NOR'EASTER 2006: INSIDER'S REPORT

I'm a little late in telling you about this, since it happened last weekend. Last week was Nor'Easter, a LAN party sponsored by Intel and various other companies.

For the uninitiated, a LAN party is where a bunch of people pack up their computers, bring them to some room large enough to accomodate a few dozen Dell-wielding gamergeeks, network them all together, and play some games. And Nor'easter is not just any LAN party, it's run by the LAN Party Association of New England, or LPANE. It's the biggest lan party in New England, with total space for 250 preregistered gamers. And it lasted a total of 36 glorious hours, from 9 pm Friday to 9am Sunday morning.

Leading up to the party, I was a little concerned that I wouldn't have anything to play. According to LPANE's Polls, the top few games that people wanted to play were those I didn't have. Battlefield 2, for example. After finding it on sale at CompUSA for $10 cheaper than the WalMart near my house, I figured, "Why not?" and tossed it in the cart with the can of compressed air and the Cat6 cable that were the reason I had ventured to the store.

Looking back, I can conclusively say that I spent WAAY too much money in preparation for this one party. About $100 on games: Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2, and DEFCON, none of which I ended up playing at the party. $200 on a new flatscreen monitor, since I didn't want to lug around my heavy 19" CRT. When I got there, I found out that someone there had the exact same model that I had just upgraded from. Incidentally, I had met this guy previously, working as a ski instructor at Nashoba Valley in nearby Westford. He got more of my hard-earned cash, as I bought $50 of computer memory from him. The 25-foot Cat6 networking cable was a bit of a waste too; although LPANE had recommended bringing a 25-foot cable, it turned out that I was seated right next to an ethernet switch, thus I wouldn't need a cable longer than 6 feet, something I could have taken from the Linux box in my room.

Oh, and as mentioned in the previous post, I was building a DDRHOMEPAD. Another $100 for supplies. I was naive to think I could possibly finish that thing before the party without using any power tools.

Anyway, The event was being held at the Intel campus in Hudson, Massachusetts. Although I had left at 8 PM and the drive is a half-hour at most, there was still a line as people were waiting to check their computers and start setting up. I hadn't reserved a seat, so as they checked me in, I was randomly assigned one. I headed inside, set up, and did what any gamer would do: compare rigs with the guy next to me. Then, I started showing off my collection of vintage games and interesting mods.

About 90 minutes into the party, I still hadn't played any games. I was perfectly capable of it; my connection was fine, my computer hadn't mysteriously died on the drive over, but...no one was really playing anything interesting.

There was, of course, Counter-Strike Source. An incidental acquisition included when I bought Half-Life 2. CS:S happened to be the second-most-voted game in LPANE's polls, so there should be no problem finding people to play that. My problem was, I had been playing for maybe a month or two. The game had been out for over a year, and it was the logical extension of the original Counter-Strike, which has been out even longer.

Ergo, everyone was better than I was at it.

That is, they knew not to waste time on body shots and go straight for the head. The server we played on would tell you how many shots you had fired had hit your opponents, where, and for how much. While I had hit with 6 bullets, for about 75-90 damage, often they would score over 100 damage with a single shot to the head. It's one thing to be sniped at, but quite another to be emptying an entire clip into a guy, and have 80% of those shots miss, only to have his one bullet go right where he wanted it.

About 15 minutes of that and I was bored again. So I tried some Warcraft III tower defense with the guys next to me. Fun, yes, but with only 3 people, it got boring quickly.

Later I tried SourceForts. Based on Half-Life 2's Deathmatch mod, it was Capture-the-flag with the added twist of having to build structures out of blocks to keep your flag protected and/or make entry into your opponents' base easier. It ept me occupied for a few hours, but again, It slowly fizzled from lack of players. Everyone else was busy playing Battlefield 2, which, after one game, I had decided was not to my liking.

And then I heard the laughter. Across the table, there were four guys laughing their asses off. At what? I watched in anticipation, hoping to find out. They saw I was watching and invited me to play. What was it? A card game, called Apples to Apples. The premise: There's a deck of green cards (descriptors) and a deck of red cards (nouns). On each player's turn, that player turns over the top green card, and each other player has to pick a red card in his hand that best fits the descriptor on the green card. Whoever revealed the green card decides which noun fits best, and the winner keeps the green card. Whoever has the most green cards at the end of the game wins. By itself, not much to speak of. But factor in that these four guys, Vince, Glenn (they started calling me Glenn #2), Ian, and Supreet, had a very sick, sarcastic, and tasteless sense of humor, and sooner or later, I was reeling with laughter, as we described "Ground Zero" as "deep," and "Falling Off A Cliff" as "graceful." Maybe you had to be there to enjoy it, but it was great. I ended up hanging with the 4chan Party Van (as they called themselves) for the rest of the party.

I ended up staying until 7am sunday morning. I was planning to stay the entire time, but by that point, almost everyone was starting to pack up and leave. I hadn't slept all that night, I probably shouldn't have been driving, and I missed work that day, but all I could think on the drive home was: It's worth it. It was worth everything.