Weekend Gaming Recommendations

If you’re anticipating a large snowfall, looking for something entertaining to do over the weekend and PC gaming is right up your alley, might I make some suggestions?
Unreal Tournament 2004, while excellent in and of itself, has also given birth to a slew of excellent mods. Any of those on the Make Something Unreal Contest Grand Finals list are well worth your time (I particularly like Alien Swarm), but there is one glaring omission on that list: JailBreak 2004.
While more of a gametype than an actual mod, JailBreak is just plain fun. The concept is simple enough; I’m sure you’ve played something similar in middle school gym class: eliminate all opposing players (send them to “jail”) in order to win a round, get to a certain point to free all your captured teammates, etc. Download it, install it and play a few rounds with bots and Zoom InstaGib turned on and you’ll be hooked. Also, while you’re at their site, be sure to pick up the JailBreak Classics map pack, which contains several old JailBreak maps redone in the UT2k4 engine.
For those of you unfortunate enough to be without UT2k4, might I recommend ETF?
If you consider yourself an Old Gaming Fogey, ETF will be a wonderful trip down Quake memory lane. Back in the halcyon days of Quake World, there was a little mod called “Team Fortress” that featured class-based combat in a variety of objective-based maps, from capture-the-flag to hold-all-the-command-points. Some enterprising lads have been working on a conversion of Team Fortress for Quake3 for quite a while and the results are outstanding. However, you have to own Quake3 in order to run it.
This is where ETF comes in. You may recall that iD released Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a Quake3 engine-based shooter that was well-received and, if I do say so myself, quite a bit of fun. After RtCW’s release, they began working on an add-on product called “Enemy Territory”. The multiplayer portion of ET was finished but the singleplayer portion languished on until finally iD pulled the plug on it and decided to release the multiplayer portion for free.
Well, given all that, some people decided to port Q3F to the ET engine, which resulted in ETF. So go grab Enemy Territory and the 1.02 patch (it’s available in client and server versions for both Windows and Linux. Oooh-rah!) and then head to the ETF site and pull that down, all for free. Then look for me online – I’ll be playing as I always do under the screenname “ZaMoose”.