LAN Party V

The fifth monthly LAN Party was largely a success. We had a great turnout with 9 guys (myself, Dave, Jeremy, Zach, Noah, Urn, Daniel, Bob and Josh). We also had 10 computers and a ton of monitors. I was going to take some statistics like “30 miles of ethernet, 1200 feet of power cables, 80 Gajillion watts of power, 700,000 square pixels of desktop real-estate, etc.), but the guys were making fun of me, so I gave that up.

I brought three computers, my regular machine, as well as my old computer and Annie’s machine, both of which are well past their gaming primes, but still capable of pumping out some old stand-bys like Quake III. They were completely unable to handle Battlefield 1942, though, until Dave though of taking his Radeon 9200 out of his extra box (which wasn’t working) and plugging it into one of my machines, which worked great.

As a result, I’ve ordered two Radion 9600 cards, which are down to $60 each on newegg, and they’ll be installed in time for LAN Party VI next weekend. After the party, I stuck around for a few hours and formatted the two older boxes. I put a clean copy of XP Pro on Annie’s box, giving her a stable and up-to-date OS for once, and for fun I put XP media center on the other. Dave has a media center box, and it looked like a lot of fun. Once I got the new card in, and hooked up the remote control, it’s pretty cool. The remote lets you do just about everything through media center, but if you want to, you can also use normal windows programs, like iTunes or Battlefield 1942, so it will serve a double function as a media machine in my living room, and a gaming box at LAN parties.

At the LAN Party, Dave and I tried to introduce everyone to Battlefield 1942, which we had dorked around with a bit and fallen in love with. Everyone seemed interested, but as usual, it took us an hour just to get it installed everywhere and get everyone initiated and into a game, and then everyone was complaining the whole time because they weren’t used to controlling vehicles. We didn’t play much after that, but now that my two old boxes can run it, we’ll definitely be giving it another try, because the game is excellent.

After that, we played some Worms World Party, and I was shocked to find out that Urn had never played any of the Worms games. He tried to get himself up to speed by playing the tutorial missions, but when I came over to find out why he was bellyaching about the game, I found out that the training missions suck, and have nothing really to do with the real game. So I dumped him into a quick match against me, and he quickly saw the light. Then we managed to get two full four-person games going at once, and a good time was had by all.

After that, we played some Urban Terror and Quake III, and agreed that we should play some Half-Life multi-player next time around.

This next LAN Party, Sean will be here, so we should have even more fun. And the time after that, we’re having an “analog” LAN Party, where we’re going to play board games all day (already on the agenda: Cranium, Risk, and Zombies!).

Oh, take a look at the other photos I posted over in my photo gallery. In one, you can see the gigantic 20+ inch monitor that Bob gave to Josh (it’s a hulking monstrosity of an engineering monitor from 15 years ago that cost several thousand dollars at the time), and in the other you can see the peg rack that one of the guys made for all of his games. Believe it or not, they’re in alphabetical order, and it’s got hooks on it so that he can hang the whole thing on his wall.