Where have all the CoD men gone?

Today,  I was going to uninstall CoD4.

Like many of you, I used to play CoD4 so much I knew the inside of the A-Bomb site on mp_crash better than I did my own house. I lived CoD4, ate CoD4,  shat CoD4, but didn’t sleep CoD4 — cuz I was up playing it.

As in life, there comes an end to all good things. Lately, I’ve not been motivated to play. One of the main reasons is that, my good friend John ex-of eFragtv has been either too busy at work  or too wrapped up with League of Legends to 1v1 me anymore. Of course, “ex-of …” is a term I’ve been using a lot to describe anyone in the old CoD scene. So many have left. We are all ex- of something. I am not immune to the ex-patriate nation of CoD, after all, I’m Jock…ex-of the BASH webcast.

CoD4′s time has passed and it has just been sitting there idle for months.  I’ve tried to get on and get my Promod-on, but frankly, I don’t really know anyone playing anymore. And to be quite honest, I simply don’t trust anyone to be on the up-and-up playing CoD any more. Too many shenanigans on pre-CoD:BO titles have soured me on taking competitive gaming too seriously. I made the decision. Off the computer then, to make room for more exciting games!

So there I was, my finger hovering over the mouse button as I slid the pointer arrow closer and closer to “REMOVE”.  I felt like a jailhouse executioner about to flip the switch on an inmate who continued to plead his innocence (or as they call it in Texas:  Wednesday).

Then, “ding” went my Gmail alert. Was the Governor calling with a reprieve?

Yitch,

Just wanted to thank you for keeping up your website BASHandSlash.

I started playing CoD in 2003 when the first game came out for the PC, as a kid in middle school and was instantly hooked.  I moved over to UO when that came out and began to play in CAL, “competitively” until that died, which was the middle of CoD2.

I played CoD2-CTF every season then moved to CoD4 when 2 died.

Left for school in 08/9 at the height of CoD4 I guess and lost all contact with the community because the school had all ports blocked and I’ve been living in student housing until recently.

I was pretty excited to see what the CoD community looked like a few months ago when I moved into my new place…where had it moved to?

Was CAL back?

Did they EVER get PROMOD to work correctly?

But was severely dissapointed to have to come to terms with what I knew had happened.

Anyway, after getting CoDBO for the Xbox (in June) and being satisfied for a while, I found some old frag movies of former friends: it dawned on me that the controller just doesnt feel right — I need a mouse and keyboard, vent, and a “clan server” to feel right with any game. School got busy and I didnt have any time to play any game but some NCAA football here and there, so I havnt touched CoD since early July.

This brings me to today.

Yesterday,  I was home reformatting my parents computer — which was my gaming rig before school — and found all these old demo recordings of every season/match of CAL, TWL, CEVO and even OGL.  Short story- we got banned from TWL for “hacking” in UO and was forced to go to OGL. When the restrictions were eventually lifted we had won some 100 OGL matches, lost none and when we removed the team from OGL we got an email from the head of the organization asking if everything was OK and did he need to rent a server for us to keep us around…good times.

I ended up watching a few hours of my favorite video game memories and have a bad itch

…to build a new machine and hit it up old school, but I know I dont have the money or time to do so. If things were more similar to how they were back in the day, I think I’d be easier convinced to do it, but they’re just not.

And finally this brings me to your website.

I remembered an old blog that had some good configs and a podcast waaayyyy back in CoD2 days. After searching for a few minutes I re-found your site. I thought the podcast thing was a little nerdy back then, but I cant thank you enough for doing it because it’s given me a look back in the past. It does make me think ‘man, I really wish the CAL forums were still up…’ just because of all the laughs that place produced.

I’m sending this email partly because I’ve lost contact with most of the people I played with and dont have anyway to reminisce about the good ole days of staying up all hours of the night scrimmaging, planning for the next day’s match and just goofing off in a sever trying to make stupid 125fps jumps that I never could do because my PC always sucked. And partly to put gaming to bed for another few months. These moods tend to come and go about as quickly as the next CoD game did.

Thanks for the work,

Xerox