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Another four-day computer gaming pilgrimage to Louisville is in the books. It was a hectic run-up to this event – with frantically working on the DTS II (see DuctTapeServer.com) for several nights, and then dealing with some last minute car trouble. But it all fell into place and we rolled into the event around 1:00 on Thursday. Another large Team Boom Tape crew met up this time, 8 of us, not to mention our three ‘associate members’ who helped out with the Team Fortress 2 tournament.

Thursday is always the warm up day of sorts – getting set up, making the rounds and saying hello, and of course getting the first several hours of gaming on. There were no tournaments on Thursday so most of our attention (at least for those of us who don’t WOW) was on warming up for Friday’s TF2 tourney. At most times throughout the event there were at least 2 local TF2 servers running, and with the great network, my in-game ping was 5 or less..you can’t beat that! I think it was about 5am when I crashed out for about three hours.

Friday was a really crazy day. The roll call and bracket seeding for the TF2 5v5 tourney came around noon. There were ten teams and we drew an opening bye, but our first round match up was a tough one against Call For Blood’s “B” team, “Team Fuzzy Pants”. CFB is a well seasoned gaming group mostly from the East coast. They have been to several previous MMLs, but we never really crossed paths before. Our match was played on the Well map, first team to four points (or the highest score after 40 minutes) wins, with a point being a set of captures all the way across.

This map was our downfall in the third round of our previous tournament. In that loss, the other team got off to a fast start and did an amazing job of defensive turtling in their base to keep us from catching up. This time around we had some new ideas for getting off to a quick start. Sure enough, we rushed hard and scored the first point pretty impressively. Fuzzy Pants switched to tougher classes on the second push and withstood the rush and went on to score two straight points. We adjusted our attack, and evened the score at 2-2. At that point our team was pretty sure a server restart was imminent, let up our guard a little, and before we knew it Fuzzy Pants sneaked out another point. After the restart, Fuzzy Pants got conservative and dropped back on D, content to ride their one point lead into the time limit. With about a minute thirty remaining, we knew we had time for just one good push. We abandoned defense and all attacked the control points. While my teammates were gaining control of the third and forth CPs I was sneaking into the back base to be in position for the final CP. Luckily our guys got control over the forth CP and I hopped down from hiding on the second floor and captured the last remaining CP with only 8 seconds left to send the round into overtime. IT. WAS. AWESOME.

Fuzzy Pants regrouped and went on to win the sudden death point and knocked us out of the tournament, but it was still an adrenaline-filled blast that had us shaking for an hour afterward. The tournament director, Francopoli, said “[it was] one of the most exciting matches ever! For the first time in MML history, a team tournament went into overtime!” The championship came down to CFB’s other team and another polished team, Black Ops Squad, with BOS taking the title.

Later that night I tried my luck at the Wii Bowling tournament. They had a Wii connected to a projector aimed at a wall creating the biggest screen I’ve ever played anything on (and that’s saying something). Everyone bowled in a qualifying round and the top four scores moved on to the finals. Unfortunately, my typical score of 139 didn’t make the top four and I was knocked out of another event.

As if that wasn’t enough, Friday also included the ritualistic Duct Tape Wars! This year’s challenge was Forth of July inspired and pretty specific. We were tasked to build a rocket (as in a shaft with fins) that gets launched when you step on a bag of air of some sort. The rocket which sores the highest wins. We were given our single roll of tape and a hour and a half. This year’s team included the usual suspects (Gratch, Xomox, MinionX, and myself) plus some new extra hands (Zenny, Jouster, and Whipple). Heck, I even spent a few minutes on the phone with Boom validating our ideas. In some cases having too many people could really cause a meltdown, but it wasn’t a problem this time. Everyone was really good about jumping in when needed or stepping out when they weren’t. We spent a good 15-20 minutes planning and went to work. Some worked on the bag, others worked on the launch tube and rocket. In our usual form we worked right up until the last second.

Our biggest fear in building the thing was that upon stomping on the bag to launch the rocket, there’d be a blowout somewhere. Our second fear was that our bag/bellow was a little undersized and may not provide enough air for a remarkable flight. Turns out neither was a problem, but we did have a major downfall: the launch tube leading from the bag to the rocket was rather undersized. This prevented the air from leaving the bag as quickly as stomping would allow. The effect was a mediocre burst of air (something between a blast and slow leak) and worse yet, the bag became an ankle rolling apparatus. Xomox got the worst of it, but on one attempt it knocked Zenny off his feet, too. The result was a very par-for-the-course performance, maybe hitting 20 feet on it’s best attempt. The group TBC (from Wisconsin) crushed everyone as their better proportioned device could repeatedly launch their rocket into the very high ceiling.

Saturday was little more laid back and involved a little bit of everything. In addition to some more TF2, we played some matches of the new Trackmania, some of our respective MMO’s (LOTRO for me, WOW for everyone else), some Rock Band, and a few hours of Age of Empires III. I also took part in the Texas Hold’em tournament, which is a Lanwar trandition but my first time trying it. I only had one bunch of good cards (trip 7′s, beating two people with top pairs), and eventually the growing blinds drained me until finally my desperation all-in was beat by four 10′s! I finished that tournament 11th out of 36. Let’s hope I have better luck this weekend! The Case Mod contest was also held Saturday night. Out of around a dozen entries, Duct Tape Server II placed second, losing only to the sweet ass, remote controlled, R2D2 server.

Last but not least, Saturday was also the night for our Armagetron tournament. At about 3 in the morning we made an announcement and got the players (8 of them) into the server and started the twitch fest. Somehow I avoided getting knocked out of the first round like last time, and progressed into round 2 against Bobomo and two TBC guys. After another 15 matches, the finals came down one member from each clan, Dex from TBC and me from TBT. I got off to an early lead, but after a few more runs Dex started catching back up. On the 15th and final match I was up by one – but with the win in my grasp I twitched into his trial and sent us to an extra overtime round. This time I trapped him and took the title. Given that TBC won the Armagetron trophy last year and they blew us away in Duct Tape Wars this year, it seems we might have a nice rivalry on our hands.

After crashing from about 7 to 9, Sunday came altogether too soon. We all played a few more games, grabbed a few more files, and started packing up a little after 1:00. I even got in one more tournament, a last minute Trackmania tourney. Not being a game I play a lot, though, I made a first round exit. By 3:00 we were packed, the lights had come up, and the tables had come down. It was another awesome event, smaller than most MMLs (I think this one had maybe 450 attendees), but there was little to complain about. Team Boom Tape didn’t sail to many wins this time, but we made several impressions and still scored some loot (below). I friended up the CFB folks and will be playing with (and against) them online and I definitely look forward to our next match ups with TBC.

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!

Another MillionMan is in the books and, whew, I’m exhausted (even two days later). It was another great time, and impossible to summarize in a reasonable blog entry, but here are some highlights:

World Series of Video Games

For the second year, the Million Man BYOPC was joined by the pro tournaments hosted by WSVG. If “professional” and “video games” sound strange together, it shouldn’t, the WSVG handed out $90k at this event alone. Gamers from around the world (many have corporate sponsorships) actually follow the WSVG (and similar) circuits to try to claim their share of prize money. Then there’s the Lan party side – the weekend warriors who bring their rig to have fun for four continuous days. Some gamers participate in both, others stick to one side of the fence or the other. The great thing about the pro tournaments is that it’s still an open competition – anyone can play, in hopes of staging a great David v Goliath win, or at least have some humiliating fun. See my MillionMan blog entry from 2 years ago for that perspective :)

There were a bunch of vendor booths in the WSVG area, and although they were stingy with the swag this year, they were showing off some cool stuff. Intel (the primary sponsor of the event) had a playable preview of Crysis running, along with a bunch of released games running on high end hardware. Over at the Nvidia booth I got to play some games on a 30″ Dell LCD driven by twin 8800GTX in SLI.

Duct Tape Server

Our server not only survived the drive and made it to server row, but performed flawlessly throughout the four days. It got a lot of looks, quite a few kudos, and definitely some laughs. The most tense moment came in the morning of the last day when an announcement came over the PA that we needed to attend to our server. Upon walking up, you could hear this awful buzzing sound. Expecting the worst, I felt the case (like you do to a door when a house is on fire) and opened her up. Turns out the intake fan had slipped a little and the blades were contacting some loose tape. Easiest repair ever – just taped it back into place.

Duct Tape Wars

Team Boom Tape won our third consecutive contest – though this one was a tie. The task this time was to build a pendulum. The team’s who creation oscillates longest wins. Ground rules were the same as usual: one hour, one roll of tape (but not the roll itself), and any spit or ink you care to use. Our five person team spent about 10 minutes planning, and every second of the remaining hour building. By the end, we had used every bit of tape from the roll. Our structure consisted of a pyramid frame supporting a braided duct tape “rope” attached to a cylindrical weight of rolled layers.

It turned out however the competition planners didn’t have a great means to actually judge it. They tried counting oscillations, which soon proved to take WAY too long to repeat for each contraption. Then they tried setting all pendulums in motion at once and waited for a final one to remain swinging. After waiting several minutes into this approach, only two remained moving – ours was one. As the oscillations became smaller, it became clear that ‘stopped’ would be pretty subjective and that either pendulum may continue moving very minutely for an hour or more. So the staff offered both of our teams a tie and gave all of us prizes for the win. Boom Tape in front, co-winner is behind us to the right:

Guitar Hero Tourney

The WSVG Guitar Hero tournament was awesome. Unlike most gaming tournaments where skill and strategy might be tough to discern for non-players, GH (basically a video game version of playing air guitar) drawls a large crowd and everyone can pretty much tell when you mess up. I hardly have played so I wasn’t involved, but Minion X and Prof Xomox mustered the guts and tried it. The competition (which lasted several days) was fierce. Out of 31 first round competitors Minion X managed to pull in 22nd place and Xomox brought up the bottom of the pack in 27th.

Command & Conquer 3 Tourney

This was a non-pro 2v2 single elimination tournament. Since no one else in our group is into C&C;, I paired up on the spot with a gamer I met on the forums a couple weeks back. Before the tournament we played a couple practice games to work on a cooperative strategy, and then we were set. Or so we thought. Ten minutes into the match my partner, Kore, was getting pounded. By the time I helped him fend off the onslaught, both opponents sent in a higher tech wave and smashed him, and then me pretty convincingly. I was a good strategy on their part; it got me divert from building units to building defensive structures at his base, which left me with a relatively small low-tech army. The game was a blast though much due to my teenage partner’s alternating trash-talking and panicked cries over the VOIP. “Oh yeah, you want some of that, oh, come get it”, then “Holy crap, I’m getting swallowed f-ing alive over here!!!”

Other Gaming

A lot of misc gaming filled the days, including BF2, Unreal 2k4, Serious Sam II, and a little Quake 4. Our group also spent hours getting into Supreme Commander for the first time. That game is very cool, and very different from C&C3.; Where C&C; matches may last 20-40 minutes, SC games can last for hours!

Away from the CPU

As usual the MML staff had some nice physical activities available for when you actually wanted to burn a calorie or two. I enjoyed the joust and basketball – usually late at night to get my blood going again. Gratch was dominating in a joust tournament until things went haywire:

And he and Xomox tried to sumo one another for a while:

Another bit of amusement was grilling out in a makeshift shelter during a heavy rain and setting sun. Boom did a great job feeding the whole crew.

Prizes

Last year at MML I won a sweet gaming chair and a headset together worth a couple hundred bucks. This year the luck continued…between the Duct Tape Wars win and being drawn in a trivia contest I came back with high end Fatal1ty keyboard, mouse, and CPU cooler (worth a combined $160 at least). Not that I look to make money from attending, but lately going to these events is covering the $65 registration fee a couple times over!

Summary

It was another awesome event. This MML seemed to fly by significantly faster than the others for some reason. I met some cool new people, played some cool new games, decreased my free hard drive space by about 90 gig, and again was fascinated by the freakishly-good pros. If you’re reading this, game, and have never been – you really should start making plans for next June.

This past weekend was Lanwar 33 – about 28 straight hours of gaming goodness. It was a great time! Joe, Rob, Cassie and I make it to this one. We haven’t been to Lan since MML5 last summer so we were definitely due. There were probably about 250 gamers at this one, so even though it’s a mini it’s still a big setup.

This was Cassie’s first Lan and her proud Pop got to introduce her to all things uber-geek.

She of course got her traditional initiation.

Team Boom Tape was back (sans JBoom) to field a Duct Tape Wars team to defend our MML5 title. The challenge this time was to construct a boat (limited to the size of a box they had (about 11″x7″x7″) which would be placed in a tub of water and gradually loaded with poker chips. Once your boat sinks to the bottom you’re out. The boat with the highest chip count before submerging wins. Team Boom Tape did not disappoint. Our “box” handled 368 poker chips before giving into the 9.3 pound load. The next closet competitor sank to the bottom with 342 – making for a pretty close match. For our win we were given a case of Bawls. Watch out for the next Lan where Team Boom Tape will be going for the 3-peat.

Gaming was good. Lots of UT2k4 (DM and ONS) this time :) BF2142 had action, but not BF2. We had some good fun with Trackmania and some silly rounds of Armagetron. Leaching was pretty good (besides some flaky servers); I got about 75GB of goodies. Add to that a constant stream of hot food and snacks at a reasonable price and none of the eating and sleeping rules of MML and overall it was a great event.