Clan Gaming

I’ve been playing games online since 1996, way back in the AOL pay-per minute dial-up days.  My first online game was Dark Forces II:  Jedi Knight.  I can still remember the feeling of going head to head in a light saber duel with some random person, knowing that I was beating the crap out of an actual person instead of some AI controlled bot that the game programmer thought would challenge me.  After wiping the floor with the random Jedi, I was quickly introduced to what I eventually came to realize was a gaming law:  “No matter how good you think you are, someone in the next match is likely going to hand you your head”. 

Jedi Knight also introduced me to my first experience of online cheating.  I remember chasing some poor bastard down a hallway, firing away at him as he sprinted by a couch.  Suddenly the couch sprouts a light saber and slashes the guy down in the hallway and turns to face me.  I toss a few thermal detonators at him, unload my blaster at his evil cushions, to no avail.  The couch hops down the hallway, cuts me down, and bounds away.  Not only was this guy using some sort of “god-mode” cheat that rendered him invulnerable, he had re-skinned his character model to a sofa.  While I despise cheaters, the sofa skin was brilliant. 

I say all that to say this, playing in a clan like 2Old4Tactics has been a great experience.  Most of my online gaming was limited to PC gaming prior to picking up my Xbox 360.  I played a little NCAA Football and Madden in the GSN clan, but that basically fell apart after people decided to abandon the leagues, complain that the teams they picked prior to the beginning of the league weren’t fairly balanced in comparison to the other teams in the league (one of the inherent failings of online sports gaming, in my opinion), and generally make playing in the clan a chore.  Interest split between Madden and NCAA, nobody really made the NBA 2K7 switch, and after the debacle that was the Tiger Woods 07 inability to actually play online unless I was one of the 50 people in the WORLD who happened to get into the ONE room EA had set up for Tiger Woods 07, I pretty much dropped out of site as far as the clan was concerned. 

I was leery to try out the clan experience again, but after playing some R6 Vegas with some site members and not completely sucking at it the entire time, they asked me to join up.  Not realizing how discriminating these bastards were at the time, I accepted, feeling a brief surge of pride, kind of like being picked up as the 5th man in a pickup basketball game at Rucker Park.  Now I realize we’ll pretty much let anyone with a twisted sense of humor and the ability to aim relatively straight into the clan, but I’m still proud, in a “twisted” kind of way. 

As a married father of 2 (on in the uterus, developing from a zygote to a fetus, one running around my house destroying my stuff like any good 18 month old will do), I realize that I don’t have a lot of free time for “friends” in the real world.   I, like most men, have a few guy friends, one of which I’ve known since we were 5.  The rest of my “friends” are married to my wife’s friends, which for the most part means that by default, they’re my friends as well.  Few of them are gamers, and most of whom I see only a few times a year.  This severely limits my social gaming.  My wife’s not a gamer, she pretty much sticks to occasionally playing Super Monkey Ball, Tetris or a game of Bejeweled on the laptop now and then.  While I can’t wait for my kids to play games with me, the oldest is 18 months, I think I’ll wait a few more months before I introduce him to the distinct joy of finally popping someone in the head after they’ve dropped you with sniper fire from across the map 5 times in a row (yes, rabb, I’m talking about you).  So this left me a solitary gamer, which was fine for a while.  Now I can honestly say that I’m hooked on the online component of gaming.