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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.

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.

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!