Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: The most fun that AHL ever was

[quote name="mark"]I also enjoyed the very early AHL releases, sort of. Because I was younger and dumber, initially I was impressed by the fact that you could play on servers and have a good chance of playing against Oddjob from the actual A-TEAM!! WOW!! I think later to replicated this amazing feeling they just set the default name to "oddjob" which was less exciting. Also since I was a LPB back in the day when such labels still mattered, I was the only person to have ever successfully used the handcannon. AHL's A-team was shockingly like the modteams mocked in the HL2 mod reviews. This confused me at the time as these guys had actually released a mod (for Quake 2) -- how was it that they seemed incapable of doing anything but modeling a couple guns? As it turned out something like 0% of the original A-team actually worked on any mods after AQ2. I'm not sure how they chose their replacements -- guys who started telling everyone that they were going to create Action Unreal Tournament (and started posting pictures of awesome new gun mods) long before AHL looked or played like anything other than shit, as it was always broken. There was one great period of time when the server couldn't stay up for more than about 20 minutes (I think it crashed at most after one map change). They were mystified and just told people to restart the servers continually. This was the exact moment that AHL died -- after a week or so, the about 50 servers shrunk to about 12. 12 mostly empty servers, as everyone was tired of getting booted minutes after they started play. I'm not sure when they eventually fixed that bug, but I think it might have taken a couple months, or so. What was awesome was in the <i>early</i> early days, there was this huge rivalry with counterstrike. As everyone probably remembers, CS Alpha and then CS Beta 1 sort of sucked. I think cs_siege might have been the only working map at that point (or only one worth playing) and the skins for the players were almost identical, aside from the color of their pants. AHL wasn't anything special at that time either, both were sort of fun but incredibly unfinished. Yet the a-team had no qualms about gently mocking CS. Later when CS became totally awesome, the A-Team would be like "WAY TO GO GOOSEMAN! WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER! WE'RE ALL PART OF THE ACTION FAMILY!" like the mod was so much life-preserver. This sea change shocked many people on the AHL message board, who had been used to describing how much CS sucked were initially taken aback, but then fell into line. Much like in Soviet Russia. My favorite bit of party propaganda was the M4. In AQ2, the M4 was a popular gun and most people expected to see it in AHL. The A-team, however, decided that it was totally unbalanced and refused to put it into AHL. Maybe it was, I don't know, but one might be curious as to why it was unbalancable -- I suspect the usual martian-logic of mod makers would have been a complaint about realism. But wait, AHL is a game were people fire a Colt 45 with each hand (with amazing accuracy) and a game where the reload animation for the glocks is throwing them away and where bleeding from a shot to the throat takes about 5 seconds to bind. Well, no, they'd reply, we're talking about Movie Realism, a term so meaningless and illogical I am shocked that it was possible for a computer to accept it as input. Anyway, because movie realism is 1000% realistic except when it isn't, it was impossible to balance the M4 and it wasn't included. Okay, fine, whatever. When a new AQ2 fan would show up on the forums he would usually say something long the lines of "What happened to the M4? I loved that gun!" forty or so members of the forum would scream "NOOOOB! NO SKILL M4 USER!!" until they decided never to play AHL again and just stuck to CS. Then one day the M4 was included in a AHL release and suddenly people couldn't stop talking about how awesome and fun it was.[/quote]