Official: Team Arena chaingun BADASS

What with Doom 3 and Gray Matter's re-make of Wolfenstein 3D on the cards, it's often easy to forget that the next release from id Software will be the Team Arena Quake 3 add-on pack. With luck Team Arena will bring the sparkle back into playing Quake 3 teamplay. The original Quake 3 suffered from a lacklustre Capture-the-Flag mode and precious little else for team players. Bobby Pavlock, of fellow developer Rogue Entertainment certainly believes it will be worth a play or thousand. He's updated his .plan with a highly excitable message of praise for Team Arena after an intense beta-test session at id HQ:

"All I can say is "WOW!" That is by far some of the most fun I've had in a long, long time. The new maps are sweet, of course. But what really rocks the gameplay are the new powerups, weapons, items, and gameplay types. Man, oh man! The chaingun is, how can I put it... BADASS! When you're firing that thing it feels like you're carrying around a big 30MM gun from an A-10 and chopping people into pieces..."

That's, err .. great, Bobby (we think). Anyway, look out for Team Arena. id's official release date is, of course, "when it's done". Publisher pressure being what it is, and with Doom 3 being potentially still a long way off however, we'd bet on Christmas for this little bundle of evil, corruptive influences to hit the high street.