Soldier Films
To the contrary of the rest of the household (my wife that is) I have grown a passion for soldier wars. My first soldier film was Saving Private Ryan, a film which I saw alone and left me squirming in the seat for the first 15 minutes. I had been wanting to watch a soldier film ever since but, with my wife not sharing my same tastes, I could'nt get myself to watch any. I had made an exception with The Pianist, which I saw on my own but there were quit a number that I wanted to see.
Black Hawk Down
One of these was Black Hawk Down which also starred the not-so-notorious-then Orlando Bloom. I started playing the game and got myself well immersed into the story. Just before I reached the mission ' Irene' , I managed to rent the DVD and watched the video. Tremendous. Then I played the game and, whist loading, I was reading veterans' stories about their experience in that tragedy in Somalia.
Black Hawk Down was the first game I completed ever since DooM.
American Cousin Visiting.
A few weeks later I was visited by my American second cousins - the younger of which was an avid player of Enemy Territory. He told me about it and I downloaded it. But when I tried it, I must have loaded quite a drab level since I remember being in a really graphic-less environment in which I thought ET was just an outline environment (no textures) and I quickly uninstalled it.
Call of Duty
Then I went on to play Call of Duty. The change in graphics from Black Hawk Down was tremendous and I felt I had done the right thing of playing BHK before CoD or I would not have enjoyed it so much.
Call of Duty pitted me back in the Second World War and I really enjoyed the fact that you played it from different parts - Allies and Russians. Again, I finished the game - I actually shot at the guys coming up with the Russian Red Flag on top of Berlin at the end. Luckily I missed.
After playing Call of Duty, I managed to watch Enemy at the Gates, another tremendous film which to me highlighted a yet unknown frontline of WWII - Russia. The role of the sniper also attracted me - something which left repercussions in my first online encounters on Enemy Territory... the subject of my next Weblog
Monday, February 28, 2005
The Early Days
Connections
My first attempts as playing online were through the Quake II engine. Back then I was using a 33k dial-up connection. There weren't any local servers running the game so I had to find foreign ones. The ping was relatively horrible and I was dying sooner than spawning! I limited myself to hiding in corners and camping on others which did not make me very popular. So I gave up on the playing.
I tried something less spontaneous - Diablo. The low connection still meant I was lagged... either having monsters dying seconds after being killed or waiting at the edge of the virtual world waiting for the next segment to load.
It was not until I got a 512/128 ADSL connection, and later had it upgraded to 1024/256 connection was I really into playing.
My first attempts as playing online were through the Quake II engine. Back then I was using a 33k dial-up connection. There weren't any local servers running the game so I had to find foreign ones. The ping was relatively horrible and I was dying sooner than spawning! I limited myself to hiding in corners and camping on others which did not make me very popular. So I gave up on the playing.
I tried something less spontaneous - Diablo. The low connection still meant I was lagged... either having monsters dying seconds after being killed or waiting at the edge of the virtual world waiting for the next segment to load.
It was not until I got a 512/128 ADSL connection, and later had it upgraded to 1024/256 connection was I really into playing.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Before the Beginning: Multiplayer gaming
I remember my first multiplayer game: I was in 6th form (back in 1995) and I had just bought a 14400bps modem. My best mate came over to my house to help me set it up and we agreed with another colleague to wait for us at 6:01pm. The chosen game was iD's DooM. A game which I had lost myself in after buying a Lm12 book on how to create levels. at 5.59pm we still did not have the modem settings up and working and were actually helping my dad bringing up the new tiles for the bathroom from the ground to the first floor.
At 6.04pm we tried the settings for one more time and this time it was dialling! Unfortunately our colleague had got fed up of waiting and answered the phone himself. Since I had no phone in my room we yelled over to my parents to get the phone (just minutes after yelling at them not to touch the phone!) We told him the story and got him to wait for us again. We tried again, waited for the dialling, for his modem's reply, for the handshake. It was working!... then the game started to load.
It was exhilarating. Seeing pixels on my CRT screen being lighted at the command of another person - who I knew personally! I still remember him opening a door, and faced with a horde of monsters in an un-lit room, he fired his rocket launcher into the midst. Unfortunately there was a monster right at the door and with the blast he was thrown against the wall outside my field of view. Splendid - you never saw a monster do that!
Co-op
My days with DooM grew more intensive as me and my best mate, nicknamed Green Trooper, connected every evening at 6:01pm (it was cheaper after 6pm) and played all of DooM and DooM ][ co-operatively. We grew into best buddies, knowing each others moves, inventing acronyms to speed up our communication (e..g "JL" short for "Jien Left" meaning I will take the left part - ergo, you take the right side).
Deathmatch
Later on I made friends with an ex-acquaintance from school, nickname DaemoN, who was more into deathmatch gaming then co-op. Now there is a large difference between computer AI and human intelligence - and I was just about to find out. I remember seeing his eyes in that Trooper helmet cartoonish character of his. I felt like a hunted bird running around whilst he shot out at me. But with time I got better. I remember being cornered in a room with no ammo left, just a chainsaw, and he was challenging me by shooting with the doublebarrel shotgun on the wall opposite the entrance - then I made my move - I timed the shots and on the reload, I emerged chainsaw in hand and scarred his face with it enough to clear a path towards the exit. I was proud of myself that day.
Saturday Matches
More friends joined in and we fell into a pattern: every saturday at 9am I would leave home with my PC straddled to my car with seatbelts, take it to my friend's house and spend till 6pm playing Starcraft or Diablo. Optrex was of the essence for those tired eyes.
Pentium Parties
Just like Bottle Parties - but you bring your Pentium instead of a bottle. These were annual events, usually after the exams, where 8 of us would converge at somebody's place and link up to the network (BNC's at that time - Black Vomit managed to nick a router for our last one) and play Starcraft or Quake for the whole day. Our last one was in 2000AD.
Today these are organised on a national scale and called LAN Parties.
Internet
The Internet was not feasable both in speed and cost to play games over it until 2002AD. I had a bad debut on the Net, but that is best left for the next post.
At 6.04pm we tried the settings for one more time and this time it was dialling! Unfortunately our colleague had got fed up of waiting and answered the phone himself. Since I had no phone in my room we yelled over to my parents to get the phone (just minutes after yelling at them not to touch the phone!) We told him the story and got him to wait for us again. We tried again, waited for the dialling, for his modem's reply, for the handshake. It was working!... then the game started to load.
It was exhilarating. Seeing pixels on my CRT screen being lighted at the command of another person - who I knew personally! I still remember him opening a door, and faced with a horde of monsters in an un-lit room, he fired his rocket launcher into the midst. Unfortunately there was a monster right at the door and with the blast he was thrown against the wall outside my field of view. Splendid - you never saw a monster do that!
Co-op
My days with DooM grew more intensive as me and my best mate, nicknamed Green Trooper, connected every evening at 6:01pm (it was cheaper after 6pm) and played all of DooM and DooM ][ co-operatively. We grew into best buddies, knowing each others moves, inventing acronyms to speed up our communication (e..g "JL" short for "Jien Left" meaning I will take the left part - ergo, you take the right side).
Deathmatch
Later on I made friends with an ex-acquaintance from school, nickname DaemoN, who was more into deathmatch gaming then co-op. Now there is a large difference between computer AI and human intelligence - and I was just about to find out. I remember seeing his eyes in that Trooper helmet cartoonish character of his. I felt like a hunted bird running around whilst he shot out at me. But with time I got better. I remember being cornered in a room with no ammo left, just a chainsaw, and he was challenging me by shooting with the doublebarrel shotgun on the wall opposite the entrance - then I made my move - I timed the shots and on the reload, I emerged chainsaw in hand and scarred his face with it enough to clear a path towards the exit. I was proud of myself that day.
Saturday Matches
More friends joined in and we fell into a pattern: every saturday at 9am I would leave home with my PC straddled to my car with seatbelts, take it to my friend's house and spend till 6pm playing Starcraft or Diablo. Optrex was of the essence for those tired eyes.
Pentium Parties
Just like Bottle Parties - but you bring your Pentium instead of a bottle. These were annual events, usually after the exams, where 8 of us would converge at somebody's place and link up to the network (BNC's at that time - Black Vomit managed to nick a router for our last one) and play Starcraft or Quake for the whole day. Our last one was in 2000AD.
Today these are organised on a national scale and called LAN Parties.
Internet
The Internet was not feasable both in speed and cost to play games over it until 2002AD. I had a bad debut on the Net, but that is best left for the next post.
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