Grand Aspirations

FS: You boys played a heck of a lot of UT, specifically somewhere around 250 matches, what was your favorite match?

ViolentJ|HV: My personal favorite match was probably vs. BMF for our first #1 spot ever. BMF was undefeated at the time and #1 on the OGLWe played their best map, on Lava, and were down by 1, grim capped with about 7 secondss left to put it into Overtime and we later won 5-4, that was about 27 months ago.

Grimdeath|HV: I agree VJ, my favorite match was definitely vs. BMF on Lavagiant also. We hadn’t been much of a powerhouse team before this, and we were excited to get a shot at, and take, our first #1 spot.

ViolentJ|HV: Definitely a crazy match. Every #1 spot since then wasn't as good as the BMF match. First times rule.

GrimDeath|HV: Well, as for 2v2 matches. Xavier and I teamed together at the first Ultra Unreal LAN party and had a completely intense match vs Sonix and Phar0e 2v2.

FS: When did HV retire from UT? What inspired it?

GrimDeath|HV: HV first retired from UT after UTI4 around November of 2001. We hadn't lost a match since September and people were beginning to lose interest in UT. So as we started to slack in practicing, our matches were becoming closer and closer, and we decided it wasn’t worth it. So we retired. It wasn’t a good reason for retiring, I see that now, but it allowed us to play RTCW in the BoB tournament on OGL.

ViolentJ|HV: We had played the same team on the PG ladder about 5 times in a row.
First time we retired was because there was really nothing left in UT. We had done everything there was to do in it. So we wanted to try new stuff. We came back to for UTI5 because a lot of people wanted us to, so we did, won it, then re-retired.


FS: UT and RTCW while bearing similarities are entirely different games. What made it appealing? How was your run in RTCW? What kept you playing it?

GrimDeath|HV: We really decided to play RTCW because while we were sick of UT, we were still searching for another game. Hearing of the tournament, and the prizes involved, got us interested in Wolfenstein. After UltraUnreal 2, and retiring from UT for the second time. We were waiting for UT2k3 to come out, and hearing of Quakecon's RTCW tournament, we decided to pick up Wolfenstein once again because we were experienced with the gameplay.

ViolentJ|HV: Wolfenstein has a lot of cool things that UT doesn't. The first time we picked it up was blindly looking for another game. We returned to it because we found it to be VERY fun...the amount of teamwork involved in the game is phenomenal. It isn't simply about having better aim, it's about positioning, cross-firing, and helping the guy next to you.

GrimDeath|HV: We had picked up RTCW a week before the BoB tournament started. We did fairly well and won the three matches. Our fourth match was vs. the #1 seeded team in the tournament, Empire, on mp_sub. We took the game to 4 rounds, and lost by four seconds in the final round.

ViolentJ|HV:Yeah, after the Empire loss we took a few weeks off from Wolf. It's hard to handle a loss like that. After we came back to Wolfenstein, the best teams were a little farther on the learning curve (this is back when Punkbuster didn't exist, and Wolf was based on who had the better config files, not better skill) But we had to come back to RTCW. UT couldn't hold our attention. After UTI5 we didn't have any motivation to continue with it.

GrimDeath|HV: We quickly retired from Wolfenstein after that for stupid reasons. We picked wolf up again ten weeks ago and started practicing for the CAL-Open RTCW division. Our record in that is 10-0 with next week being the beginning of the playoffs.