Our First Ever Halo 2 Lan Party

Originally Posted On: 12/11/2006 02:45 AM PST.

The idea of setting up a LAN party started when I started playing on XBL. Playing with friends is always more fun then playing with some unknown players at XBL because most of the time you end up with complete jerks or people who just play team games on their own.

So I sent a mail to my friends with whom I’ve played co-op on my Xbox. My plan was to have at least 8 people, 2 Xboxes and 2 TVs so that we can at least have 2 teams. The response was positive. A date was set. Saturday Nov 4th.

With some help from Amazon and folks at bungie.net forums I was able to figure out what kind of cables and setup is needed to setup a LAN based game. Acquiring the second TV turned out to be a bit tricky but i was able to get one 32" Panasonic from craigslist for 50 buck's. Acquiring 8 controllers and another copy of halo 2 turned out to be easy as the people coming in had those.

Next up was the question that only one other player had played on Xbox live so how do i balance the team. If the XBL players grab the power weapons and critical locations, they will completely own the first timers running around the map with an smg. So I created custom game types where everyone had the same type of weapons and so were the weapons on map, for example, team duals (where all weapons on the map were smg, plasma rifle, needler or pistol etc), team rockets, team shotgun etc. Same goes for objective game types.

So finally the day arrived, some of the friends came early to help me with the setup and carry the 2nd TV upstairs. we had the setup done pretty quickly and people started to pour pretty much on time. We divided into two team with the 2 live players, me and YL, became team leads. You must understand that for a desi gamer the hardest part is to leave the wife behind and come out alone for a party or something so the ppl who were showing up were really brave hearts.

We started with team duals on Coagulation and before we knew it YL was on rampage on the warthog turret. His team won easily. dang it, I should’ve turned off vehicles for matches with duals or shotguns. After that no particular team took the lead in terms of number of games won. But it was fun nevertheless; it gets boring if one team wins continuously.

My favorite matches were 1. Team Rockets on Beaver Creek where i completely wrecked havoc on the opposing team and 2. Crazy King on Burial Grounds it was a very very close match and we won because YL's team couldn’t find the way to the hill in the last few seconds. YL kicked a** in Team Snipers on Ascension. ZS also plays pretty darn good, which for me was kind of surprising because he doesn't play on XBL at all.

A funny thing happened during the first few matches that one of the guys in YL's team took the tag that tells the location of teammates as bulls-eye and thought he needed to shoot these guys, imagine the guy sitting next to you on the couch constantly betraying you! finally ZS asked him "O yaar aap hamein to marna band karein" (hey man stop killing us). I think it was hilarious.

For food I ordered biryani from shahnawaz but it didn’t turned out to be fresh, infact we had to throw out pretty much half of it. i called them later on but in vain as you might guess.

Anyways it was time well spent and i had a ton of fun. Can’t wait to do it again

Take care
Naveeda

 

Posted by naveeda @ 2:10 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

2Old2Play here I come

I'm planning to move my blog from naveeda.1up.com to here just because i love you guys so much. What that means is that I'm going to post some old stuff here that might not make sense at all, for example jumping in excitement that Team SWAT is once again unranked now, so before you think I'm going crazy and start whacking me on the head or kicking me in the nuts, remember to read the "Posted Originally On" on the top of the blog, which I'm going to put in bold and big fonts for you old people.

Posted by naveeda @ 3:07 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Hello World

In Computer Science, its customary to create a Hello World application when you start learning a new programming language. Books on languauges almost always have some clever twist to this 'Hello World' program. So this is my first, and i'll do it in my favorite language and thereby showing you my ability to complicate simple things

using System;using System.Text;namespace HelloWorld { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { byte[] bytes1 = { 0x4E, 0x41, 0x56, 0x45, 0x45, 0x44, 0x41, 0x2E, 0x31, 0x55, 0x50, 0x2E, 0x43, 0x4F, 0x4D }; char[] chars = new char[15]; Decoder d = Encoding.UTF8.GetDecoder(); int charLen = d.GetChars(bytes1, 0, bytes1.Length, chars, 0); foreach (char c in chars) { Console.Write("{0}", c); } Console.Write(""); } } }

Thanks for reading and if you actually tried running the above, you're going to be my best friend

Take care
Naveeda

Posted by naveeda @ 8:14 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments