Players of Philip's Media Games' groundbreaking flight sim product, Fighter Duel, now have easy access to real live human opponents via the internet's WorldWideWeb at http://he.net/~stupid. The Challenger Inn has been the host of an ongoing open-entry international challenge ladder supporting the Fighter Duel flight sim for the past four years. Originally BBS-based, this forum gave players of the Amiga version of Fighter Duel a convenient way to find other like-minded players for this modem-based head-to-head product. After the release of the PC version of Fighter Duel by Philips Media Games, The Challenger Inn was moved to the World Wide Web, but the interface was still basically unchanged from its BBS roots. It was cumbersome and unexciting, but functional.

A whole new look ... and more!

Set to coincide with the release of the much awaited mulitplayer NetDuel upgrade, members of The Challenger Inn finally saw the first major upgrade in over a year. Instead of the old, boring plain-text forms and displays, The Challenger Inn now takes advantage of all that the WorldWideWeb has to offer, including full-color tables, forms, frames and background images. Additionally, the server that hosts The Challenger Inn was moved from a partial T1 connection to a full-time, dedicated T3 line connected directly to the internet. Not only is it more colorful, but it is faster and easier than ever to access.

Player response has been enthusiastically good. "The new site looks great." says player Bill Simpson. Jim Rathgeber, a long time Fighter Duel veteran known to many by his handle "Hawkeye", commented "I love the way it handles!" The current champ at The Challenger Inn, Brad Howe, summed it up even better, saying simply "I love it!"

By utilizing the newest HyperText Markup Language (HTML) codes, The Challenger Inn can display exciting, full-color player reports based on actual World War II documents. Unfortunately, these new features come at a price. Unless players are using the newest version of either the Netscape browser, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer (both in their 3.0 incarnations) some pages will not display correctly. Even the six month-old version 2.04 of Netscape will not function correctly. AOL's WebBrowser product also fails to display The Challenger Inn pages. This is due to a limitation in the native AOL browser, and possible solutions are being investigated. However, AOL users do have the option of using Netscape 3.0, and are suggested to install that product if they plan on accessing The Challenger Inn web site.

Despite this minor drawback, The Challenger Inn is a valuable resource for all Fighter Duel players.

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