Hey there, you may have played me in TM2PC if it was anytime during 2003 and beyond! Great game that is near and dear to my heart forever.
We have resurrected this game from the ground up and have been playing together for years, new and old veteran players alike. So you are guaranteed we will be here for some time yet into the future.
Won't lie your biggest hurdle is your timezone. We have had German/Dutch/French/Austrian players be able to play during 11pm Eastern Timezone. But they had to wake up early Sunday morning to join in the matches. You are currently 5 hours ahead of that, which would be 4am earliest start time. Sometimes people can only play for an hour or two, so you could slip in and take a spot if they currently have a 8 person game that is full. Game nights can sometimes last from 1.5 hours to 4 hours+ depending on various factors. I'm also fairly confident people would be willing to accommodate and make different game times on another night, just arrange it on discord.
Some special considerations since I'm also assuming you have a PAL PS2 and PAL TMBO version? You will not be able to use the in-game chat feature that is a hidden unlockable feature in the NTSC version, unless you have a cheat device like gameshark/codebreaker/ps2rd/etc. That's not a huge deal, considering most of us use discord at the same time as playing (voice and text) and have access to a computer. Not a big deal in 2018, but something of note.
For the game itself: much like TM2PC the teams are imaginary (no official team mode), but that doesn't stop us or hinder us in any way.
We play with a few rules:
No usage of environment attacks. Much like TM2PC these are a burden on the game. Entire sections of levels are completely abandoned when these weapons are legal, because no one wants to get hit by them.
No healths pickups: if you accidentally grab one, mine yourself back down to where you were at (one blue mine generally = one mini health pickup). If you grabbed one in combat, wait until you get outta combat and then mine safety as needed.
Try your best not to spawn attack - give someone who spawned in front of you 5 seconds to get away, and vice versa; if you spawn behind someone, don't rape them, give em 5 seconds.
That's really it, all cars are legal, all specials are legal. We just try to balance our teams out, both with player skill and car picks. As well we try to not have repeat cars on the same teams so we can get even matches.
A good TMBO youtube channel where you can watch our more recent game night matches:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Eospag/feedAnother great video is the TMBO Bible by DarkScorpius - it has a lot of the strategies and finer points of combat in TMBO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CEOz1WXOlo&app=desktop