I remember the good ol’ days in Team Fortress Classic playing my Engy; setting up sentry guns, chucking EMP grenades and wiping out an entire team, falling back in Dustbowl to protect the,.. umm,.. whatever that thing is we had to protect. There really wasn’t a game quite like it.

This was back in the days of the dungeon (my basement), when me and a bunch of my friends would set up a LAN and game all night long. We’d drink beers, smoke butts, talk smack, and kick ass. As time went on, the dungeon was used less and less in favor of gaming in the comfort of our own homes (VoIP was starting to become a little more mainstream). Team Fortress Classic was eventually replaced by games like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament. I quit smoking.

We all still game and we all still have a blast, but there’s just something about the older games that you miss from time to time. I’ll say this though, if Team Fortress 2 is even half as good as Team Fortress Classic, I will be one happy camper. We may even have to reopen the dungeon.

To give you an idea of how long Valve has been developing this game, check out the original TF2 trailer that came out in 1999. A little bit of a difference, huh? It was originally developed on the Half-Life Gold engine until they scrapped it and went back to the drawing board. Now seven years later…

If you recall, back in October, I experienced the great cellar flood of 2005 which single handedly wiped out three of my four computers. As luck would have it, my XPS laptop was spared from the devastation of said flood. This was mostly due to the fact that it was 10 miles away, sitting on my desk at work.

After almost five months of desktoplessness, I finally finished all the repairs to the cellar and restored the command center (also referred to as the dungeon) to its former glory. Everything got a complete upgrade; the walls , the ceiling, the floors, the windows, and most importantly my computers. Ahh yes, my new babies. Take particular notice of the brand spanking new Dell XPS 600 sitting ever so menacingly to the left of my desk. This thing is so screaming fast it actually hovers off the ground. Complete with full blown, dual nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX w/ SLI, Creative X-Fi sound, 2 Gig of DDR2 ram, and a dual TV tuner. Click on the larger of the two images above to check out all of my new goodies.