To each their own, really. But games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band are picking up the attention of the masses, something CS and TF2 have yet to do. Which is unlikely. However, many people know about Quake and Doom, all for the wrong reasons :(

What happened to all those kids who used to play Counterstrike or Quake or all those first-person shooters that provided an immersive perspective of the gaming world?

They grew up, dumped that childish games (hey, I can insult other games too!) and play World of Warcraft… ;)

That reminds me - we used to have an active Quake I community. Here’s some of the website that’s still left from that era.

And the ISPs were happy to accommodate us - rather than letting us to play in servers abroad, and consuming their (expensive, especially at 1998 / post economic crisis) international bandwidth; they’d rather provide us with gameservers instead.

That resulted in rather impressive ping and responsive gameplay, even though we were just using modem (not broadband connections) back then.

It still holds true to this day - online gaming are serious cash cow for ISPs, because the traffic is local, and the players can be online for hours. I’ve got a friend in Gedung Cyber laughing while telling me that if game servers are down, you can count that the ISPs (not the players) will be asking around and will help to get it back up in anyway they can.

If we can get some local players for Tremulous, I’m sure we can arrange to get a local gameserver up & running soon.

Nowadays I like to play Tremulous.
It’s a very unique multiplayer game:

# It’s a co-op game : No teamwork, no win - no glory !

# RTS element : this is where it set itself apart. You need to build your base : create respawn pod, armory, generator, medic pad, etc.

And defend them - losing all respawn pod for example will make you unable to, duh, respawn. Which is kinda suck :)

Here’a picture showing (from left to right) an armory, respawn pod, medic pad, and another respawn pod

# RTS element #2 : you get credits from shooting & killing enemies, which you can use to buy equipments. Yay !

# Strategy : don’t just kill the enemies mindlessly. Scheme against them. Do something wicked, for example - destroy the generator, so none of their structures in their base is functioning. Yeah.

# Two races against each other : Alien versus Human.

The Aliens can evolve after sometime. The Humans will get equipment upgrades. Each will need to fully understand their strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to win the battles.

If I sounded like I’m enjoying this game - I am indeed, immensely. The graphic may not be the most stunning, but screw that. I care about gameplay much more. And this game delivers it in truck loads.

Good fun.

[ More screenshots ]

[ Download Tremulous for free from here ]
(available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)