LAN Party

This is a week ago now, but I forgot to blog about taking the boys to their first LAN party. For those of you that don't even know what I am talking about, LAN = Local Area Network. So what we do for these parties is rent out a big meeting room in a hotel, bring a big network switch and we all bring out computers and set them up in the same room so we can play networked games locally without the internet. Its a lot of fun and although we don't do it as often as we used to, its always a blast.

This time the boys were with me for the week and so they got their first opportunity to attend one of these events. It was a big undertaking this time. Normally its just me and my computer gear. This time it was 3 people, 3 entire computer setups, and then my xbox 360 setup and all the rock band stuff as well. It was quite a carload.

It took us about 45 minutes to set everything up when we got to the hotel. Gabe's computer unfortunately is old enough that he couldn't run a lot of the games we were playing and so he ended up playing Fable on the xbox quite a bit, which he loved as it was hooked up to a projector and was huge on the wall. Nothing like gaming on a 100" screen.

The rest of us played a mix of games including Call of Duty 4, WC3: DotA, Spore, and of course some Rock Band 2. We actually had two RB2 setups and two projectors. Our original plan was to do a battle of the bands. What we found out, much to our dissapointment, is that there is no way to challenge a specific band and thus sync up the songs. When RB2 announced a battle of the bands mode, we just assumed that you were going to be able to pick someone on your friends list or out on the xbox live service in general to compete against, but that is not actually the case. You can do challenges where your score gets pitted against others on your friends list that have done the same challenge as well as the internet as a whole. But there is no way to challenge a specific friend and his band to compete against yours. Dissapointing.

What we did try was to pick a song, and sync the start so we could do it anyway. This turned out to be quite a clusterfuck. The timing was off due to load times and when people selected their difficulty.. so one was always a few seconds off. This would have been fine had we been in different rooms, but we were about 15 feet from each other. Which means it was near impossible to try and stick with the rythym of your song and not get distracted by the other one playing. We tried it through a few songs before we gave up.

Overall though it was a fun time for all. We had about 15 people there at one point, with people coming and going as their schedule allowed. The boys and I showed up around 10.. and left around 10 at night so we put in a full day of gaming and pizza. The boys really enjoyed themselves and want to go to the next one. I don't think they were too emotionally scarred by some of the things shouted during intense gunfights in CoD4. Or at least they are clever enough to deny even hearing anything questionable. ;)