Talking with some folks today about UT, and being invited to play some UT2k4 in an interdepartmental gaming group that gathers over lunch got me thinking. It made me remember one of *the* most epic moments in LAN Party history in my life, and one of the hallmarks of what was so amazing about being honored with the Gummi Bear clan tag, both in game and out.
We were at Asylum Lan. The exact one I don’t remember sadly. I think 2k4 had been out for less than a few months though. GB was in the final match (no surprise there) playing the new and awesome Onslaught mode. Now bear with me because the details of my memory are fuzzy, as are the exact mechanics of ONS and the map in particular. Perhaps a fellow Gummi will drop by to flesh out anything I forgot. Sadly, I think this was one of the rare matches we don’t have a video cap of 
It was best 2 out of 3, and on round 1 we steam rolled fairly well. I think we linked up the nodes to their core, and damaged it down in under 2 minutes. Nothing spectacular, about on par with our performance the whole tourney, but fast enough to demoralize the other team a bit. Then round 2 came up. Now, this particular map, if memory serves me correctly, had 2 nodes outside each teams core, where only one was needed to link up to the chain across the board. (For those who have never played ONS mode, you take over nodes to build a straight link from your core to theirs, which drops the shields on their core and allows you to damage it.) We strategically had people in the right place at the right time to take over the first node faster than normal, and two guys in place to start capping the second node the instant we had #1. By time #2 was then taken, the team that took #1 was already at #3 bunkered in and ready to start the process, using link guns all along to speed things up. In the time all this went down, the opposing team was still at the alternate #3 taking it, and preparing their vehicles for a convoy to #2 to try to take it from us en mass. Something major was about to go down though that no one other than Stale knew. While we were working on #2 and #3 he had peeled off in a vehicle and flown up to grab the Redeemer, and then hauled his ass up high in the air. Before #3 was even fully ours, to complete the link to the Core, he fired it off on a slow path to their core. Because of this, when we took node #3 the message popped up on everyones screen saying the Red Teams core was exposed. Before the message even faded and anyone had any time at all to react however, BOOM the core was destroyed and we won the match. I think it was a good 20 seconds before the other team realized what had happened and it sunk it.
My hazy, 5 year old memory wants me to think it was 45 seconds into the match.
Yeah, we fucking rocked that shit in record time. I still have the trophy from it! Ahhhh memories. Such a different time in my life that I do indeed miss at times like this!
Gummi for fucking life, yo.
