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.)

Even Risk Express made an appearance! NatX is still awaiting his copy.

Galaxy Trucker was played for the third time, and really appreciated for the first. I have no pics, but here is a weird Youtube video of it showing the first phase of the game.

In a nutshell, you build your ship, then fly it through a card driven adventure, and try to make money from your journey. Probably better with alcohol.

I finally opened Blokus Trigon, and lost to Reebs. If I remember correctly, this is my first loss at any flavor of Blokus, boo. Regardless of my lack of victory, I think the game is less fun, since it inspires far fewer jokes, or perhaps we just haven’t figured them out yet.?

Citadels made it to the table, but I was too much of a spaz to finish it, as I needed to get to the Quake Wars game inside. Sorry Red and Reebs. Expect a full pictorial on this game later.

The highlight of the night was the Colosseum game that went long after the party was scheduled to end. I had a great time, but I had to wake up at 6 in the morning for some work stuff. Painful.

Reebs won… all by herself, with no help from anyone. Here’s her production of “Isis’ Revealed Secrets”.

… and the scoring track. I lost, by a lot (blue). Jester (green) was second biggest loser, and Pottse (red) was third. Seraphim (orange) came second. Notice that purple one all the way around the board at 104.

By the time we wrapped up, it was 1am. So much for this being a Daywalker BP.

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!

Surprisingly, everyone seemed to like this game, even with this massive fault.

Team Fortress 2 – Gold Rush

I was really looking forward to playing this, but I was deeply involved in a game of Risk Express with Red5 and Reebs. From what I heard, it was awesome.

Enemy Territory – Quake Wars

This one I demanded we play, even going so far as to shut down the currently running TF2 game. I love objective-based/assault/team games like this, and until Novalogic makes a successor to Joint Ops, this just might do.

Luckily, no one knew what they were doing, so we all equally sucked, but it started to come together by the third and final round. All I know is that Red 5 constantly used me as his personal spank totem for the last 15 minutes, and it hurt.

Here’s a decent video showing the full range of hardware:

I think everyone went away satisfied with the game play, and by now it was 9:45pm, 15 minutes before close. Or was it?

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.

In the basic throwing game, you have a tower of blocks, which you must knock down by throwing baseballs at it. You get points for each block you knock off.

In the Pulling type games, you have a tower, a la Jenga, which you dismantle piece by piece. You gain 5 points for removing a single piece, and lose a point for every other piece you knock out along the way.

A demo of pulling:

The shooting game amounts to target practice, and in my opinion should have been left out.

As I expected, Boom Blox was a hit, but I had no idea how popular it would be. Nothing else made it on the Wii that day (not even Mario Kart which Mrs. G lovingly donated to the cause, with a full set of four wheels!) Several people left saying that they had to buy it for their parents (the whole “adult” Wii thing is really cracking me up/freaking me out.)

For those looking for the game, both Circuit City and Target are giving away a $10 gift card with purchase this week. Buy it, you’ll love it!