Another MillionMan is in the books and, whew, I’m exhausted (even two days later). It was another great time, and impossible to summarize in a reasonable blog entry, but here are some highlights:
World Series of Video Games
For the second year, the Million Man BYOPC was joined by the pro tournaments hosted by WSVG. If “professional” and “video games” sound strange together, it shouldn’t, the WSVG handed out $90k at this event alone. Gamers from around the world (many have corporate sponsorships) actually follow the WSVG (and similar) circuits to try to claim their share of prize money. Then there’s the Lan party side – the weekend warriors who bring their rig to have fun for four continuous days. Some gamers participate in both, others stick to one side of the fence or the other. The great thing about the pro tournaments is that it’s still an open competition – anyone can play, in hopes of staging a great David v Goliath win, or at least have some humiliating fun. See my MillionMan blog entry from 2 years ago for that perspective 🙂
There were a bunch of vendor booths in the WSVG area, and although they were stingy with the swag this year, they were showing off some cool stuff. Intel (the primary sponsor of the event) had a playable preview of Crysis running, along with a bunch of released games running on high end hardware. Over at the Nvidia booth I got to play some games on a 30″ Dell LCD driven by twin 8800GTX in SLI.
Duct Tape Server
Our server not only survived the drive and made it to server row, but performed flawlessly throughout the four days. It got a lot of looks, quite a few kudos, and definitely some laughs. The most tense moment came in the morning of the last day when an announcement came over the PA that we needed to attend to our server. Upon walking up, you could hear this awful buzzing sound. Expecting the worst, I felt the case (like you do to a door when a house is on fire) and opened her up. Turns out the intake fan had slipped a little and the blades were contacting some loose tape. Easiest repair ever – just taped it back into place.
Duct Tape Wars
Team Boom Tape won our third consecutive contest – though this one was a tie. The task this time was to build a pendulum. The team’s who creation oscillates longest wins. Ground rules were the same as usual: one hour, one roll of tape (but not the roll itself), and any spit or ink you care to use. Our five person team spent about 10 minutes planning, and every second of the remaining hour building. By the end, we had used every bit of tape from the roll. Our structure consisted of a pyramid frame supporting a braided duct tape “rope” attached to a cylindrical weight of rolled layers.
It turned out however the competition planners didn’t have a great means to actually judge it. They tried counting oscillations, which soon proved to take WAY too long to repeat for each contraption. Then they tried setting all pendulums in motion at once and waited for a final one to remain swinging. After waiting several minutes into this approach, only two remained moving – ours was one. As the oscillations became smaller, it became clear that ‘stopped’ would be pretty subjective and that either pendulum may continue moving very minutely for an hour or more. So the staff offered both of our teams a tie and gave all of us prizes for the win. Boom Tape in front, co-winner is behind us to the right:
Guitar Hero Tourney
The WSVG Guitar Hero tournament was awesome. Unlike most gaming tournaments where skill and strategy might be tough to discern for non-players, GH (basically a video game version of playing air guitar) drawls a large crowd and everyone can pretty much tell when you mess up. I hardly have played so I wasn’t involved, but Minion X and Prof Xomox mustered the guts and tried it. The competition (which lasted several days) was fierce. Out of 31 first round competitors Minion X managed to pull in 22nd place and Xomox brought up the bottom of the pack in 27th.
Command & Conquer 3 Tourney
This was a non-pro 2v2 single elimination tournament. Since no one else in our group is into C&C;, I paired up on the spot with a gamer I met on the forums a couple weeks back. Before the tournament we played a couple practice games to work on a cooperative strategy, and then we were set. Or so we thought. Ten minutes into the match my partner, Kore, was getting pounded. By the time I helped him fend off the onslaught, both opponents sent in a higher tech wave and smashed him, and then me pretty convincingly. I was a good strategy on their part; it got me divert from building units to building defensive structures at his base, which left me with a relatively small low-tech army. The game was a blast though much due to my teenage partner’s alternating trash-talking and panicked cries over the VOIP. “Oh yeah, you want some of that, oh, come get it”, then “Holy crap, I’m getting swallowed f-ing alive over here!!!”
Other Gaming
A lot of misc gaming filled the days, including BF2, Unreal 2k4, Serious Sam II, and a little Quake 4. Our group also spent hours getting into Supreme Commander for the first time. That game is very cool, and very different from C&C3.; Where C&C; matches may last 20-40 minutes, SC games can last for hours!
Away from the CPU
As usual the MML staff had some nice physical activities available for when you actually wanted to burn a calorie or two. I enjoyed the joust and basketball – usually late at night to get my blood going again. Gratch was dominating in a joust tournament until things went haywire:
And he and Xomox tried to sumo one another for a while:
Another bit of amusement was grilling out in a makeshift shelter during a heavy rain and setting sun. Boom did a great job feeding the whole crew.
Prizes
Last year at MML I won a sweet gaming chair and a headset together worth a couple hundred bucks. This year the luck continued…between the Duct Tape Wars win and being drawn in a trivia contest I came back with high end Fatal1ty keyboard, mouse, and CPU cooler (worth a combined $160 at least). Not that I look to make money from attending, but lately going to these events is covering the $65 registration fee a couple times over!
Summary
It was another awesome event. This MML seemed to fly by significantly faster than the others for some reason. I met some cool new people, played some cool new games, decreased my free hard drive space by about 90 gig, and again was fascinated by the freakishly-good pros. If you’re reading this, game, and have never been – you really should start making plans for next June.
