Tag Archive | Respawn

Many LANs make light work.

Apr14

About time I got around to posting something new from the aardvark front.

It’s been a pretty busy past month in a crazy way as I elected to join some friends on part of their House of Doge LANsploration Adventure.

To begin with, last month we had eLeague hosted up in Sydney, where a whole group of us Melbournites travelled up, some by plane, others such as myself by car in a convoy.
Didn’t really know what to expect, I just knew there was no way I was going to realistically transport my desktop machine (which could in many ways have been used as a desk itself, or a seat, or even a coffee table if I drank coffee, what I’m saying is it was big.)
So I borrowed a gaming laptop from my good friend tOrN and along I went.
The main thing I did while there was play Paragon against the AI, watching the Nvidia drivers on the Venom constantly crap themselves, and the foliage flicker like crazy. Finding humans is difficult when they need to pay money to get in to early access.
I also jumped in a deathmatch of the new Unreal Tournament, where I ran around trying to kill people with the Impact Hammer. Good times.

After we got home I had a bit of time to myself doing next to nothing.

The start of this month was of course LANslide.
A much shorter journey was involved.
I’m certain I played games that weekend, and I know there was cake, prizes being launched at head-height, and doughnut shenanigans.
There was of course also the Doom closed beta, which Tofuboi and myself decided to take for a spin. I’m apparently not terrible when running at 800+ms latency.
This  was also the weekend where Babymetal’s Metal Resistance was released, and the Telstra unmetered data Sunday occured (I only acquired something like 63gig of Steam and Epic games.)

Last weekend a considerable number of Melbournites made a trip down to Traralgon for ROFL LAN.
This event was very much like the LANs of 10+ years ago, a whole group of stress-free people in a hall playing games, no eSports, 7 Bishies, 30+ parmas and 1 fish and chips, crazy parking, and one person ending up contained within something they shouldn’t.
Seriously this was the type of event that has the soul of the events of old.
These days there’s generally too much focus on the big competitions, big prizes, big sponsors. ROFL didn’t involve any of those.

Of course after I got home from ROFL I took it upon myself to transfer my gaming PC back in to my Air540 case, and my productivity machine slash fileserver in to my behemoth.
After lugging something bigger than many people I know around, I finally took the smart option. I have many injuries from the transition between cases.

This coming weekend I finish my journey on the LANsploration adventure with RespawnLAN.
It’s the time of the Doom open beta, and I have no idea what else I’ll be doing.
There are many games I’d like to play with others, but unless I can bludgeon people in to submission I don’t see them happening.

There are many more events coming up like RF LAN, LAN of the Damned, and so on. I just don’t see myself making the journey west of Melbourne to get to them.

I suppose I’ll end up focusing my attentions on my planned upcoming Beast: the Primordial chronicle, where I’m sure my players will find some way to set the environment and themselves on fire.
The goal of course will be taking it to LARP scale.

AmK.

It is time to for Duck season, and the Melbourne internet is invited!

Sep23

So I’m totally incredibly slack about posting, as people will know.
I really should have posted about this earlier, because for some strange reason it seems people have duck blindness, and this simply will not do.

This coming weekend (the 26th through to 27th of September) there’s a very special event hosted by Respawn LAN, the 34th of the main weekends, DUCK SEASON!

I think I shall need to repeat that again so people get what it is.

DUCK SEASON

Now for people who don’t know what Respawn LAN is, picture a large university hall, filled with rows of long tables (I guestimate three metres), on which each contains two computers+monitors, both of which are plugged in to a fast network switch (a box thing that lots of cables plug in to with lots of blinking lights).
Multiply that by hundreds of tables with attending people and you start to get an idea.

Night Time LANtheon

Take that, give it some sort of an event theme, fill it with lots of awesome people, get them to play games and have a great time.

The theme this event is Ducks, with duck prizes, duck competitions, duck hunting, possibly duck costumes, and Zardoz squeeing out over his favourite animal (he really loves ducks).

I shall be there. I might even have some fairyfloss on account of I can’t get any aardvarks, though I may have time to make something to stick to my monitor (no promises or anything.)

Anyway, last but not least, the link for the event which you should go and sign up to, if you have some kind of a PC (be it windows, mac, or linux), feel like traveling to the northern suburbs, have nothing else to do, like ducks, and want to have fun.

Don’t let your dreams be dreams.
Click this link!

Quack quack!

It’s been an eternity in internet land, but I’m back.

Jul14

It’s been months and stuff since I last posted, but don’t worry I am still alive and am not just a cunningly placed zombie.

Let’s see, what’s been happening.

Well I guess most recently as in yesterday and last night I’ve been working on some PC stuff.
See, with July 29 creeping up on us, and the free upgrades to full version of Windows 10 for Insiders, I figured I might as well make the most of it.
A couple of months back I had to reinstall windows (because it totally killed itself on the registry level) so I pretty much shifted to 10 and condensed hardware in to one machine, which was up until that point my Steam Box (Praise GabeN).
I scavenged the RAM and everything, because why not.

Of course I kinda got used to running on 16gig, so if I was going to get the other machine operational again I had to acquire two things, a new SSD (amusingly the Win10 install sitting on the old SSD transferred between machines no issue) and new memory.

While I was at it I figured why not also get a fun new case, the Thermaltake Core X9 in black, and a Corsair 240mm closed loop radiator (I intended to acquire that one a year back).

So anyway I spent a few hours shifting my most powerful hardware in to the Core X9, I shifted my storage drives (well pretty much all my spare drives, there’s even a 200gig sitting in there for the hell of it) over to my Antec 1100 except for my Steam drive.
Then after that was up and running and windows was installing (build 10162) I shifted over to the Antec.

Would you possibly believe my installs were flawless other than a flap on the IO shield on the Core X9 blocking it’s dedicated USB DAC port.

Sure it’s a lot of work, sure I now have a case you could pack a human body in, and sure it’s going to be fun transporting the thing to the next Respawn LAN on the last weekend of September, but honestly I feel I achieved something.

So now once again after many years I have a machine dedicated to productivity stuff (storage, office apps, boring stuff) which I can remote in to, while at the same time having a separate machine I can take to LANs.

Sadly my poor Corsair Air 540 cube case is now feeling empty and unwanted.
It’s a good case, it just sucks when it comes to storing 3.5″ drives

Anyway, my file transfers between machines have finished, I should get some sleep, since sometime today I intend to redesign the network in my room to allow for gigabit between the boxes, with WiFi for everything else.

Respawn: 9 – Grandfinal Shenanigans.

Sep3

Well that time is upon us once again.

Respawn, the premium gaming scene of Melbourne is having another event in a few weeks time.

I decided to quote it below just for those of you not willing to go to their main site at http://www.respawn.com.au/ where you will go eventually, because I know you will.

Respawn LAN v9
September 27-28th
The Union Hall, La Trobe University Bundoora

With more win and gold than the Chinese Olympic team comes the next installment of Melbourne’s most popular LAN gaming event, Respawn. We’re back for the Grand Final weekend to bring you a 350 player exclusive event.

Competitions will include:
* Warcraft III 1v1
* Warcraft III DOTA
* QuakeWorld Deathmatch (DM6)
* Flatout 2
* Worms World Party
* CS Source 5v5
* CS Source GunGame

And other servers will include Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 3 arena and more! Since we’re running on the Grand Final weekend, we’ll aim to have the game on the projector for those who love their aussie rules.

Registrations are alrady open right here, clicky clicky. We look forward to seeing you there!

So come to Respawn, I’ll be there, so should you.