Where did I leave off… Oh yes! _NERV
I became fairly close with a few of my clan mates from _NERV. Toji was close to me in skill level, and was fun to talk to about martial arts. _NERV_Kelli (a dude irl) was a very competent nf saberist, and was my 2v2 team mate for nf sabers. And _NERV_Viper was a very good friend, helped me with the images for our website, and was also a very competent nf saberist. And Viper was also my first friend that had ever committed suicide. After Vipers death, something was just never the same with _NERV. All of his images have been long lost. I don’t even remember the name of his irl friend that gave me the news, but they were neighbors and were both adults. I remember afterward his friend told me that Viper was thinking about doing it, and that he had a gun.
At some point during the year 2000 my interest in full force was reawakened. I was known on the zone for being one of the biggest laggers around. And this gave me a huge host advantage in bgj ff. With a 1000ms ping I could literally grab the dark surge one second after my opponent and still walk away with the item. In my last article I talked about how subby was the first good player I had ever seen. Well… some point after that I had gotten into an argument with a guy named WD_Gsmbit, and challenged him to a clan match. He completely destroyed Toji (my best ffer) and then myself even harder than subzero had. And for some reason still unknown to me, he decided to take the time to train me how to play full force sabers. He showed me all of the parts of the map you could run at full speed and force jump and land without taking any fall damage… and the areas where you could use your momentum and slide across the map to propel yourself to places more quickly, etc. Aka “the jumps.” He told me about how his clan The Wielders of the Darkside were the best at ff, and eventually I met and became friends with a lot of the other guys: Luke18, Reiko, Rage, NiGhTMaReZ, vipraven, Xisko, ThePie, Rampage the 1337 12 yr old, just to name a few. At some point during all of this I started using the mouse. I think because I started playing unreal tournament and quake 3. I ended up joining WD for UT, and was invited to their newly formed nf sabers team, but I didn’t want to get in the easy way. I refused to join until I was good enough to be in their FF division. So I practiced my ass off for a few months, and then asked the leader of the clan Rage for a tryout. I wasn’t able to beat him, but it was a close game and he let me in. I disbanded _NERV, and joined one of the top clans as a BGJ FFer. The thing that I liked the most about WD was not only the fact that we had a lot of the top players, but they were a lot friendlier than some of the other top clans. At the time when I joined, NiGhTMaReZ and ViPRaven had won the most recent clan world tournament in full force guns, we had what most players agreed was the best player at ff oasis with the dark side of the force (WD_Death), and also one of the top 5 BGJ FF players (Luke18). At the time most people thought that the light side of the force was better because they didn’t take damage from dark powers, and couldn’t be pulled, but I spent a good portion of my time playing this game completely destroying that notion. Anyway, in the year 2000 the general consensus was that our rival clan DSbr had the top light Jedi in DSbr_SithLord. DSbr_AeRoN said that he was better, because he had beaten SithLord 1 to 0, and 0 to -1 in matches that I’m sure lasted every bit of 30 to 45 minutes long lol. DSbr_AssKicker was also one of the top lighties, and was in the discussion of the best player around.
At some point ViPraven found drivers for my ultra laggy modem, and I was able to fix a lot of glaring holes in my game when I wasn’t able to hide behind a 1 second lag barrier. He also showed me the jumps in oasis ff. Around this time, I started to beat some good players in both bgj and oasis, and was starting to make a name for myself. I was probably one of the top 25 full force players after about a year or so after being trained by gambit. And as the weeks went by, the list of names that could beat me became shorter and shorter. People that used to beat me into negatives would only beat me by 5 kills or so, and I was becoming a very respectable team mate in oasis ff 2v2 as a lighty, even though my aim was pretty horrible. I was so stubborn about using high sensitivity because it made you warp faster, and it was the style that I used when I played nf sabers. I was able to beat all of the full force players at nf sabers, besides nightmarez and maybe a few others. I was better than my buddy lyricist that ended up starting the best nf sabers clan VDS as well as most of their members, but at nf guns I was pretty much a laughingstock. I was no where near the top50 nf gunners. Mostly becauSe of my high mouse sensitivity, and because of my belief that “if I wanted to play nf guns, I’d play q3.” And I did a lot of that. So much so, that in a moment of frustration after losing some games…. Well
Let me back up. In 2002 I achieved “elite” status, and was able to beat all but a very short list of players at both bgj ff and oasis ff. In oasis I couldn’t beat a lot of the top 10 guys at dark vs dark, but as a lighty or in dark vs light games I could take anyone besides aeron, nightmarez, and ummm…. Yeah that’s about it. JZA, Jeb Springfield, darkstrike, and reiko were all better than me at BGJ FF, and maybe a few others too but I’ve got a gigantic ego and I remember things th3 way I want to 😉
One of the reasons why I became as good as I was is because my good friend nightmarez would spend countless hours in game with me talking about JK theory and history, showing me a lot of the nuisance of the game, giving me criticism, and scrimmaging and playing with me. I owe him a lot of credit, as well as reiko and all of the top players from DSbr as well. And also the arrival of high speed internet in my area (some time during 2001).
Me and reiko, as well as me and nightmarez had gotten lucky a couple of times and had beaten the famed AeRoN and Narz, AeRoN and AssKicker, and narz and AssKicker teams in oasis ff. They would usually beat us though, and there were times where we would get completely raped and lose the game by a very large margin. But we did squeak out a few close victories for WD! And I was a part of it! I felt like Shawn Kemp and Gary Peyton of the Seattle Supersonics winning a game in the NBA finals against Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen/Dennis Rodman. AeRoN was the Michael Jordan of Jedi Knight, but on a given night i might be able to pull a win out of my ass against him.
Part 3 of this epic story coming soon….
TO BE CONTINUED