any great frequency and few of them are very good when they do. They seem doomed to only spring from the pen of writers who don't understand games, or gamers who can't write. So we're happy to tip our hat to Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, which is very good.

We've known the wretched beast talented journalist that is the Rossignol for a while, from his scribblings for RockPaperShotgun, Wired and PC Gamer, but also from wayyyy back in the day when he and some of our number were heavily implicated in Quake III Arena clans and leagues, which didn't seem to do any of us any harm. Who among us indeed would not warm to TGL's opening paragraph: "In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game...It was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Grand Theft Auto 4 has come and gone, and so the eyes and hands here at Splash Damage turn to a new crop of games. With games like Lego Indiana Jones, GRID, Rock Band, and Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars hitting consoles last week and with stuff like Metal Gear Solid 4, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Sins of a Solar Empire all set to assault our wallets before month's end, the impending advent of Summer doesn't appear to be affecting release schedules very much at all so far.

Let's take a look at what we've been playing recently and what we're looking forward to in the coming weeks:

Following up on the smash hit that was the initial installment, ETQW Mapping's Terry 'Salteh' Seidler once again deploys his all-seeing editing community observer telescope for another episode of Snap to Grid.

In this latest chapter, we take a look at the very cool Dusk mod, which seeks to combine the thrill of being chased by a horde of hungry Strogg zombies with the excitement of getting the heck away from them. There's also a round-up of some of the maps currently floating around the editing forums, complete with download links and such. On to the words!

Great news - The latest Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars game update is currently headed straight for the tubes of the internet! We're planning to push the the Windows and Linux versions along with the upated SDK this evening London time, while the folks at Aspyr are currently putting the finishing touches on the Mac version. If you want to read up on the changes and improvements included in 1.5, you can do so by way of this blog update. To round out the impending file assault, we'll also have the final version of the Official Competition Mod available within the coming days.

As soon as the 1.5 update is ready for download, we'll publish a list of mirrors here on the ETQW Community Site, so keep checking back!

I thought I'd start this blog update with a quick look at something that I've neglected to cover until now, a mod. This isn't the much vaunted Wheels of War that you will have seen around the ETQW Community Site, nor the upcoming Official Competition Mod but rather a mod that has already been heavily integrated into the Quake Wars competition scene: ETQWPro.

Made by a collection of programmers from the ETQW competition scene, ETQWPro modifies the basic game to enhance it for competition play, adding the sort of features and gameplay changes many players feel are needed for tournament play. The team behind the mod includes former PigMod creator Blaze and Ultraviolet Productions' frag movie guru Hannes.

Here it is, your bi-weekly look into the gaming exploits of Splash Damage. While Grand Theft Auto 4 continues to maintain its firm grip on our gaming consoles and makes us tumble into bed at completely unreasonable hours, Boom Blox took the office by surprise and managed to win people's hearts and minds in an instant.

There are also a few other, less mainstream (and thus, according to conventional internet wisdom, infinitely cooler) games being played here inside the Splash Damage blimp - read on to find out what they are, and don't forget to share your recent virtual adventures with us in the comments!

Just a quick update on where things are at with the Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars 1.5 game update. We're currently doing some last minute testing with id Software to track down a few issues that have turned up, but we don't anticipate this to take too much time. We really just want to make sure that all the issues we're aware of are actually addressed rather than pushing out an update with a big asterisk and a list of It'll-break-if-you do-this-ers attached to it.

Distribution is being sorted out at the moment as well and if there are no further complications, we anticipate having the update out next week. We'll try and keep you as updated as possible from here on out, so as soon as we've got a definite release date, you'll read it here first.

Hello playmates. Having lost previous months to big, deep, long games, recently I've been snacking heavily on lots of small ones. I was really impressed by the Independent Games Festival nominees at this year's GDC, and ever since have felt compelled to cast a tiny piglike eye over some of the less famous titles and genres.