While that may be the definition of “Tremulous”, that’s not what I mean. Instead, I’m talking about the first-person shooter that David went and got me hooked on. Tremulous is based on the Quake 3 engine, and was originally a mod for the game. When the engine was released open-source, Tremulous became a standalone game which is free for all to download and play. With clients for Windows, Linux and the Mac, it’s quite easy for anyone to join in and have fun. And that’s what I’ve been doing lately. Met a few friends by hanging out on “DarkLurker’s Lair”, a server that David helps to maintain and has a lot of good people that come and go throughout the day. And one of them, Mexel, mentioned that his clan was disappearing. So we started one called The Deft…
Of course, the first thing that a couple people had to do was explain to me the point of a clan. I remember them from back in my Quake days (and I mean Quake I, the original – when searching for a game to connect to was done in a separate relatively unknown program called GameSpy) and never understood really why people would want to join a clan. It was explained to me that clans are usually in two types: Those that exist for competition (holding matches with other clans, leaderboards and the like) and those that exist for camaraderie, a group of friends that like to play the game and have similar interests. When I said that the latter was the type of clan I’d enjoy – since I’m not that big on competition and proving who’s better than who – Mexel said that he was very similar and wanted a clan to be like that. So having been given the name of an old clan that disbanded before, and already having a site for it, we resurrected and founded The Deft. Since I’d been running a server already, we made that the clan server. So grab a copy of Tremulous, look for =TD=Xanadu and come out and play – but I’ll warn you, the game is very addictive :>