infinite trajectory
It happened at the Fighternight #5. At some indefinite moment during nighttime I took my headphones off, leaned back in my chair, and allowed my gaze to wander around aimlessly. Suddenly my eyes locked on the screen of a guy sitting behind me. There was ↑Q3A-gamespace, not uncommon, but an avatar cruised along a wall, through midair, following an unbelievable trajectory, the latter marked by a blue-glowing sequence of blasts from the plasma-gun—for the first time in my life I watched a tricking movie. My reflections on tricking are already jotted down (↵piling up—playful appropriation of gamespace and ↵appropriation by mastership)—have no fear, I won’t rephrase and repeat them here & now, but I feel the urge to appropriately hint to the two tricking-movies I like most. Yes, there’s a plethora of other excellent tricking movies, they are legion within the Q3A-community already. But the following two are my favourites. What I saw at the Fighternight #5 was
↑The Art of Tricking [19:30min | .avi | 469MB] by haZe and cyrus. My all time champion is
↑The Art of Tricking II [13:57min | .avi | 325MB], again by iT.haZe (Patrick Chita) and iT.Roffo (Jordan Roff). The cast furthermore includes iT.Dynam1c (Ryan Williams) and Meph1sto (Mario Weber). The prefix iT. stands for ↑team infinite trajectory, a Q3A-tricking clan.
Here are some emic voices from a discussion on trickjumping which took place in September 2003. I won’t repeat the whole discussion, which consists of several strands of different topics and arguments, but only some selected parts which illustrate the trickjumper’s perspective on trickjumping and computergames, as well as the opinion of an opposed faction. The thread was triggered by iT.Roffo:
Trickjumping capabilities?
Hi,
Coming from a quake3 trickjumping community I myself and many others are dying for a new game with a high level of ‘trickability’…
We don’t hold too much hope in ↵doom3 or ↑quake4 but i heard a rumour that ↑painkiller [see also ↵world’s greatests] will have these capabilities? if so I thank you already
Its not just trickjumpers that want these settings, but every fragger, considering ↑strafejumping adds a level of skill to the game just not possible with the convential standards of map / item control etc…
A bit later a contradictory vision was voiced:
Trick Jumpz like in Quake are not good at all IMO [in my opinion]. I play a game called ↑Gore, and it has stamina, so it stops those jumpz, because your stamina will go down if you try to do it. I think Painkiller should insert a Stamina system, it makes games alot better IMHO [in my humble opinion].
This led kr33p to jump in and emphatically defend the case of trickjumping:
nah, trickjumping is ADDICTIVE! Not necessarily used for DM [Death Match], but more for just messing around and seeing what you are capable of. If you could join a jump server you would see. I used to compare it to going to a virtual skate park where you and the other players sit around and talk about different tricks, explaining to each other how to do them, attempting them several times and then when you finally are able to complete the trick on a regular basis you actually feel good and feel like showing everyone else how to do it. It promotes an extremely friendly gaming community when it’s not about competition, rather about fun and helping each other out. And i’m not even a tricker!
kr33p immediately got supported by iT.Roffo:
:-) @ kr33p
Games that use stanima systems kill it imo. Strafejumping gives the game that extra skill thats easy to learn but hard to master, such as cs, bunny hopping was possible but now it isnt, and its a whole lot less fun now… (not that i play cs at all :P)
In order to have the most fun trickjumping maps need to be high with a lot of ledges etc :-)
Trickjumping just adds an extra aspect towards the game (meaning more reasons to buy it), believe me there are a LOT of q3 trickers even though the game is 5 or so years old.
If you want to see an example of a trickjumping video (quake3) download my clan ‘iT’s first video from here: [meanwhile dead link] go to download page and choose a mirror :-) (sadly im not in the vid as i wasnt tricking then :P)
Inserts and hyperlinks by me. I placed them to enable the occasionally dropping by anthropologist to follow the somewhat far-distant topic ;-)
screenshots from The Art of Tricking by haZe and cyrus
