FragM #04 08th - 11th November 2007

Friday

Setup and arrival

This was our first time at Linnet Clough and so we arrived extra-early in order to make sure we'd be read for you lot in time :) The first order of business was finding out that half of the tables we'd been promised were actually stored far, far away on the other side of the site. Le win. Luckily for FT, et al, Flibble and Beelidge were gullible nice enough to go and get the tables we needed whilst the rest of us sat around doing nothing got on with the other tasks at hand.

Slight disaster when we found out that half of our long network cables had gone missing in transit. Nothing we couldn't deal with but it did mean that a small portion of the attendees were "only" on 100Mbit. Sorry guys! This will be sorted for next time :)

Games Meister Tourney

Our regular GamesMeister tourney once again took the form of bomberman 2 on the SNES, played on our projector for extra bomby goodness ;)

As the game has been around for a while, a good deal of people had 'teh skillz' and we saw some insanely close games. In the end though, Pyscho managed to beat out Komodo, FrenchTart and JemZ in a landslide of tasty victory action. Nobody came close to him - with only FT getting even one win in the final. Complete shocker (especially for me, damn you Psycho! - FT). As always, the winner of the tourney took away 2GB of Crucial Ballistix and the amazing GOLDEN JOYSTICK. Well done to Psycho!

Domino's - The pizza isn't a lie

Despite requiring rock-climbing gear, GPS and omniscience to find the venue, our good friends at Domino's were as ever on hand to deliver some tasty goodness. As always, the half price pizza proved highly popular with everyone and went down well with the half price side orders and cheap bottle of coke. We eat so healthily at these LANs, y'know? :p

fragM Pub Quiz

Well the last one was to easy so we tried to make this one a little harder... Possibly too hard as most people struggled to hit 25% correct answers. Perhaps we need to tone it down and make less use of google/wikipedia next LAN. Perhaps... :)

Still with a bit of hard work, grit and a lot of sweat Meister and John (AKA Mr.T) won with 13 points; team beer coming in a very close second with 12.5 points. If only they would of attempted more guesses and got lucky, they could now be savouring the nice cold refreshing taste of a crate of Carlsberg for their troubles. Alas, they did not and so off it goes to Meister and Mr.T.

Congrats to the winners and thanks to all taking part. Next LAN we promise to make the quiz less fiendish :)

Wii Bowling Tournament

DETAILS TO COME

Saturday

Counter-Strike:Source Part 1

After a delayed start of the CSS tournament (thanks to the server setup before the lan messing up and having to go back and totally configure a new one), we got underway with some le fun CSS action.

The matches were all short and sweet, and no one complained at all when the CGS rules were brought into play; this made for quick deathmatch-style games with less emphasis on team tactics and more on players skill with the weapons and team work. Still Browny,Sekret, and Raven quickly established their dominance in CSS with no one able to even get close. That was until Chungy, Komodo, and Meth when on a rampage and almost, almost had them (helped in part by Chungy's evident 1.6 experience).

With a few other very close matches and some absolute ass-kicking things got on quickly and the tournament swiftly came to an end on the first day with just the final to play.

To be continued...

Quake 3 Tourney

This was the first fragM to hold a big Quake tournament and it certainly won't be the last...

After the horror of dragging ourselves out of bed at the unholy hour of 11am, the tourney was quickly (if groggily) underway. Seven teams participated in order to make the tourney scheduling as awkward as possible ;) Two random matches were drawn for each team with a league-style scoring system. At the end of these matches, the top four teams went through to the semi-finals. All these initial bouts were played on pro-Q3DM6, possibly one of the all-time best TDM maps.

After some intense domination by JemZ's team, the following teams went through to the semi-finals:

Rick's team
FT's team
JemZ's team
Komodo's team

Semi-finals:

All of these bouts were played on OSPDM5. An odd map and an unfamiliar one to many players here.

First up we had FT's team vs Rick's team:
This one mostly involved FT's team dominating through a mix of controlling the map and and being giant rail-whores :p

Second we had JemZ vs Komodo's team:
Here, the unfamiliar nature of this map meant that the JemZ and Smile tag-team of map control faltered, letting Komodo's team inch their way ahead and come out on top.

To be continued...

Savage Pizza Tourney

Slotting in neatly after the tense semi-finals of the Quake 3 tourney, an hour of beast vs human combat mayhem was most welcome. Two quick and dirty warm up games were played, in which the beasts, commanded by Frenchtart annihilated the humans, commanded by Hypno. The tourney match was a very different affair, with Frenchtart commanding humans, and Hypno the beasts. From the start, humans seemed to have an edge, setting up a forward garrison close to the beast lair, and quickly teaching up to siege weapons. After ripping down building after building, it seemed as though the beasts had their day. Little did the humans suspect that the beasts had captured the middle spawn point and sneakily sent a battalion of hardened beast warriors to take down the human garrison. Engaged with the conflict at the beast base, this attack was overlooked until it was too late; the beasts earning a well deserved half price pizza prize for their efforts. Well done beasts!

You can see a full list of the Winnarz and Lhuzarz here (team 1 are the losing humans, and team 2 the conquering beasts)

PICTURE LINK y0

Soldat Tourney

As per every one of our awesome Lan events, a Soldat free for all was held ;) Soldat is a manic 2D platform shooter - think realtime Worms, but with Rocket Launchers and Chainsaws!

The fight was to fifty kills, and with over twenty people on the 'Big Falls' map, it wasn't going to take more than a few minutes! The first minute started off fairly even, but soon the top two started breaking away - by the time 35 kills was reached, there were two contenders - Hypno and Buttonz - separated from the rest of the pack by ten points.

Part way through, Buttonz managed a lucky frag with a grenade drop, killing 3 people at once, and from there onwards Hypno was playing catchup, the two players climbing to the frag limit always separated by only a point or two. After 7 minutes Buttonz hit the kill limit, with Hypno a close second on 47 kills.. about as close as a closeling from closeville.

Well played to Buttonz, and a sloppy second place to Hypno - Buttonz walks away with a babe-imprinted mousemat and a snappy optical mouse courtesy of powerdrive-computers.

I AM the Law!

Command and Conquer 3 Tourney

After a certain amount of mindless procrastination, the fragM 4 RTS tourney began. This took the form of a series of 1v1 games played on the map "Tournament Tower" in a single-elimination tourney structure.

Due to the size of the map, and the aggressive posture of most of the players, games were short and brutal. Notable were games played by Hypno, due to his trademark engineer rush strat. This really paid off for him, as he beat a tough set of opponents in the form of Helios, Smile, and Sekret. Frenchtart seemed to use a wide range of strategies, which turned out to be highly effective in battles with raven and uv.

Semi finals

Frenchtart (nod) vs Ubermicro (GDI):
Frenchtart and Ubermicro traded attacks, with Ubermicro seemingly having the edge due to effective harassment of FT's expansion and thus his economy. In the midpart of the game, though, he lost the initiative, turtled, and allowed FT to tech up to upgraded avatars, which decimated Ubermicro's fleet of mammoth tanks just before they could be upgraded with railguns. With little money and little defence, Ubermicro flung in the towel.

Hypno (scrin) vs MrTortoise (scrin):
Hypno headed quickly to capture both spires, and after sending a largely futile expansion above MrT's base, sneaked an engineer into MrT's conyard and sold it. Whilst a harsh blow, MrT rallied, fending off waves of attack before amassing a respectable army of gunwalkers, seekers, and disintegrators. For a moment, it looked as though the tables had been turned, with MrT's army ripping down building after building. Unfortunately for MrT, Hypno had just produced his first devastator warship, which, with the aid of some buzzers and disintegrators tore through MrT's army, followed by his base as though they were made of paper. Really soggy paper. Game over for MrT.

To be continued...

Le Poker Tourney

What better way to get away from the computer screen for a bit than to spend 6 hours straight playing poker? None that I can think of ;)

On the final table it was a monster battle throughout between smile and flibble. Smile's luck was inconsistent but it was a lucky run at the end which enabled him to come back to top and take home all the chips and an excellent Steel Series S&S mouse mat. As flibble, an admin, came 2nd it was brownY who took the runner-up prize of a Speed-link laptop back pack.

Sunday

Quake 3 Final

FT's team and Komodo's team fought this one out on DM7. This map emphasises teamplay and it's vital to control the main chamber containing the rail spawn, the red armour and only a short trip to the megahealth.

Mostly led by Ink, FT's team managed to hold on to the rail for a good portion of the map until a well co-ordinated attack by Komodo's team managed to wrest back control. This was only a short respite for Komodo's team as FT's team spent a few brief minutes tooling up before launching an attack from either side on the main chamber. Komodo's team almost repelled this attack but unfortunately fell with FT remaining alive in the room. From then on it was an inevitable victory for FT's team, leaving Komodo's team out in the cold. Bad luck guys!

The winners of this tourney (those that weren't organisers anyhow) netted themselves a shiny £10 amazon gift voucher.

Command and Conquer 3 Final

Frenchtart (nod) vs Hypno (scrin):
The final was played on the map "Tournament Rift" (just to shake things up a bit). Hypno quickly expanded to the middle blue tiberium, and took over three tib spires in quick order. Before hypno could take advantage of the blue tib, Frenchtart distracted his forces and captured Hypno's expansion. A little fracas later, and the expansion was destroyed. Both players then settled down to consolidate. FT expanded to the north tib field, and hypno to the field below FT. Hypno then stepped up his harassment campaign, forcing FT on to the defensive. This, combined with the 3:1 tib spire advantage was enough to allow hypno to tech up and start churning out tripods. After these began to cut a swath through his opponent, FT conceded the game.

Victory to Hypno netted him the very nice SteelSeries 3H Headset. Well done Hypno!

CSS Final

Sadly the final was destined to go only one way. With Mr.Tortoise having to leave early and with Komodo now filling in things didnt seem to look up. However, komodo, et al fought hard and the first map was a semi-close encounter, but with the second map came another problem: Komodo's PC messed up and restarted a few times so another gun for hire stepped in, this time in the form of h00x.

After a very close first half, the second was more drawn out. Eventually Browny, Sekret and Raven broke the deadlock and after a few more rounds they emerged victorious and thus took home the 1st place for CSS.

TrackMania Tourney

Though not as heavily played as previous events Trackmania was still very popular over the weekend. With OOKomoDo taking a commanding lead early on and grabbing it back whenever anyone challenged it.

Final rankings :

1 OOKomoDo
2 Psycho
3 J3mZ`
4 Hypno
5 Tom
6 sekret
7 Raven
8 uv
9 smile
10 meth

The Raffle...

DETAILS TO COME

Another LAN over and a year of gaming has passed...

I can't believe it was only just over a year ago when we were setting up for our first fragM event. It was incredibly nerve-wracking; not knowing if what we'd planned for would work and not really appreciating just how big the transition from small house LANs of 10-15 people to large 50+ person LANs was. Thankfully, it all worked out just peachy :) We took away huge lessons from that first event and used those with the feedback from you guys to transform the LAN into a true masterpiece. I know it probably sounds like I'm biased, but I truly believe that with the help of you lot we've managed to make fragM one of , if not the best LANs in the country.

So, once again, a huge THANK YOU to you all for coming along and helping make fragM what it is. We're going to carry on improving on the LAN whilst maintaining the atmosphere that makes it what it is. We've also got big projects working in the background and you guys will be the first to hear of it, so keep an eye on here and stay in the loop.

See you all at fragM #5!

FrenchTart