I love reading stories about Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel who is clearly the world’s number one and most successful gamer. Fatal1ty has won 12 major championships, but more impressively, across 5 different games.

One of Fatal1ty’s top games is Quake 4, and John Chow wrote an interesting post about a competition in Taiwan to find the best Quake 4 player who would play Fatal1ty in a big money final. If you play any games online, you will know that Asian gamers are very, very tough so you’d expect Fatal1ty to at least have to break a sweat. Well, the final score for the ten minute match was 74 to minus 3!

What game would you consider yourself World-Class at? Only online games are allowed, as beating your next door neighbour’s or your little brother’s ass doesn’t mean that you are any good!

Sometimes I just don’t know how these online gaming guys do what they do sometimes. The speed that they react to and the level of control sometimes just seems so amazing in games, the only explanation seems to be that they must be hacking. Sadly, this is what happened a lot with the only online game that I’ve played to a good standard, Age of Empire II (Age of Kings). In Black Forest games I can hold my own against most players.  Maybe, not 1v1, but definitely in team games where I excelled.   I don’t think I will ever play a game as intensely as AOK, where some games could last for 4 hours.

I started playing online in 2000, just after the legendary players like Arch_Koven stopped playing, but there were still some great players knocking around like Illume_Nuisance, Mad_Chieftain, Knight_Pilot, Knight_Chicken etc 

I thought I was good playing against the PC, but playing against human opponents took the game to a completely new level! I remember the first time I got Trushed (Tower Rush). I was wondering what the hell was my enemy doing building lots of stupid towers in random places…… but, before I knew it I couldn’t even get out of my TC without getting shot!

Luckily I got chummy with the players I mentioned above, and they spent a lot of time training me. Nuisance and Knight_Ewok in particular got me up to a near 2K rating.  I think my proudest moment was when I flushed Nuisance in a 4v4 arabia game, and although eventually he kicked my ass, he said afterwards that for a while he really thought that I had him.

If you are an old AOK player here are my main old nicknames (far too many smurf names to list!):

• Knight38_Binson
• Vulture_Foster
• Digital_Toomuch
• Pur3_Flava
• SIN_XenJi

I stopped playing at the end of 2005 as it was taking up far too much time.  I wish I hadn’t quit totally though as the AOK community is still going strong, but I’ve forgotten so many of the theory, hotkeys, build orders, tricks, counters etc that I can’t even play the odd game with the guys.