 |
Jared Bender GuestSpotter |
A 40-Hour Day, Monkey Sex, and the Curse of the French Monitor
Unemployed, sleep-deprived, game-withdrawn, cursed, sexy man-shell...did I mention sexy? This is the state of things. For the sixth summer kick-off "Fest" in as many years, devotion to the cause has left me as such. There are no victors, save for the Sandman, but for the five or six of us who call Dave's mom's basement home for a day, the only losers are those that leave early.
I'm getting ahead of myself; the true beginning to the story began a few days prior to the Fest. An old-school, Pentium-powered, Windows 95, "what's USB?" mini-Fest trapped us in Mitch's parent's basement for a few hours as we played games like Duke 3D, Doom II, Blood, and Death Rally. We used to throw LAN parties with serialized names--it started with our own QuakeFest, but as Quake and its sequels became evermore long in the tooth, we tossed the game names and just stick with "Fest" now. Anyways...I didn't bring my archaic Packard Bell P75 or my AT&T Globalyst P75 (yes, with a "Y"), so I was stuck with the leftovers from the cannibalizing of random systems stamped with the "Microsoft Windows 95 seal-of-approval." Though it was the slowest of the four computers, the real problems didn't occur until I plugged in my new 19-inch Fest-ing monitor. I won't release the brand name of the monitor for fear of assassins, but the company's name is three-letters long and seems to cause a lot of four-letter words. The two-week-old monitor had an affinity to expand and contract the screen's image based on the dark and light of what was displayed, and due to its unwillingness to cooperate, it was dubbed "the French Monitor."
The mini-Fest began with mass consumption of peanut M&M's and marveling at Duff's new digital camera (which, by the way, captured all of this article's included pics). Duke 3D was installed on everyone's systems and Blood was ready for sloppy seconds. The co-op game started, but as everyone jumped down the laundry shoot/vent to begin the WereCat and Pig-Cop alien slaughter, I was left on the roof hoping to move. The network connection crapped, and my gaming experience instantly became like that of a fat man riding a pony--plenty of potential energy, but a short ways to go.
We restarted. Chunk-chunk-chunk; another restart--the same 10BaseUgliness. We switched to Blood. The level: Bodies. While I found the 20 to 30 seconds of secondary flare gun "scrotum separation" I was able to get in to be fulfilling, the same network problems persisted. Doom II was the same. The constant Ctrl-Alt-Deleting and the "Task Manager" screens it blossomed caused my monitor's screen edges to expand and contract as I switched in and out of dark and bright screens. At this point, we had pinpointed that the carrier monkey of network poison was my PC. Last resort: Death Rally. It worked, but network problems continued, causing my car to disappear and reappear on everyone else's systems and everyone else's car to do the same on mine. By the time I had to leave to get enough sleep to be unemployed the next day, we all thought our troubles would be over when we left those crippled systems atop the ping-pong table. I left hoping the true Fest would fare better for me...
Friday night, 7:30pm, Dave's mom's basement, complete with cat urine smell. My troubles began when I arrived half an hour late and the seat I'd had for every Fest prior had been stolen by Anthony--minor, but an ominous discrepancy to preempt the night. I got set up and headed off to the local grocery--M&M's and frozen pizzas were in short supply.
On my way out I careened into a 2-foot-high rusty metal spike sticking out of the ground. It must have decloaked just before it scraped a good five inches of my tibia. The curse, I thought, was official--what a horrible night to have a curse. The spike's not-so-apparent purpose was to keep garden hoses off of the garden, but what it turned into was a painful but highly ineffective leg guillotine. After 20 minutes of pain and a quick stop at Mitch's parent's house for Neosporin and bandages, we continued on our way to candy consumption.
Upon return to the Fest-ing dungeon, I started downloading what I'd need for the night through my wireless connection. What whatever reason, I was experiencing a new round of network ailments--I don't like to speak in hyperbole, but it would have been faster for me to yell the binary code at my computer. Halfway through the 48-minute download, Dave accidentally reset the server and the process had to begin again. We switched out my wireless card for a Server Class 100T wired card, and the transfer proceeded with a little thunder.
First order of business would be some Unreal Tournament 2004. Duff set up the server and we all jumped in. I noticed immediately something was a bit off when it took my computer as long to load the levels as it did for the others to finish playing them. After about four rounds of this, we finally switched to a different game mode that allowed my system to actually load the game. This tiny victory was short-lived as I quickly noticed a discernable dropping of frames. The game usually runs smashingly on this rig, so I knew that something wasn't on the up-and-up. I rebooted, checked some system diagnostics, and eventually cracked the case open to perform a little hands-on exorcism of whatever digital devil was plaguing my computer. Whatever it was, it was causing my CPU to run at egg-frying temperatures. Rather than tinker, we bootstrapped a big-ass case fan to my machine. After a few minutes, the case was noticeably cooler, so I was able to rejoin the Fest-ing.
They had switched over to Battlefield Vietnam and I hopped into the game. At about 3fps during actual gameplay, my dreams of winning Vietnam became much like the real thing. I exited Vietnam and loaded up the Painkiller demo (downloaded from GameSpot, of course) expecting similar chunkage. Inexplicably, the game ran like butta' and looked great, even with all the settings cranked up. Curious, I booted up UT2K4 again to test my luck--snake eyes. The case: cool, the settings: low, the graphics card: new, and the leg: bleeding. The only conclusion: the uncooperative monitor was hobbling my system. Oh merde!
It was now 4am and there was little to be done. We had all stopped playing and begun to accommodate our sleepless insanity by searching Google Pictures for things like "sex flange," "peppermint windshield," and "monkey sex," with expectedly disturbing results. The only game that was to save my gameless Fest-ing night was Warcraft III. The game surprisingly worked like it was supposed to, and we played some hero siege mods as the sun slowly crept through the curtains drawn over the window wells of his basement. The morning sun had vanquished the horrible night.
At 11am, we departed. My computer was filled with floating cat hair from Dave's basement. The Mountain Dew had done its damage to my bladder. The leftover pizza took on the shape of Abraham Lincoln. The cat-urine discolored chair had tainted my shorts, and the chocolate I stole from Dave's ex had melted into the pocket of my swim trunks. It was a successful Fest, despite the curse. The rest of the day was spent recovering and watching zombie movies, with whom I felt a kinship.
Previous PageNext: Your Gaming Machine Keeps You Away From Prison
GameSpotting Fan Club
This is eight unique perspectives on the world, games, and everything in between, and includes a radical idea for release schedules, a love letter to Lovecraft, and a detailed account of a LAN party gone awry.
