Bunker Project Log

The dizzle was set to start at 5, and I should have been turning things on, but was instead framing and hanging the pictures that Mrs. G had composed and printed as 18?x24? posters a year before. She had given me a rage-saturated earful about the fact that I hadn?t done anything with them since I first attempted to put them up.

What Mrs. G wants, Mrs. G gets, so they were displayed in all their glory, with about 5 minutes to spare.

I?d ripped apart the Bunker infrastructure, and put it back together slightly sloppily. I wasn?t really sure how it would go, so I had a sort of limited release party to work the kinks out.

First to arrive was Timmah!, who came with a bag of grocery store cellophaned subs (my favorite kind!) He checked out Beatles Rock Band while I fretted over the loss of machine #7. D?OH!!

Believe it or not, I solved this by inserting my Windows CD, hitting ?R?, attempting to log in, realizing that I do not know my administrator password for that machine (which is odd), then frantically rebooting. It woke right back up. Booyah!

Stub arrived first and waited for me to sync all my controllers to the new 360. Ingenious of me to forget that part. Within minutes Papergirl (who has been gallivanting in Redmond so long that I forgot her old nerd handle) arrived with her sister. Somehow I got those sweet innocent things to play a completely sociopathic round of Pain. The new movie studio environment didn’t seem to be a hit, although the Hoff model was semi-interesting.

By now everything was working and more dorks were arriving. It was decided that it was time to fire up Left 4 Dead.

My 360 Red-ringed last week, so I had to get a new one. (Guess who bought it 3 years and 1 day before?)

I replaced it with an Arcade, to make sure I got a Jasper and HDMI. This meant using the old hard drive, and the transferring of content. If anyone is interested, or I am bored, I will post the details of 360 DRM management.

The Bunker was a disaster, mainly because I had vomited little styrene spaceships all over the place. Details on those later. You are on pins and needles, I can tell.

Due to the holiday season and other foibles, I was forced to have the latest BP on a Sunday. Although unnerving and possibly unholy, it happened with new hotness. 19 brave souls entered and 2 stayed behind. Excruciating detail to follow.

One of my resolutions… plog more… plog less. In other words, more often, and short. The way it should be.

I’ve been here before, we’ll see how it plays out. Yay 2009.

I love Days of Wonder games. In fact, I think I have opened several posts with exactly those words several times in the past.

However, they haven’t put anything new out in a while, and that has really bummed me out. I don’t know if this is true, but I have been blaming BattleLore.

Sure, the game has lots of cool bits, and if it is anything like Memoir 44, (which I enjoyed my one brief play of) it should be fun.

However, I’m sick of going to the DOW website and being bombarded with news of up and coming Battlelore expansion packs, and no new games!

As Pottse remarked, “This Bunker Party was weird”. What he meant by this was, there was very little Rock Band, no SingStar at all, and although the LAN got play, the showcase this time was the Analog room.

First up was a lot of San Juan. I had tried this out for the first time earlier this week, so was glad to introduce it to a few new players.

Of course Pandemic was played all through the day, with even Mrs. G playing. There was at least one win, but I don’t know what the final tally was. (I am aware of some flagrant rules violations, but the offenders will receive their karmic punishment eventually.)

As usual, I spent most of my time in the Analog room, but from my brief glimpses into the Lan room, here’s what went on:

Prey – I started things out with Prey Multiplayer running on each machine. I don’t know if more than three people ever played simultaneously. If anyone knows, speak up on the comments!

Tron – Pottse was clever enough to dig this up while I tried to get Team Fortress 2 running. From what I could tell, the game was full with 4 teams of 2 players each. What sucked was, the game isn’t smart enough to point the player away from the wall when the game starts, so the few games I played, I was constantly spawning in an alcove facing the back wall!

Boom Blox drew a constant crowd:

As people trickled in around 3pm, the easiest thing to do was start with Boom Blox. For those that don’t know, this is Spielberg’s first real entry into the video game space. Whether or not Spielberg was intimately involved in the creation of the game, I can’t say. What I can say is, this game is awesome!

Here is the official trailer:

Basically, Boom Blox boils down to three types of game play: Throwing stuff, Pulling Stuff, and Shooting stuff.