Liam Crowley: I don't think any introductions are needed Michael so why don't we start with a brief rundown of how you have found Call of Duty 4 so far?

Michael Sowa: It's a pretty good game actually. I can't say if its better then CoD2 and that's a bit strange. I was really bored of CoD2 the last half year I played it but now I actually already miss it. CoD4 is nice, nothing more to add. I guess the point why I'm not 100% pleased with it are my 30 fps at the moment. The fast gameplay and the new weapons are great and with the right ruleset this game is surely one of the best out there. I think it's gonna have a far better level of competition than CoD2 had and that's the most important thing for me i would say.

Your team, Speedlink, started very strong in CoD2 but the same could not be said now for CoD4. Why do you think this is and how do you plan to get back on track?

Hard question. First of all I wouldn't say we missed the start yet as no big compos are done yet and we didn't lose a LAN yet. CoD2 was from the first minute on a special feeling for us, especially for me, and it just worked amazingly good the first month as a team. The main fact out of this maybe was that we did not have a break between CoD1 and CoD2 but just played both at the same time as CoD2 got released. Therefore we already had a good and nice team feeling as we were pretty good at the end of CoD1 as well. This time its all different, we had a long break as a team in which we nearly never played together any match and even after CoD4 got released, some of us didn't even have the game nor the time to play it. As team we just started playing a week ago and played our first pcws together. We joined our first cup for that game after one day of pcws as a team and just played every map without any tactics or stuff, just like "you go here, you here and you here". This way u cant win the first comp against really good teams who are already prepared on their homemaps.

Also a small excuse would be that fuchs, phY and I nearly had no fps in CoD4 from the start. They both fixed it a bit with new stuff for their PC and I'll try to grab some soonish as well. You just can't win a game if someone rushes you with mp5 in two smokes and still has 125 fps while yourself only have 20 or 30. But as I said, this first cup wasn't anything important and not even a good balanced ruleset was done yet so I wouldn't count this as bad start. We are training now weekly maps until 2008 and then we will go for a bootcamp. After that the real CoD4 time begins for us.

What do you feel your newest addition, Soulreaper, brings to the team and do you feel it was wise to bring in a player that has been inactive for almost a year?

Well overall I have to say that if he didn't fit in and wasn't a good player as well as person we would not have picked him into the roster. He's a really calm player and active as hell. With a lot of game experience in RTCW and CoD1 - in which he played in top teams as well - his long inactive phase doesn't matter that much. He played the last days of CoD2 a bit and started directly as soon as CoD4 got released. He came back out of the inactivity because he wanted to be on top once again. He wants to reach something and that's the only reason why he came back to gaming and I really think thats why he already showed us to be a good addition.

We wanted to pick a sixth gamer in before we start with the real training this week and as he was definitely one of the best players in Germany we could see in this short period and also living in Berlin with a good connection related to Fuchsstute and spaR, he was the best and only choice for us as a last player. It's better to train your lineup with six already if you do train as we do instead of including a new sixth player after two months of deep training for every map and style the game brings with it. And as we decided at the end of CoD2 already to have a six man lineup again, this was just the best decision to be made.

How do you rate the level of competition now compared to how things were at the start of CoD2, do you believe it will be tougher to dominate this time around?

At the moment right now it's really difficult to rate the competition part already because in my opinion there is no competition yet. The community is pretty much split with the rulesets which are on the market now and with all these perks and settings you just can't rate a competition level now. I guess if the ruleset is fixed for all leagues in the next days or weeks it will be still hard to reach the top in that game, harder then in CoD2. But at the end we will see a lot of CoD2 top teams also in this game on the top but a lot of new clans coming out of the nowhere and gonna beat the shit out most of them! I'm really looking forward for the first real events and LANs to come up and to see who's owning still and who had just the first day advantage.