So in case you haven’t been on the BM Steam chat in the last week to hear about my excitement for this weekend, I bought tickets to GenCon, the (now) biggest gaming event in Australia, and by games I mean everything, PC, Console, Cards, figurines and board games, everything, and all that other convention stuff like cosplay and special guests and what not.
So to start.
Day 1: The Set Up[/SIZE]
So today was 2 things, set up in one hall for the weekends main events, shows, stage, LAN and all that good stuff and also all the D&D fellows crept out of their basement to play in a 11 hour comp, 12pm-11pm.
I skipped on spectating the D&D and decided to help out my mates at LANSmash with the set up for the 3 days of LAN games to be held.
First it was a bit of drama, as me and Slapper Joe (SF4 guy) were there before anyone else, mainly Blade, the LS admin, who was the only who could sign in and get all the volunteer wrist bands, and high visibility vests, which were needed, as security pointed out.
After a decent 45 minute wait, Blade finally arrived and we got to go in and start setting up.
The first thing I noticed once in there was a group of people inflating what looked to be soft walls or something, I was later informed this would become an improvised indoor laser skirmish.
To get started, while Blade went off to get all the gear in his tiny car, myself and Joe started to rearrange the tables, so better suit the needs, since 90% of them wobble, quite a bit, and since the ones that they set up to have the GameStah and CS PC’s on, were quite dirty, we proceeded to ‘trade’ them with the tables from the card games section, while grabbing the 3rd or 4th table, an organizer came along and asked why we were stealing tables, we merely had to inform him we were trading them and he left us too it. After a decent half hour or so, we had the tables set up and were ready to start assembling the display PC’s for the WCG display.
It turned out the PC’s we would be pulling out of boxes and assembling would be the Acer Predator pre-built system, with a very nice, ‘finger thin’ (said it on the box) Samsung LED monitors for each, along with G11 keyboards and G5 mice, and this is for people playing CS1.6.
Wasn’t long after we started that, when Tobi from GameStah got there and started to set up his commentators area for the many LAN events to be held.
After a few more odds and ends, like sorting all the LAN cables and switches for Wilco, the carpet squares stank and were sticky, and Slapper Joe had his consoles set up for the Street Fighter 4 comp, it was looking like we would be finishing up soon.
We booted up the Predator PC’s for the WCG CS1.6 comp, to find 4 of them wouldn’t even post and just beeped at us, now if you have ever seen the case for the Acer Predator, you will know, just looking at it means effort to take the side off and open it up, it turns out since the crappy Acer mobo didn’t have any clips to hold the video card in, a few had jiggled loose on the trip there in the truck and just need a firm push to get them in, except one, which seemed to have a faulty RAM stick and only wanted to work with the 1 2GB stick, which was fine, they’d only be running CS1.6, if you can run that on 256mb if you really have to.
But once they were running, with the very nice monitors all was good, and it was time for us to slowly one by one start slacking off.
Wilco proceeded to play Red Faction Guerrilla, which looked pretty sweet, he was bscly hammering everything into oblivion or throwing obscene amounts remote charges at everything.
But at around 9pm, the day was done and all we could do then had been finished, so all of us hungry and grumpy decided the best thing to do would be to go the the pancake parlor, and we did.
I also saw this cool building on the way there and had to take a photo.
Btw this Supercar CHallenge booth, was it pods or actual simulators, wheels an’ all?