Long before I became the monster I now am, with fits of rage beyond this side of the Milky Way, feuds with 22 year-old kids that act like Neo-Nazis when their mom’s not around, and teabagging people, there was a simpler and perhaps better time to be online playing against unknown opponents.

Simpler and better? I don’t really think so. It’s more nostalgia than anything else, since everything we play now will be remembered fondly, and made fun of. So here it is: My 5 best online moments in history!

… Uhh, after the jump!

Best moment # 5:

Unreal (PC)

Approaching seriously old school...

A psychedelic, high-end FPS brought in to take down the unstoppable ID machine, Unreal turned a lot of heads when it came out in 1998. Featuring a slick single player campaign, it also had online co-op and deathmatch.

My moment: Firing up the 56k modem and playing online for the 1st time. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to connect to people, so I used Heat.net to do it for me. Heat.net was an old java browser that allowed you to login with your account, chat, make “rooms” and set up matches. It, and others like it were the birthplace of Clans as we know it.

So there it was; I found a room on heat.net, played a 1v1 match with a random dude, and got the SHIT KICKED OUT OF ME. And I was never happier. It took about 20 matches before someone showed me the ASMD combo. I wondered why that ball shot at me always made me explode…

Side note:? I later was accepted into the ranks of the Dark Mercenaries of Death (DmD) clan. Labbe99, Earthjam, Killababe, where are they now…?

(Yeah, it’s bad, but what’s in a name?)

#4: Unreal Tournament (PC)

Newbie.

I already declared my opinion on this game, so no introductions are neccesary here.

My Moment: Well, to put this into perspective: When I joined among the 12-or-so members of the DmD clan, I sucked. No, really, I was terrible. In a typical match of 1st to 30 frags, I would be lucky to get 5.

I’d type in questions during a match, and no one would dignify it with answers. Basically, I only got in because I asked, a lot. Even though I couldn’t kill any one player on their team one time during my tryout, they still accepted me, out of pity. That said, I was still adjusting to mouse-and-keyboard, and this game in particular (Unreal 1) was already out for about 2 years.

But when UT came out, it was a different story.

Now the game was brand new, and the maps undiscovered. By the very first match, suddenly I was somewhere in the middle of the pack of players slaughtering each other. Within a few short weeks of playtime, I was frequently on top, mainly due to my 500 ping. Ping is the latency between you and the server, which roughly translates into a full second of waiting for my rocket to leave my launcher. In other words, it’s a full second I have to aim in advance, and a full second they need to aim ahead to hit ME. Beware the HPB (high ping bastard)! Labbe99 (our just and caring leader) said to me:

“You used to suck. Now, some of us are saying when you come in: ‘oh shit, there comes Trev, the High Ping Bastard!’”.

I took that personally. In a good way. Ego points awarded!

Later on, the DmD clan renamed into DB, or Da Brotherhood. Yeah, it kinda went downhill from there. The names were gay, but back then, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that you were a community, and that’s hard to find nowadays.

#3:Halo 2

Best... Evah?

I was long into the playing with “real” friends phase before I got my hands on DSL, and fired up X Box Live for the very first time. But when I did, I was blown away. Truly the next step in fast, reliable online gameplay, Halo 2 had so, so many things right about it. Game chat for every player, messaging your friends, built-in clans, a persistent ranking system that actually matches your skill level to the others in your room…? It’s all too good to be true.

It was, since it also gave birth (a mutated, anti-Christ blood bath birth) to the HaloFags, a disgusting race of human beings that pillage the earth in search of superbounces, BXBA, flag bouncing, clone glitching, secondary standby, primary standby, IP banning, second account boosting, and of course mods. Did I cover all of it…?

Nope! They also delevel, a brilliant process of forcing a team to lose by repeatedly suiciding over and over so their rank will decrease, and their next opponents will be of a less skill level. That’s fucking brilliant. Fucking. Brilliant.

My Moment: I have a ton of moments, and some other time will make a top 5 of this game. But one moment above all others seems to stick into my brain:

I had a woman over (yeah, a real one) with an old buddy to play “drunken Halo”, an awesome spectacle of wrestling controls while slamming a cold one after bar close. She was a terrible, terrible, hot player. She doesn’t know how to fire her gun, or pick up the bomb in Assault. But she ventured online, and we hooked her up with the headset.

After her 3 teammates quit out of the game, it was round 3, our turn to pick up the bomb. By this time, the 4 other players on the opposite team gathered around her, and were trying to help her get to the bomb plant point. They were even leading her around, showing her how to jump and so fourth. She didn’t get to the bomb plant point, as the round time was only 3 minutes.

I guess it’s one of those moments that you had to be there. But at the very least, it was a time where every player in a particular room didn’t really care about the outcome of the round, and in Halo 2, that’s saying something.

#2: Gears Of War

Gears 2 image shown. Bet you can't tell. Good job, Epic.

There were so few good games to play online before Gears Of War, if you didn’t have a PC. Honestly, there was a whole line-up of games, and they all sucked ass. I refer to you the following titles as an example:

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon - Great for waiting 20 minutes to get into a room with every option turned off that you like.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent – Great for getting kicked from a RANKED MATCH because you’re winning. Seriously.

Quake IV – Great for searching for one player from Taiwan with one bar, and he quits out.

Battlefield II – Great for playing with 300 people in one day, and not ONE FUCKING PERSON USES THEIR HEADSET. Also, great for knowing that there are 10 some-maps, and only 2 are ever, EVER voted to play next. (Was it… Oasis, and BridgeTooFar?)

So anyhow, even though we were playing on a next-gen console, I was still resorting to Halo 2 to get my fragging fix, since in that title, you had this amazing feature of playing against people, within 10 minutes of firing up the game. But then comes along the behemoth that would change the face of the 360 (and possibly, save its ass). Gears, baby!

While ranked matches still took forever to set a full room, you could always find a social match, all the time. You didn’t have to go through the “searching… connecting… failed to join” prompt that every other title seemed to have. And it also happened to be amazing fun, once you got over the sticky controls.

My Moment: Getting the “seriously…?” achievement. I was in an unofficial clan of good players, both in spirit and skill. I was one of the last to get the 10′580 ranked kills* needed to unlock the 50 GS points, and the flaming Marcus picture is bestowed. I got on the phone with one of my comrades and told him the big news, which also reminded me of how online play can actually connect people, if you are truly lucky. (Too bad that guy ended up being an asshole, but friends can do that sometimes )

* Most everyone had trouble getting the achievement at 10′000 kills; no one really knows why, and some have 20′000+ and still don’t have it. The mystery of the web…

#1: Left 4 Dead (360)

Just run backwards, you morons! Gurr!

OK, the real reason I even thought of this post was because of this recent event. But it’s so awesome, I WILL be remembered for a long, long time.

My Moment: I am not a fan of glitches, by no stretch of the imagination. I hate people that cheat to win so much, it sends me into a fit of rage that makes those over actors in those Gamefly commercials look like child’s play. But that won’t stop me from trying them out, so I can at least anticipate players that will use them, and possibly counter them. This wasn’t one of those times. In case you don’t know about the recent 2 glitches that plague this game, I’ll give a quick overview:

Fag-ass glitch #1: The Powershot: Basically, you switch from a pistol back to your assault rifle/SMG. You hold down a sequence of buttons and “trick” the game into thinking you’re firing, when you’re not. Let go of the button, and unload the entire clip into a smoker/witch/tank in an instant.

During the start of an early morning versus game I joined into a random lobby, with a stacked team on the Survivor side. I went Infected, and some rando-people got locked into the game. The scenerio was Dead Air.

A homo on the other team killed me instantly as a smoker, while dragging him. He used a powershot to instantly kill me, rather than trying to aim for my head. I immediately became infuriated. I sent him a voice message (I never remembered his name, but they’re all the same):

Trev: “Are you that weak of a player that you have to cheat to win…?”

By the end of the round, all but 1 player made it into the safe room. He sent me a voice message back:

Homo420: “Are you going to whine like a little bitch? Are you going to cry?”

Truly an indpired response, to be sure. By the luck of the gods, his team of fags were no match to my team of British dudes that I could barely understand. We got into the safe room without a hitch, and things were looking up. On the next map, (dead air 2: the cranes) we busted through their usual by-the-number locations, and got into the safe room with few problems. Then something unique happened:

They locked themselves in the ice box room, where the developers forgot to allow you to break the door down. They weren’t moving.

10 long, gay minutes go by, to where the entire Survivor team simply sat in that damn room, doing absolutely nothing, presumably trying to get us to lose patience and quit. I, of all people, was not going to do this. I voiced out an opinion, and they all agreed: These homos will NOT win today!

Meanwhile, Homo420 sends me another message while they wait in the “mini” safe room:

Homo420: “Are you pissed? Are you gonna cry? are you mad?”

Well, I won’t lie to you. I was pissed. But then an idea occurred. I asked if anyone on our team knew the “invisible scratch glitch”. By the Gods, one did. Let me introduce you to:

Fag-ass glitch #2: Invisible Scratch: When you’re spawned as the infected, you can cause an automatic hit on the other team by respawning when you’re too far from the survivors, and the “X” prompt appears. Simply claw as you hit “X”, and voila! Instant gayness!

Well, in this case, and ONLY this case, I did what was necessary. Me, and every other teammate strolled to the other end of the map and were all tagging these assholes from within their own safe spot. We couldn’t hear them, but you could almost see the looks on their faces when they were getting hit from out of nowhere, their silhouettes darting around in that dark little room.

By the time they were nearly incapped, they finally got the idea and opened the door. We slaughtered them, one by one. Before they opened the door, I sent that little fag one more message:

Trev: “I’m not mad at all, what are you talking about”?

Once we cleared the next map without problems, they called a vote to “return to lobby”, in the vain hope we would accept so they could kick us out of their little lobby. They proceeded to quit out. I then sent that guy one last message:

Trev: “3 Questions: How does it feel to lose despite cheating? How does it feel to lose to a better player? And finally, how does it feel to be blocked?” — I then spammed him with about a hundred chat invites, and then blocked communications. Honestly, I don’t think I have ever been so satisfied to kick someone’s digital ass in my life.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this, and I also hope you can think of some fond memories of you own. Toodles!

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