Quake
.
I don't play online games any more. Too addictive.

The main game I was addicted to was Quake, specifically the mod Quakeworld. Man those were great days.

It started when I was working for a large insurance company in South London. We were the first company to allow people to buy their insurance on the Internet and I was the guy who'd put together all of the web servers, load balancers and other shit. Because of this we had a fat 2 meg pipe to the Internet.

Now these days, 2 meg sounds like bugger all but these were the days of dialup when most people were still on 28 or 56k modems. 2 meg was a monstrous amount of bandwidth back then. But it wasn't enough for what we wanted.

Us Quake players in the office didn't want to share our bandwidth with people buying fucking car insurance. We wanted our own pipe. So we went and bought another 2 meg and explained to the company grown-ups that it was for redundancy. If the main link fell over the we could fail-over to this new link. All that was true but the real purpose was to play Quake.

There were about 10 of us in the company who were Quake fanatics and we formed our own Clan with our own uniforms. Most other clans had names like:

"Death Stalkers!
"The Knights Of Dark Reknown"
"Blade Kissers"

and they all had jazzed up fancy skins with lots of sharp bits and skulls.

Not us.

We were Clan Fluffy - Death In A Fur Coat. Our uniforms were big pink fluffy coats and sunglasses. Every other clan in the universe hated us for not taking it seriously.

We'd be sitting in the office late at night, headphones connected through our own phone system so we could talk to each other and co-ordinate our attacks and defence. We'd all report in from our workstations that we were ready to go and we'd simultaneously connect to the same server. 10 geeks in pink fluffy jackets would drop into a Quakeworld server and unleash hell on the other players.

For the first 30 seconds there'd be absolute carnage as we fragged our way across the map and then the squeals would appear, flashing across our screens as the other players registered that we were on their server.

"It's Clan Fluffy!!!"
"Get the pink bastards!!"
"Everyone play together - truce. Get the pink cunts"

But it was never any use. We had virtually zero lag due to our massive bandwidth and our headset communication was an order of magnitude more efficient at co-ordination than texting commands as they they had to do. Even on a virtually full server - 50 of them versus ten of us it was always carnage.

I must have wasted thousands of good drinking hours playing that game.

Man those were good days. I still miss them but I can't afford the time anymore to get involved in online playing. It would suck the rest of my life away. But I don't regret it.

Cheers - "Death In A Fur Coat!"
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 6:53, 6 replies)

ah the days of E1's
How i loved the 8 ping in CS. Lost many hours in the office thanks to that.

clicks
(shamen Geekius Maximus, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 8:23, closed)

It Got Worse
Because, after a while, we started to host our own gameservers on the company LAN and these were discoverable via Gamespy.

So we'd get hordes of London users registering a 50 ping, which they thought was great, while we were sitting on the same switch as the server and getting almost zero.

That server, and two of our IT people, later left to setup Barrysworld.

Barrysworld - it all started in our offices in South London.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 8:32, closed)

Barrysworld!
A Quake player told me about that and I used it for free internet for a year or two, didn't play Quake on it but I figured that one piss-taker wouldn't matter too much.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 9:11, closed)

Cool :)
I used to work know a load of guys in a local computer retailer and took part in a load of "Rise of the Triad" lans, damn we had fun :D

DOG mode was such a good laff, damn I miss that game.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 8:39, closed)

Rise of the Triad
Still my favourite computer game ever, bar none. Where else can you find a weapon called a 'drunk missile'?
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 9:00, closed)

plus the GOD mode was you actually being a god
making all these "MUUUUUUUUUWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" noises and blasting people with balls of white energy, was a Nazi version of Duke Nukem and no mistake.
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Fri 19 Dec 2008, 9:32, closed)