Friday was much more active and fun. I got in on the Armagetron tournament – I almost won! I was leading for all but the last two rounds. Damn you, videos on the main projector! My save vs meme check failed. Congrats to tikitaco!

I needed to patch up a few non-Steam games I’d not played in a very long time, so I took to the fileservers. I was a little frustrated by the plethora of FTP servers. I guess I’m spoiled by the DC++ hub common at LAN parties in the northeastern United States. The network seemed very speedy and the latency was low throughout the weekend.

I would be remiss not to mention the presence of a much-appreciated 1 Gbps Internet service courtesy of UofL. I needed to install Call of Duty 4 and it downloaded in approximately 15 minutes — all several GB of it. There are very, very few LAN parties which afford that luxury!

Friday afternoon, there was an interesting three-man challenge as a side event. The folks were tasked with participating in a series of events gauging all of the things a gamer needs to have: accuracy, speed, memory, precision, trust, patience. To that end, there were these tasks: throw a duct tape ball at an apple on an opposing team member’s head, blow all cards but the kings from a deck off of a table, find and collect same-colored Skittles and put them in cups across the room one at a time, stack Gatorade bottles, and throw Skittles through a roll of duct tape 10 feet away.

Everyone seemed to love the competition. Events like this are great for getting gamers out of their chairs for a little bit.

At some point Friday night, I cruised around the halls looking for nice rigs. There weren’t a whole lot of really elaborate ones, but those that I found were pretty awesome. There were however many, many high-end Cooler Master, Lian Li, Thermaltake, and Antec cases.

Friday night’s main activity was dodgeball. Several teams took to the street outside and battled it out.

At some point, the guys sitting next to me submitted themselves to my newbness in Pittco-favorite Heroes of Newerth and taught me how to play. We played several rounds and I started to get the hang of it. HoN is like Othello: a minute to learn, a lifetime to master. A big thanks to Hazek for taking me under their wings for a few matches.