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The Firearms: Source LAN release party was a great success for such short notice. High five!

Firearms has returned with its first new release after five years! To celebrate this awesome achievement, a Firearms: Source LAN party is being held to play the hell out of it. We will be taking advantage of the awesome bandwidth at rollernet and playing online (you really need at least 8 vs. 8 teams to play LAN only), so everyone needs their own Steam account due to modern day copy protection.

Insults and profanity will be used freely. This is a rated R gaming environment. Bring snacks, drinks, chips, and some cash to chip in for food. A mini fridge is available and we will have bottled water on site. Plan on playing long into the night.

If you can’t make it we’ll most likely be playing online as a group, so join us online. We have set up two public servers just in case: Roller Network Firearms #1 and Roller Network Firearms #2. Friendly Fire may be on or off and will be noted, but we generally prefer to play FF ON.

What you will need to play:

1. See our Firearms: Source page for more info.

Install all of these and you should be good to go. We have plenty of bandwidth to download things the day of. Steam is available for Windows and MacOS, but the Firearms mod is Windows only.

What to bring to the LAN:

You must provide your own Computer, Headphones, Keyboard, Mouse and LCD Monitor. We have power and Ethernet cables; NO WIFI. (We have it, but we don’t use it for gaming.) Use corded mice and keyboards for best results.

A limited supply of keyboards and mice is available on site in case something breaks or is forgotten. Bring a mouse pad or wrist wrest if you can’t play without them (I can’t). We do have plenty of power cords, power strips and Ethernet cables. Leave those at home. Headphones are an absolute must with multiple people playing in the same room. Microphones are optional, but useful to talk to teammates online. LCD monitors are required due to power, weight, and heat limitations.

HAVE FUN and welcome to Firearms!

Local Mirror Copies:

• See our Firearms: Source page for mirrors.

I don’t play video games very much. I can name the games I thoroughly enjoyed (Bungie’s Marathon, Myth, Myth II, Starcraft, Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, just to name a few). However there is one multiplayer Half-Life mod that was the staple of LAN parties and one of my favorites: Firearms. It’s probably the only one I played online, and still have occasionally played to this day when I have time.

When the Source engine came out there was lots of talk to a successor for Firearms on Source. Some of the original team went to work on World at War and there was even a Firearms 2. There were accusations of stealing and other drama, but the only team that actually ended up with a release product was the Firearms:Source team. All the rest went defunct, lost interest, or disbanded.

I’ve always particularly enjoyed the “push” mode where you have to capture points/flags in order and hold them. Your reinforcements will always come from your base (none of this magic spawning at the forward point or arbitrary locations) so it gets progressively harder the further away you get. I also love to play with FF on. FF off is too boring.

On July 23 2010, Firearms will return.

I recently got an EVO from Sprint and wrote a little review about it. Ultimately I decided to return it.

* The EVO is only allowed on your account if you have one of a handful of expensive service plans. You will be forced to change even if it does not benefit the other phones on your account. In my case, it would have made the base charges around $170.

* I average about 250 minutes a talk time per month. Upgrading to some plan with a lot of minutes does not benefit me. I also do not partake in all the social networking shit that’s all the rage right now.

* Paying for unlimited data and text on phones that have SMS blocking and no data capability does not benefit me. (And no, I do not want to upgrade them, they do their intended job perfectly as-is.)

* You’re supposed to pay an extra $10 on top of everything else for each EVO because Sprint has enhanced my experience. Add another $30 per phone if you want to use the hotspot tethering function.

* There is no Sprint 4G in my city. Paying extra for that does not benefit me and I don’t care to subsidize other cities that do.