After a lot of reading, some discussion, and just a little tequila, we here at Joystiq have finally determined the
recipient of our third Joyswag giveaway. Even though only one out of the initial 250 entries can win, there were
a
few
that
we
can't
help
but
mention. However, in the end
Triese came out on top after reminding us what
college is really all about: 24/7 lan parties. Special thanks go out to Major
Nelson for providing the headset and the Xbox Live! subscription. And if you're one of the 99.996% of the entrants
who didn't strike it big this time, stay tuned for Joyswag #4 which is just around the corner. This time we asked what
your favorite online multiplayer game of all time was, and this was Triese's response:
The greatest online game for me has to be Half-Life. The reason I like it is not only for the great gameplay, but also
for the first experience I had with it.
My first year of college I lived in a dorm that was not wired for a lan or internet connection, however we all had these pc we had gotten for college. Sure we could have used them for class work, but we saw even greater potential for them.
A group of us got together and pooled some money and bought a couple of spools of cat 5 cable, a couple of routers,
some caps and a crimper. We then proceeded to bend some of the dorm rules and wired all 32 rooms on our 11th floor for
a lan. I can remeber feeling like one of the characters from ?Hogan?s Heros? as we ran cables above ceiling tiles and
drilled into the rooms through cinder blocks, all while hiding our activites from the dorm staff. We didn?t stop there
though, we knew that the administration office down on the first floor had an open spot on their network switch, so we
ran cable down 11 floors and had a custodian let us in so we could plug in to the switch and ?borrow? some online
connectivity. Sure the connection was slow and I?m surprised that we got it all to work, but it was worth it.
Everyone on the floor kept their room doors open, so you could always walk out of the elevator onto the floor and be
greated by string of curse words that would make a drunken sailor blush. That was always worth a good chuckle. You
could always tell who sucked at the game because they were the ones that strung together combinations of words that
you?d never heard before, thus earning them a few catch phrases and nicknames. There was someone playing every minute
of the the day, and alot of us would play for hours on end (much to the dismay of our parents and their pocket books).
It was one of the greatest couple of months of my life; we had no responsabilities, and as far as we were concerned our
parents were paying for us to play Half-Life. We eventually got caught and had to remove our cable from the switch
downstairs, but we kept the lan and continued to play lan games. Oh yea, one more thing ?Damn crowbar!?
