back in 2002 most online gaming revolved around half life on pc in one form or another. while almost everyone will have played or at least heard of counter strike at some point, one awesome mod was released that i spent almost all of my time playing - natural selection.
nothing todo with darwin, this mod resembled more of an alien vs predator style gameplay with two teams (aliens vs marines) fighting to secure the whole of the level. but this wasn't the standard team deathmatch though - this was a first person shooter come real time strategy. i won't go into too much detail but basically one of the marine players plays as the 'commander' who instead of playing first person shooter gets a top down view of the entire level and has the power to drop upgrades and equipment for the other marines to build and use.
in the standard mode the fight between the aliens and marines could go on for hours and these games were awesome. in later updates the creators added another 'combat' mode which was more like a quick version of the game more gears towards team deathmatch. both game modes were fucking great and just thinking about them makes me wanna fire up my old pc and get back into it. problem being i have since done away with my old gaming pc and now just play console games (seems cheaper in the long run and i don't wanna have to upgrade my pc for every new game that comes out). once you get used to the controller instead of mouse and keyboard they aren't so bad. plus now with xbox live, consoles have pretty much caught up to provide a very decent alternative to pc gaming for playing online.
anyway this post has already gone on waaaay longer than i intended. in summary natural selection rocked and the creators are working on a stand alone sequel originally titled natural selection 2. they recently released a new teaser trailer and it looks awesome! with all the multiplatform releases for games these days this may be the one game that gets me back into pc gaming (unless they get this out on xbox, unlikely but you never know). either way i can't freaking wait!
