Event: Hurriquake II LAN Party Event Date: 07/13/2002 Written By: Warhawk Date Written: 07/18/2002

I had the pleasure of attending the Hurriquake II LAN party at Hurricane Electric in Fremont last Saturday. I showed up early and was able to get to know a few of the partiers waiting outside for the doors to open. Everyone there seemed very friendly and easy to talk to. As the doors were opening some of the guys I was talking to asked me to sit with them and play CS with their clan (tlp clan). I agreed and within 5 minutes of setting up we were already in a scrimmage with another clan. I was unfamiliar with their clan's strategies so needless to say I got worked. But hey it was fun.

The party area itself was well organized, clean and kept cool throughout the day. It looked to be a lunchroom because there were bathrooms of either side of the room (very convenient) and a counter with a sink on the far wall. Setup of the computers was extremely easy because each table had its own large power strip and there were CAT 5 cables for each computer, which eliminated the need for a power strip or even a LAN cable.

Once everyone started connecting to the network I began hearing gasps of joy and shouts of ecstasy as the network speed was analyzed. The network was on a fiber optic backbone with a 100mbps switch, so the connection was wicked fast. The building itself, which was home of Hurricane Electric (web hosting company) also housed all of the HomeLAN servers. You could see into the server room through a glass wall that was on one side of the room. Such a sweet setup made for some extremely low pings. I talked to some of the party Admins (who were extremely nice) and found out that there were 10 servers in use that were donated by HomeLAN and another CS server that was brought by the West Coast Elite Clan (WCE). Most of the CS battling took place in the WCE server throughout the day.

Free pizza was provided at 4 and 10 o clock. This was very cool of the party organizers, especially considering there wasn't even an entrance fee for the party. There was also a movie style popcorn machine that was standing by all night that provided a good snack in between games and pizza deliveries.

As is the case with most LAN parties these days, CS and to a lesser degree Quake, were the predominant games throughout the party. I saw one game of tribes 2 and a few Warcraft 3 matches. At one point someone started up a Jedi Knight 2 server, which I promptly joined and began to OWN. Apparently the other players in the server were relatively new to the game. At one point I had a score of around 500 or so and the next highest player had around 100. It was great throwing those guys around for a while. At one point [WCE]Viper stands up and says "hey who's Warhawk?" After pointing myself out to him he says "Man! You're kicking butt!" It was great!

Unfortunately I didn't own quite as much on the CS servers. I did do alright, managing to stay near the top scorers on each map, but I was by no means the best player. I couldn't help but notice that one of the members of WCE (Dark Angel) was… get this… a girl (a rarity at LAN parties) AND not only that but also extremely good at CS. Very surprising, and also somewhat humbling to be beatdown by a girl, heh heh.
From what I saw the tlp clan was scrimmaging other clans all night (including the WCE clan), and they won all the scrimmages they competed in.

After a while fellow Mower, QueMine, showed up and set up his P4 and his Athlon XP rigs. We kicked some butt at Jedi 2 and CS together and QueMine showed off his sweet rigs to interested partiers who passed by. All were extremely impressed with the speeds he was able to get out of those machines. A bunch of people even asked him to OC /tweak their machines for them. A lot of people went a way from that party with faster machines because of him. QueMine is the tweaking master!

Around 10 or so the admins gave away some raffle prizes, which consisted of posters, t- shirts, Linux penguin squeeze toys, yo-yos, etc. This was by far the best LAN I've been to, not only was it free, but it had free food AND I scored a free t-shirt and squeeze toy. Not bad, not bad at all.

I left the party a little early (around 11:30) but QueMine stayed till around 5:30 am. It was a great party and both QueMine and I had a lot of fun. According to the party admins there are going to be parties there from now on every 4 months or so. I can't wait for the next one!