For those of you who don’t know I’ve been an active member of a FPS Gaming team for over four years: Team Wolfenstein Resource. We play IdSoftware’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein, its follow up Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory and the soon to be released Enemy Territory : Quake Wars. Over the course of the last four years I’ve gotten to know some of my team mates very well and formed some wonderful friendships. The team has members in the UK, all over mainland Europe and in the US. Our members aren’t as active as they once were but were still proud of the fact that we haven’t lost a competitive match in almost two years!

Two of my friends Wim ( along with his gf Julia ) and Alan came to visit me this weekend, and we all had a wonderful time just catching up and chatting.

I guess the three of us started off as guys who played for the same team but we became very good friends, we try to get together fairly regularly away from the computers to just hang out, eat, drink and be merry I guess. The team has had some interesting events, we had an official LAN party in Port Jervis, New York a couple of years ago, followed up by a looong sight seeing weekend in Belgium where close to twenty of us descended on a lovely little town called Ghent. We followed that up eight months later with another great weekend in Oxford, where Matt and I entertained the others with our laughable attempts at punting! Then earlier this year we had another big weekend in Bristol, were we hooked up with friends from another team and spent the weekend touring some of the sites in the south and bowling … a lot …. badly! :p

We don’t actually play as often as we used to so it’s important to us try to get together regularly, Wim and Alan have both been wonderful friends over the last few years ( and Matt and Dom but they’re in the US so we don’t meet up as often as we’d like). There have certainly been times when things haven’t been going so well, I recall when I was laid up in hospital and both Wim and Alan would call me up and try to cheer me up … or in Alan’s case constantly remind me not to do anything stupid … the old fella get’s very sentimental!

Were currently trying to plan our next expedition I think were going to hit mainland Europe again in October, probably the Netherlands, but where ever it is I know it will be fun. As long as no one brings a Monopoly board with them …. *shudder* ….