24 Hour Crack

Greetings. I am not insane. Just prefacing this particular post, because the moment most people see 24 Hour they freak out and think you're mental for doing something for 24 Hours.

Anyways, there's been a high density of game related posts, and I'll be blogging on other things, but this just happened so I'm obligated to post about it.

We recently (or are currently) concluding our annual 24 Hour Crack session.

If you recall from a previous post, Crack refers to anything addictive, and in this case refers to Video Games. Mostly computer games to be specific. So, logically, this would be a 24 Hour gaming marathon.

Now, if you're a gamer, a 24 Hour LAN party sounds ridiculously awesome and insane at the same time. For non-gamers, this sounds stupid.

Here's a bit of history. I started this last year during Spring Break because I had an idea of mashing several Cracks such as ITR Games, Crack in the AC, and Warcrack into one giant session. Then I talked to some people, and we decided instead there should just be a 24 Hour session. So, I organized it, got a fridge, had people bring drinks, reserved the computer lab, and we had a blast. Some alums even popped in during the night to have fun with us. And of course even if you didn't try for 24 Hours, what I called Hardcore, you could drift in and out as you please, a Casual player.

So, this year, I decided there needs to be a little more organization. Buy drinks so people didn't have to bring their own. This ended up as 24 2-Liter bottle of soda. Of which 6 currently remain. Mental note, less Pepsi. Still got a fridge. Ordered dinner from Chipotle who were really awesome at getting our order together for us. Also, easier for me to handle who owes me what. Got Dominos for the midnight and morning meals. After all, nothing keeps quite like pizza for the morning, and nothing is open at 6am to order food. I had a special time where we took a break and tried out more alternative games. Didn't work out so well since no one brought alternative games, so we watched a replay of the stupidest StarCraft game ever. I opened it up to the Claremont Colleges. And lastly I setup a more constrained game list and made sure the games were all loaded onto the computer ahead of time.

Whew.

It was a huge success. We had at least 20 players at all times with the exception of very early morning. We had non-regulars show up and experiment with the games. People were fragging. We had some serious and some ridiculous games, such as UT2K4 with all Shield Guns on Double Domination mode. Super Smash Brother Brawl was on continuously for the duration of the session on a projector. Several epic games, including a StarCraft free for all where I went BattleCruisers without anyone realizing it until I squashed the Medic Marine player. Then I lost all 24 of them to a bunch of cloaked Wraiths since I had not enough Scanner Sweeps and no Science Vessels. Basically, ridiculous amounts of awesome.

Being someone who takes pride in what they do, I of course have already taken down notes on how to improve this for next year. It still will have to be during Spring Break so people can sleep and recuperate. I might shift it to the 5pm to 5pm slot instead of noon since some people don't want to wake up pre-noon on Break and then people could sleep and come back if they wanted to. More incentive for people to play through the morning. Then you can get dinner afterwards and sleep to the next day. I should bring my own alternative games in case no one else brings any. Less Pepsi, especially since Root Beer is king when pizza is around, and more Mountain Dew. Oh, and I should eventually get a USB mouse so I don't have to use the ones in the computer lab. They've served me well, but the Mac mouses tend to have a finicky right-click, which is bad for FPS games.

So, if you happen to be around for Spring Break, keep an eye out for me spamming the e-mail lists again next year. I promise it will be even more awesome.