Monday, April 13, 2009

Arcade Day 2 at Howie's

CSULB Gaming Club had it's second arcade day Saturday at Westminster Mall's Howie's, and despite a smaller number of people showing up then normal, nothing quite beats that feeling of playing on a local area network with seven other friends on Left 4 Dead.

In case you don't know, Howie's is a godsend to non-pc gamers. I've only recently upgraded my pc, and even then, Team Fortress 2 kinda chugs along. Howie's not only has over 50 360s linked together with a wide variety of games to choose from, they also have a large stock of pc's rigged for optimal gaming over a variety of games at high end settings.

So far before, my experience with L4D was limited to the 360 and online. At most, one other person can join with me on a second controller. Anymore players would be online and even then, I'm sharing a split screen.

On a PC, L4D truly shines for someone who's primarily a console gamer. Eight people on a lan, all in the same room, smack talking each other and hearing their reactions as you play as an infected during versus mode and tear them apart.

We were cut down to 4 people when Team Fortress 2 started, so the only game type we could play was Arena, which was straight up death match as opposed to the traditional objective based game types (like capture the flag or territories). Later on though, when things really died down (only 3 of us left, not even enough for a proper game) we joined up a server online and things got exciting again as we joined the BLU team and tried our hand at playing a much part in a much larger team. As I played a medic, healing people and in return, leeching points off their achievements, my friend Juan played an engineer and tried his hand at support the team with a forward base with a dispenser and teleporters. His brother played a dedicated sniper; I didn't see him change classes once.

All in all, it was a great job well done for the club. Good impressions from the members and all around good time too.

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