We started Critical Hits over a year ago now for many reasons. One of those reasons was to create a kind of community here where all of our friends, and even people we don’t know, could come to talk about the things that interest us most. In an effort to further support these ideas, we held a celebratory LAN Party last weekend to commemorate these events!
Our lovely townhouse became a den of killing, flag capturing, and massive army slaughtering for a whole weekend as we gathered to test our skills and enjoy thoughts of shooting each other with rockets. It was a small, but very fun, event for all of the local people who greatly enjoy a chance to get together and play some computer games for a few days. I had originally planned it to consist of about eight people, but after some inital contacting and planning, we decided to bump it up to a twelve or more person event. We started setting up the network and a few computers in the middle of last week, and things started up on Friday afternoon and didn’t stop until Sunday around noon. A few of us went the whole weekend only getting as little as six hours of sleep, but the whole thing ended up going very smoothly, and we all had a lot of fun!
The games we were installing and playing were determined beforehand, to help things go a bit faster. We ended up playing quite a lot of Unreal Tournament 2004, everyone’s favorite as always being Onslaught maps with vehicles so that we could all ride around and kill each other with style. The node-control set up of Onslaught maps works perfectly for a LAN team set up, but I was actually surprised by the number of matches that quickly seemed very one-sided (alternating between sides, surprisingly enough). Dawn of War was actually a break-out favorite, it ended up being played just about as much as Warcraft 3, which just stands as a further testament to its fantastic reworking of the RTS formula!
We enjoyed a weekend of very posh nerdery as we had delicious home-made Chili, Beef and Beer Stew, and even Pancakes and Sauasage! The weekend also didn’t go without some completely ridiculous events. The O endured a painful seven hour drive up to the LAN, which seems considerably worse when you realize the drive really should only take four and a half hours. After several people commented friday evening that DrScotto’s monitor was taking up a whole freaking table on its own, something that most computer geeks are quite accustomed to, he promptly showed us by going out to Best Buy and purchasing a flat-panel monitor to make the rest of his weekend pure, micro-sized bliss! There were a few more that I will most likely be satirizing in coming weeks to further my egotistical strangle-hold of superiority.
I would like to thank everyone who came out for it, and made it such a great time. I’ll leave you with an excellent picture of Steve attempting to sleep off the post-traumatic stress disorder often associated with such lengthy battles.
Wait a second, there is a girl there! This must have been some carefully staged event to lure readers to the site. Brilliant!
First, thanks to Bartoneus and Sucilaria for hosting, and to joshx0rfz for basically being LAN Guru (and be sure to check out his articles on How to Host a LAN party parts 1 and 2)
Bartoneus, josh0rfz, and I played some 3 player Infinite Dungeons. For some reason the more powerful computers couldn’t host a game, but the Mac running boot camp could. I enjoyed it alot, but you end up getting waaaaay too much loot and not enough XP. It was especially brutal when you go a couple levels without finding anyone to sell stuff too- the encumberance rules started killing us. It was like a Monty Haul game x100!
ZOMG! super weak! taking pics of sleeping g33ks should be outlawed.. punishable by something to do with someones mom, or something.
All in all a great time. Next time have that ADA ramp installed damnit!
Boot camp did a surprisingly good job all weekend, I was really expecting some horrible issue to crop up while playing a game. The only problem I had was I couldn’t have all the games installed at the same time due to a small partition. My other partition is MUCH larger…much much….
“Kill Jimmy to set me free…”