Well folks its that time again when I finally feel human enough to report on the goings on at LAN,  i44 is well and truly over so here is the run down.

EAS this time round started around 1pm and even though they weren’t allowing entry until 6pm this did stop all the usual queues and I’m sure it made a lot of people happier, the campsite although had been moved 3 mile away to the local rugby club and I feel this might have had the opposite effect even if it did seem a lot quieter. Once again in the main event Craig “Wizzo” Fletcher and his amazing event crew did a blinding job and gave us the Insomnia LAN experience we expect.

Advance Gamers brought along our CoD4 team who had a couple of minor issues at LAN but still managed to play some very good games and had their first match streamed live on codtv.net, whilst at LAN we pulled together a Battlefield 3 squad which managed to place fourth overall in that tournament.

Major thanks this LAN go to Ghost, MYK and all the crew who came with us to Insomnia44.

Thanks,
~MiB

So Monday, LAN is officially over. I got a good night sleep and was ready to take down Bandit in the CCL Challenge. However, I did have to pack up first and packing away a tent at 9am, when it was raining the night before is not ideal, definitely considering a hotel room for the next one.

Luckily I had moved most of the heavy stuff from the tent back to my desk over the weekend so there was very little work to do. I managed to get the CCL stand before it opened and got to work on beating Bandits 1 minutes 55 seconds. It had to be possible. After about 40 minutes of failed attempts I managed my first timed run for the day and pitted a time of 2 minutes 3 seconds, which isn’t a bad time considering it was my first successful try of the day and my hands hadn’t woken up yet. After a few more failed attempts I managed my second completed attempt of the day and landed a time of 1 minute 50 seconds, SUCCESS!

It was at that point that MiB found me and informed me that our lift had been waiting since 7am >.<’. So we moved all my stuff to the bus and then I went to claim my prize from the CCL stand, hoping that no one had magically beat my time in the time it took me to move my stuff. So, with prize in hand, and stuff all packed, we set off home on the LANBus.

See you at i45, or epic.EIGHT if I can make it.

So I didn’t sleep at all last night.Instead I spent time talking to random people, having a laugh with random people and ended up with the G3 radio nerf guns having a gun fight with a lad from Nordrassil Radio.

Sunday marks the official 3rd day of LAN and the finals of most of the tournaments. It also marks the day of contests where most of the exhibitors do their 1 day contests with the hopes of normally winning a smaller prize then some of the bigger contests that run all weekend but are still worth taking part in. Personally most of my time today was spent at the CCL stand again defending my amazing time on the build contest, I started off strong going head to head with bandit and reaper and kept pushing ahead of them by just a couple of seconds however by the end of the both myself and bandit were on 1 minute 55 seconds, with bandit pushing out the lead by just a couple of milliseconds. I will beat him in the morning before I have to go. Not much to really talk about today, I pretty much spent the entire day at the CCL stand building that rig, playing bf3, playing minecraft, browsing facebook and just chilling. I that tired at this point that I’m not really paying attention so early bed now, I have to be up early to destroy bandits time and pack up to go home.

Results from all the matches played will be going up in good time and MiB should be doing write ups from the team point of view once we get home.

Call of Duty 4

Double Elim

Match 1 : Backlot

Advance Gamers 11 vs 13 VYE2

Match 2: Citystreets

Advance Gamers 10 vs 13 eXtremepro eSports

Battlefield 3 resulting coming soon

So somehow I managed to over sleep again and didn’t make it back to the venue until 1ish again. Lets try and not make a habit of this.

Day 2 started with me catching up on what happened with the team on day 1 and where we stood for the start of day 2 (already well under way) then I went on walkabouts saying morning (afternoon) to everyone that I knew and even a few unknowns that I randomly came across. Following a nice pizza for breakfast I broke for the CCL stand to make sure I was still bottom of the board. Turns out that not one, but 2 people had somehow manage to take longer then me to build the system even through I was actually aiming to land at the bottom. So myself and Steve from CCL hatched a plan that would land me at the bottom of the board for all of time. It involved getting a time of 10 minutes, surely no one could take longer then 10 minutes to build the system; yet somehow someone managed to log a time of an amazing 12 minutes to build the system, that was painful to watch.

I, of course, did manage a serious time before leaving the stand of day 1, a reasonable time of around 3 minutes 30 seconds, which stuck me top of the board, however someone managed to set a time of 2 minutes 37 seconds after I had left. This meant war. After several tries I managed to decrease the time further setting a new best time of 2 minutes 11 seconds.

Hopefully Steve will upload the video from my amazing 15 minutes of making an idiot of myself for the sake of being last on the board.

So by the end of Saturday, I was top and bottom of the CCL Build.

After the exhibition hall closed, I turned my attention to the Pub Quiz and getting myself a team sorted. I couldn’t turn to my old team since when I go over to the desk of the persons responsible for getting me into that team last time had a certain cold feeling to it. So I went around a few desks and asked some people that I know, I have to say turn up was quite good, although my plan of not ending up with the particular persons from my last team who were now giving me the cold shoulder did fail and they did end up in my team. Oh well, it was a good night and wizzo did challenge my table to come stratlan and learn how drinking games are really done. If only I could get the holidays for it, then it would be a case of CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. I not too sure where my team came in the pub quiz overall but it wasn’t near the top. So I think that about covers day 2, I’m sure the team played at some point and the bf3 was meant to start today as well but ye, I think I’ve been tagged AFK for this event too.

Match 1 – Backlot

Advance Gamers 16 vs 8 Diabulus

Match 2 – Citystreets

Advance Gamers 20 vs 4 eXtremeProClan eXp||

Match 3 – Crash

Advance Gamers 5 vs 19 Infused.Tt

Match 4 – Crossfire

Advance Gamers 8 vs 16 HIGHJ!NX.EU

Friday marks the first official day of LAN. Somehow I managed to over sleep and didn’t make it back to the venue until about 1pm. Meaning I missed the CoD4 briefing and the opening ceremony which makes me an unhappy bunny but life goes on.

I did a couple of walks around the exhibition hall, somewhat disappointed by the number of exhibitors that turned out and the lack of freebies!

I ended up deciding to camp the CCL Stand for the rest of the day. They had the CCL Fastest PC Build contest on again but thats not what caught my attention, they had the eyefinity system with them again! They took our advice and switched from using 6 screens to just 3 screens which meant that the middle of the screen wasn’t on the line between the top row and bottom row and it worked out quite well. Naturally the first thing I did was download minecraft and run it fullscreen across all 3 screens

I then had a go of the CCL Build contest but didn’t aim for the top, I don’t stand a chance. Landed a 6:55 build time putting me comfortably at the bottom of the board.

I then ran off and chilled with the lads from FragRadio. Its nice to meet up with some old friends and catch up.

Well that about wraps it up for day 1, I think the cod4 team played at some point tonight but ye, I was otherwise occupied socialising, strange enough.

Hey folks,

I’m going to try and keep the site up to date with all the happens at i44. I don’t exactly have a good track record of doing these blogs, and as I’m trying to write this post I find myself rewriting each and every sentence, god I hate writing news.

So day 0 got off a pretty good start for a change. Myself and MiB caught the LANbus first which was running 10 minutes early, we made it the first and only pick up on the way 30 minutes early putting us quite far ahead of schedule.

We got to Telford for 1400 and booked straight in, there was no queue at all this time around which makes a nice change. We then stood around while andehh and woodyx went and booked into their hotel room. Once they got back, those brave enough to camp headed to the camp site to set up. The camp site an absolute trek this time, taking 10-15 minutes to walk or 20 minutes to drive.

We got into the main hall a little early and were mostly set up for 1815 meaning the gaming could begin.

Walker didn’t show face until gone 2000 meaning the team didn’t play any games together until later in the night. Woodyx’s monitor also appears to have died meaning we need to source a spare and will probably end up needing to use my monitor during the tournament. The rubbish is already building around a few peoples desks but the people handling rubbish collection are actually asking people for rubbish instead of just taking it off the desk and binning perfectly good leftovers. So day 1 here we come.