The Group Thing

It’s time for our quarterly update on TGT’s activities and to encourage you lot to part with your hard earned cash.
TGT has been a thriving community of gamers for almost four years now, we’ve seen some awesome games and some fun times and enjoyed them together.

TGT is a productive community, we have a collection of talented and creative people on board who have produced unique things for our community.
Haunted Mod for L4D and L4D2.
Game reviews written by our members.
Gamers Call, offering in depth and regular reviews of games we wouldn’t otherwise hear about.
A fully functional portal site, offering everything from forums through to site games and rankings.
Customised and easily available game servers free for our members to use whenever they want to game.
Our own dedicated quad core server ‘Deep Thought’ providing game servers and FTP for custom maps.
Competitions to win games and prizes.
Occasional opportunities for members of the community to speak with and meet with the Game Developers of some of our most cherished games.
Voice Comms servers, maintained and administered by the community.
Our first TGT gather, which was a huge success and saw many friends meet for the first time in the flesh.

There’s more coming in the future. In coming months you can expect to see.

An exclusive interview with Dmitry Glukhovsky, the creator of Metro 2033, Game & Book and a chance to win both as a package prize.*
A competition for two lucky winners to win copies of the much anticipated Brink on pre-order.*
Competitions to win Brink Paraphernalia, including T-Shirts and Posters.*
A Gamers Call competition.*
Zombie Night, a TGT gather being held to watch zombie films on Halloween weekend.
Regular game reviews from Gamers Call.

So, what do we want from you in return for all this awesome community goodness. Two things; Keep on gaming and posting in the TGT forums and send us as much as you can spare so that we can keep the gears of TGT turning for everyone.

Remember TGT is staffed and run entirely by volunteers, everything you see and enjoy in our community has been created by the community with the support of our sponsor partners such as Alpha Networks and Splashdamage.

Keep on gaming guys, and click the paypal ‘Donate’ button so that TGT can keep on being awesome.

Yesterday we announced over at The Group Thing that we're looking to sponsor a new team for pro/semi-pro gaming. This team, if there is interest, will be formed from within The Group Thing's own ranks, or The Group Thing will announce the sponsorship offer to other teams.

This is the real deal, folks. If you're looking for a chance to get started in the competition scene, The Group Thing is your step stone. The Group Thing has all the means available to you to get started with servers to practice on and much, much more.

Read the original entry here.

Splash Damage once again combines their Cristmas cards with a fund-raiser for the endagered species, their beloved mascot, the tapir.

As a founding clan and major part of The Group Thing, Connect Gaming will of course support and do our best to try and raise some awareness of the Splash Damage Christmas Tapirthon '09. As you may or may not know, the tapir is Splash Damage's official mascot and is depicted in most situations and pages on their company website.

This card is the one we recieved over at The Group Thing, with our custom TapirScene™

The back of these cards read:

"Tapirs are endangered, but you can help! Simply customise the card with the enclosed sticker sheet, post a picture of it on your website, and send a link to tapirs@splashdamage.com. For each of the first 30 submitted Tapirscenes, Splash Damage will donate money to tapirs.org conservation project."

All four species of the tapir are all endangered! With your help, they can be saved!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

As expected, Splash Damage's new title, which will be revealed in June at the E3 conference, will be a "genre-breaking" FPS! Still as tight lipped as ever, but a little taste of things to come have been revealed.

Fable II lead designer Richard Ham is the projects lead director, add Bethesda to this, and we might have something very special to look forward to.

Bethesda Europe's managing director Sean Brenna has let slip this little nugget, who's title is yet to be revealed, and for us to look forward to! Brennan explains they have been tight-lipped as "there are so many innovative features in there we don't want to reveal them too soon."

We can't wait!

Source: Splash Damage