Bunker Project Log

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!

Next in were Vitamin Z heavy laden with beer, and SirKy, returning like the prodigal son from a 1+ year hiatus in the desert.

Thus began the endless playing of the third version of DOTA to hit the Bunker: Heroes of Newerth. SirKy slipped comfortably in to smacktalk mode, Z took it like a man, and I knew all was right with the world.

Eventually Pottse appeared and started up version two of DOTA: Demigod. I love Stardock and all, but it was obvious that Demigod has performance issues. I had chalked it up to my 100Mb LAN before, but we were now on Gigabit, with only two clients, and it ran poorly. At the same time HoN smoked along at a decent clip.

JayJian arrived, and with two fixed games underway, he was forced to experience a little Pain, Andy Dick style. I?m a sucker for Pain DLC, even if I don’t actually play the game, and earlier in the day I had downloaded all the new content. This included a new Museum environment. (Imagine every Smithsonian building kind of mushed together with the Mall of America and you?ll get the idea.) New characters included George Takei (whom I haven?t played yet), and Andy. He was funny enough.

Soon HMAN, Stub, Markus, and Banana showed up, and the LAN activated fully with HoN. Since I would rather take a hot acid bath than actually play any DOTA variant, I resumed the Pain chillout.

Then NatX arrived, and wanted to play? Resistance (??!)

I decided to just drink it in, spectating while he went through the single-player campaign from the beginning. This was all good until he started making frequent 180 degree turns, at which point I got violently ill. I spent the next 10 on the crapper, desperately craving Dramamine.

I escaped to the analog room, and was eventually joined for the only analog of the night, a five-player game of Tsuro. It looked like Banana was going to win, but she had chosen her cards unwisely. Somehow Markus took it, and for some reason this depressed me.

Then came the great Beatles Rock Band experience. I had been looking forward to this. Unlike the other Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and SingStar games, I was finally going to be singing to songs that I sort of knew the words too, and had listened to long enough to actually know how the words were supposed to sound. I also had managed to amass three Lips wireless mics for the harmonizing features of the game.

But this proved to be my undoing.

Somehow, the confluence of two wireless guitars, a wireless drum set, three wireless mics, two wireless access points, about 300 miles of Cat5 cable, 15 computers, three console systems, and the collected cell phone signals of the Bunker faithful in attendance wigged out the mics, and culminated in the message ?I can?t hear you!? Stopping each song from one to five times. It was a total drag, and really sucked the life out of the game. Pottse, who was in a DOTA-clone coma later said ?I didn?t even want to try after seeing that.?

There better be a patch, or I am going to boycott.

Once that was over, some sort of miracle happened. I don?t know what, but it was as if a veil had been lifted from the nerd?s eyes, and they decided? that they didn?t want to play a DOTA clone any more! I was dumbstruck. Even more strange was that somehow, by the grace of the almighty gods of Steam, I had convinced these nitwits that we should play? Dystopia!

Unfortunately, the map cycle I had set up (probably for a sense of variety) included maps that most of us had never tried before. On top of that, there were only two or three of us who had played the game at all. It started off pretty rocky, and none of the teams managed to complete a full assault. Hopefully we will play again now that we have a good cross-section of BP players who have at least two game rounds under their belts.

Finally Scotty arrived, and with him a big Bass Guitar Amp in tow. By now I was pretty exhausted so I went to see what the deal was. He explained that the speaker was dead, so I chilled out in the analog room with that and my multimeter and benched it while the party wound down with more Beatles Rock Band (this time with wired mics? boo!)

All told, it was a decent day, and all the things I was worried about breaking worked fine. The new guts are ready for primetime, and hopefully I can get clearance from Mrs. G for a fully populated festival. I?ll let you know.