Category

LAN Party

"A LAN party is a temporary, sometimes spontaneous, gathering of people together with their computers, which they network together primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games."

I even ran my own LAN Party from 2002-2003 called the Dead Gamers' Society. Now I don't have as much time to dedicate to them anymore. I still visit Caleb's LAN Parties and Quakecon in Dallas, Tx.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Quakecon ‘09

I was very lucky to get the time off for Quakecon 09 this year, and it was a good thing because this was a good one.  Dan came down with the normal group of Tim, Adam, March, Matt and Steve.  Also there were Brian and Joe.  As usual, they drove down, which took about 19 hours.  They somehow get faster at it each year.  Unfortunately I wasn’t at home when this happened because I was working, but a few hours later I got home to find about 15 more computers in my apartment than normal.  It was pretty funny to see all the laptops everywhere and I wish I got a picture of it.  People slept on our sofa bed, on our air mattress, on heavy comforters, and even on our footrest thing.  By the time I woke up the next day, most everyone was gone already. 

I had a slightly different strategy for the line this year.  Instead of waiting all day to be at the front of the line, I wanted to wait until it started to move before heading down to the Gaylord.  With Tim and Adam and the group volunteering, they would get in first and let us know when to come down.  Typically we’d arrive at the line around 2pm and wait 9-10 hours for registration to start.  On top of that, I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo in the mail from Newegg.  My desktop is intel based for the first time ever, a Core 2 Duo 2.93 Ghz, Asus motherboard, and 4GB of RAM.  Woot!  It arrived mid-afternoon and I spent about an hour or two rebuilding my computer right before quakecon.  It would give me some problems later, but nothing that ruined the experience.  After I finished rebuilding my computer, Dan and I decided to head down and get in line anyways.  I was pretty lucky to get a shirt right away as they were thrown to the crowd.  I don’t hoard shirts anymore, but I like to get one per year.  We waited for about 4 hours in total, which wasn’t too bad.  Had I waited another hour after Tim texted us we might have been able to cut that down to 3 hours, but there were plenty of people who showed up after we did, so I don’t think it’s possible to entirely skip the line.  That night you basically set your computer down on the table where you choose, and walk out.  We had a good spot near the tech desk and the NOC, but next year we need to sit on opposite sides of the aisle, instead of around the table.  If someone is on the other side of the table, you basically don’t see them the whole event.

This was the first year I woke up early enough to get down to the event when it actually started, 9am on Thursday.  After dropping Alison off at the airport to go home for the weekend, Dan and I went to iHop for breakfast and then to the Gaylord.  The layout was similar to the 2005 layout when it was at the Gaylord before.  The vendors were straight ahead through the door with the BYOC to the right.  I always like the sponsors that let you use their products while playing a game, like when Razer had the copperhead display.  There didn’t seem to be much of that this year.  There were some laptops like that, and some consoles and intel systems, but I could pretty much get the same experience at my own computer.  I’m looking for stuff that will make my computer better, not just the same experience somewhere else.  They did have cool stuff though, the new Wolfenstein game looks sweet, and playing Doom 2 was fun on the xboxes.  I think it really says something when your game is still fun to play like 15 years later.  These days a game leaves you bored after 4 hours.  Bawls was there selling cases and drinks and we got one.  Around the sponsors was a lounge area where you could watch the tourney matches with commentators describing the match.  That was pretty cool and fun to watch.  And there was the Quick Draw stage where they held the “how much of your humanity will you give up for something free” events and the Quick Draw Quake matches.  It would be fun to play a quick draw match, but you have to be present to win, and the odds of me getting called are so low that I don’t think it’s worth my time to hang around there.  I’ve also watched plenty of noobs play quake before, so the match itself isn’t appealing enough.  If you want to win a shirt, it’s the place to be though. 

We got to our computers and set them up.  The main game this year was Quake Live again, like last year.  They used Quakecon as an announcement for Linux and Mac support which is cool.  Quake Live is a great game, and it’s basically what Quake4 should have been.  And despite what people say, it’s NOT just Quake 3.  Should I go into it?  The weapon strengths are different which alters gameplay and it took a little while for me to get used to it.  The machinegun is weak as all hell now.  You can pump 100 rounds into someone and still not kill them, which means that getting your revenge frag is harder.  Instead of going for the quick MG frag after you die, its now a better strategy to give it up and look for a weapon.  Quake has always been a game about controlling items, and this makes it even more important.  The shotgun is stronger but spreads more, making it strong enough to kill almost anyone at really close range, but even more useless if someone is medium/far distance.  With a longer weapon switch time, it’s also harder to get the SG kill.  The Rocket Launcher is similar.  It does lots of damage when it actually hits you, and far less when you get hit by splash damage.  You can bounce around your enemy all day and hardly hurt him, while he’s probably pwning you with Lighting.  The LG seems to be the center of the QuakeLive experience, with it being found everywhere and ultra powerful, quick reload time (meaning you can switch from it quickly), and instant damage.  You can own at QL by having a LG and switching to the RL to finish the kill. It also seems easier to rail people in this game.  All in all, it’s close enough to be fun like Q3 and mastering the new skills can be fun.  QL’s web interface and stats will let you play against people with the same skill level as you so you’re not just always being pwned by one person, and that’s probably a good thing.  It’ll help people learn and like the game better so all in all QL is a win.

The events there were pretty hit or miss, like usual.  It’s never quite been the same since HardOCP left, but I had high hopes for the Nvidia event and something called the hardware event.  I heard a rumor in the forum that Nvidia was supposed to do something big so when I got the day right, Dan and I and the group headed down to it and were excited to see a big pile’o'prizes, HardOCP style.  It became clear pretty quickly though that the prizes were for the few that they brought onstage.  Not only did Nvidia have nothing to talk about, but they couldn’t even give prizes away without embarrasing themselves.  They had a mod-a-PC contest between two groups that was okay, but then they wanted to wax a guy’s chest and when it came time to start eating live crickets and fish, I had had enough.  I’m not sure but I think I was one of the first people to walk out of the mainstage.  Like I told Adam and Dan, it’s not so much that I was grossed out, it was just boring.  I’ve never been excited by people eating things on fear factor and such, and I’d just rather be in the BYOC if Nvidia has nothing to talk about.  I was surprised when the rest of the group was behind me again in about 5 minutes and we decided to hit up Logan’s for steak.  Much better use of the time, indeed.

The Hardware Workshop by PC Perspective the next day saved Quakecon events.  This was basically a return of the HardOCP workshop, and those guys did a great job of putting it together and keeping it interesting.  AMD was there showing off their overclocking tool, and it was cool to see just how far their processors could be pushed, but it could have been even better if they talked about the basics of overclocking.  What steps to take first, where to start with, etc.  Would have been very cool to learn some real stuff at a workshop like that.  They did manage to overclock a 3GHz Phenom to 5.5GHz, something like that using liquid helium.  Pretty impressive, but not practical at all.  I don’t see a lot of 3dmark2007 tournaments anywhere.  They called tickets for prizes and threw a lot to the crowd, even processors.  Dan wants me to mention nvidia douche who somehow showed up again at this event.  He was giving away prizes, but would run around screaming trying to pump people up but would rarely actually give anything away, and when he did he just gave them to people seated on the aisle.  So we learned pretty quickly to not be impressed or excited from him.  Everytime we turned around nvidia douche was there it seemed. 

I didn’t feel like going to the closing ceremony or finals, and I don’t know who won the Shelby Mustang from Ventrillo.  I still think that money would be better spent on more video cards for more people.  A lot of people worked hard just to win a 99% chance of losing that mustang.  Other than QuakeLive I played a little Quakewars, Q3…and uhhh…ok I guess I played a lot of Quake Live.  Also got some more TV shows for my AppleTV setup like Seinfeld, House MD, XFiles, Stargate SG-1.  My plan to upgrade my computer right before QCon was mostly a success, although there were times when my computer threw an absolute fit.  I didnt reinstall Windows XP, just let it redetect my hardware when it rebooted and reactived windows, and I got pretty good speed out of it.  Quakewars looked great at 1920x1200, but then it would start to throw explorer crashes and firefox crashed a lot (which is not helpful when QL is launched from the web browser).  Reinstalling Firefox seriously helped it not crash all day Friday, but on Saturday it started again and early Sunday night I installed Windows 7 with Adam’s help.  It’s actually not too bad and has been completely stable, so maybe it was just WinXP and not bad hardware after all.  I should probably RMA the motherboard just to be safe, but laziness will probably prevail.

All in all, it was a great time, I’m glad everyone could come down again.  Glad Dan finally made it down after 6+ years of trying.  I tried to balance out sleeping and playing, tried to not get dragged into drama and all that that comes with less sleep.  I think this year was an overall really good year.  It was a record setting year for Quakecon in terms of attendance, it seemed well-organized this year with twitter and google calendar updates, and I hope we can do it again next year!  Thanks for coming everyone!

Check out more pics in the Quakecon ‘09 Gallery

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

LAN Weekend and Days Off

These days it's getting hard to tell the days that I work from the days I don't. I'm enjoying being on reserve, or "On Call" for an airplane Eagle doesn't fly anymore. I've gotten called into the airport once out of 6 or 7 days and it doesn't look probable for many more days. The way to tell my days off from my days on are that I can travel on my days off. I did just that on Saturday, traveling back to Cleveland for a LAN Party hosted by one of Jo's coworkers, Caleb (Not sure exactly what his handle is, ma shtie or something).

It was a fun time, a great minilan. Caleb provided bawls, hamburgers, and good amish sweet bread or something. It was pretty much pure sugar. The network had some small hiccups, but I got to play some good Quake 3, and UT2k4. I have to say I am not a UT fan when playing with all those mods. I think it was an RTS mod where you get experience points which can be traded in for powerups. The whole reason I play FPS instead of RTS is to avoid that. It's no fun to jump in a game and be pummeled by someone with a ton of points. Most FPS set everyone pretty much the same so it's a game of skill. The highlight of the day though was definitely ET:Quakewars. Finally! This game has been out for a while but no one wanted to play it with me, due to WoW and xboxes. It really doesn't take too much to run, I was playing decently on my macbook pro. Being the only person who really knew the maps and gameplay, I took the role of the leader as a medic. I didn't think it would be fun for everyone else if I just ran through the levels completing the objectives myself. I shouted out what needed to be done, what classes were needed and where, revived teammates, and showed how all the different classes worked. I think everyone enjoyed that. We ended up playing pretty late into the night. I want to keep it up, but no one else has actually bought the game, so we can't play online. It was good to see Jo and Tim, and wish Dan would have stopped by. The party broke up about 1am eastern.

Crashed for about 4 hours on Jo's couch, before waking back up to jumpseat back to Dallas. Big thanks to Jo for picking me up, dropping me off, and letting me stay at his place even with work in the morning. The flight out of CLE was delayed by a flap issue or something. The captain boarded and we sat on the plane for 90 minutes before finally departing. I don't think there's been a cloud in the sky since Ike rolled through, but it was raining monday. I had planned to go to the "Big Tex" Texas State Fair with Alison, but it was looking like we couldn't go. By the time I got home though, the rain was clearing up, and although there were some short showers, we did go to the fair and had a pretty good time. The fair was pretty much a game of "how much $ can we take from you before you start to notice". After paying $14 for admission and $10 for parking, you had to buy a bunch of tickets to do anything. We walked around the free stuff, shops, and the auto show was pretty nice (one of few free things there). The food is always really popular there, even though it's not good for you at all! I got a turkey leg and a fried snickers bar. We walked everywhere to find that one place with the fried snickers bar, and it was something else, that's for sure! Very hard to describe, and it was good..but not really $4 good.. Alison and I both agreed just a normal snickers would have been better and cheaper. But by all means you should try one if you get the chance. It's not bad. We didn't want to ride a lot of the spinny fair rides since that's where you hear about people getting killed on in the news, but we rode on the big ferris wheel and the carousel. The wheel was $6 each and the carousel was $3, and most of the rides were 2-4 bucks. I didn't really like that approach, although I guess we saved money compared to an amusement park. I don't want it so seem like I didn't have fun either because I had a lot of fun and it's great to hang out with Alison. We have our routines and stuff we do together a lot, but this was special :D

Tuesday I spent working on my website again on the friends page. From 1.4.2 to 1.5, this is a very big change, although it doesn't look like anything changed from the initial look. It's largely a backend change where instead of copying the code several times and editing it for each person, I created a multidimensional array of friends and their website data, and I run a loop of the same code until it runs out of people. This means one day I should be able to sort by post date instead of person if I choose, and it's far easier to edit overall. Also, and this is a big one: You can now control the image on the friends page yourself! RSS feeds can contain a link to an image if you set one, and my page will use whatever you select. If none is set in the feed, it defaults to an image saved on my site. LJ uses your default pic I believe.. Anyways if you're not sure if the image is yours or mine, click "History" and see if it displays a pic in the title. If it does, that's the pic I'm also using on the friends page. So now if you don't like the pic there you have nothing to complain about. The last thing is that "Tweets for Today" doesn't light up, you actually have to write something constructive.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Quakecon 08 post

since no one else has done it

Quakecon came and went quickly this year. The usual group had grown a bit. Tim brought down 8 people from Ohio to stay at my apartment. Luckily it was only for the first and last nights. They reserved a room at the Hilton Anatole for the majority of the event. It was nice to see Tim and we had fun driving in my car, but as always I wish more of my friends would come down.

This was the first year that I volunteered with Tim, Adam, March, and Matt. The day that is typically wasted standing in line I spent helping lay down cat5 cabling, crimping network cables (I suck at it) and doing check-in. It was a long day but it felt good to give back to the event a little. My main motivation however was the fact that I had no one to stand in line with this year.

Overall the convention was pretty good but it seems to be stalling a little bit. 2005 was a huge year that saw us kicked out of the Gaylord Texan for being rowdy. 2006 was "almost a year without Quakecon". With only a month or so advance notice and a significantly smaller BYOC, QC kind of returned to its roots so to speak. A lot of the big sponsors and shows such as hard ocp were missing, and to this day it is still hurting. 2007 and 2008 have grown since then, learning to maximize the hilton anatole's arena for maximum BYOC and sponsor area. 07 was fun because Will came down. 08 was a year by myself again.

Featuring Quake Live as the main event this year, I was disappointed at the lack of Quakewars! There were about 6 main servers, but it was hard to keep enough players in one. Hell this game was still beta during the last Quakecon! The problem in my opinion was bots in the servers. It's something that may turn into a rant in itself one day. Bots should not count as players in game servers! You would be playing the game like normal and all of a sudden you notice you are on a team of bots versus a team of humans. Umm...wonder who's gonna win that one? Of course no one wants to join your team to help because its full of stupid bots and you're going to lose. I played a little quakelive and it's fun and it's everything quake4 is supposed to be, but I spent most of my time in Quake 3 Arena servers. I played some really great players, even got into a 1v1 match which tied at one match each before he had to leave. The BYOC was its normal self, and is always great.

Quakecon's problem now is how stale the events are becoming. Yes there's the quickdraw tournaments. But this year you have to be present at the stage to play. No more "Price is Right" style announcements to the BYOC with a happy gamer running down the aisle. There's the "what would you do for a geforce" or whatever where they are shaving people's heads for video cards. Seen that, didn't think too much of it to begin with. There was more Guitar Hero/Rock Band than Quake featured at the closing ceremony. Todd Hollingshead didn't even know the quakelive player's handles in the finals. ATI's swag shirts were embarrassing. Ventrillo had a corvette they were giving away, but not everyone who attended got a chance to win it. Raffle tickets for the vette were given away as prizes for other shit. Of course I won nothing like every year but if I was to win anything in the world it would be a losing ticket for a vette. Congratulations you didn't actually win anything! Think about how many people could have gone home with a video card and a new love for ventrillo instead of the one guy who now gets raped by taxes on a new car that will cost so much to insure. People shaved their heads, legs, and did all sorts of crazy things just for a chance at that corvette and the person who ended up winning got the very last raffle ticket given away. They threw it in a shirt during the closing ceremony. How's that for randomness? I suppose it's technically no different than any other ticket but you have to think they didn't shuffle very well. And a sinus show by another other name...well i still wouldn't go.

What made this year good was that I got to spend quite a bit more time there and seeing my bro and adam and maybe even matt. I'm just surprised that I got so much time off work to be able to go. With '08 done, QC's 3 year deal with the anatole is expired and I hope they renew the deal because it's a nice location. As always, I would like to see more of my friends go next year. I think next year I'll spend a little more time on the suggestions forum too!

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Battlestar Galactica Party 11/25/07

UPDATE

Lan party will be Noon 11/25/07 THATS SUNDAY now due to many more people being able to go on sunday. Now obviously the battlestar galactica theme won't really play a part of the LAN since we won't be watching it. So here's the deal: if you want to come over to watch razor / play the game / download episodes from me you can at 8:00pm saturday and even sleep over if you want.

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Battlestar Galactica Razor premieres on Nov. 24th at 9 p.m. That's the saturday after thanksgiving. I propose getting together around 5 or so (maybe earlier if you want a bigger LAN Party which I am all for). Recently I picked up the BSG game that just came out by Sierra. It is by no means a masterpiece of the gaming world, but I think that the multiplayer could be fun for a few hours. We can totally play anything else too. I'll also have all the BSG episodes on a server so if you want them the 24th is your best bet.

The BSG game is kinda similar to Asteroids in that you have your little viper or whatever and you zoom around with your inertia and can change directions and shoot. Unlimited guns and missles. The game is rendered in 3d, but you can only move around in 2d which kinda sucks. It is pretty fun to play with a usb gamepad which I recommend, but it can use a joystick or keyboard. Kind of a pointless game but I think the instant action is fun so the multiplayer should be fun and it's easy to get the hang of quickly so being a noob is fine. Multiplayer has deathmatch and team deathmatch and a domination mode. It's also been a while since we played trackmania nations and generic FPS's. Even if you are not a fan of BSG it would be fun to get together, since it will be the last lan I'll be at for a long time. I'll be shipping out of Ohio mid december probably.

I'll be pestering a lot of you on IM but leave a comment if I don't and you're interested.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Quakecon 07

Didn’t really make any posts about Quakecon this year but I went.  I find that every quakecon is pretty different for me.  I think it’s all about the company.  In 05 it was out first year and everyone was really excited to do it.  It was a huge year for qcon with about 3000 people in the BYOC.  Quakecon 06 was the opposite.  It was announced at the last minute and so none of my friends could go.  Of course, I was already in Dallas so taking the time to go was not hard at all.  I talked to Schultz some but mostly I was lonely. 

Now Quakecon 07 was a good year again.  Being that it was announced in February, I really thought people would be able to go and it would be awesome, but only Will was awesome.  We picked him up on the way and it was good to see him again.  Also Alison is in Dallas now!  So I get to see her again.  It was hard only seeing her on weekends and it’s even harder going months between visits now.  So I split up my time seeing her and going to the con.  So I spent less time at quakecon this year but enjoyed the whole trip a lot more.  Alison thought that she was stealing my qcon time and was sad but that wasn’t true.  I know I could have spent more time at the anatole, but I wanted to see her too.  I’m not sad that I spent my qcon time with alison, but maybe I am sad that I didn’t have enough time go to quakecon and see her as much as I wanted to.  Although, I don’t ever really want to leave when I see her so maybe that’s impossible. 

Anyways, back to the con.  It was more like 05 in terms of size but not quite as big.  Quake 4 was the big game last year which I wasn’t in to.  So this year is Quakewars!  I sure do love that Valley map.  3 days of playing the same damn map over and over again…  So I ran around like a noob for a day before really getting into it.  It seems exactly like Battlefield 2.  Wolf:ET was great because there were a few classes but you could have a really good time with few players.  Quakewars is different….there’s a hell of a lot of different player options and about 1 billion different ways to kill each other.  It’s a lot more like Battlefield 2 - it you’re not in a vehicle you’re pretty much sniped or artillery’ed.  And the strogg overpower the humans in every class, so you’ll pretty much only have fun if you’re strogg.  I got to play some instagib and I didn’t win this year!  I’m slacking…

We went to Logans Roadhouse to finish off the trip and it was really good.  Just like I remembered!  I had a great time down there this year.