Team Pandemic will be the first pro-gaming team to exclusively game on Dell XPS systems featuring Intel Core 2 Duo processors and Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate. “Dell’s college initiative provides us the opportunity to work closely with the industry’s technology leaders,” said Chris Lemley, president of Team Pandemic. “With Dell Unleashed as a title partner, we have a unique variety of media to further reach the college-aged gamer.”

The Frag Dolls, a team of seven women gamers, will hold a casting call for a new member as part of the sponsorship with Dell. I wrote about the Frag Dolls on GameJournalism.com back in 2004, and it turned out to be one of the best read articles on that blog (now part of Video Game Media Watch). The combination of attractive women and FPS gaming was a hit magnet, which is clearly what Ubisoft was thinking when it assembled the team. The Dell sponsorship will likely raise the Frag Dolls’ profile even further.

Applicants for the casting call will be interviewed Aug. 2-5 in the Dell booth at QuakeCon in Dallas, and the qualifiers will compete in the finals on Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle, Aug. 24-26.

CEVO holds online video-game competitions in North America and Australia for both amateurs and professional gamers. With a base of over 30,000 registered members, events typically have 2,500 gamers competing for up to $30,000 in cash and prizes. CEVO’s whole online experience comes through the Internet Platform provided through the LT platform, which stores player, team and match data on highly secure and accessible database servers. Layered Tech’s infrastructure operates the live virtual environments for each competition. Since launching in 2005, CEVO and its sponsors have awarded over $150,000 in cash and prizes to event participants.

Well folks. Due to a lack of traffic and readership, the powers that be have decided to close the pages of FPS Rantings. It’s been fun and I hope you all enjoyed reading my thoughts and sarcasm regarding the genre of FPS games.

Is there no audience for FPS blogs? Part of the issue may have been the focus of FPS Rantings, which covered a broad range of FPS titles but seemed geared to everyday FPS gamers than competitive gamers. eSports sites such as GotFrag seem to have plenty of readers, as does TwitchGuru (which has the advantage of being part of the Tom’s Hardware Guide network). See our directory of gaming news sites for more reading.

“I don’t plan on retiring anytime soon,” Fatal1ty told TwitchGuru. “But I do want to concentrate on making gaming into a mainstream sport.” Wendel didn’t say whether his commitment to the Championship GaminGS eries would affect his participation on other professional gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Professional League and World Cyber Games.

In addition to being broadcast on MTV, USA Network, and DirecTV, professional gaming has its own dedicated sports media that broadcasts the matches via the Web and reports box scores, stats, and news recaps. For example, GotFrag.com is a site dedicated to covering live competitions with online streaming video as well as news reports, stats and record keeping. There’s also Amped eSports , which covers a variety of professional gaming tournaments and organizations. In addition, Cohesion Productions is currently filming documentaries on the history of professional gaming. And just recently, Gotfrag partnered with Beckett Media to launch the first e-sports magazine, dubbed eSports. A number of other gaming and tech sites are following the trend and increasing their coverage of professional gaming. 

You can find a lot of these sites in the Game Hosting Guide under Game Blogs and Gaming News.

“We have hundreds of thousands of registered users who want their MLG content on demand, so we’ve got a lot riding on the availability of our infrastructure,” explained Paul Sullivan, MLG’s Vice President of Product Development. “Rackspace has been essential in prescribing the appropriate technology architecture for our expanding IT needs. Their technical expertise and 100 percent network uptime guarantee have been instrumental as we prepare for a global expansion of our league.”

Competitive gaming has been experiencing strong growth as it gains media visibility, with champion Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel being profiled in the Wall Street Journal and on “60 Minutes.” Two other major leagues, the CyberAthlete Professional League and the Cyberathlete Amateur League, are hosted at The Planet. Low latency (”lag”) is crucial in the multiplayer first-person shooter games used in these leagues, as a slow connection can muck up gameplay and/or leave a player at a competitive disadvantage.

“Major League Gaming has entrusted Rackspace to develop and manage their infrastructure to run a mission-critical broadband business that requires 100 percent uptime and incredible scalability to meet the demands of their users,” said Glenn Reinus, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Uptime is critical for these sophisticated web applications, and we believe that, with Rackspace’s Zero-Downtime Network and Fanatical Support, MLG will enjoy a world-class gaming environment to showcase their ground-breaking media online and at their national competitions.”

Rackspace, which is based in San Antonio, Texas, was recently named the most reliable web host by Netcraft for the sixth time in 11 months this year. The home page for the Rackspace.com web site did not have a measurable outage from March 2004 through November 2005, when it experienced three minutes of downtime, and hasn’t had one since.