Well the LAN party could have gone a little more smoothly, but it was still fun. Of course there were the usual communication issues — one of which simply turned out to be someone forgetting to turn off ZoneAlarm, but we had a tough time getting Age of Empires working through the cablemodem router.

Mostly we ended up playing Medal of Honor and Battlefield 1942. The nice thing about the latter game is that we could play cooperatively against computer players, so I didn't have Severin threatening to hit me every time I killed him...

It's unfortunate that I didn't think about it earlier, when everybody was still playing, but at one point on Sunday night I had everyone who was still around line up against a wall so I could take their picture:

Back row: Carlos, Cord, Carl. Front row: Scott, Brian.
Not pictured: Severin, Lory, Albert, Jim, Perry, Jeff.
Click for full-size color image.

Naturally, as soon as the picture was taken, they immediately shot me dead and then turned on each other.

We ended the weekend with a bloodbath. I had created a simple weapons test range: 100 by 50 yards, no cover whatsoever, spawn points right in the middle. We played it with rocket launchers only, speakers turned up full volume. Then we switched to grenades only. Then pistol-whipping, which was absolutely hilarious: six people running around trying to bash each other in the head. (The smart thing to do was to wait for two people to finish a duel, then swoop in and dispatch the victor with one brutal smash.) When we got tired of that, we shot each other with pistols for a little while before finally shutting down. It didn't seem like it, but we stayed in the weapons test range for an hour and ten minutes. No subtlety, no subterfuge, no strategy — just wall-to-wall carnage.