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the Hushed Casket
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Gears of War LAN at JANLAN 2007
Submitted by Midnight on Tue, 01/16/2007 - 1:05pm.
For a small sliver of time during the monstrous JANLAN 2007, eight THXers committed sacrilege and cranked up Gears of War in the middle of a perfectly good Halo 1 LAN. Yeah, it was risky. It turned out to be a nice change of pace from Halo 1, and we all enjoyed it, but we soon reverted to 3-shot sweet-ness (well...maybe 4-shot).
(New schoolers in action)
The roster was Old School vs New School. Mintz, PooBerry, Myth, and Phoenix took on Midnight, Oculus, Reverend, and JDogg/Disavowed. We all played on identical 32" Westinghouse LCD HDTVs capable of 720p. Four Xbox 360s displayed Gear of War in local multiplayer splitscreen for eight players.
It took a few minutes to get the network configured, as our two switches weren't talking to each other. However, after some experimenting with the uplink port we managed to establish connectivity. BTW, does anybody really understand the uplink port? If you do, you should be more vocal at LANs, because we always resort to experimentation to get it right when it comes to connecting multiple switches. We also encountered a strange problem with Oculus's 360 when connecting it via VGA. I deduced the problem quickly: that he normally runs in 1080p and the 32" Westy couldn't support that resolution. Solving the problem, however, was more tricky. It turns out that the 360 stores a separate video output setting for use only when the VGA cable is connected. Changing the setting in the dashboard using a component connection will not affect it. Therefore, everytime we changed the dashboard display setting to 720p and then plugged the VGA cable back in, it reverted to 1080p--and no picture. We finally solved it by connecting the 360 to one of rapture's 22" LCD monitors with 1080p capability. From there we scaled the resolution down to something the Westy could support and the problem was solved.
(Old schoolers on 32" HDTV's)
The first thing I noticed was that splitscreen was very disorienting. To quote Mr. Horse from Ren and Stimpy in his review of a competing cat litter to Gritty Kitty Cat Litter, "No sir, I don't like it. I don't like it at all." There really isn't a border between the two half-screens, so my eyes had problems following my own action without noticing the adjacent screen. It also screws up your sensitivity, ala playing Halo 1 on a 16:9 television in widescreen mode. It took about ten minutes of playing for me to adjust, and it never became truly intuitive.
Problems aside, playing an eight-person match of GoW with almost no lag was certainly a lot of fun. Favorite quote of the mini-LAN:
"Why don't you stop running, Midnight?"
"Why don't you stop dying, Mintz?"
Another interesting part of the mini-LAN was that one of the New-Schoolers' TVs wasn't running in hi-def. Phoenix's 360 wasn't set to display in 720p because he doesn't have a hi-def TV at home. When it was connected to the 32" Westy it continued to display in 480i, although it was possibly 480p--I can't really remember. What I do remember was that the picture looked like crap compared to the exact same image (the GoW pregame lobby) on the TV beside it running at 720p. I pointed this out to the New Schoolers a couple times, most notably Myth, who replied, "Ahh, we're good with it like this." Not one to force people to do the right thing if it doesn't affect me, I replied, "...OK." To my knowledge, they played in standard definition the entire mini-LAN. I think it was worth the 90 seconds to reboot the dashboard and change the setting, but perhaps I'm a perfectionist.
(Oculus's (Ocului's???) sweet GoWish paint job on his 360)
Overall, the mini-LAN was a good time. It provided our first GoW LAN experience, educated us on some nuances of the 360 display settings, and showcased the difference of standard and high definition. I really enjoyed the competition of the New Schoolers. They are some battle-hardened COGs. I also enjoyed introducing Disavowed to GoW for the first time. Perhaps we hooked him. A GoW LAN with separate 360s and displays for each player would be awesome, albeit difficult to coordinate. However, I did notice that at high resolutions a 22" monitor is more than adequate for a single player. Oculus regularly plays on a 24" Dell 2407 running at 1080p, and we know how he pwns. I am unsure of the relative value of LANing Gears of War versus Xbox Live (XBL), but it's fun for a change even if it's not our staple mode of GoW multiplayer.
(They game. They saw. They got pwned.)
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I jumped in on a few GoW
I jumped in on a few GoW games at the LAN. I liked how the host-advantage was significantly reduced. As you stated though, playing on splitscreen is less than optimal. I'd like to give this game another go on LAN sometime.
I noticed that one GoW box wasn't playing in HD. To me, it actually looked pretty good. If the colors were more vivid, I may not have noticed the non-HD-ness. I think this is because most of the GoW action happens right in front of you at close range. If that box was playing HALO, then I think the differences would have been more pronounced. In HALO, you have several mid-to-long range weapons, mainly the pistol, that is used all the time. There, you are constantly looking for and firing at targets at long distances. In GoW, this isn't necessarily the case. For one, the maps are a lot smaller than most HALO maps. Secondly, there's really no way to take down an enemy at a long distance, except for a with the Longshot. I don't think that the loss of definition will have that much of an affect on GoW gameplay since most all action takes place in close combat situations.
Agreed, it might not affect
Agreed, it might not affect gameplay that much, however, the picture quality was very, very noticeable to me. The non-HD looked slightly fuzzy and colors were much less vivid.
I missed out on the GoW
I missed out on the GoW lannage. It looked like fun at first, but then I lost interest before I got to play. Nice summary, though. I wish I would have tried it out now.
The difference between
The difference between the Screen running HD, and the 480 screen was irking me a little bit too. All I could think about is, all they have to do is boot up one more time. It was surprisingly playable though.
I felt like I was hosting when shooting the gnasher, even when I wasn't. This would make a GoW tourney much more evenly matched than the Xbox live games we play. I just don't see how someone is going to beat a decent team over XBox Live if there's any lag. Learning to play host and non-host are like two different games altogether; different strategy, different weapons.
I enjoyed the GoW miniLAN. It was a nice little break from getting my hiney spanked by Diesel and co.
Not My Prob brah
Well, it worked for Myth and Convict, and that was good enough for me!
For future lan reference.
For future lan reference. An uplink port is for connecting two switches or hubs together. You could also use a crossover cable. The idea is simple you have two pairs: one transmit, one receive.
So from a switch to a computer you'd have.
TX ------ RX
TX ------ RX
RX ------ TX
RX ------ TX
As you can see a straight through or patch cable will work fine. The transmit talks to the receive and all is happy. However, connecting two switch ports together you have this.
TX ------ TX
TX ------ TX
RX ------ RX
RX ------ RX
Transmit doesn't talk to another transmit and same for receive. A crossover cable does what the name implies it crosses over the connection. An uplink port does the same thing automagically.
The problem during the lan was raptures little blue switch, in the garage, had a uplink button. Which I didn't see at first. So to have the TVs in the garage connect, I had to use the single uplink port of another switch by the front door to connect to the garage. That uplink port was being used to connect to the other side of the house. So that ended up being the casualty until I saw the uplink button. Confused?
Whatever, you just made that
Whatever, you just made that up. ;)
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