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IGDA Melbourne LAN

April 2nd, 2006 - 11:14am

The other day I mentioned that I’d purchased a new video card for my computer. There were two reasons. The first is because it was running pathetically slow so I was forced to upgrade if I wanted to play new games. The second is because there was a LAN Party being put on for the IGDA Melbourne chapter.

Stephan and I had been organising this LAN since late January, when the idea was first hatched. It’s been a lot of planning, since this was the first “large scale” event we’d ever organised, and in the end I think we both had a pretty good time.

On Friday night, we went to the event location (Torus Games‘ warehouse in Mitcham) — it’s at this point I should probably publically thank Romi for helping organise the space, David B for organising the loan of equipment from the Shafted LAN crew, and Bill for letting us use his warehouse — and setup as much as we could for the next day’s events (in case you aren’t keeping up, that would be April 1st).

Firstly, I should apologise to everyone who turned up expecting some of the competitions to run. The Quake competition almost got started, then everyone seemed to forget. The Call of Duty 2 and Dawn of War competitions seemed to be DOA and I would’ve loved to see the Battlefield 2 competition run but I don’t think there was enough people willing to play to have a decent 2-sided match.

The one competition that did run was the Mario Kart DS competition. We had nine entrants (including me; I was running the competition) and though many of the entrants performed well, I think the competition was mostly between David H from Tantalus and myself — we were neck and neck almost the entire time. It almost doesn’t seem fair, but I won the competition and walked away with a remote controlled Mario Kart of my very own. Kudos to David (and the others!) though, as it was a very exciting contest and it took me eleven rounds to get my five wins. David was on four.

The star of the whole event was, for me, Guitar Hero (the picture at the top there is me playing said game). The game is not yet out in Australia but someone from BlueTongue kindly lent us their imported copy and guitar to play. It’s hard to explain how good this game is unless you’ve played it. Imagine Dance Dance Revolution, except instead of stepping you “play” a guitar-shaped controller in time with classic rock tunes (such as “Sharp Dressed Man” which turned out to be Trav’s nemesis, or “Take Me Out”). Perhaps it might not appeal to musos who can actually play this stuff, but to us regular humans, I defy anyone who plays this game for the first time not to have a goofy grin on their face. I know I did.

Sing Star was also quite popular a bit later on in the evening, though I didn’t get a chance to play. Imagine karaoke, with points!

We’d hoped for a pretty decent-sized turnout of maybe 60-70 people, 40-50 of which would have played PC games on the computers that they brought. Sadly, only two-thirds of the people that registered even bothered to turn up. That means the turnout was around 20 people. Disappointing, sure, but I think most people that turned up had a good time.

The event began to run out of steam at around 10pm, so we started to pack up. The last few people left at around 11pm so it ended up being long enough, but not over staying it’s welcome.

I would hope we can run another event like this in the future, but would love to see a lot more people to attend. The small target audience (Melbourne video game developers and friends) was partly to blame, as was the distance from the city (where most developers are located). I’m not sure how best to rectify these issues but I think I speak for both Stephan and I when I say I think we’d like to try and figure them out.

Rock on!

Tags: gaming, lan, outing