Tag: fom

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LAN Parties?

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

Reading back the review I wrote about OCC22, it’s feels strange. It’s not quite how I feel about LAN parties today. Fu-LAN6 might have been great for the attendees, it sure wasn’t great for me, and FoM was a major dissapointment as well. Thinking back at OCC: you shouldn’t spend your time watching DVDs at a LAN party, you should spend your time playing multiplayer games, something you can’t do (as well) at home. But at the LAN party, you realise that you don’t have the same games as the people in your clan, and you end up being stuck with the games installed on your computer. Playing it alone, because no one else has it.

So I end up getting bored, watching television series on the DVDs I brought from home. But honestly: I can watch them much more comfortly at home. Last FoM I spend 4 hours drawing our clan’s logo in 3D, in a race between Blender and 3DsMax. Ofcourse, I lost, I’ve never done anything like that before, but because I has nothing better to do, I kept on going untill it was completed.

Maybe I’m not “pro” enough, maybe I’m getting too old for this, or maybe I just need a break from it all. Anyway, I have decided not to go to the next FoM and OCC events, so you won’t be getting any reviews on those.

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FoM 9.0

YALR (Yet another LAN-party review)

Last FoM I visited was kinda like a revelation to me, this edition the experience is alot milder. The theme competition failed to attrack many participants, half even came dressed as biblical figures instead of the proposed super heroes. Should have known that ZWAM doesn’t do well with rules Cool. The kidnapping of FoM-man was fun for a moment, but failed to raise any attention from the patrons or the crew. They showed the movie on the projector, but that’s just about it.

Compared to last FoM, there were practically no fun competitions. At least none that I noticed. I also missed the BBQ subscriptions, probably because I was not sitting on my ass all day.

1 garbage bag for 20 people, litter all over the floor as a result… I wouldn’t want to be the one to clean it all up. Talking about cleaning up, I really feel sorry for the person in charge of desinfecting the toilets. I feel even more sorry for those bastards that don’t know how to flush the toilet after taking a crap or puking all over the toilet booth. Gory… I held everything up for two days, no way I was sitting myself down in there. The crew claimed they cleaned the toilets every 6 hrs, perhaps they were talking about some other toilet.

And then there were the pro-gamers… Disillusioned teens who actually believe you can make a profit by gaming. And when those teens go down in a game, they go down loud. Screaming “kill those fucking bastards” over a crowd of 400 irritated gamers is dangerous at best. I believe he deserved a good spanking, only lucky for him the crew stopped several attempts of willing volunteers aiming for his ass. All this pro-gaming shit is destroying the fun in LAN-parties if you ask me, there is way too much focus on “official competitions” and “world cyber game qualifiers” these days, it’s hard to imagine how one would possibly find any fun in there. This is also the reason why I’m skipping the next OCC, it’s completely dedicated to WSG qualifiers, with an “invitation only”-LAN so the die-hards aren’t offended. Not for me.

Like BoeBoe said: maybe we’re just getting too old for this kind of stuff, or maybe the LAN scene really is changing for the worse.

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Panic1 @ FoM

After the cancellation of OCC21 at the beginning of August, I lived in fear and terror that this would be the first summer in years without any LAN party. But there it was: my ticket to a happy ending after all: Frag-o-Matic 8.1!

And it came just in the nick of time, the summer is almost over. I have never been at a FoM LAN party before, but I have heard alot about it. Some are really positive, others just hate it. So I arrived at this LAN party with mixed expectations and a very critical mindset.
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