Wooooow…
For some reason I have not been able to come up with the motivation to write about my trip to Las Vegas, partially because I have told it to so many people and partially because I do not believe that the people that might be reading this are from the same crowd as I am.
To sum everything up, very few teams actually attended MLG Las Vegas. Where there should have been in the neighborhood of two hundred, four man teams in attendance, there was about fifty. Keeping that in mind our placing is not what it would have been had there been a full crowd.
The first day was FFA aka Free for All (every player for himself in a race to amass the most kills in fifteen minutes).
I am pretty bad at FFA and I was not surprised at all when I got knocked out first round (still disappointing!)
The next day was the team games and that went ok for us, out of fifty teams we made thirtieth (semi pro bracket.)
Even though I don’t count it due to the lack of people technically we can say that we went to an event and got semi pro, which is about the top two hundred players in the world.
What did count and that thing I am the most excited about was playing against a Halo 1 pro (keep in mind that we have been playing Halo 2)
Halo 1 definitely is where I excel and it is my favorite game; getting to play it against someone who was a Halo 1 pro was a dream for me.
What happened next blew my mind. We agree to play 1v1, first on his host, then on mine (host plays a very large role.)
Both games I won with relative ease. A day later I we played some 2v2s (again on the Pro’s host) and we won four out of the five games we played.
I knew that I was good at Halo 1 but I never would have guessed that I was good enough to beat a Halo pro. The only thing that makes me sad is that I never had the opportunity to play Halo 1 while it was being played competitively or else I too could have been a Halo pro. Partially this is because of growing up in Alaska, cut off from the rest of the world. Another reason is that my mother did not want me to play “killing games”. Because of these two reasons I missed out on having something that few people in the world have the skill to take, a pro contract. That would have changed my life in such a huge way.
Parents, I urge you to really think before you stop your children from doing something. I have been playing “killing games” for years now and I have never, nor ever will without sufficient reason kill another person. This is because of the morals that were instilled into me by my parents, not because they stopped me from playing video games.
If anyone really wants to know more about my trip to Las Vegas or pretty much anything concerning video games, feel free to come talk to me.
-Jason
Ok, when I said I was going to keep this blog more or less up dated, I really meant less. I do apologize for keeping everyone waiting in suspense but, as those of you who are intimately familiar with last minute vacations would know, things can get a little hectic.
Last blog I left off with a three man team, plane tickets, and not much else besides a stubborn resolve to make this happen even if it wrecked us.
Here is a quick tip for people thinking about going on a trip to Las Vegas, don’t! Ok, well I am obviously joking but there is a lot of hassle involved.
If you are under twenty one there are only a couple hotels that you can check into, one of those being the Hilton.
Secondly you might leave with all your appendages attached but you will return missing an arm and a leg at least. Food there is so expensive you would think that America was enduring a serious famine.
Another thing that was amusing to me were the Mexicans that stand on the side walk, flicking their hooker trading cards. They are there on the pretense of handing them out as cheap advertising, but really they are just mocking you for not have trading cards with ladies on them whom are only covered by advantageously placed stars, stars that you would wish on if you were into wishing on stars.
Enough tips, back to the story.
There was only one other person that I could think of to fill out our roster, and he was already on a team. A quick wish on a hooker star later and Nick was on the phone telling us that his team couldn’t go and he wanted to talk with us about getting on ours. As an added bonus he also brought a coach to the team.
Coaches for gaming teams have a rather interesting role, instead of coaching us before the game and letting us do our thing during the game, they let us do our thing during practice and coach us during the game. I will explain that a bit more later.
Somehow (again with my mom’s help and quite a bit of luck) we managed to get our hotel situation figured out. It was fairly complicated but it boiled down to someone from a different team that was over twenty one would get two rooms (one for our team one for his) and we would give him cash once we met up.
With everything set up we got down to practice like good little children. Yeah right.
A combination of conflicting schedules, lag due to living in Alaska, and ACS (Do not subscribe to ACS they are terrible) we never had much practice before we left. In fact, the most practice we had as a team was once we arrived in Vegas.
well I wrote quite a bit but said little right there. I am ADD and can never pay attention to one thing for to long, so I guess I will post this now and write more later.
Better Google images!
I went to Google images and I noticed something new. I don’t know how long this has been the case but I just noticed it.
When you select the image size you want you can now pick “Super large”, or something along those lines.
Previously the largest you could pick would return a picture size of at least eight hundred pixels (I believe). Now the smallest is somewhere around one thousand pixels.
I am in love.
I instantly ran a search for “Bioshock” (If you have a problem with this game, do not keep your ignorance to yourself, speak up so we can all marvel at your lack of education. Ie come talk to me about it, you can be helped.)
So far as I have found this is the best way to search for High Res pictures. I am now going to spend the rest of the night on my 41k dialup getting as much pictures as humanly possible.
-Jason
