16^th October 2004

Event

LAN Party

Location

Ant's Place

Time

10am to 12pm

Attendance

Ant, Matt, Rich, Dave, Chris, Parm and Paul

Games

NB Nobody made notes so the map list is incomplete.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Onslaught – Artic Stronghold, Red Planet

Last Man Standing - Inferno

Rainbow Six 3 - Raven Shield

Terrorist Hunt – Persido, Penthouse, Island Estate

Survival - Training

Bomb - Presido

Pilot - Presido

Star Wars Battlefront

To get the day started the usual egg and/or bacon rolls were served to all but Rich who was fasting, although he didn't seem that fast in the games ; o )

As perhaps a portent to the problems that where to plague the day Parm's PC needed to be completely rebuilt thanks to the swarms of evil spyware apps that were infecting his feisty Compaq. A trip to PC world was required when it was discovered that Matt had forgotten to bring the vga cable for the flat screen he was loaning Parm for the day. Paul had sold Dave his GeForce 5700 Ultra after upgrading his own PC to a GeForce 5950 Ultra. Due to the lack of techies in the group (Matt was building Parm's PC and Ant was out getting the vga cable) we encouraged Paul to help Dave install it.

A quick test of the card showed that it wasn't running as fast as it should be. Installing the latest drivers showed that the card was not getting enough power. Opening the case up Dave's PC indeed pretty full with 2 hard drives and two optical drives. It was pointed out by Matt however that Paul had neglected to connect a Molex to the card! Unfortunately thanks to the aforementioned amount of devices in Dave's PC he didn't have any spare Molex power cables. Another trip to PC World for a Y splitter was in order.

Adding Power

After over 3 hours of PC maintenance we were ready to kick off with some games and kick off we did. A team game of Onslaught in UT04 got us all fired up, and blown up :) The AI was no match for our vented frustration and the power cores fell to our firepower in quick succession. Feeling warmed up it was time for the challenge of Raven Shield. The game's softly softly approach is wasted on us as our plan always seems to be charge in and get shot. Taking out the last few terrorists on the Penthouse map with the two remaining members of our team, Jornce and Matt, did not bode well. Presido being too much for us we decided to switch to some vs. matches.

The Welsh double team of Rich and Jornce were joined by Matt to form the Green team. With Ant, Chris and Dave and Parm forming the Red team. First up was some Bomb games on the Presido map. Matt had a reoccurring issue where he couldn't move so the already out numbered Welsh boys had a bigger hill to climb. The team balanced seemed to be about right given the closeness of the results however the Greens were able to force the Reds into submission over the play of three matches.

Paul and Christopher managed to get 5 minutes to play Command and Conquer while everyone else was getting food, well that's all Paul needed to beat Christopher, what can I say, after watching Christopher play this for hours on end, I thought he would have a chance at beating Paul at this one, maybe it was to do with Paul knowing Zero Hour a lot more, We'll just have to see next time.

At 8 minutes past 6 Rich's fast ended and he proceeded to eat everything in the room as fast as he could, maybe that's why they call it fasting. The pizza choice split into 2 camps with the Dominos and the Asda both begin requested. The Dominos Party managed to order, pick-up and eat their Pizzas before the Asda party had even got back with theirs. On the plus side, Matt did get a great bargain in breakfast cereal :)

Bellies full it was time to head to a galaxy far far away to fight off some rebel scum. Ant's machine had a firewall installed on it's network device which stopped him seeing other game sessions so sat out the first few games. Being able to switch sides every time you die is not a good idea with a group of such cut throats. No one really knows who won what but Parm and Matt, our resident mouse masters headed the leader boards. A new game to the group it will take some time to get used to the game play and weapons but I think it will find its place in the regular line up. It is a lot slower paced than Unreal, but not stealthy like Raven Shield, which for some of us could be an advantage as we are getting on a bit.

What better way to round off the day than with the way we started it. A request from the last event was that more deathmatches were played this time and boy was that request answered. Parm, as ever, proved that he truly is top of the heap during the last man standing games. The ability in the group is now so close that in many games the top three could were only spread by one frag. Chris a newcomer to the group more than proved his merit by appearing near the top on several times. Look out for his PC in the kit section soon.