LAN party

Oy, I went the whole weekend without a blog entry. Went to a LAN party at my buddy Damon’s house over the weekend. Damon is just an incredibly cool guy. Anyway, the group of us twenty and thirty-something guys is called the ULANG, or Utah Local Area Network Gamers. We usually get about 9-15 people showing up to these things, which is just around the right size for Damon’s house. Started at 7 PM, ended at 2 AM… these things rock.

This month’s game was Medal of Honor. We’d planned to play Armagetron too, but other than a few demos showing it off, never got around to it. Around midnight, two more guys showed up, and one of them turned out to have brought a laptop with a Neomagic video card in it… in case you aren’t aware, Neomagic cards, even when called “3D”, are generally understood to be 3D decelerators; Neomagic laptop video cards really, really stink. So I gave up on playing and went downstars to watch The Bourne Identity on Damon’s massive home theater system so that Aaron, the kid that brought the not-too-good laptop, could play for a while. My take on the movie: fun, well-conceived, take away a few points for predictability, give a few extra points for handling the sole “sex scene” in a way that I wouldn’t be embarassed to watch this with my kids, and overall it gets my “cool thriller” award for making an engaging movie that remains serious but isn’t over-the-top with tension due to some save-the-world scenario. And Damon has invested many thousands of dollars into his projection theater system; every time I watch a movie there, I remind myself that I need to invite myself over more often to watch movies there.

But at around $6,000 for the whole setup, if I recall correctly… dang, that’s a lot of movie tickets.

What a fun weekend!