I didn’t sleep as well during this LAN party because I stole the couch several hours before anybody else stopped playing games. While this ensured a comfortable sleeping place, it means that my impressions of the November LAN recorded here below are a bit fragmented. I’d recover in a few days, except that I’m going to visit my parents this Thanksgiving, meaning that I’ll wake up several hours *after* everybody else. The time difference is equivalent to the jet lag of visiting Germany. No, wait, they live in Tennessee. The jet lag of visiting Croatia.

ANYWAY.

This is the first LAN that I actually contributed to, outside providing upstairs entertainment between rounds. (And during the Guitar Game craze, even that was overridden) Before the LAN, I suggested Starcraft, since it’s the only multiplayer game my ancient PPC Powerbook can run. So We had a real Starcraft tournament. I was even going to give out prizes and everything. However, Worst Prize (Banjo-Kazooie 3) was never awarded due to irregularities in the contest scoring such as The Pizza Just Arrived, and The Wireless Crashed Again. Even if Worst Prize had been awarded, I surely would have won it, because my team lost every time, despite having Nate Reiter on it.

I also tried to give away Fable 2 a couple of times, not as a prize or anything, just because I don’t want it any more. But it’s a tough crowd at a LAN; the people lugging in 80-pound G5-ripoff cases haven’t even heard of the newest consoles. Seriously. They’re so tough, they only play Mario so they can beat their girlfriend and then complain about how console games are too short and cartoony. Not like the new PC game Dragon Age, which drenches characters in blood after every encounter, including 3 Normal Rats*. Serious realism right there.

But I digress. The other reason I couldn’t give Fable 2 away is that Butch’s nephew Jake played the wood-chopping minigame most of Friday, including straight through supper. Not only were people impressed with his dedication to grinding wood-chopper levels, they never wanted to play the game. There was widespread agreement that Molyneux was insane to make it ANY part of the game, let alone such an important part of a rapid playthrough.

Finally Jake switched back to Fable 1 until The Pizza Just Arrived, at which point his dedication failed. Fortunately, after the pizza (but before The Wireless Crashed Again), Rose took over and finished it on Sunday. I was pretty happy about that; I heard that Fable 1 and 2 are nearly the same game, and now I’ve seen both all the way through and can verify it myself, but without having to suffer through playing it twice!

In between all the Fable, Thomack played halfway through Braid while Kaleb and I watched. My reaction vacillated between annoyed and delighted. Annoyed, because Thomack breezed through several puzzles that I had to check GameFAQs for. How is he so good at puzzle games? Delighted, because both he and Kaleb had some very insightful comments about Jonathan Blow’s deft use of gameplay to convey a message.

On a related note, I also gave several times my spiel for my Theory of Game Classification on Two Axes, and was received with listening if not outright agreement. I will post it here when I finish writing it down.

Before you go, as a public service announcement, Braid is available on XBox Live Arcade and Steam. It also has a demo on Steam. I don’t know what the demo is like because I just bought the full thing as soon I got an XBox. On the Mac, Greenhouse, the Penny Arcade games distributor, sells Braid. There is no Linux version.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Butch has New Super Mario Bros Wii, more accurately called New New Mario, since it follows New Mario on the DS. It was kind of fun, but I don’t think Nintendo seriously expected people to get past level 1-3 in multiplayer mode. Tycho’s comments on this are entirely correct, except that I don’t live with any of the guys at the LAN party any more, so we were more forgiving about the whole thing. The basic problem is that Mario jumping on Luigi’s head is the platformer equivalent of friendly fire, and it happens all the time because precise platforming on a non-split screen basically requires all players to make the same jump at the same time. I play more platformers than Rose, so when we played together, I tried to hang back a little and make a slightly harder jump each time, but it didn’t really work.

On the other hand, like New Mario Bros (for the DS), the single player mode seems pretty cool if you like the Mario 3/Super Mario World 2D pinnacle of Mario.

*Normal Rats are miniature Giant Rats. Dragon Age is actually a 360/PS3 game.