Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, Fuel Dump, by lairnouille.

“Would you stop spamming our spawn with your bloody air strikes, you fools!”

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Seawall Battery, by Mr Bismarck.

Although I had played UT online extensively, Wolfenstein was the game that got me back into online FPS - I got the metal box collector’s edition for Christmas and my new cable modem meant that for the first time I had a ping under three figures and boy did that make a difference. The free Enemy Territory expansion was excellent and this map, had a lot of good memories as I hung out with people I knew for the first time. This is the map that taught me how to mortar, as the early German attempts to keep the Allies from advancing up the beach usually led to large numbers of Germans in the paths between the spawns and the forward bunkers. There was an excellent mortar spot on the west-most Allied spawn, where you could be pressed hard against the cliff face, but still have enough angle on your tube to land shells in the enemy camp. You could even time the spawns to a degree and drop shells in when the enemy was returning to their positions.

This map also introduced me to large numbers of online idiots for the first time. Playing as the Germans there was a back door out of the bunkers which could only be opened from inside. If you didn’t open the doors then the Allies simply couldn’t get in there. So, of course, large numbers of Germans would pour out the door for hilarious sneak attacks flanking the Allies, except that the Allies would always know they were coming and would take advantage to sneak into the base. This led to my friend and I hanging out by the back door chatting. In the first few days we would say on chat that we had the door covered, don’t open it and then eventually we took to only playing servers with Friendly Fire on and would shoot anyone from our own team trying to go out there after the first couple minutes.

In what some like to call foreshadowing, complaints that we were ruining their brilliant master plan were always badly spelled.