white noise

It’s always nice to start the year by getting away for a couple days for some intense computer gaming. Having skipped the October LAN (being completely occupied with Halloween), it’s been 6 months since MillionManLan over the summer. This was the Lanwar crew’s 10 anniversary and 40th event, so they pulled out all the stops and were kickin’ it old school.

The action started early with roll call for the 5v5 TF2 tournament at 1:00. Gratch was in the mist of a LONG fight with Steam, so the team ended up as two Boom Tape members (me and Xomox) and three others (Furyfire, Jouster, and Zenny). There were nine teams who entered the tourney and, by losing a coin toss, we had to play an extra opening round to even the field to eight.

The opening round went off with no problems, with us scoring 5 straight points on 2Fort. Then we went on for another 2Fort round against team “Ir8”. This was more challenging but still ending in a 5-1 win for us. Our strategy was pretty solid through both 2Fort rounds. Xomox covered the intel as engineer and Zenny provided defensive backup to him, usually as heavy. Meanwhile, I played offense as either scout or soldier along with Jouster and Furyfire who would switch between Medic, Spy, Soldier, and Scout.

That moved us into the semifinals against team International Anarchy, a well-practiced high school squad from Kentucky. The map was Well and although we consistently held the center cap, there were two times we lost it and they had players to take the other caps immediately. Once we were down 2 caps to none, [IA] put of some crazy D on station 4 that we could never break through. They typically had 3 engineers (with 3 fully upgraded turrets and dispensers), a demo, and a heavy all camped around 4. It always stinks getting knocked out of a tourney, but it was a ton of fun and we did great considering we’ve never all played together before.

As the day went on Gratch continued to fight with Steam, so we did some Guitar Hero and some Rock Band. It was my first experience with the later and I was pretty impressed. I played guitar parts ranging from medium to expert lead and bass and it all was very much like GH (and probably a notch or two easier). Then I took a couple turns at drums and felt clumsy all over. I expected to be a little more at home with it than I was. Between the somewhat lifeless pads (not enough bounce to simulate a drum head), the ultra-springy bass pedal, and the fact that I was playing on medium and the rhythm was stripped down to fewer notes than what you hear, it was a real challenge. It was obvious though that with four people who are competent with their parts, it’s a real blast. And with four fumbling fools, you can barely tell what song it is.

Later in the day brought the time honored tradition of Duct Tape Wars. Our team of course got it’s name from this competition and has built a certain reputation based on three straight wins and the Duct Tape Server side project. For this installment the challenge was to construct a bridge to span a plastic storage bin and support as many poker chips as possible. With only three guys and a single engineer among us we had our work cut out for us. One roll of duct tape and an hour later we had constructed a 6″ by 24″ corrugated beam:

It was a design I knew wasn’t exactly optimal, but a familiar construct technique that we had used in the past. Instead of spending a lot of time planning we dug in right away. And it was a good thing because it still took every second of the hour to complete it. Unfortunately, it fell far short of everyone’s expectations, and collapsed at 140 chips. Part of our downfall (in retrospect) was simply the width of our bridge. It allowed room for three chip stacks across which concentrated a lot of weight at the center before the chips started getting placed outward. Of course the bending stiffness of the design wasn’t great either, but hey, did I mention we only had three guys instead of five!

The winning bridge was quite impressive holding a competition crushing load of 320 chips before falling. Team Boom Tape vowed swift revenge at the next event.

After that, Gratch spent several hours playing Texas HoldEm (finishing 7th), and I started some downloads and got in some more TF2. I didn’t end up filling the hard drive with too much – maybe 40GB at most.

By about 6 am there weren’t too many games going on and I couldn’t concentrate on file directory listings anymore so I shut my eyes and passed out in my chair for about two hours. I woke up to the sound of one LANer telling Gratch (unsolicited of course) every necessary move needed to finish the last level of Portal. A few more hours of gaming as the crowd came back to life and we packed up around 2.

It was a fantastic event. I didn’t win a thing. Lost two competitions. But it didn’t matter a bit, it was just plain fun!