Bunker Project Log

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.

Well, I finally got my ten… plus two extras. My first two worked fine. Then my CC was refused by Steam. I eventually got smart and set up a new Steam account, but used PayPal as my payment method. This allowed me to get five more before Steam wised up and killed that.

So, I started getting antsy, and emailed friends at work. Being that it was Sunday, I didn’t get a response. Then, I got really desperate, and asked DangerKitty to help out. He hasn’t PC gamed in years, and doesn’t have a Steam account, so chances were slim.

Steam is running a great special on Prey right now, at $4.95 a pop. This is perfect for me, as I can get a groovy game on the entire LAN for just shy of $50.

So, I bought the first one to try out the multiplayer and it worked lickity split. I had the dedicated server set up in about three minutes, which is a record for me. I was sure that the gravity and Portal effects would be perfect for a drunken Bunker Party LAN game.

Friday night, I went through a “medium” (five Epidemic card) game of Pandemic with Mrs. G and The Wall. Throughout the course of the game, we discovered that the St. Petersburg card popped up twice, which, if you know how the game works, is impossible.

I had heard at Boardgamegeek that there were possibilities of missing cards, but I figured it couldn’t happen to me. Upon further inspection, here’s what I found:

(And yes, my pictures are getting horribler. I blame the camera.)

As you can see, I have two St. Petersburgs, and no San Francisco. With the addition of some very stylish markerwork, order is restored.

Thanks to Scott Burkett at Pothole on the Infobahn, I’ve finally solved my theme changing issue. Hopefully my two loyal readers will never again be shellshocked by the constant theme switching.

Also, for my one mobile reader (possibly Dangerkitty), the site now actually shows up and works well in a mobile browser. Thanks to Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition for that one. (Of course, I’ve had this thing installed since about day one, but I was too stupid to install it correctly.)

One more thing off the list. Now to review the 10 or 20 games that have been waiting!

So last week or so, Toys’r'us has this 50% off blowout on games, and for whatever reason they usually throw some non licensed-Monopoly type game in the mix. Last time I scored the Seafarers of Catan 5-6 player expansion, which really wasn’t a victory at all. This time they had Starship Catan (which I already own, love, and have been too lazy to review) and Settlers of the Stone Age, which I did not own, and desperately needed to get closer to closing the loop on the whole Catan series. So I ordered it for the a-mazing price of $15, and had it two days later.

I spent so much time playing board games that I never got any pictures. Thus, I was only able to capture the aftermath.

Beer:

The third game of Pandemic in a row (in which we got our asses kicked):

Besides the fact that there were a few people from BP’s of yore, there was the usual. Plenty of Blokus, but totally innuendo free (not enough drunk girls playing… just mature manly men.) There was some Singstar, but  I missed it. Lots of Rock Band. A screwed up game of Shadows Over Camelot (I lost 2 of the loyalty cards, which messed things up, and there was NO TRAITOR!)

For whatever reason, the four of us (excluding Princess NotCool, AKA, Mrs. G) who played TI last time, all had this romantic notion that we would have a great time playing it again.

For me it was the white whale. I was bound and determined to make it through this damned game, whether we enjoyed it or not.

So, did we enjoy it? I’m not sure. Did we finish it? Almost. Z thinks Red5 was headed for a win, but I had managed to Diplomacy Markus into the boredom zone, and he was breaking off… which could have led me to Mecatol Rex, which my Secret Objective was all about.