The nickname that has stuck with me the longest, the one that i kept using, partially due to it actually being recognizable. It all probably started in secondary 3. A trip to JB proved fruitful with a game titled Unreal Tournament. The single player mode was heckuva fun but it all started when I ventured online. Like everybody else, i started off as a noob, getting owned all the time.
It didn’t help that I was on a 56k modem
connection too, yet it was good training to start tho, as it just really
forced a more intelligent style of play and resulted in me playing much better
later on. My favourite weapon then, the ASMD (which is an acronym for
something crude) Shock Rifle which was more lag friendly. (its been 8 years
and i still remb the name.. Haha). I was unable to aim well, what with the 1-2
second lag, so the weapon suited high-pingers as its explosion radius was
huge, yet a one trick monkey wasn’t going too far, and I really only started
improving much later on.
There were clans then and when playing so often, it was easy to make friends. I formed a clan.. ngE with Weiyi, and it grew to a size of 5 lol.. And to commemorate the clan, what better way than to organise a clan match. I still remember then that X3M (a clan) members were very friendly and were very willing to play with other people, so we eventually organized a match with them…
Which ended us losing..
ngE Web
(which btw stands for Neon Genesis
Evangelion … the Anime)
*ngE didn’t last long, we had too little people and well, it was a headache being a clan leader, so it got disbanded soon after the first game.. lol
I was clanless then for awhile, and after sometime, was eventually recruited by X3M, giving rise to my gametag. They were a bunch of great people, and though I was very much a young boy compared to the rest of them, they still treated me very nicely. Guess socially, we all belong to rather different strata, which made it rather interesting. There was me, the ‘good’ boy, then there were some who weren’t great academically and had dropped out of school, some were working, heck, there was one who was studying for a phd.
Around that time, the first competition came up, SiliconHorizon UT99 and it was held at parklane. Hmm, think it was the first time I went there and also the first time meeting up with the rest of the clan mates. I was in X3M team 2 then, and we did perform rather admirably, getting booted out in the quarter finals, out of 32 teams. No prizes though, but the experience was definitely worth it.
That was also about the time where I
finally switched to broadband, and that was one big difference to my gameplay.
I started playing much better and became a big fan of 1v1s and started playing
with alot of players, even with the top ranked UT player in Singapore,
LightBringer, at that time, needless to say, got pwned rather badly. One of my
closer friends in the game, Destiny[X3M] who later left the clan, had somewhat
of a bad boy reputation and had lots of clashes with other players potentially
due to his attitude. However, he was rather ok with me and he was also
somewhat my part time coach, often getting me for training sessions. On a
sidenote, he was a psle dropout, yet, he was excellent at web development /
flash and well he did do some business from there which was admirable. His
stories were all pretty interesting though…
My nickname started to be recognised when I joined any multiplayer game. To an extent that when joining a game with my nickname would be added pressure and I only kept it for official games or where I wanted to be identified. It was also more fun when I joined with an unknown nickname and owned the game, resulting in various guesses to my identity. Instead of playing to win, I started trying to survive each round without dying, well, it goes like this…
20 kills without dying - UNSTOPPABLE!
25 kills -
GODLIKE!!!
Those were the days indeed… heh…
There were a couple more tournaments after
that, the Singapore Unreal Tournament League (SUTL) and then the SAFRA
CyberExtreme Tournament which we both came in 2nd I think, no luck / skill in
getting the coveted first. Though I would say both times were pretty close!
Prizes weren’t great compared to today’s prizes but still very much welcomed
for something that was enjoyable at the same time.
The new version of Unreal Tournament came out soon after, and my computer wasn’t able to support it and it wasn’t enjoyable when everything moves in jerks. I stopped playing for awhile and with JC and what not, was distracted from the game. When I did finally upgraded my PC, I kinda lacked the drive to practice from scratch again and it was also hard to play catch up all over, so that well.. kinda marked the end of my online FPS gaming days =).
It was fun while it lasted!!