Xmadness Begins

Today was the beginning of Xmadness. I have a feeling its lifespan will be much longer than that of the day's contenders.

Xmadness is something a small group of us started to play system-link Xbox games over lunch at work. Today was the first encounter. We setup 3 xboxes with 12 controllers using 3 DLP projectors in a conference room. We would have added a fourth xbox, but we could only muster 12 controllers. The game was Halo. Even with the screen being split into fourths, each player still had a view larger than a 36" TV would provide one player.

We ended up with about 25 players and another half-dozen spectators. You might be surprised how much some of your coworkers would enjoy "killing" you! Twelve people playing the same Halo map in the same room is action-packed, to say the least. It was probably 80% beginners, but most learned quickly and everyone had fun.

The games went faster than expected since getting 15 or 25 kills doesn't take too long when there are 11 targets and you're holding a loaded shotgun. Ultimately, I'd like to play some team games and introduce a little more strategy. But for the next several events it will be hard to beat the simplicity and thrill of "shoot everything in sight". No reason to ask any questions.

We mostly played Hang 'em High with Shotguns, no shields, 50% health, and no radar. This makes for quick kills and lots of action, even for newbies. Most of the earlier matches went to FireCrkr (me) with G-Zero (Dave) getting a victory as well. And big papa (Wayne) made a strong showing as well. But even though we hadn't played this map, the three of us had played together several times and certainly had the upper hand going in.

Once we had enough players, the three of us sat out and several players came on strong. cHaks (Vicente) certainly had skills and Tivolicious (Eric) and kmo (Karl) were contenders, but kaelius (Ken) was victorious. Other sentiments expressed during the game were that newbie (?) should consider a name change, and peaceful (Ishraq) was not.

Now to find four more controllers... Posted by Chris on 9/10/2004 10:28:00 PM :: Permalink   
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