The Grandmother

It all started when I was much much younger... I didn't have my own PC yet, gaming for me was limited to the 5/6 games I had available on my SEGA MASTER SYSTEM II, my dad owned a PC, which I ocasionally used to do some homework on... Then 1 night I was at my godfather's place, where I would spend all my time with my cousin ( that DID have his own PC ( he was about 6/7 years older then me )) and that night when I had arrived he told me he had gotten hold of something absolutely amazing...

Basically the nights I spent in his room were my first experiences of Multiplayer-gaming... We'd play whatever game he had gotten through his "channels" ( no internet yet to download "WAREZ" or anything ) and then he showed me a disk labeled "Wolf3D demo"...



I was absolutely amazed, we played the same set of levels for hours on end, until I had to go to bed, but from the guestroom I could still hear the guns blazing-action going on in his room...

A few days later he called me up, brimming with enthusiasm "I've got it all!" he exclaimed... I jumped on my bike and drove over to his place ( 4 km, at that time a HUGE distance for me ), we played the whole wednesday-afternoon, until my mother came to get me in the evening, in my exitement to finally see the whole game, I had forgotten to tell my family where I went :-)



As the years went by, I became an even more avid gamer, playing all kinds of games, but with a serious love for FPS-games, but not a single FPS had given me the same exitement as I had experienced that wednesday-afternoon when I raced over to my cousin... In the mean time I'd lost contact with him due to some things that happened in the family, a situation that has only recently been resolved thanks to facebook...

The Mother

During my first year at College, my Multiplayer-gaming-enthusiasm was at its highest point untill then, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike I was playing anything I could get my hands on!

Then, completely out of the blue, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" was announced, instantly I was exited like a little boy! A few weeks later the multiplayer-demo appeared online, I was in an IT-education at school, so I had loads of mates to play online with, even before the full game was available, we had started a clan, called -= Short Ridge =-

The teambased action on MP_Beach was so unbelievably intense almost anybody I told to try out the MP-demo was instantly addicted to it...

And it had a flamethrower!!!:


Our passion for the game resulted in us playing it daily, it became so bad that my GF started playing just to be able to spend some time with me ( and she became a pretty adept sniper & medic :-) )

The maps are the true beauty of RtCW, with each patch giving us some new candy to fight on...



We went to LAN-parties to fight our way to victory... As I had started it all, I was the so-called "ClanLeader" but this was purely for official purposes as we were generally a pure-for-fun clan that just happened to be pretty good at what we were doing :-) This game learned me what it was to truly play as a team, to be part of a well-oiled machine... Most matches required all players on a team to work together perfectly to achieve victory...


The Daughter

This would be the free stand-alone spin-off "Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory". At this time most of my clanmembers had given up on school and LANparties, so I was forced to mostly play with semi-random players online, this is when I learned the concept of pick-up-games, players would log in to a specific IRC-channel, where 2 teams would be built after which we would look for an empty server which we would then fight a few wars on after having some strategytalks in IRC...

While RtCW showed me how great it was to play in a team, it was RtCW: Enemy Terrytory that perfected it. No longer was it possible to go off on your own and blast away to 'win', in RtCW:ET you're forced to play as a team, the better you fullfill your function in the team, the more points you score...



A medic receives more points for healing a teammate then for killing an enemy, and it is like this in every class, you HAVE to play your role, or your score will be among the lowest of your team. This way, players with 'lower then usual' aimingskills were able to score huge points just by being a good teamplayer. They way this is done is that you earn XP for everything you do. Every map is divided into several differnt sub-objectives, plus every class has their own objectives ( medic must heal, engineer must build, fiel-ops must deliver ammo, covert-ops can find landmines with their binoculars and mark them on the map or steal an enemy's clothing to infiltrate into the enemy team ) and scores were based upon the amount of XP you gained during one round. A full match ( called campaign generally ) consisted of mostly 3 seperate maps and you would keep you XP ( plus the benefits you received from scoring certain amounts of XP ) over the 3 maps which would entice players even more to be good teamplayers...




The Granddaughter

Last year the follow up to RtCW:Enemy Territory hit all consoles, sadly it was greeted by absolutely abismal sales. I blame for a large part the fact that there was virtually no marketing involved... barely anybody I talked to about Enemy Territory: Quakewars knew that it was coming out on consoles, or even that it had been available on PC for more then a year... I was playing the PC-version since the release, in the beginning it was absolutely brilliant, I just started playing pick-up-games again, but as the IRC-channels became emptier and emptier, I resorted to playing on regular public servers, but this was not anywhere near as fun as the pick-up-games were...



I learned the problems of playing with random players in a game that absolutely required teamwork... If the oposing team just had 5% better teamwork, they would win, always... Players driving off with an empty humvee or flying off with an empty troup-transport helicopter were legio and nobody seemd to complain about it... It was absolutely horrible... Sometimes you'd get lucky and you'd be on the side of a clan that was playing on their own server, then I could be part once again of one of those well-oiled warmachines...



ET:QW completely perfected the series in my eyes, the maps were huge ( 1 square kilometer on average ) with vehicles, the same classbased scoring, more 'sub-objectives' and stunning visuals... Another huge advantage was that this time the 2 oposing teams had completely different technologies and vehicles ( since 1 was an invading alien army and the other were mere humans ).

The big drawback of this, was that the game isn't pick-up-and-play, you actually need to learn what the role of each class is, how best to tackle specific maps etc etc, but ( and this is especially true on consoles ) that was just too much to ask of the gamers it seemed... everywhere you hear people complaining about the supposed difficulties while playing the game, which were mostly simply due to people not taking the time to actually learn the game...



When the game was fresh out on PS3, I was able to really enjoy some brilliant matches, with people truly co-ordinating wars like in 'the good old days' but the game also thought me the consumer-mentality on games... after merely 6 months, there were almost no more players online... on the 360 it was over even faster I heared from my mate who got it for that console...

Thus 1 single 'family' of games has guided me through most of my MP-experiences, from the simple hot-seating in Wolf3D to the basics of classbased combat, to the perfection of classbased combat and finally to the 'lazyness' and consumermentality of the general (console)gamers who simply didn't seem to be able to appreciate the brilliantness that is ET:QW and simply stopped playing it...

I hope that one day enough dtoid-PS3-players will own the game ( should be pretty cheap second-hand by now ) so that we can have a FNF in it, since this game truly rocks ( and to be honest if you set the bots to some decent settings, you'll have great fun as well ) when played with a good team...