Booted the game up and after a few tweaks in the video options screen.

Remember, the game's got a separate video-options screen directly under the main menu!

Instead of heading on out on a single player nostalgia trip, I started wondering how the game's online community's doing now?

Seeing as this was one of the first games I ever started playing online (this was at the time Microsoft had a matchmaking client named msn gaming zone, precursor to XBL?), I was thriIled about maybe finding a server or two with some hot q2dm1 action going on.

To my surprise, finding an active server was extremely easy, as one of the first result of googling "quake 2 server list" led me straight to q2servers.com where I even saw a Swedish server among the top most active.

So there I find myself, with 4 other players wondering how the hell I ended up in their little corner of the world. Immediately I start to recognize what's so different about what I'm experiencing here, as to what we define as the norm in online games now.

Instead of just owning me to oblivion and rant about how useless I am at the game, my mother's their private prostitutes or why I won't just shrivel up in the corner and kill myself. Both the admins and other players start to give me tips about how to navigate his home brew server scripts and how not to "almost dodge" dodge their rockets.

As time goes by, the admin starts to describe how he's still hosting the game on a pentium 3, running windows 2000, and plays the game on a similarly speced PC with a Riva TNT card. Almost the exact same configuration I played around with in my early teens, making custom maps with Qoole and hosting them on my 56k modem, with opponents complaining about how "laggy" my map was.

So, there was a bit of nostalgia, and a bit of realization...

With gaming having an entirely new level of reach to players, and the ability to host dedicated servers declining.. Are these sort of community's forever lost in old titles?

Are we going to see people playing the games of today with the same type of open community feel?