QuakeWorld Team Fortress was awesome when it first came out, and it still is very bit as heart pounding and exciting. Though fewer and fewer servers exist here in the United States, new servers keep cropping up elsewhere in the world where new hardware is not as accessible.

I started playing this game in December of 1996. The game first came out in August of that year so I was already a little behind the first time I played. At the time I was looking for a team based game, and the only team based games based on Quake were the Team Deathmatch and CTF mods. In Quake all you had to do to make a team was match your pant colors to someone else's and that was it. Team Deathmatch is kind of boring to me. There has to be a bigger goal than just killing.

QuakeWorld CTF (Capture The Flag) was ok for a while, but the individualist in me began to lose interest in the game. CTF is different from Team Fortress in that you must carry the enemy flag and touch your flag to score a point for your team. In Team fortress there is a capture point on each team's base.

After playing CTF for a while I began to look again for new mods because they were showing up everywhere. I mean everywhere. The same interest that pushed people to mod DOOM into Barney DOOM, Simpsons DOOM, Aliens DOOM, and Beavis & Butthead DOOM pushed Quake modders to do the same with Quake. Well some Australian guys were working on this wonderful game Team Fortress and released it to the world.

Team Fortress was exactly what I'd been searching for. Not only do I get a chance to play a team game, but the goal is more than just blind killing, I can also choose what type of player suits me best! TF is fast, furious, engaging, addictive, and incredibly fun. After playing all these years there is always something new or someone that manages to amaze me with something.

My favorite map to play on Team Fortress has and always will be the 2fort map. In QuakeWorld TF I started playing on the 2fort4 version, and later on everyone moved onto 2fort5 which is what the current 2fort map for HLTFC is based on. There was a 32 player version of 2fort called 2fort32 that when full provided for hours of entertainment.

In 1997 I formed my first QWTF clan called Crimson Tide, in 1998 it was the Quake Republican Army. I ran a small but active QuakeWorldTF Sever called Cold War II on a Pentium 120 with 48MB of RAM using Windows NT 3.51 until early 1998 when I was caught by my boss and forced to shutdown.

When Team Fortress Classic first came out as an add-on for Half-Life I was skeptical, but I still tried it. Once I realized that everything I loved in the old QWTF was transferred over and still very much the same but with much better graphics I made the switch entirely.

Then I realized there was a new dimension added to the equation, Half-Life sprays. Half-Life gave the player the ability to chose a spray to use at their convenience to make the game and the map more colorful. It came with some standard sprays but it was very easy to creat custom sprays and include them in the game. My artistic side went crazy, and from that moment I was completely sold on HLTFC.

Over the years I have accumulated a large amount of 64x64 pixel black and white sprays and they are all located in this compressed file.

After being forced to shutdown my QuakeWorld server my clan disbanded and I moved on to TFC. Then I got my boss hooked on it and the doors reopenned under a different guise, the server was Trial by Ordeal, and it reminds me a lot of a particular server I like to join called Drippy's 2Fort. The server's mood was defined by the people that played there and they were all very cool.

Then I formed the only TFC clan I've ever belonged to, Netlords Coalition of Arms. NCA was all about honor and sportsmanship and at one point we were #1 on the OGL. Here is NCA's Code of Conduct, it applied mainly to OGL matches but it has some good advice for public servers.

I quit playing TFC for a while in 2002 because TFC was destroying me. I started coming back to TFC around 2004, but instead of playing I became the number one spectator on Steam. I think I enjoy watching it as much as I used to like playing it.

Though spectating TFC is an addiction, I do play every now and then. I consider myself a model team player and I feel real pressure not to be the one that screws up ending up in a capture for the enemy team.

My opinion on Counter Strike is that it sucks ass. The beauty of playing TFC is that even when the teams are even, the skills of the players may not be. In all my time playing and watching I've never seen two identical games. The first two CS games I ever witnessed were almost identical in how things happened and I was immediately turned off by that.

Please keep coming here as I will be posting demos and screenshots from different servers, but mainly from Drippy's, and I welcome everybody to send me your demos and screenshots and you will get all the credit due to you for sharing. I am particularly interested in demos of players acting really lame, and demos of insanely good players.
melancolico.catrin@gmail.com