Update: rapture's write-up can be found here: http://hushedcasket.com/node/1634/

Midnight has become something of an internet celebrity. Ever since be began his blog, now titled "The Midnight Hour" after changing from "Midnight in Iraq," he just about became the face of "milblogging". Midnight’s origins are here in Huntsville, Alabama, so it only seemed fitting to have a monster LAN celebrating his return here for a winter vacation. Dates were marked on the calendar months in advance for January 6th, plane tickets were purchased, and road trips were planned. rapture sacrificed his house for a day and a night to be the victim of our LANnage, and jayWHY from Philly flew down here to take advantage of rapture’s sacrifice. Max Power aka dewbe aka dewberry aka pooberry (soon to be just pooberry) took a long road trip up from Birmingham for some action as well. All of this happened for nonstop Halo 1 action. Truth be told, there was a break in the Halo 1 action for Gears of War, but Halo 1 was the main attraction of this fest.

I woke up early that morning to get stuff ready. I prepared my 32" LCD TV, my 27" S-Video tube, and my original Xbox for the road, stopped by a local store to pick up way too much Mountain Dew and chips, and arrived at the LAN bit early to help set up. I’ve always enjoyed helping set up equipment at a LAN, but not as much as I did here. When I arrived, there were already two 32" LCD TVs set up with a little bit of pre-LAN action going on, but that was nothing compared to the amount of HD goodness that was about to unfold. When all was said and done, there were four 32" LCD HDTV’s set up (all the same TVs, purchased by Casketeers to take advantage of a Black Friday deal), four huge LCD monitors, rapture’s monster LCD HDTV in the living room, a 95" HD projector nobody used because of the lag, and two 27" CRT tubes that didn’t completely suck. There were cables everywhere, but they were neatly tucked under rugs where available and taped down in others to comedic effect (to explain the joke to those that don’t know: Jdogg originally wasn’t going to bring his 32" LCD, but after his manhood was questioned, he redeemed himself by bringing it).

Years in the Marines barely prepared Midnight to order gamers around.

After most everyone had showed up, the final Xboxen were adopted by TVs and Midnight quickly and randomly assigned everyone to a network of TVs/Xboxes. There were enough stations around for everyone to fit two-to-a-TV. I originally started playing on my own HDTV with Bullet, the most "seasoned" gamer of the Hushed Casket. We played against people in a room adjoining ours, and after a roster change between our two teams, started playing for an hour or two. Pooberry showed his face around this time. After a while, I was tired of getting owned by the other team (mainly Shyzza), so I searched the area for D1ESEL and jayWHY. I played with jayWHY on XBC a few times, and he’s good enough to carry a weapon/powerup timer in his pocket. D1ESEL used to play professionally. Needless to say, I wanted to be on that team. I found them in the garage and asked on of the other guys on their team if he would mind switching with me at my previous station. He was okay with it, so I plugged up my controller and began to own. We played several Team Slayer games against the guys in the living room and completely tore them apart. After three or four games, Foulbreed poked his head into the garage and barely kept from yelling, "Mintz, what are you doing in here?? I just had the teams even, and you had to come in here and mess up the balance!" He ranted like that for a couple minutes, with rebuttals from me, before jayWHY chimed in and said, "OK Foulbreed, Mintz f’ed up. Now how are you going to fix it?" We decided to trade me for one of the more skill-challenged folks on Foulbreed’s team. It was a little more balanced after that. For the record, Foulbreed, I’m so very sorry.

But one of many HD stations set up

Sweet, not-available-on-Xbox-Live Halo 1 action continued into the evening until Midnight started making the rounds for pizza requests. Five bucks bought you a medium one-topping pizza from Dominoes, and it came to a whopping twenty pizzas. When pizza delivery guy showed up, he was carrying a stack of the largest amount of pizza I have ever seen a man heft. "Do you need help with that?" I asked. "No, that’s alright, but I have to go back and get the rest in the car." Yes, he had more. No, not lots more, just eight more. We all grabbed our box of pizza then tried to solve the dilemma of finding a place to sit. It worked itself out, and while we ate, Gears of War was introduced to the LAN. It began with a demo on the big screen and then branched to a 4v4 in the back of the house. Don’t worry; Halo 1 was still played everywhere else.

It was pretty cool seeing Frankie again. We greeted each other like brothers.

pooberry started to ask me about Guitar Hero, and we discussed it for a bit. He mentioned he brought his guitar in case I brought it to the LAN, but I was under strict orders to leave my PS2 at home, so I informed him of this. However, the idea struck me that he could drive me home and we could play for a little while before he hit the road back to his abode. We played for several more hours, then as Gears of War died down, I packed up my LCD, donated my 27" tube (it was taking up space at my house anyway), packed everything in pooberry’s tiny car, and ventured back to my place.

We arrived at Casa del Mintz, set up my TV, plugged in our guitar controllers, and got ready to rock… but there was one problem: I left my PS2 memory card with all the songs in my sister’s luggage, which she let me borrow to take to Louis Wu’s Deadly Night LAN. So yeah, I f’ed it up again. But have no fear; we could use a cheat code to unlock all the songs! Good thing EA didn’t get anywhere near this game or we might have had to pay five dollars to do such a thing. Oh wait, there ARE NO CHEATS to unlock all the songs. pooberry and I made do with playing all the available songs, then played a little bit of Halo 2 before he headed home. Playing Halo 2 right after playing hours upon hours of Halo 1 is quite disorienting. For starters, you can jump off high ledges without worry, pressing XXY does not backpack reload, and the damn BR takes a whole FOUR SHOTS to kill somebody. A whole photo shoot with Master Chief’s hand later, pooberry was out my door and on his way back to Birmingham.

Thanks again to rapture for hosting an awesome LAN, rapture’s wife for letting such an awesome LAN take place, rapture’s kitty for tolerating everybody and not running outside, and thanks to everyone for showing up and making it such a great time!

Link to rapture's Flickr photos, the source of the photos for this article.