1. a random, steady, unvarying, electronically produced sound
2. nerdy notes from suburbia
Some numbers:
It’s been fun to see pictures of my case make their way online following the event. Glad to see people found it photo worthy. Here are some taken without my knowledge:
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And so we come to the final day. We got a fair amount of sleep this morning, from 5am to 9, so that was a nice rest before driving back later today. All the BYOCers gradually made their exit, mostly from noon and on.
All the pro tourneys wrapped up today. Fatal1ty finished in 4th place in the Quake 4 tourney, but his teammate (and understudy in a sense), Stermy, avenged him by beating LoSt-CaUsE in the finals. I didn’t stay to watch the final matches but I saw his matches against socrates_ (who finished third) and he really tore him up. Stermy’s aim and anticipation is awesome making him deadly with Quake’s rail gun.
Earlier in the day, I ran into Stermy in the hall and congratulated on a great tourney thus far. Young kid at only 19 or 20. He said after this weekend, he’d be following the rest of the WSVG tour – Dallas, then Brazil, China, the UK, etc. Last year, between the CPL tour and some other events he said he made about $150k. Amazing.
Got a little more UT2k4 in this morning along my last couple GB of downloads.
Also, the staff recoginized all the “fun event” winners in the BYOC area. Team Boom Tape got many props from Francopoli on our winning Duct Tape War device. He said it was one of the most impressive Duct Tape creations he’d seen through all the past events. For our trouble we each recieved a nice Creative Labs headset.
There was also a raffle for a BOOM gaming chair among all the BYOC event winners, which somehow I managed to win! It’s pretty sweet with four built-in speakers and a ‘kicker’ for vibration. Too bad the basement’s not done.
We packed up around 3 or 4 and headed home. It was an awesome four days without a doubt. Look for another wrap up post next.
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Things only got more hectic as the weekend went on, so I have to finish my blogging post-event.
Going into Saturday I got another 2 hours of sleep (6-8am). There was just too much going on today to get much sleep. The second round of the BF2 tourney started at 4pm and matched us up against the tough Lazy Ops Squad. Despite some tough fighting we dropped two rounds in a row to them, eliminating us from the bracket. In the first round we failed to control the chopper checkpoints and they capalized on their airpower. The second match was much closer, we generally were even on armor and airpower, but we just couldn’t hold a majority of the checkpoints throughout the match. I was leading scorer on our team in both rounds. Lazy Ops continued to roll through their next round and eventually lost in the finals. See a wrap up article here: http://www.ampedesports.com/news/2442.
In other news, MinionX, Gratch, JBoom, Keeperman, and I formed a team (Boom Tape) and competed in the traditional Lanwar competition, Duct Tape Wars. The gist of the event is for each team to construct some device (which varies every event) from only a single roll of duct tape. (Technically you can also use the ink from a pen and saliva, but that’s it). The contraption that performs best wins. This event’s challenge was to contruct a device to shroud an egg to allow it to survive drops of increasing heights. A particularly hard requirement was that upon landing, the egg had to be in plain sight and removed without touching any duct tape. JBoom and I went back and forth in a typical engineering debate, refining our concept, while apparently annoying everyone else (particularly Joe). A few sketches later and we were off and building.
After the alotted 2 hours, we had constructed a landing cone, with a padded egg box inside. After drops from increasing heights (up to 27′), ours and one other were the only ones not to break the egg. As a tie breaker they decided to throw each device to the ground rather than a simple drop. Our design was unphased and actually slowed during the decent leaving us the clear winner. Lanwar head-honcho Burden wanted no egg left unbroken and was convinced that our cone would fail if it were thrown hard enough. No luck. Finally, the crowd talked him into throwing it from 27′ horizontally like a fresbie. The cone coasted, settled softly, and the egg came loose and slowly rolled out. That one gave us a tiny crack, but the crowd was amazed.
Also on Satudrday they held the Miss WSVG contest…a truly silly beauty pagent. But at least the interview questions were themed around gaming and weeded out the non-gamer models. After that was the less formal, and scary, Mr WSVG contest – something the female clans (Frag dolls and PMS) threw together to give some balance.
More hours of UT2k4, Serious Sam 2, and Trackmania Nations. In the wee hours of the morning we fired up a Armagetron game to which more and more people joined. It was 3 or 4 am when we had around 10 players in. MinionX kept rotating the server settings to keep everyone on their toes. Gratch had never seen the game before, but slaughtered us! Great fun!
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Got about 2 hours of shut eye last night, and I’m up even later tonight (5:30am now). I competed in two tournaments today: the first was a silly ~100-person version of rock-paper-scissors. I made it into the top twelve, but then my luck turned. Congrats to Rob for making top six and landing a free PC game.
Second tourney was BF2. It’s set up as best of 3 between two teams of 9. I’m playing with Team WONK. About four of the guys are from Chicago (three below) and play together regularly; the rest of us were drafted on the team. We played some practice rounds and discussed strategy and everyone has a clearly defined role. After losing the first round 10-0 (that’s a close game in BF terms), we went on to win the next two ~50-0. Kick ass! I held up my end – second in scoring for both wins. Next round is tommorrow (later today) at 4pm. See an article on the first round here: http://www.ampedesports.com/news/2436.
Unfortunately with eveything else going on I had to miss the 1v1 Starcraft tourney and the Texas Hold’em tourney. There is a TON going on here!
A new addition this year is the BYOX section. Gamers bring their Xbox or Xbox360 and hook up to provided TVs. The rows of big-ass TVs are pretty impressive.
Hard drive is digesting lots of yummy nuggets…getting full.
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