OOC

[captainankh]

The rest of that day consisted of getting completely wasted on 42 below (vodka for those not in the know) and going for a walk with a mate. We ended up at the airport, and stole some signs. Then we walked home. So now I have a big sign saying 'CHRISTCHURCH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. NO PARKING' in my room.

Isn't about time that Gerald posted in Hell? From memory I asked to be filled in on various details that my character doesn't know. I'm not sure how this is going to work, maybe I'll just add a super metabolism. I mean, I was supposed to be near death, and now I'm fine (more-or-less). And if bad guys show up I want to be able to at least have a go at shooting them.
It always works in the movies...

[arcticgal]

Some other 'non-regulars' and I would quite like to visit the next LAN, if we are invited and it isn't on a school day.

[captainankh]

On the subject of LANs...

Universities (and halls in particular) have at their disposal an uber-network. Essentially, you show up with your computer, there's a network port in your room (separate to the phone line). You pay about 20 bucks a term for access to all networks. The uni has a satellite uplink to the net, so it's super-fast. And the hall networks are the holy grail of file sharing.

So as soon as somebody puts something on the network, everyone has instantaneous access to it. Forget about overnight downloads, you can get a DivX movie in a matter of minutes.

And of course there's the games. If you like Halo, you'll probably enjoy living in a hall.

[sheizus]

It probably is my turn. Sorry guys, I forgot for a while.

Here's something I wrote a little while back and had some trouble with. It's slightly changed from its original incarnation (this afternoon's ramblings). Some names changed, some bits left out.
Note - I did a preview, it could be huge. You don't have to read any of it.

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Chris, your livejournal only allows replies of under 4300 words, and apparently mine was 9395. Also, I'm supposed to confirm I'm a human by typing out some letters and numbers. I'm just posting it here instead.

Who can I get the Zim from? Whiu? It's pretty good.
Also, not having a quake awards LAN report is like having a pizza with no pepperoni. The Muss giveth, and the Muss taketh away. So, from my perspective, this is how it went: (Format isn't too well sorted out. Bear with me. Also, feel free to fill in the details I missed.)


Vanilla QW: The game was absolutely frantic. We played on modified DM2 and E1M2 levels, and a little on DM3 when there weren't as many people. That turned out to be a backwards decision. DM3 is big. The others were crazy - Not enough room, or too many people. The fact that we didn't turn off weapons staying where they were when we picked them up didn't help, either. People got to the spawn points of the RL (I think we all remembered how to find it in the end and there would be about three people having a scrap waiting for it to respawn.
Altogether Damien ripped up here. Score about 110 to closest person, Clarke on 60. I was a bit lower on 50 something. Any clarifications on this are welcome.

TF Dueling: Before we started up, Chris reported a win over Stefan 10 - 9. There were some minor complaints of a score limit not being set earlier, along with electrocution and bees in the face. I think Stefan may have bent the rules of shotgun, or something. Chris beat me late in the lan, so he took the title on this one. In games from here forth, score limits will be substantially higher to get better long term measures, though this shouldn't change anything too much. Also, we could have some warmup sessions before getting into the scoring.

XPRESS2, or possibly 3: Joel decided to play scout. Joel decided he like concs. People complained a bit. Damien did his usual run as sniper, and lamented the fact that there was something preventing shooting across from one deck to the other. Clarke also had a go at sniping on my team, with similarly good results. Someone placed an sg up on a ramp in the other base, and it killed a scout or two. I went hwguy for a fair bit, and sat on a hill gunning people down for the most part. Between Clarke and myself we didn't let too many through, and I'm quite proud of that. I had a go at the offense too, and that seemed to work alright every now and then. I think HW has so much armour that he can take a beating bunnying there and get boosted home by a sniper. Chris, of course, decided that xpress would be the perfect place to rj and gren jump all over the place. He made it sometimes.

VIP: Chris decided to protest against playing on Hunted, so we did VIP instead. It was a completely different game. Clarke and I went as the Scorpions (assassins), Damien and someone else went as bodyguards, and Chris went President (modified spy). I think. Clarke and I swapped between hwguy and demoman a bit, and it worked a bit. There were some nice little ledge thingies that were quite useful to sit on (in the dark, no less), and fire off some grenades and the assault cannon. If pipes bounced down hills the demoman would have been of more use, but we didn't do too badly. The scoring on that map is b0rked, so it made it look like Clarke and I caned, when we let a few too many president caps through. I'd like to think we broke about even on that one.

Soccer13: This map was messed up. I complained too much here. With even teams it worked fine, but 3 against 2 left us with huge score differences. We decided to give it a go with scouts only, and that worked a bit better. We tried no shooting, and the concs came into play. Then the axes. Then the guns. Then the hwguys turned up. Things didn't go so well after that.

Realm: This map was interesting, and it was here the snipers really shone. Scouts has a go at going around every which way, and tht didn't work so well. Damien was with Chris again, and Clarke with me. There may have been more people. It was basically an attack and defense game, and for the most part Damien sat up top somewhere and took people out, and Chris took the rest as soldier. I got through with low health a couple of times as HW, and found a lift that allowed me to bypass a defender or two on the way back eventually. As scout I got pretty ripped. The flag got trapped in between the bases a bit at one time, and with Chris sitting on it it went nowhere for about ten minutes. That was insane. Damien got bored I think, and came through for a couple of caps when we weren't looking.

Dkeep: Some more attack and defense, only nobody tried to cap. Chris was on my team, as a soldier. I was a medic. Clarke and Whiu were on the other team, as demomen, engineers, hw guys.. I think someone was on random for a while. I got set on fire once, and there were too many spy grenades at one time too. That was among my favourite maps. Sentry guns did their jobs for a bit (but not too long, thankfully), and there was some nice teamwork coming out. Pipe traps with the hw sitting around the corner. Medics healing people. Spy grenades finally dissipating, and the hw sitting there to clear out the people coming around the corner. I practiced some concing across the slime between the bases, and got a nice one over a pipe trap that blew up a few seconds too late. Of course, my teammate rushed over just after that too, for backup. Teamwork.
Nail grenades didn't seem to do too much when I used them, but others may have had more luck. People got into spawn rooms and died a bit. Sentry guns were put in spawn rooms, and actually got some kills.

MegaTF: We played Demoz, I think. Once the binds were sorted it worked ok. The 20mm cannon wasn't what I expected, but that wasn't such a surprise. If I'm on defense I think I'd use the Assault cannon instead anyway. The airscouts were good, but I wasn't usually in the big scrap areas in this one, and I didn't see what happened too much. For the most part I prefer regular TF as a game, but if I want a quick, fun game Mega wouldn't be bad.
I capped the flag without turning as the hwguy. Someone killed me before I got back to base the second time I tried it. I got a nice rocket kill as soldier on that one too.

Mini32s: Awesome, as usual. People complain a bit, but we all had fun, I think. Engineers had a go, the pyros came in every now and then, but for the most part the play revolved around the scouts and soldiers, I think. HW guys were big at times too. Chris (I think) found the quad, and things didn't work quite as well, but still good. I really enjoyed myself as a demoman, and killed a large number of scouts. They eventually got the flag down to the lava grate, so we shot the button. Someone would jump into the lava, and die. The flag invariably jumped out at this point, and the grate would close beside it. More pipes went down, and we kept them from capping for another while. We didn't manage to kill them before they reached thae flag, though, so they didn't give it a chance to return to its original place. Perhaps doing this as a heavier class would have been more effective, though I don't know what sort of defenses we had outside.

We played some 2fort, but I don't remember much of it. No Well. No Border. I don't think we got into the Bam and NMTrees. We had a little attack and defense on Z7, and we all just stayed in the room outside the flag place and tried to think up the most innovative places to put sentry guns.

Class-wise I'm not too sure I'm a good judge. I think Chris took Soldier. I was probably the only person who played medic to any great degree, and that might be what put the people who chose randompc up on the spy and pyro rankings too. Clarke or I might get demo, him for dkeep and me for mini32s. I think him, though. Damien took the sniper again, I don't know about hwguy. There were too many lemming scouts to name, and I couldn't say who was the engineer of the day either.

Chris did well at AvP. Once the controls were all sorted (a menu for each class? Come on, people), we all got into a game of some sort of Hold Off The Aliens, or something, which was interesting. It was rather dark, and I kept shooting at Clarke, who was a Predator. There were big explosions that didn't seem to hurt me. I didn't understand at all, but the aliens looked cool when they died. Overall that was fun.

Doom didn't work. People were sad.

Again, I leeched less than I should have. I got an album, which is more than last time. I just realised that it is all .wma files, and I'm sad. Damien was a popular person to leech off of this time, and Clarke got all of everyone's media. 19 gigs or something, from memory, and a good thing we didn't delve into our burnt cds.
A server program we were running for quake kept squishing us in doors and burning us on lifts, so we changed server programs and fixed the problem. Well, not actually burning. Ping on the dedicated server was significantly better than what we had going last time, and everyone was able to get into the quake. Damien couldn't get into AvP, and there were issues with Need For Speed. The switch made sparks when we plugged it in. When I woke up in the morning the pizza was all gone, but there was a packet of chips left when everyone was gone. I think they were trying to placate my rage, or something.

Next lan in the holidays, I should think. I don't know where, or when exactly, but I'm gone for Saturday - Saturday of the second week.


Perhaps I should have put all of this on Incident..
meso

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Lans would be open to newcomers, I should think, Nora. Feel free to join in next time.
About next time - it is the holidays one, and this one was pretty last minute. Should we think about keeping a couple of days free? They tend to fill up pretty quickly around then.

[arcticgal]

Easter is probably out for everyone. From the sound of it, most of the newcomers and I would go insane if we had a whole day of computer games. Not to mention the 'constant losing' factor. So we are interested, but one probably couldn't count on a whole days' worth of enthusiasm.

<font color="#333366" size="1">[ March 15, 2004 02:34 AM: Message edited by: Nora Fraser ]</font>

[captainankh]

These sorts of things tend to be as much about the pizza and spaghetti, though the spag is usually a jumble of wires resulting from everyone plugging stuff into other stuff. Pizza is a well known form of nutrition, defining it's own food group.

It's still funny just to watch. I was going to say something else but completely forgot what it was.

...

Yep, completely blank. Damn.

[dragonflynz]

Watching a TF match when everyone is using headphones (as opposed to speakers) is surreal. It goes:

Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
"Holy F**K, did you SEE THAT?"
"ohmygod, cover me!"
"I'm going in!"
Silence.
Silence.

[captainankh]

Remember when this was a board about role-playing?

[dragonflynz]

Yes. We didn't like it, so we deleted all the posts and started again.

[meinside]

It is in the best interest that the one they call frank to go to the board that is the kamo high school board for sea needs to speak with him over important matters that only Sea shall speak of