Felon's adventures in online gaming, part 2

Aliens Versus Predator (and later AvP:Gold Edition)

Someone once told me the AvP Aliens looked like hunched over, little old men.

 

was my first online first-person shooter. I've always loved the Predator and Alien franchises so it was exciting to have a game where I could actually play as one of those sci fi legends. (Note: whenever I play a game where you can choose different races, I will almost always choose a non-human race, (i.e. the Zerg or Protoss from Starcraft, the Alien from AvP and the Kahjiit from Oblivion/Skyrim. I find the humans to be boring...) Same as before, I played through almost all of the single-player campaigns, except for the Marine one. The Marine campaign in AvP was fucking SCARY. I could barely make it through a level without my palms sweating like crazy. I also had a bad habit of shooting wildly when I got one of those little "blips" on my motion tracker but couldn't actually see the enemy because of how dark it was. But I digress.
When I finally got around to getting onto MPlayer (the multi-player system that AvP used before it became Gamespy) I played as the Alien, under Dark Mystery just like on Starcraft. The frame rate on my computer at that time was terrible but I loved the thrill of playing online despite the lag. It was incredibly fast paced to the point that you had to keep moving all the time. I was, again, approached by a clan rather quickly and I DO remember that clan's tag: JAW. It was an all Alien player clan, hence the jaw thing. Unlike Starcraft, I became pretty good with the Alien fairly fast. When I finally got a faster computer, I was kicking ass on a regular basis. One of my favorite moments that I recall was telling one of the Marine players I was slaughtering that he was getting his ass kicked by a girl. Oh was he mad! I was pretty proud of myself. Eventually, the clan I had been in dissolved, so I just became a solo player. I joined one other clan while I played AvP but after they were done, I decided that I liked being a solo player more. Too many clans were too serious about themselves. I just liked to play. Again, I made a lot of online friends in the community and I still remember many of them too.
AvP was one of those games that I played until the community died. Many of the players moved on to Aliens Versus Predator 2, but it just wasn't quite as fun. Eventually, that community disappeared too. As always, bigger and better games come out and we all move on to something else. But AvP was one of those gaming experiences that I will never forget. When the newest Aliens Versus Predator was announced and it was revealed that Rebellion was producing it, I was ridiculously excited. However much like AvP 2, the aspects of the game that had made the original AvP so good had not been put into the new game: the Alien was way to slow and clunky and not nearly as fluid as it had been, the Predator was also too slow and somewhat over powered, the Marine was ok but when you went into an online game, you would be slaughtered almost instantly. It just wasn't as fun.

So the span of Dark Mystery came to an end. But it was a good run! I moved on to playing some Ragnarok Online and some World of Warcraft eventually, but I wasn't really as involved with the communities on those games. Sad but true. If I had more time, I'd probably get back into WoW. I LOVE immersive games after all. But right now, roller derby takes a lot of my free time. I hope that some day I will be able to enjoy an online community as much as I did with Starcraft and AvP.

Next time, Speeder and I will be launching a brand new segment called RETROspective, a look back at our favorite games from the past!