Sandy's Blog

Now being an ex-student without free hours on tap, I have turned into a irregular computer gamer - I might play games one or two evenings a week but thats it. One of the games I play which has stood the test of time is CCTF for Quake 3 Arena. The basic objective is to capture (cap) the enemy flag by stealing it from their base and taking it to yours. But that ain’t the half of it. You have a grappling hook, a huge amount of temporal and permanent power ups, weapons and maps to play with.

The big seller is the grappling hook, which can make or break the game for your team. If you have a good grappler that is difficult to hit and can move fast, you are more likely to cap - and therefore win.

Obviously with 6-a-side its very much a team game, and you have to time the armour and converge where the quad damage spawns every few minutes, but the grapple makes such a difference.

So anyway, enter my team. I play for a clan (team) called Fun Loving Quakers (FLQ), who I have been with for about 4 years. As you might guess from the name, the team is not entirely pr0. While you probably think that all people who play computer games such as this are late teens/early twenties and male, think again. We have a few older people and women in the clan, a teenage boy (although he might have left now) and 2-3 20something blokes such as myself, from countries all around Europe. With most clans, players seem to join for a while, get bored then leave. We have had more or less the same players for the time I have been with the team. Sure a number of people have moved on but the same hard-core of players are still around and active. Part of the reason for this is that the regular CCTF community is so small, with maybe in the region of 100-150 active players.

The reason im blogging about this, it that im playing in The Last Evar CCTF Cup, which is a real shame as it is so good, however Q3 will have to move over for Q4 at some point.

We had a practise (praccy) this evening against the team we are to play on Monday evening (Rogue Warriors). They are very good, but also really nice people I think. We got taken to pieces in the first map and lost by a lot of caps, but in the second map we managed a 4-2 loss so not all bad. For the game on Monday we have decided to beef up the defence and camp power ups a bit more in response to their tactics.

Game 1

Game 2