So what does a self confessed geek do for relaxation. Once J is in bed, slashdot and digg are exhausted. My Kubuntu box is finely tuned and there’s no dream shopping to do on ebuyer / amazon. No bargains left on Ebay … well you get the picture.

Well I discovered Enemy Territory: Return to Castle Wolfenstein (ET:RTCW) over a year ago and have spent many happy hours playing it.

What’s so good about it? Well for me I think it beats other games because of hte community surrounding it. Splash Damage released it to the world for free some years ago and there are clients for Windows and Linux. I play on a server run by the HarryHomers clan who have a website, forum and active community. A clan is just a group of people that play together often competing against other clans (teams); a gamers community group if you will.

So am I a traitor?

Since I got my new computer with Vista Home Basic preinstalled I’ve been using that to run ET. Why? Well partly because the preferred communications appliction TeamSpeak can’t work properly on Linux without some serious tweaking. Ditto running ET itself but with a little less tweaking – I did have problems getting the screen ratio configuration right for my 1680 x 1050px flatscreen monitor.

So does Vista just work … well apart from crashing at least once a session, yes it does.

I even like some of the features of Vista – like the much maligned “cancel/allow” and “continue” dialogs that pop up when you attempt to run potential unsafe softwarre or when performing administrative tasks. Much like kdesu with no password.

So my game persona is ivorBIGgun(!). If you’re interested you can check out ivorBIGgun’s stats at splatterladder.