[o_deizel]

i can still remember the day i got my quake1 cd. got it bundled up in my xmas pressies when i was a kid. made a change to playing snes, or doom modem to modem with my neighbour (or any other classics), or playing duke nukem online where someone would host on their ip whilst everyone else had 60secs to get into dos and load duke.exe with some paremeters, back in the mid-nineties or something. i can also recall my disbelief when the cd played music when i stuck it in my cd player, great soundtrack, NiN?.

so yeh, q1, the first online fps with servers on could join willy-nilly, and 3d characters, that you could see the back of (or was that doom?). had this program called mplayer, can't remember why i got it, possibly for duke3d, but maybe it was for q1. so i played q1dm, learnt the levels, then played a mod called qball, some hide&seek/domination/kingofthehill-type mod where the guy with quad only had an axe, and that was the point.

but i had read about this thing called team fortress, with forts and snipers, and i could just imagine the sniping long range, something that i hadn't yet experienced in any of the games i had come across at the time, not to mention teh spies and teh leik, but you know. so anyway, something was up with this mplayer page i read it no, it didn't seem free at all.. so a week more of qball, and then i was ready to become a nub at tf.

quake.exe -game fortess.. with that awesome intro video, with the pyramid shaped nails, and the classical music, and the fattie. 2fort4, what a fun map... that really long narrow corridor leading to the flag in the basement, i spent my first week or two tryin to keep up a sg down there, wouldn't dare attack at the point.. but after watchin the spies tricks, i thought i was ready, not. :> launching flares from your sniper rifle to under the opposing sniper deck (not battlements at the time) to light up the place, and possibly lag up the server a tad. scout with his radar that used cells, quake-type lightning bolt effect that would shoot through the wall and a console message telling you the distance to the nearest enemy. not to mention the uber flash bang (cs u saw it here first), who needs to bunneh when u can flash.

then there was quakeworld, ditch mplayer and get gamespy3d, qwcl.exe was teh way to go. many different version of tf went by, until 2.44 or somin, including shortlived concs that would make you stagger like a drunkard, and you would actually have to prop yourself against a wall to see straight. 2fort4r, 2fort5, 2fort5r, ones at night time, 4forts, well, ... ;o i played, and played, and rocketjumped, and pipejumped, and concjumped, and shotgunjumped, and spyknifejumped, and sniperfilejumped, and strafejumped, and played some more.. pilaged every tf script resource on the web and put together a cfg for every class, with those fancy quake characters for a nice console output, made a grenade bind that would stick with me for life (bind mwheelup "bind mouse2 +gren1", and the oppposite for the 2nd)....

then q2 came, which did not feel quite like its predecessor, but neotf had hit the scene and being er, oldschool, i couldn't really be bothered with it, floating zepellins and airstrikes you couldn't see, it was overkill, and was ruining my favourite game. so 6 months later i am bored with q2rocketarena and q2rail, but my occasional games of tfc are always filled with fun....

enter tfc, teeeffsee! yeh so, that screenshot of the new 2fort on the half-life engine, liek wow!`1one have you seen it ?! how did they make the battlements curve leik that, i can't wait to play zomg. the rocketlauncher wasn't quite the quake rl, but the splash damage was good, and there was 'the hunted'. i played for a while, ending up in tds (team dont shoot), but didn't hang about for long.. can't remember the reason really, although i did go back to playing qwtf for a bit, but got pwned by people that had suddenly became way better than i had previously remembered, new tricks up their sleeves, wallstrafing the bridge into bunnyhopping, and possibly a bit of wallhacking too. everything was a bit faster anyway, too much of the old soldier in tfc ;p

sooo, back to tfc, scout this time lol, practicing conc jumps (post-patch) on the old ign servers, 'dropconcs' as i termed my invention back then. not a handheld, as i was 56k, nor the noobstyle "lets try and get up this lift" type conc. you all know the one, jump over any patch of water in well and chuck the conc under you as you do. great fun thoses servers, nice people, met a few regulars, creed, thewarden, thedr00g, pingchowchi, skorp, co33ie, infy, okenora (who was just startin out, but learnin fast :E). it was at some point in those few summer months i was invited to help form a clan that would be called reaver. what can i say, best, online, experiences, ever. :>

clanned tfc was great, as was pro tf. so many gg's, vs. [ir], [dw], mr.men, [dtm], =bc=. <|187|> to just name a few. i can still remember my first match against dw on well, so guys, lets play the best clan we can find on the most lockdown level we could possibly play atm.. 30 mins of trying to conc past the soldiers either side of the flag, about 20 midairs to them + a few craters thrown in just for kicks, and then there was both at the same time. ;p who knows, by the end of it all (2yrsish), i may have been one of the few prem hpb scouts that could handheld near-flawlessly on any uk server, or we can just leave it at 'hpbscout'.

anyway, not really got much to say about tfc itself now that i've got this far, lol, but i'm sure most of you will already know enough about it as it is. :>

oh yea, then there was life, gf, booze (well, the 3k i was meant to spend on a car), uni, firewall, no online games so resulted in some lan cs (and 200gb of music/tv/films/games/apps, shh), now my own flat, 2mb bb, and dun-dun-dun, now... FF :E

</nostalgia time="6am" bed="true">

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