A very quick recap of the 50th edition of the LAN party in Lou’ville. There were about 300+ gamers there, so the turnout was really good for a January event.
Starcraft 2
Gratch, Keeper, and I played the crap out of this, and mostly took a beating in the 3v3 ladder. Sill tons of fun and those two are getting better. Gratch and I were in a “why not” mood and competed in the SC2 tourney even though we’re well below the requisite skill level. As expected we were we trounced in the first round. In my case I faced a Rank 6 diamond Zerg and his b’lings overwhelmed me 17 minutes in.
Nation Red
This game was having a free weekend on Steam so all four of us loaded it up and spent a few hours blasting away at zombie hordes. It’s a buggy game, and very simplistic, but just the thing for bleary eyed twitch gaming.
Duct Tape Wars
Challenge: build a shotgun (i.e. fling a duct tape ball, and also a full roll). Scoring: There rounds for accuracy with shot (balls), three rounds for distance with shot, and one distance round with the full roll. Turned out to be a bunch of flinging straps that were just like the bottle cap shot a couple LANs ago. The best scores came down to how well you fired it and not what you built. Oh well, TBT had a couple poor shots and settled for second place.
And somewhere over the course of three days and two nights I even got 5 hours of sleep!
Posted Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 12:20 AMNo Comments
Another weekend of intense gaming has come and gone. Approximately 111 gamers descended on Louisville for about 28 straight hours of WSAD fun. The Lanwar staff is down to doing only 2 event per year (winter lan and the big summer MML), so we set off to make the most of every minute.
I got in an hour or so of Team Fortress 2 to start, then we moved on to Left for Dead 2 for a couple hours. Once Gratch settled in we got into Borderlands for a few hours and sped through many areas, quickly leveling up new characters.
A little later in the evening Gratch and I got into some Rock Band. We suffered through songs like “Sex Farm” by Spinal Tap, “Kung Fu Fighting”, and even some horrible piece of junk by the Dixie Chicks, before moving on to some more familar tunes.
Later in the evening it was time for a traditional round of Duct Tape Wars. The rules were about the same as always: one roll and one hour, but this edition included a plastic bottle cap. Our goal was to launch the furthest through some means of duct tape in which the kinetic energy we apply is not in the direction of the cap’s launch. We decided on a simple strap that would hold the cap in the center. By extending the strap with your hands to your each side, the cap is shoot through the air. Xomox had the thought to add an ogive over the cap to aid it’s flight. The curved ogive and the cap couldn’t be tapped together so they would separate at some point. As expected, the distance of the cap was highly dependent on when that separation occurred, but in any case it helped.
In the end, a few teams built a similar, simple device, but none hit nearly the same distance as ours. Except for one. That team built a very long strap assisted by three people, and pulled off the win. Our final attempt (it was best of 3), flew well, rolled beyond their mark, then curved and came to rest a couple feet short of it. Team Boom Tape had to settle for runner up this time.
Posted Friday, January 22nd, 2010 10:30 PM1 Comment
The annual four-day, computer gaming fest, MillionManLAN 8 has just wrapped up and it was another great event. These things seem to fly by faster and faster with each one I attend. Team Boom Tape had eight of us from Cincinnati in attendance and we were joined by some of the usual players for some tournaments. This time there were about 350 gamers in attendance. There have been past MML events with many more, but it was still about 2x a typical lanwar. As expected we saw a lot of familiar faces there. There was CFB Gaming who brought about 12 members from places ranging from New York to Tennessee. There was our friendly rival team TBC (Team Bok Choy) from Wisconsin and beyond. I also met new teams, like SOMAD from South Dakota who drove 13 hours to come to their first MML.
We rolled into Louisville about 12:30, signed in and set up, and got the Duct Tape Server online. Thursday is pretty laid back as far as formal events go since people arrive throughout the day. I did try my luck at the Wii Bowling tournament in the evening, but my ~165 didn’t make the top four scores for the finals. Nvidia and BFG had a booth set up showing off some huge monitors and even huger “Phobos” computers. Many of the stations were demoing their 3D technology on games like Left 4 Dead and Fear 2. The 3D gaming experience is really awesome – I can’t wait for prices on the 120Hz monitors to fall.
Friday started with the Team Fortress 2 tournament at noon. We got a first round bye, which is nice, but it skipped us past the map we were most prepared for. In the second round we played team SOMAD on the map Well, which is the same map that’s knocked us out of the competition three times before. This time was no different; we put up a long, hard fight, but lost 4-1. Then early evening was the first ever dodgeball tournament sponsored by Crucial Memory. I assembled a team and then realized we had one too many players and sat myself out. Our guys gave it a good go, but didn’t advance past the first match.
Feeling a little dejected we went into the late evening competition…Duct Tape Wars. We had our core team all back together – the team which started our run of greatness in 2006 – plus a couple newer members to help. We didn’t win the past two competitions so we felt we really had to make a comeback. In this year’s challenge we had about an hour and a half to build a structure to suspend a container over a couple bottles with CDs balanced on top. Then the container was loaded with poker chips until a CD was knocked off the bottles. The winner was the contraption holding the most chips before it collapses. Check out this video to see the action and our triumphant victory.
Saturday we played a lot more Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead. We made a last minute jump into the Left 4 Dead Tournament and got beat up in the first round pretty good. Reps from Nvidia and BFG did a presentation and Q&A; and gave out some schwag. Rock, Paper, Scissors was later that night. Jedi mind tricks weren’t working; I lost in the first round. Starting about midnight was the Texas Hold’em tournament. I wasn’t concentrating well and got knocked about half way through. Johnny Boom finished an impressive, but prize-less, 6th place.
We ran the annual Armagetron tournament in the morning, and as usual it was a battle between Team Boom Tape and Team Bok Choy. Gratch and Xomox played in the final head to head and Xomox took the title this year. A final few hours of gaming and leaching and before we knew it we were packing up at the last possible minute. By the time it was over I had logged over 24 hours on Team Fortress, over 16 on Left 4 Dead, and stuffed my hard drive with over 250GB.
Posted Thursday, July 16th, 2009 5:29 PMNo Comments
Another Lanwar has rolled around again and not a moment too soon. It’s been six months since Team Boom Tape last graced the grounds of the University of Louisville. Small group of just three of us going this time, making up our part of the roughly 150 attendees.
As usual lots of different games were played over the 28 hour event – lots of WoW (as is typical these days), various FPS games like Team Fortress 2, Unreal 3, Call of Duty (4 and 5), a little Halflife 2 deathmatch, and several RTS games (C&C; and even a few Starcraft matches). It’s gotten more common for gamers to pack up a console along with their computer, so there were plenty of Xbox games going on and a few Wii ones, too. One group even had a Rock Band setup going most of the night, which made for an excellent break between computer matches. But the real standout game this time was Left 4 Dead. There was always either a campaign or versus game to jump into, and we had some great competitive matches.
Tournament-wise TBT had great fun crashing and burning again. We scrambled to pull together a TF2 team at the last minute and with little practice took a swift beating in the first round. Few of us had played TF2 much since the last summer LAN and boy it showed. Of course, there was also another Duct Tape Wars competition, and for the third time in a row TBT has failed to meet the lofty expectations of everyone else. This year’s challenge was to design an airplane of some sort which would carry a computer mouse “passenger” and make it as far across the room as possible. After burning half our time with the phone-a-friend tactic, our resulting creation would’ve sunk to the bottom of the Hudson River. For what it’s worth, the other teams didn’t fair much better.
When it was all said and done TBT walked out of the LAN without winning a single prize, but we had a great time and vowed to make a return to Duct Tape glory at the next MillionManLan in July.
Posted Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 6:09 PMNo Comments
