A Brief History of SoF2

Early versions of my website received a lot of “sof2″ hits because it included match history for several teams I played for: brand x, Casual Heroes, and spiN. Because of the traffic I decided to sum up my SoF2 experience in a blog. Enjoy.

I played as bx|eHome, ch:-:ehome, and spiN . ehome. I was “eHome” long before the Chinese made it cool. I lack modesty, so I can tell you: I was very good. I can’t count the number times I was called a cheater or kicked from a server for a “wall hack” or “aim bot”.

In the early days, SoF2 was split into two communities: Infiltration (INF) and Capture the Flag (CTF). INF was generally considered the more prestigious game type where teams like zfz and smf dominated CAL-I. Allow me to be honest and say, if you don’t know those two teams you probably weren’t very good at SoF2. These guys pioneered the game. As much as I wanted to be apart of the INF community, unfortunately, I played CTF.

The two dominate CTF teams at the time were [LL] and |CAFN|. Don’t know those guys either? Well, you were just too late for this game. By the time you started you were just playing against scrubs — the benchmark was gone. I know this because I came back to play twice.

Before the life was sucked out the game by Real Damage mods and actual hackers, CTF saw a mini-resurgence for two seasons in CAL and TWL. At the time, I was the best player on a mediocre CTF team and in order to compete with [LL] and |CAFN| I made a difficult decision to leave brand x and form my own team.

If I have seen further, it’s because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.

Before leaving bx| I spent a lot time playing with bx|TICK and a relatively unknown player and friend of brand x: [NN]Darel. TICK could strafe-fire faster than anyone I had seen and Darel “floated” across the map. I played an obscene amount of hours to be as good as those two, but knew I couldn’t standout with 0-11 losses to [LL]:

I left bx| and formed a new team called Casual Heroes. My theory was: convince five guys like me — the best players on mediocre teams — to play together and we’d be like when the Power Rangers combine and form Mighty Megazord. And that’s exactly what I did. The six original team members were: myself, SeL, nukleuz, TravDrew, Sactown, and L_Zep.

Instantly we were one of the best teams.

We practiced five days a week for nearly a summer; scrimming anybody and everybody. We knew the game was dying and we wanted to ride that last wave. Prior to the CAL season beginning, however, SeL went AWOL and was replaced by a former smf INF player: KoVacs.

It was an interesting pick-up for us because KoVacs was a well-known INF player and up until this point we had been turning down a lot of “famous” players that wanted to join. We relished the fact that nobody had really heard of us and we were going to make some noise. But KoVacs understood and respected what we were trying to do and was a really nice guy.

We were set.

Immediately we had an opportunity to dethrone [LL] as we were paired against them in the first week of the new CAL season. But we lost 1-2 in the final seconds of the game. It was a real heart-breaker, however, there were only one or two teams in the 24-team league who could keep it that close with [LL] and we were one of them.

(Edit: kiSs[LL] actually found my blog and provided the below screenshot.)

There is so much interesting subtext to this match, including the fact that I was the CAL Admin who randomly scheduled this season opener. Casual Heroes was put together to beat [LL] yes, but I didn’t want to wind up in their division let alone face them the first week! Random is random.

We tried not to let that take the wind out of our sails. We knew everything else was going to be smooth sailing. 90% of our wins were blowouts. Unfortunately, time has washed away my screenshots and demos. All that remains is one screenshot of a 33-2 victory:

When both those CAL and TWL seasons ended and the game officially died we finished with approx. a 16-3 record. I could actually be underselling our wins. But we definitely had 3 losses. They still haunt me. Our second loss was to |CAFN| in the TWL finals. [LL] had already been upset by our friends, the other (BX), Bronx Psychoz robbing us of our long awaited rematch. Our final loss was to -EfX- in the CAL semi-finals. I’ve never made any excuses for our losses and I won’t start today.

The theme to The Sandlot wraps this story up nicely:

Heroes get get remembered, but legends never die.

SoF2 was a brilliant game and to a few of us, the best FPS of all-time. Win or lose the few months playing with the original six Casual Heroes is the benchmark every other FPS has failed to live up to. It was rivaled only by our return to SoF2 on the TWL Elimination and CTF ladders as spiN. Where between the two ladders we amassed a 45-3 record. spiN was a wrecking ball, but by then the buildings were already abandoned. Noteable spiN players included: wiggum, trav, wildbeast, nukleuz, sactown, shizzy, and mesh. (I forced them to all use lowercase.)

I can’t talk this much about SoF2 without making a Top 10 list. Below is, in my opinion, the Top 10 Best CTF SoF2 players (in no particular order):

  1. kiSs[LL]
  2. One[LL]
  3. smokaj[LL]
  4. -EfX- sicko
  5. ch:-:nukleuz
  6. ch:-:ehome
  7. (Bx)TopGun
  8. spiN . wildbeast
  9. bx|TICK
  10. [NN]Darel

|CAFN| players and fans everywhere are throwing up their arms in disgust at me. “How can I have a top 10 CTF list without any players from the 2nd best team of all-time?” But you see, in my opinion, |CAFN| wasn’t strong individually. It was their team work that made them great. They moved up the map like a marching band in perfect sync. PaNiCBuTToN and Jammer are going to find this one day and say, “Yah, but we beat you” and they’re right. They did. So, I’m giving them the last word.

To play you guys out, below, is the famous (BX) SoF2 rap! Keep in mind they were HEAVILY mocking another SoF2 rap that was just horrible.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

This entry was written by Jason Parmele, posted on April 2, 2010 at 4:56 pm.

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