Massive Impromptu Gears of War Party

Many people were chainsawed

I present to you exhibit A. 8 Friends. 3 Xb0×360s. 3 TVs. 1 Livingroom.

The Sunday before I started University, January the 7th, my roommates decided it would be a good idea to play some Gears of War. Fine, that’s a good idea, it’s a great game. You can play online with your friends, and you can play 2 people on the same console while online with up to 8 people. So we started out with one console, two players.

One of our associates, who also owns a 360, decided to bring his over as well, we could hook them both up to the router, and play 4 people at our house, and two other people at home on their own 360s made 6 players. Fun!

This process was then duplicated by another friend who happened to phone and wanted in. We had the TVs, the network cables, and the moxie to rearrange the furniture to make it happen. Now we had 6 players in our living room!

Soon more friends arrived and left, a huge box of chips arrived, and a flat of cola materialized. Suddenly we weren’t a bunch of nerds playing a video game. Suddenly we were a party of nerds playing a video game together.

Although we had to trade controllers a lot because we had more people than seats, it was a blast to run across an alien planet with 4 team mates with an assault rifle that was also part power tool and chainsaw the opposing team in half if they came around a corner too quickly. A testosterone fueled bloodbath.

I’d like to draw your attention to the final picture of the photoset, this one here, because you can’t quite appreciate the horrors that occasionally enter into my life without seeing them for yourself. (zoom in on the picture with the little magnifying glass, it’s kinda longish)

CONCEPT: 5/5 – Hey, I’m always into video game themed events. If you’re throwing a Legend of Zelda wedding don’t let me know, ’cause I’ll crash it. Super Smash Bros. bar mitzvah? Mario Party birthday?

INNOVATION: 2/5 – Nerds have been hooking together pieces of machinery since the dark ages. (insert joke about 1960s here)

SATISFACTION: 5/5 – There’s nothing like hopping around a corner, having someone lumber at you revving their chainsaw, and blowing their legs off with a well placed shotgun blast at the last possible second. Space Marines that looks like 800lbs gorillas, and monsters that look like 800lbs monster gorillas in space boots tearing each other apart.

EXECUTION: 4/5 – Well done considering how spontaneous the whole thing was, but with only one HDTV, some people were forced to suffer unnecessarily.

FUN FACTOR: 5/5 – It put a nice cap on the winter break, and set a standard for future dorkery.

OVERALL: 9/10 – Fun times with friends, no matter the condition or situation or social implications is always a good thing. Without exception. I can’t really think of any possible situations in which any of those things would take precedence over fun times with friends.