TrackMania 2 Canyon screenshot featured on Intel's XMP site

Talking tonight with Thundr about a new gaming desktop he'd put together, we got on the topic of Intel's Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) technology.  If you follow the link, you'll see one video game screenshot at the top of the article ... and one only (the rest of the photos are of gamers.)

Of all the video games chosen to be represented for this article about gaming RAM, guess which one was chosen?!   That's right, one of the best gaming franchises ever made... TrackMania!

This mega-awesome screenshot of TrackMania 2: Canyon was a fantastic choice for the Intel site; and one I use as a desktop wallpaper.

I really wish this game was more marketed in North America.  It is so awesome and many North Americans still don't know about it.  Yes, it's on Steam, but it's rarely highlighted except for once or twice a year when it's on sale on Steam.  Unfortunately it usually goes on sale when more well-known titles are also on sale.  We had one time when a surge of 10,000 new North American players came to TrackMania 2: Stadium when it was on sale for $1.99.  I hope we'll see more of that so we can get more North American TrackManiacs!

Anyway, back to the XMP story... I run TrackMania on a machine with XMP RAM and it runs as fast as I drive in TrackMania.  If you're using XMP RAM in an Intel motherboard, make sure to set the XMP profile in your motherboard's BIOS so you can take advantage of this great technology.

Then get into some TrackMania and come race with the Friday Night Gamers!

A&G 2012 TrackMania 2 Tournament - New Dates, Prelims Track Pack and Practice Server

Here is a quick update on the A&G 2012 TM2 Open tournament, sponsored by Ubisoft and Intel:
Prelims' and Semifinals' dates have been moved to the following:

Prelims: 21 January 2012 at 8:00PM Eastern
Semifinals: 04 February 2012 at 8:00PM Eastern

The finals will be held on 10 March 2012, live at the Animation & Gaming Ohio expo.

Read the A&G Ohio's TrackMania 2 Tournament Rules and Regulations for full details, including any future updates.

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The prelims track pack has been released and is being hosted in the USA | Utah zone under the name:
A&G 2012 TM2 Open (practice)
The name may be changed to something similar -- we do that when we're testing mock tournaments there.

Click the link above to launch TrackMania and automatically join the server.
Mark this server in your favorites, as it will be the server we play the preliminaries on.

If you find the server is down for some reason, please contact me at trackmania@thatoneplace.net
so I can get it running again.

You may also download the prelims pack to practice on your own at home.

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Best of luck to everyone!
GG

A&G 2012 Trackmania 2 Open - 2nd Official USA TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament

Register for the Tournament!

I'm very pleased to announce the 2nd Official USA TrackMania 2 Tournament, sponsored by Ubisoft, Intel and DSGW.de; and hosted by Anxiety and Macduffman, two finalists in the GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon tournament that were unfortunately unable to attend the finals.

The A&G ’12 Trackmania² Open will be even bigger than our GEEX tournament, extending to the entire world to participate!

Registration is free, and more details can be found by clicking on the registration link above or below.
The preliminaries and semi-finals will be held online, and the finalists will be invited to Cincinnati, Ohio in March for LAN finals at the Animation & Gaming Ohio convention.

Here are some quick details from what I know so far:
Prelims: 14 January 2012 (online) - The top 16 racers will be invited to the semi-finals.
Semi-finals: 28 January 2012 (online) - 2 sections.  The top 4 racers from each section (8 total) will be invited to Cincinnati for the LAN finals.
Finals: 10 March 2012 (LAN at the A&G event)

Like GEEX, competitors will be responsible for their own flight/lodging expenses, but prizes are rumored to be as good or better, so it will be worth it for the winners.  :)

So head on over to their registration page and sign-up to play.  It's going to be a blast!
See you at the races in a few weeks!

Register for the Tournament!

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament Finals Results

Rank	Alias	Points
01	Iceman	247
02	Fallout	221
03	KOFSKawa	198
04	nicknacknob	171
05	rudoneyet	166
06	FNG_Thundr	131
07	FNG_NapTime	110
08	ronnation	108
09	FNG_SpeedMonger	106
10	FNG_DirtyD	86

Iceman, who traveled all the way to Utah from his home in Wisconsin, battled it out with GEEX defending champion and Utah native Fallout in an incredible contest featuring rounds that ended sometimes with milliseconds making the difference.

Iceman pulled out the victory and dethroned the two-time winner Fallout, laying claim to the $2800 gaming laptop sponsored by Intel and Ubisoft. Fallout and Kawa went home with a brand new boxed i7-2600k processor from Intel; and we congratulate them on their fine performances.

Two of our competitors, Iceman and nicknacknob flew in from out-of-state. We were grateful to have you here. We hope you enjoyed your stay and your experience at GEEX!

We missed a few players that weren't able to make it... Anxiety (Canada), Besus (Texas), Alderon42 (Utah), and macduffman (Ohio). The missing contestants' slots were filled in by NapTime, SpeedMonger, ronnation and Thundr (all from Utah.)

We had a great time at GEEX and thank Ubisoft, Intel and MediaOne for making this awesome tournament a reality.

I personally wish to also thank ATP Havoc, Dengel, Eyebo, GanjaRider, LineAddict, NitroGuy, smok3y, sol666 and tmjonas, some of the greatest TrackManiacs around the world, for building the tracks for our finals (and some of our prelims!)

Great job to all contestants!  We hope to see more tournaments like this start to emerge across the entire United States and again thank Ubisoft and Intel for sponsoring our tournament and prizes.

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament Finalists and Prize Updates

Some our finalists unfortunately had to cancel their plans to compete in our GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Finals.  We had to fill 4 slots and are happy to announce the final lineup of competitors (in order or ranking):

Iceman
Fallout
KOFSKawa
nicknacknob
rudoneyet
FNG_DirtyD
FNG_NapTime
FNG_SpeedMonger
ronnation
FNG_Thundr

We wish everyone the best of luck in the competition.

The Intel sponsored tournament PCs are running Intel i7 3.3GHz processors and NVIDIA GTX570 video cards in them!  Needless to say, TrackMania 2 settings are maxed out and ready to show off.  :)

Intel came in with another win by upgrading our prizes from boxed i5 processors to boxed i7-2600k processors!  We've been extremely fortunate to have Ubisoft and Intel co-sponsoring our GEEX TrackMania 2 Canyon tournament and want to thank them profusely again for everything they've done to make this tournament great.

See you all at GEEX tomorrow night for the exciting TM2 showdown!

Remember, if you can't attend the event in-person, watch the live stream from GEEX tomorrow night!

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Finals - Track Pack Available Now!

After several months of collaboration with some of the best track authors around the world in the TrackMania community, I'm proud to present the GEEX 2011 Finals track pack.  (Download and extract to your "My Documents" folder ... it will put the right files in the right places.)

It is a well-rounded mix of many of the track styles available in TrackMania.

This pack is extra special; made with TrackManiac passion by the following authors:

ATP Havoc

Dengel

Eyebo

GanjaRider

LineAddict

NitroGuy

smok3y

sol666

tmjonas

Now, I have to say something.  These track authors are some of the finest people I've ever met.  I have loved playing their tracks over the years, and I am honored that they were willing to help make this tournament a success, by granting their talents to designing tracks specifically for the GEEX tournament.  These incredible tracks really show off the different aspects of TrackMania that make it great and each author has a style all their own.  You'll enjoy racing their tracks even if you're not in the tournament!

I have become friends with each of them over the past several months, and some of us even enjoyed watching the prelims together on the Team FNG Mumble server.  All of these extraordinary people voluntarily took a lot of time out of their busy schedules to make this a reality, and I want to publicly thank each of them for their participation.

TrackMania is a fantastic game on its own, but what really makes it stand out as the best racing game in the world is the community that powers it, and these authors are a testament to how great the community is.  You'll see it in their tracks.

I wish you all could be here in Utah with us Friday.  Some of the authors will be watching the stream, and if you're lucky, you can chat with them in the Twitch.tv chat room (Eyebo was kind enough to participate some there during the prelims... thanks Eyebo!)

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Prelims
Competitors take flight on the epic jump which starts the
Tortilla Chip Raceway

Not only have these incredible authors packed their tracks with awesomeness, but they've added a special touch... GEEX billboards in each of the tracks, custom intros, outros and podium blocks.

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Finals
"Life Elevated"

Combined, it's going to make the GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament Finals an incredible production at this Friday as our 10 finalists compete for a $2800 Gaming Laptop and some sweet Intel i5 processors; courtesy of Ubisoft and Intel

The outros make for some incredible replay cams that will be broadcast on the big screen and streamed on the internet, shoutcast by GEEX own LeGrande Jolley (GXRoyale) -- who did a fantastic job streaming our preliminary tournament last Friday.

Those that can attend GEEX, come watch our skilled finalists drive their hearts out as they compete for the laptop!  We will have some TrackMania 2 Canyon t-shirts to give away so be sure to be in the audience during the finals!

GEEX 2011 

TrackMania 2 Canyon Finals

South Towne Expo Center

Sandy, Utah

14 October 2011

6:00pm

Those that can't be with us locally, be sure to catch the stream online and cheer on your favorite competitors!

GEEX 2011 - TrackMania 2 Canyon - 1st Prize Laptop Specs Revealed

Hey all!
I got official word back about the specs for the 1st Prize custom gaming laptop!

Customized shell with GEEX 2011 and TrackMania 2 Canyon logos
1920 x 1080 15.6" LED Backlit Glossy LCD Screen
2GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon HD 6970M
Intel Core i7-2720QM Quad-Core Processor (2.20GHz), 6MB Cache
8GB Kingston HyperX Dual-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 2 X 4GB
250GB Intel 510 Series(Elm Crest) - Solid State Drive
6X Blu-ray Reader/8X DVD+/-R/2.4X +DL Super-Multi Drive with Power DVD 7
Integrated High-Definition Audio with 4 Channel support
Intel PRO Wireless Advanced-N 6230 + BT Wireless LAN Combo Module - up to 320Mbps -
Built-in 2.0 Megapixel Video Camera
Windows 7 Home Premium

The laptop retails around $2800.00 so it's definitely a prize worth signing up for!  :)

I'm not sure which boxed i5 processors 2nd and 3rd place will receive, but they'll be worth it as well.

Register for the tournament today (if you haven't already!) 

Entry is free, but you must sign up before 07 October 2011 5:00pm (Mountain).

The top 10 after the prelims will be invited to compete in the finals on the GEEX tournament stage on 14 October in Sandy, Utah (finalists are responsible for any travel/lodging/food/etc expenses.)

We again express much thanks to Ubisoft and Intel who are sponsoring our tournament.

GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament Details Finalized

I, along with Ubisoft, Intel and GEEX am proud to officially announce the first USA LAN event TrackMania 2 Canyon tournament since the game was released on 14 September 2011.  We're excited to be one of the first to help the United States get introduced to the ManiaPlanet universe.

We have finalized all details except the map pack that will be used in the finals.  This is because I have some of the best track authors in the TrackMania community hard at work creating tracks special for this year's GEEX tournament!

It gets better...

This year's tournament is free to enter and open to EVERYONE (just make sure to read the fine print below...)  We will be holding an online preliminary event on:
07 October 2011 9:00PM (Mountain time.)
Online - GEEX 2011 TrackMania prelims server


All details can be found at the official GEEX TrackMania 2 Canyon Tournament website.

The top 10 contestants in the online prelims will advance to the finals, which will take place:
14 October 2011 6:00PM
GEEX - South Towne Expo Center - Sandy, UT
Tournament stage


Ubisoft and Intel really came through for us.  Intel is sponsoring some really killer prizes... including:
1st place: Customized GEEX 2011/TrackMania 2 Canyon gaming laptop
2nd place: Boxed Intel i5 processor
3rd place: Boxed Intel i5 processor
(All finalists will also receive cool TrackMania 2 Canyon t-shirts)


We expect this to be an epic event and hope to see a ton of you there.  And if you're not in the competition or aren't fortunate enough to make it to the finals, come cheer on your friends and have a blast at this special event.

Register Now!!!

And now the fine print...
Note: All finalists are responsible for any travel/lodging necessary to permit them to participate in the GEEX 2011 TrackMania 2 Canyon tournament finals.


DISCLAIMER:
This Contest is open to legal U.S. residents (excluding residents of Rhode Island and residents of Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and other United States territories), who are thirteen (13) years of age or older at the time of entry. Employees, officers, and directors of Sponsor, and each of their affiliated companies, subsidiaries, licensees, franchisees, distributors, dealers, sales representatives, their advertising and promotion agencies, and any and all other companies associated with the Contest (collectively, the "Promotion Entities"), and each of their immediate families (i.e., parents, spouse, siblings, children, grandparents, step parents, stepchildren and step siblings, and their respective spouses, and those living in the same household, whether or not related) are not eligible to participate. All eligibility is subject to all federal, state, provincial and local laws and regulations.