Tobias Traub - Natural Selection

My favourite game ist he so called mod Natural Selection, also called „ns“ or „NaSe“.
Natural Selection is a modification for the famous game “HalfLife” (so a fan-made addition to the game).
Ns is a first-person-shooter, that means you look through a character’s eyes and see what he sees.
NaSe is about a fight between two factions: The Space Marines (human soldiers) and the Khaara (a alien species with many different lifeforms).
The game takes place in a Sci-Fi atmosphere.
The game’s aim is to destroy the opponents base (the Marine base with various buildings or the alien’s hives) by capturing resources. With this “res” the Marine commander or the alien gorges can build other structeres, get upgrades, buy weapons or gestate to higher lifeforms.
Indeed Natural Selection isn’t a stupid shooter like Unreal Tournament or Doom. Without a good taktic, a good commander, good teamplay and good teamcommunication you won’t win a single game.

Now the Marines have upgrades that let them deal more damage or have better armor. The two unique upgrades they have are the “Jetpack” (jp) and the “Heavy Armor” (ha).
The jetpack is, as the name says, able to fly through the map, so the Marine can reach higher locations. The Heavy Armor has a very much armor, but is very slow. The Marines have the more “conventional” way of playing and are quite simple to understand (exept of the position as a commander, which is very hard to play).

On the other side there are the Khaara. It needs a lot of time to understand how to play the different lifeforms. They have five different of them. Each of them has four unique abbilities:
The “skulk”: He is able to walk on walls and is very fast, but he has low hitpoints, so he is more the sneaker. The skulk is able to leap around or to parasite enemies. Parasited enemies can be seen everywhere on the map, no matter where they are.
The gorge: He is a pig-like creature and the most popular lifeform in this game. There are a lot of jokes about him in the Natural Selection scene. The gorge is the Khaara’s supporter. He is very slow, has average hitpoints and he has very many special abbilities (for example he can heal allies). He also can spit green balls at his enemies to damage them. The “gorgie” is the only lifeform, which is able to build structures.
The lerk: He is some kind of flying dinosaur and the alien’s scout. He bites his opponents or spits clouds of gas at them. This gas damages Marines as long as they stay in there (exept of the Heavy Armor). The lerk is the fastest lifeform, but has not very much hitpoints.
The fade: He is quite similar to a raptor. He is ablot to attack his enemies with his claws, to heal himself or to move foreward quickly by using his blink abbility. The fade has much hitpoints and high armor.
The onos: The onos looks a little bit like a rhino and a little bit like a cow. He can impale his enemies with his horn, stomp on the ground in order to stun them for a second or he can devour a whole Marine to devour him in his stomach (indeed not a very nice experience to make).
The Khaara can choose out of a impressive number of upgrades, but at leas they can get just three of them at a time. They have to choose one of three movement-, defense, and sensory-upgrades, which makes them faster, gives them more armor or let them be nearly invisible as long as they sneak.

One of the latest features in Natural Selection are the combat maps. There are no resource slots and both teams just have their mainbuildings. In combat maps there is no commander and you can’t build any structures. You just have to destroy the opponents mainbuilding. In this maps you get experience for killing enemies and once you got eneough “xp” you rise a level and get a skill point. This skill point you can invest to get upgrades or to gestate.
In combat maps, there is no taktic, it’s just dump shooting around. And it is the reason, why the Natural Selection community began to die. Because together with the combat maps there came the “noobs” and “lamers”.
I really love this game. Because you need a good feeling of what is happening in the game and because of the feeling of playing together as a team.