TheChrisD - Rant Central

No “taxi” in “Interlan”

*yawns* In case you can’t tell, I’m back from Interlan. T’was a long near-24 hours of gaming heaven. It could have done with more people, but you can’t have everything run smoothly, especially for a college event.

For those of you wondering WTF is/was Interlan - it is/was an intervarsity BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC)/Console gaming event. Scheduled to last 28 hours (although died after 22), it featured a wide range of tournaments and competitions from CS 1.6 and Unreal Tournament to Halo 2 and Gears.

Anyway, I mostly hid out in the console section - mainly since there were 2 floors between the two areas (technically only 1 floor, as the Venue is 1 floor below, but as the Venue is a stage the gaming section was down in the section made clear by folding the seating area under the floor. Thus in a way, 2 floors as there were 2 flights of stairs) - of course it doesn’t help when you forget the little adaptor that allows you to plug in the audio jacks from the 360 VGA cable to a computer monitor audio input. Thus I had to deal with no sound on my own console, and could only get it on one of the consoles/TVs provided by the Xbox Live Gaming Centre….

Back to the event itself - eliminated in the semi-final in PGR3 (got beaten by one of the workers from the Gaming Centre - did you expect them to be as easy as the first two where I reversed across the finish line?) - only came 5th in H2 (bastards kept stealing the fucking BR) - didn’t play in Dead or Alive (crap game) - and didn’t play in Gears (I’m crap, and there were no open spots on a team). All in all, a crap day.

Ah well, after having to lug that shit to DCU and back (the monitor is heavy as shit…..), and a lot of sleep of course (1 can of Red Bull is not enough to keep a person going that long and be able to survive without sleep!) I’m back on my feet and back at work *replaces borrowed 360 HDD that was used to be able to play Halo 2 and Arcade games at event - unfortunately was noticed missing*.

However, this morning something weird happened with regards to my Silver account - after you’ve played Arcade games for a while on your main Gold tag, you know what exactly to do. So on I go to the Silver tag (which I used to play the trial of Marble Blast - I got hooked on it an Interlan) and off to Hexic and Jetpac. 1 game in each and I get a whole hoard of achievements. But what bothers me is I got Survival in Jetpac on H3L TheChrisD, when I don’t even have it yet on my main tag…..

Ugh. And a few other things I noticed:

• Taxi drivers are very annoying the way they just stop in the middle of the road for no reason
• Sinn Féin gatherings that close off O’Connell Street are gay
• Everything seems to happen while I’m away from a computer (including being fully accepted into Tx¹, Man U losing, Bungie resetting the Halo 2 ranks etc.)