Bunker Project Log

It’s early Summer, and I’m just chillin’ with Mrs. G, and she says “isn’t it weird that we’ll be married seven years tomorrow?”

And, because I’m a total blockhead, I say “our anniversary isn’t until Saturday!”

Remember that thing about a land war in Asia? That is like arguing with your wife about when your anniversary is, when her birthday is, where your first date was, when your kids were born, when your kids were conceived, where your kids were conceived, etc. Don’t do it.

Anyway, as the “talk” went on, the icy cold grip of fear began gently massaging my heart. It was tomorrow, and I had forgotten. And… we had just had kid #2, which made it all the more important in her hormone saturated brain. I had to come up with a plan fast.

So, I did what any self-respecting gamer would do. I logged on to boardgamegeek?to find out where to buy the Travel Edition of Settlers of Catan.

My thinking was this… it was our seventh anniversary. The ridiculous gift for seventh anniversary is copper and wool. Wool comes from sheep, and sheep are in Settlers of Catan! It was obvious! She would love a romantic dinner at one of the many new fru fru restaurants in town, we would play Settlers at the table, then I would take her to “Knocked Up”, and then go swing dancing. Best. Husband. Ever!

So, after calling every game store in the metro area and coming up empty, one of the lovely people on boardgamegeek gave me a lead that resulted in a pristine sealed copy. I punched out the bits and read the instructions while driving back to work.

From there, it was magic. She loved the idea! We drove to the snotty restaurant. She loved that too! We ate, then busted out the game during dessert.

So Ro Mantic!

Unfortunately, Settlers ain’t really a 2-player deal, even with variant rules, so we had about three turns before giving up. From there we went to? “Knocked Up”, which was incredible! Those of you with kids… watch it (but not with them!) Then we snuck into the Swing thing 10 minutes before closing time. We acted cool like we were?experts from the next town over?checking out the scene, but we were scared to death. Damn young spry kids, and us all crotchety and old. Youth is wasted on the young.

Anyway, that’s the entirety of my experience with Settlers. With that out of the way, here’s my impressions of Cities and Knights of Catan.

First, I have to describe the Bunker experience. There are about 200 board games, and 200 video games, and about 20 people to play them. Most of them have never been played by me, because the party is my only time to play. This makes it a little hard to commit to a game that lasts over 10 minutes long. No matter how good they are, I want to keep moving on to something else.

So when?six of us started crowding around the table, I got a little nervous. Then, when the tiles were laid out,?with what looked like 3 times as?many hexes as a usual Settlers game, I got really nervous.

A big game

Then, when all these cards, and upgradable buildings, and barbarian tracks and such start coming in to play, I felt like a rat in a cage.

It didn’t help that I had made a painfully witless road placement at the beginning. It also doesn’t help that I am cursed with the most amazingly bad luck (just ask anyone who has played a dice-rolling game with me.) I was a casual onlooker to my own destruction. I could get no brick. When I got brick, it was stolen from me by clever playing of those damned cards I mentioned. When I got one of those same cards, and demanded brick, no one had it to give. Then they started playing cards that let them steal my cards… right when I’d figured out how to use them!

I eventually whined myself out of the full game “I wanna play Dystopia…”, “13 Victory Points?!”, “Will this game _ever_ end?!” And so forth. Yes, poor form, I admit. (But Dystopia was sweet!)

We decided on nine victory points as the winning condition, and Necrontyr immediately scored four more to take it. Surprisingly, I was first loser with seven. Odd how that happened.

Anyway, even with all that whining… I am dying to play it again, just not in the chaos of the Bunker Party setting. It would make a great?game night game?of cutthroat devilry.

One of my favorite games in the whole wide world is Unreal 2 eXpanded Multiplayer, or XMP for short. It’s a class-based game of capture the flag/football that totally encourages teamplay and strategy, and allows old fogeys like me to compete with overamped, reflex-having, newly graduated college-aged punks. When Mrs. G was pregnant with mouth to feed #1, I played this game a lot. When mouth to feed #1 was in her cute little car-seat contraption doo-dad, I played even more XMP, and paused to feed her every once in a while.

Just as an aside, one of the Bunker hardly-regulars, Dangerkitty, was told that he was pregnant whilst playing XMP. He disappeared for a while, then came back. I found out the news the next day. Believe it or not, he understood the gravity of the situation enough to not blast it over team chat.

Anyway, this isn’t about XMP, it’s about Dystopia, a source mod I have been hyping, and hoping that the Bunker knuckle-draggers would take part in.

The Setup

Dystopia is an objective-based first-person shooter. Two teams, the Punks and the Corps, alternately attack or defend objectives. These may include computers, power lines, access panels, and most importantly, cyberspace terminals.

And this is where the game gets really interesting. Those of us who have played objective based games are familiar with the “hack” objective, where you run up to the computer and hit the action button, and you’ve “OMG, h4x0r3d the 5y5t3m!” I’ve always been a bit disappointed by this, and even my beloved XMP seems overly simplistic.

But Dystopia really goes the extra mile, and gets positively Bill Gibson?with the whole hacking thing. First, you must have a cyberdeck in your posession, which is selected during your initial loadout. Then you must find a terminal, and hit the action button. But wait, there’s more!

Cyberspace

The player is immediately transported into cyberspace, which is a trippy, Tron-like, wall and ceiling walking computer construct. In here are panels which allow you to open and close doors, take over turrets, or shut down certain defenses. The hacker’s job is to open the doors and shut down the defenses that allow the rest of the team to move forward in “real life”. Sometimes this is as easy as hitting a button, in other situations, different levels of digital countermeasures must be removed.

To the outside observer, the hacker becomes totally inert and defenseless. This forces his or her teammates defend them while they are trying to find the right panel, or even dodging the opposing team’s hacker. That’s right, the heacker is often not alone in there! Combat in cyberspace rarely ends up in “real death” but the player will get bounced out, and must wait for their energy to build back up before jumping back in, causing the team to lose valuable time and initiative.

How it played

The interface is clean and straight-forward. I was the only one who had played before, but everyone understood the loadout screen right away. The server was set to enforce balanced teams, so all 8 of us were allocated fairly. By the end of the first 15 minute round, we were grasping the basics.

Then, Seraphim and?Necrontyr sparked the evolutionary gap, and discovered the stealth suit, and the ninja sword, and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, there were these scary-ass predator-esque cloaking mofos slicing up my team left and right. It was damn cool.

About the same time, Jester was discovering the joys of hacking, and he spent pretty much full time opening things up for us to move on. I was suddenly out of a job, so I became the heavy, and tore the younguns to shreds with the mini-gun loadout. It felt real good.

With that said, we still had trouble finding the objectives. Over the course of the night, no team ever completed an entire mission. The game is very unforgiving on this front, not giving either side the win.

Also, the game induced vertigo in almost all of us. We had to take a break halfway through the party to keep everyone from puking. By the end of the night we couldn’t bear to be in front of a screen at all. (That’s why the lan is cleared out in the picture at the top.)

So, was it good? For me, definitely yes! I think four or five Bunkerites are true believers, the rest probably could do without. We will probably revisit the game after having passed out some Wiki links. Like this one. C’mon guys, study up!

I’ve been pretty excited about Zombie Master. It’s a Source Mod that combines FPS and RTS elements, and requires teamplay. In it, one player assumes the role of the Zombie Master, while everyone else spawns in as a defenseless human.

The Zombie Master has the typical RTS perspective and controls, and can spend points to spawn in different varieties of zombies at particular places on the map. The Zombie Master’s job is to eliminate all of the human players via manipulation of the zombie horde.

The human team is charged with fulfilling mission objectives which change from map to map. In the one that we played, “Docks of the Dead”, our mission was to locate and retrieve several parts to a van. Once complete, it would be used to escape.

Not that we would ever find out what that looked like! Basically, the second each human spawned in, we all scattered like rats. We had no clue what we were doing, or where we were going, and the map is so dark that we spent a lot of our ammo on each other. Worse, when you die as a human, you were out for the entire round. Which meant that most of our time in the game was trying to convince the lone, hiding survivor to go find some way to kill themselves so we could start over.

Now, I’m not saying that Zombie Master is a bad game, in fact, I still think the idea is great and would love to play it again. However, I do think it will require a more experienced group playing it, or some gameplay revisions (and… maybe we need to adjust the gamma before we start!)

That said, I think JayJian (who played the Zombie Master exclusively) had a good time. 😉

Friday night’s Bunker Party started at 7:30. I had arrived home at 6:45 to tie a few loose ends, namely vacuuming… and unlocking a few more songs on Guitar Hero II 360. I’ve had trouble finding time to play (compounded by the fact that the X-plorer guitar totally sucks.) I suffered through and unlocked up to Thrash and Burn just as the first contestants walked in.

The first organized anything was Stub’s return to Ticket to Ride. Unfortunately for him, he was beat down by Tron’s husband. On the Lan, we managed to get a quorum for Zombie Master, with disappointing results. We then moved on to Dystopia, which was leagues better, but had it’s rough edges. As the hardcore took a break from Dystopia, they were replaced with Lan gaming n00bs who tried a round of Worms Armageddon. From what I hear, there were… miscommunications… regarding controls, and most kills were self-inflicted. I’m beginning to think a tutorial kiosk in the hallway, is something I really need to spend some effort on.?

Cities and Knights of Catan

The biggest surprise of the night was the mid-party mass exodus to the analog room. We had a huge game of Cities and Knights of Catan at one table, and virtually every one of my thrift store finds over the last month was played at the other. The Gamecube got lots of lovin, hosting uncounted matches of Mario Kart Double Dash.

Guitar Hero I, II, and 80’s was played profusely throughout, as was a few random games of Rockstar Table Tennis. Sadly, Cobalt Flux didn’t get me my friggin expensive replacement control box for my friggin expensive dance pads, so DDR wasn’t even on the menu.

The night ended as it usually does, the pillow drunk and/or really drunk congregated around the best form of video game Karaoke that exists… Singstar! We plowed through Rocks and Pop, and were forced to move on to Karaoke Revolution Party, which promptly killed that buzz.

Eventually, I had to do the unthinkable, and gently kicked the crew out at 4am. In the old days, this was about time to play a nice calm game or three of Monkey Target, but I suspected I was on kid patrol in about 4 hours. (Mrs. G and I hadn’t really worked that detail out beforehand, so I played it safe.)???

All in all, it was another rousing success, and I actually got to play! (Sometimes that’s tough.)

Here are a bunch of blurry and dark pictures for your viewing pleasure:

There’s a lot of prep for a BP. I’m procrastinating by posting.

Checklist:

DDR Room
Get CDs back in cases
Make sure projector starts and all consoles are hooked up
Make sure CRT?starts and all consoles are hooked up
Check Batteries
Sweep

The Lan
Clean up
Put CDs in cases
Clean off Make Trax
Make sure all the machines start
Check the NAS
Vacuum

The Theater
Clean out the cupholders
Vacuum
Put away all the pillows

Bathroom
Stock TP
Make?sure we have clean towels
Clean the toilet (boo!)?

Analog Room
Make sure Mame Machine Starts
Hide TJ Bearyguts from the kid
Vacuum

Meta
Clean the catbox
Write stupid post about Bunker Party Prep (Done)

Saturday started with the realization that the nerd surface was useless in the dark Lan/Theater Area. It was switched with the Make Trax cabinet out in the analog room. I wonder why I hadn’t thought of that before.

Anyway, with that detail and some final cleaning up out of the way, I headed off to paintball, very late. I came back dirty, bruised and coppery with sweat. All I wanted to do was take a shower. I was thwarted by the first round of guests. All told, we had 35+ people in the bunker from 4pm to 3am.

DOTA Begins – I still don’t understand the allure. These dorks played this game for 10+ hours.

Analoggin’ – I was glad so much stuff got played out here

BigBass’s Coterie – Umm… yeah… these guys were there.

The rest: