Exposing my socks to the world

One thing that I never will understand is how people with a high-profile website will still post news (or whatever it is they post) that has some glaring spelling or punctuation error. I suppose it happens because they don’t know that they are doing it, and that someone should step up and show them, but some (and by ‘some’ I mean ‘a great deal’) people not only acknowledge that they don’t have a firm grasp of the rules of the written English language, but they aren’t inclined to do anything about it. That is an unacceptable position to have, especially on any site that tries to pass itself off as any sort of serious site.



I know that a lot of people have trouble with their spelling and grammar, but there are free tools out there to help them out.



Now I don’t want this to sound like I am condemning bad spelling/grammar on all fronts. Errors in IRC and other forms of instant messaging are acceptable because of their nature. There is little time for proofreading if you want to be a productive member of the conversation. Pages on the Web are another matter, there is ample time from conception to publication for proofreading of works, as well as the ability to correct them after a mistake is discovered, so there really is no excuse for the transgressions to keep happening.



Except for laziness, and that’s rarely a viable excuse for anything.



I guess I can get off my soap box now.

Bring your computer

I know this sounds obvious, but you need to remember to bring something to game on. If you forget this,
you are in for a long, boring and potentially expensive party. I, personally haven’t seen anyone forget
their computer yet, so this point may be moot, but don’t let it be said that I never helped anyone out.

Bring your cables/hardware

If you are bringing your computer, you are going to need to bring your hardware and all the connections
you will need. So you will need to bring, at minimum, two power cords, having a computer and
no power cords is just as bad as having no computer at all. You’ll also need to bring a power strip. Most
parties that I’ve been to will only give you one outlet to plug your stuff into. I won’t go into the math here,
but of you have two devices that you need to plug in and one outlet to do it, you are going to have a bit of
trouble jamming them both in there.

Ethernet cable, you need to have Category 5 (5e, 6, any of those are fine) cable to connect to the network
provided. If you get to a LAN party and can’t connect to any part of the LAN, you’ve essentially just
moved your computer across town (state, etc) to play Solitaire. Not so fun.

Bring a mouse pad. This isn’t so essential with the newer breeds of optical mice, since they do so much
better on surfaces with regular patterns (eg wood grain), and in a pinch, you can use a sheet of paper to
substitute for a mouse pad, but nothing beats a real mouse pad. If I had to guess, I’d say that mouse pads are the most frequently forgotten item at a LAN party.

Now I don’t understand it, but at almost every LAN party that I’ve ever been to, someone at some point
needs a 3.25” disk. I don’t know why, and I really am having trouble coming up with a good reason to even
need one, but the need will arise. So, while not *technically* required to enjoy yourself at the party…
unless you are the one that needs it for whatever reason.

Drivers

No matter how well your computer works at home, odds are good that it will magically, and of it’s own
accord, stop working in some way. No matter how trivial you think the drivers are, you need to bring them.
You need to to *at minimum* bring drivers for all the hardware you will be using at the event. So you need
drivers for your video card, network card, sound card driver (although you can do without sound, having
no sound in games really really sucks), and misc drivers for your motherboard (especially important if your operating system of choice doesn’t provide drivers for your hardware). Other drivers you can live without,
at least for the duration of the LAN. Once you get home, you can worry about getting your stuff going
properly.

The easiest thing to do is to put all your drivers for your hardware on a CDR and keep that in your LAN
bag. You don’t want to necessarily put it on a CDRW because, if you have to reinstall all your stuff, you
won’t be able to get anything off your CDRW disc, unless you fixate your disk. CDRs are cheap enough
that you can stand to put all your updated drivers on one. Besides, if using a sub-dollar disc will save your
day/evening/weekend/whatever of gaming, then I think it’s an excellent investment, especially if you had
to go out of town/state to go to the party.

Prizes

Now here’s where I need to get on my soapbox for a minute. You should not go to a LAN party expecting
to win a prize. Even if it is advertised that there will be some awesome swag given away at the thing, that
shouldn’t be the sole reason you go. Yeah, it’s cool to win some of that really neat gear, but there are so
many other reasons to go that the prizes should really take a back seat to them. Right… Prizes… If you are
at one of these LAN parties where something really cool is given out (like the new Whizbang 3300 video
card) please fight the temptation to install it at the LAN. If your system is working, don’t do anything to make
it not want to work (like changing out the hardware). The minute you start messing with hardware, that’s the
minute that your system will decide to take a big dump all over your fun. Hope you brought toilet paper.

Money for Food

This varies from event to event, but you should generally remember to bring money to get food at the
event you are going to. Sometimes (very rarely I might add) the food will be provided, but that certainly is
the exception to the rule. You could also go out and buy food outside of the event, but that is another
source of income for the proprietors of the event. If you are thinking to yourself (and I know a few of you
are), “They make enough money off of me by charging to get into the event, why should I buy food from
them?” The short answer: nobody starts/runs a LAN party with the intention of getting rich (at least none
that I’ve been to), and the food is a way to help them break even. If you don’t believe that, then go ahead
and start pricing out what it would cost to put on an event of any size, and you’ll start to see pretty fast that it costs a lot more than you might think to get a decent sized party off the ground.

And that’s it! That’s all the essential things that you need to have a fun time at a LAN party. There are other things that would be helpful to have, but you don’t *have* to have them, such as: a coat (some of those
venues get fairly frigid when the computers start turning off in the middle of the night), something to sleep
on like a blanket/pillow/etc., and (I know this sounds corny) a good attitude. If you can keep these tips in
mind, you’ll have a good time at the LAN party you choose to go to guaranteed*.

*Not guaranteed.

Wow, another AsylumLAN has come and gone, and a good time was had by all that attended. Of course the Socks was there, and sponsored the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. Congratulations to Dark Yoda and Xsyqo! Now I have just enough time to recouperate for the next one in November.

I wore the shirt to the Tampa Bay Bucs Training Camp practice. And of course (I usually get asked about it when I wear it) someone asks me, “What’s crummy socks?” And as bad as I want to say socks with holes in them, I didn’t and explained that it is a web address. This lady actually knew that, unlike the lady that called it an e-mail address, but she asked about the site. So I explained that it is a news site. But only the news that my friend, who runs the site, wants on there. But yeah, all-in-all, people in this world don’t understand the power of advertising. Even if the lady that talked to me doesn’t go to this site, I’m sure that at least one person that saw the shirt will check it out.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. Piracy of any kind is illegal. It doesn’t matter if you are copying The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker or downloading Pong from some internet file sharing service, that action is a violation of copyright. You can justify it to yourself however you like, most people like to use the “It’s not being made any more, so I should be able to do whatever I want with it.” There are a couple of things wrong with that statement.



ROMs and virtually anything else that you might decide to freely download are copyrighted works. Copyrights exist for the life of the creator plus fifty years. This means simply that the copyrights on all video games created after 1953 are still valid, and that, unless some benevolent programmer/game company has decided to release their works to the general public (which some have done in recent memory) then copyrights are still in full effect.



Another thing to keep in mind are the video game collectors. If unlimited copies of games are made available to everyone, what happens to the used video game market? The stockpile of games that I have accumulated over the years suddenly drops in value simply because, were I to sell it, someone could just go to the Internet and download it for free. The game ceases to be special. Rare games aren’t rare any more. Even more disturbing is that since the games are freely available from many sites on the Internet, there won’t be as many people buying or taking care of their old cartriges, save for the rabid game collectors.



The assertion that Nintendo is the only company actively fighting piracy of their games is ludicrous. Nintendo may be the most vocal about it, but Sega, Sony, and virtually any other video game company (as well as companies in other forms of entertainment) are actively fighting to protect their copyrights.



So why do the companies even care? There are a couple of reasons why the game companies should care about what’s happening to their old games. The main reason goes back to the copyright. If someone owns a copyright on any piece of work, they are required to defend it, or else they could lose it to the public domain. If that were to happen, knock off products of varying quality would begin to appear and the uniqueness of the original product would be lost.


“But the games I’m downloading aren’t available to the general public anymore!” Now let me pose a question to you. If the games that you are pirating were to be released again, would you purchase them? A majority of NES games, for example, are available for $10 or less, and yet people still pirate them because they “aren’t available any more.” Konami, Sega, Namco, Midway and Nintendo have recently rereleased some of their ‘classic games’ in one form or another. I think that this is a fantastic idea, and I hope that more companies take their lead and release more compilations for modern systems.



There is a bit of confusion about the legality of emulation and distribution of ROMs. Contrary to what Nintendo would have you believe, emulators by themselves are not illegal (they have recently changed the wording on the Legal Page to reflect this). If that were the case, then the Super Game Boy, the Game Boy Player, and Animal Crossing would all be illegal since they enable you to play games on hardware that they were not designed to run on. The real problem is the distribution of copyrighted ROMs, and, indirectly, the emulators.



So by this point, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Right, I understand all of that, but aren’t there any legal ROMs?” The short answer to that is that yes, there are a few hobbiest programmers out there that stil like to fool around and make games for dead systems. Some of them have even released some of their older games into the public domain since the likely won’t be seeing any more money out of them again.



Hopefully I’ve cleared up some misconeptions about emulation, ROMs, life, and the universe. Please bear in mind that I shouldn’t be confused with a lawyer, so if you doubt anything that I’ve said here, please feel free to contact one, and have him (or her) verify the information.



Here are a few relevant links:
Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents
The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain
Nintendo’s Legal FAQ

Million Man LAN was this past weekend (June 26 – June 29). I had planned on having an update for each day that I was there, but tecnical problems on the morning of Day 3 (which I’ll elaborate on later) made sure that didn’t happen.



If you’ve already read my impressions on Day 1, then you pretty much have a feel for what the rest of the days were like, so rather than recap the particulars of each day, I’ll just go into what I liked, didn’t like, and what just didn’t seem like it worked.

The Good

MML had one of the better gaming networks that I’ve had the pleasure of plugging into in recent memory. Not once did I have any problems connecting with game servers, or any of the other computers for that matter. Whenever I needed to transfer the odd file across the network, it was pretty fast.



MML also had Internet access. Now, normally, this isn’t really something that LAN parties need to have. However, if there were no access to the outside world for four days, I would have gone absolutely crazy. Now don’t get me wrong, talking to other game geeks has it’s own special charm, but so does talking to people that didn’t want/couldn’t come to the event.



The volume of games being played was refreshing. With a group as large as the one that was at MML, there was a large variety of games going on at all times. Some of the ones I saw being playes included: Unreal Tournament, UT2K3, Quake 3, Warcraft 3, Jedi Knight 2, Counter Strike, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and I’m sure that there’s some that I’ve missed. The event planners were nice enough to provide game servers for most of the more popular games, and the attendees did the rest.

The Not So Good

MML had a projector in the center of the room set up to show whatever random things that were (I assume) were supposed to be entertaining, and the audio was piped through the house speaker system. Now this sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately, there were some hiccups with the system. The selection of songs/videos that were to be played on the projector was fine, but entirely too short. Several times throughout the event, someone would queue up 5-10 songs and let them loop for over an hour. One of the most striking examples of this was on the morning of Day 4, when were treated to the first episode of Red vs. Blue several times in a row (five or six times, I lost count). Overall, the entertainment was lackluster, and could have been done much better.



One of the things that I like about LAN parties are the ‘extra’ things that go on along with the computer gaming. I mean, sure, the main reason I went was to get annihilated at some of my favorite online games, but it’s nice to be able to get up, take a break, and compete in something else, be it for fun or some kind of prize. Several official events were held: an paper airplane flying contest, a box-building contest, worst-case contest, and a ‘Lowest Score in 3DMark 2001′ contest. Of all these contests, I would have liked to participate in a couple of them. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know about most of them until they were over, or nearly over. The ‘Worst Case’ contest was announced in the newsletter weeks before the event started, but the others were not. The paper airplane contest was announced on the evening of Day 3, and it was at that time that I found out that there had been a box-sculpture contest (and we were to vote on the winners with our applause), and that the ‘Lowest 3DMark Score’ Contest would be wrapping up soon. Had I known what the rules were, and when they started, I would have made an attempt to enter them, but that was not the case. Extra non gaming events were nicely done, but the dissemenation of the information was not.



Now, anyone going to a LAN party solely for door prizes just shouldn’t be there at all. Door prizes are nice, but should not be the focus of any LAN party. Additionally, if a LAN party is going to provide them, then they should have a way to distribute the prizes fairly. Near the beginning of the event, there was a lot of hoopla over how many prizes there were. I, of course, would have liked to win something, but I really don’t know how these prizes were distributed. My understanding is that many of them were given out during the Q & A sessions that I had opted to not attend, for asking questions to the speakers. I waited around for quite a while on day 4 for some sort of giveaway for the rest of the door prizes, but it didn’t look like there was going to be any kind of random drawing, or anything like that. Prizes should not be the focus of a LAN party, but if you are going to have them, you should give all attendees an equal chance to win at least some of them. The guy that pays his money and sits in his seat for the entire time, being a total social recluse, should have just much chance as the guy who plays in every tournament and all the other special events.



Power is critical to the success of a LAN party. On the morning of Day 3, as I was coming back from getting breakfast, and noticed that the power for my entire row was out. Not good. The electrician came by and worked on the problem, and we had power again… for about an hour… then my row, as well as some others lost power again. The electrician was called back, so I made the decision to not update the Socks, and to leave to check out the local arcade scene. The power issues were not necessarily the fault of the operators of MML, but it was still annoying to have to sit through.



Tournaments. What kind of a LAN party doesn’t have tournaments? Apparently very few kinds. There were several tournaments, and since I didn’t participate in any of them, I really can’t comment on how those were run. I do know, however, that the Warcraft 3 tournament did not seem to be organized very well. The rules for each of the tournaments was posted on the website weeks before the event, but the Warcraft 3 rules were grossly unfinished and provided very little information on how the tournament was to be conducted. Even the day of the event, had I been signed up for the tournament, I still would not have known exactly what the rules were to have been until it actually started. While I’m sure the tournament staff did a fine job at the event, the lack of information before hand in one of the less popular tournaments is inexcusable.




Towards the end of the event, something came to a head and the party just seemed to stop. I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened, since I’m not privy to that information, but there is more info here.



Overall, MML was a solid LAN party, with a few major hiccups. A schedule of events posted somewhere (at least a bit more detailed than the one posted on the main site and in the email). This schedule was the best that I could find. No mention of the airplane contest or the box-art contest. If you were signed up for a tournament, you knew when the times were for that particular tournament, but other than that I was completely in the dark about what times certain things were going to get underway. Every time I had to leave to get food, I was never sure if I was going to miss something (and I’m almost certain that I did). The Warcraft 3 tournamet almost seemed like a last-minute addition, and was seemingly nearly forgotten by everyone. MML2 was, however, a unique experience, and I will probably go back next year. I just hope the event staff understands what went well and what went poorly so that MML3 can be better. As it stands, MML2 was a very big, very mediocre LAN party.



It gets a C+.

The party apparently got underway at about 11-ish yesterday. I arrived at noonish, and immediately started putting my computer together. After getting that squared away, I began to have all kinds of computer related problems that were independent of the LAN: mouse acting funky (the scroll wheel decided when it would scroll, and not me), it would refuse to boot for several hours, and other small miscellaneous problems. I think that I’ve put a large enough Band-Aid on the thing to keep it going until I get it home in a few days, but it’s apparent that I will need a new computer in the near future.



Right… LAN party…



So far, MML has been OK. The concession stand food that they are forced to have to deal with is, hot dogs/popcorn/nachos/other not breakfast food.



There seems to be a lot of games being played here: Counterstrike (as always), Unreal Tournament (and 2003), Warcraft 3, Jedi Knight (2, maybe 1, I don’t know, I never played that one), America’s Army, Battlefield 1942, Wolfenstein (and ET), and probably other games that I don’t know about/care about.



The local news was here this morning, supposedly. I was unconsious on the floor doing my best to get a little bit of sleep. This was at 5:00. AM, even. Even at a LAN party where the goal is to stay up as much as possible, get as much quality time in killing your friends, and play some computer games, nearly everyone is asleep at 5:00 AM. Shortly after the news crew left, we got treated to some horrible song twice. In a row. Then wake up call, some (way too) early morning UT2K3, and now this news post. Barring any more major computer catastrophes, I should be back with More from the Floor tomorrow morning.

Yep, so if you’re one of the 15 or so people that come to this site on a regular basis, you may be wondering where the crappy… er… value game of the week review is.



Sorry, Teacher, I don’t have it because (insert lame excuse here).



No, I was at a LAN party this weekend at the House of the Dakotas, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time to get any crappy gaming in, we tended to focus on games that don’t suck. Or at the very least didn’t suck when we played them. I am happy to report, however, that I still know how to play Half-Life Deathmatch, and even managed to feed some bullets to my friends. However I still suck at Unreal Tournament 2003 and am stuck in the Land of the Mediocre in Warcraft 3.



That being said, there probably won’t be any game review next week either since I’ll be at Million Man LAN from Thursday through Sunday. I can barely form a sane sentence after two days of gaming, after four days, anything I type or say should be scribed somwhere, it will it will very likely uncover some psychic illness I don’t even know I have yet.

It had been several months since I went to an arcade. The last time I went to an arcade was April 11, 2003. I only know that because that’s what it says on the back of my Buster Ball ticket coupon thing (I’m going for the world record in tickets accumulated, or their Police Trainer machine).

Whoops, I digressed again.

Right, so I went to this arcade…thing and I noticed that not a lot has changed since I went 2 months ago or the time I went 2 years ago. The only thing that changed were the games, and even some of those were oldsters.

One of the things that must have completely passed me by was that our arcades have somehow metamorphosed into some sort of sort of interactive gym. In this particular arcade we had DDR, some kind of perpetual climbing wall, pool, some skiing game, and Final Furlong. I never really thought about it before, but going to a modern arcade is more cost effective than going to some fitness center. I mad a few rounds and got some gaming in. I nearly killed myself on the DDR machine. Now, I know that only about a dozen people read this site, so I’m not that much of a celebrity, but as soon as I stepped on the DDR platform, no less than 24 people materialized around the machine to watch me kill myself and anyone foolish enough to get within 3 feet of me. SSB Master decides to pick, according to the ‘expert’ that walked up behind me, the toughest song in the game. After losing as well as I could, and believe me, I lost very well, I decided to move on to Time Crisis 3, and quickly decided to move on since that one only takes first born children as payment. I’ll play it once it gets a bit cheaper.

Ms. Pac Man is definitely showing her age, although she’s still good for a little quick fun. It still amazes me that this machine is in nearly every arcade in the country, (I’m counting the ‘new’ ones that are packed in with the huge screen and Galaga) and that they all still work.

One of the fun things that I had forgotten about was the kid who’s parent had dropped him off, probably with less than $5, and left him at the arcade for 4 or 5 hours. Since he blew all his money on a machine that gave out prizes (without winning any, of course) he decided to glom on to me every time I got near the machine that took all his lunch money from last week.

So what’s the moral of this story? Never play Uncle Fester’s Electric Chair if you value your hands.