May 24, 2003

Min and I slept in late today and got up just in time to shower and head south to Spencer to have lunch with Craig and Emily (and Ellie!) This is the first time that either Min or I have been down to their new house now that they live less than thirty minutes away! Of course, we live so far away for so long and they finally move closer and now Min, Andy and I are headed back Rochester way, figures. We had a really good time at lunch and Craig and Emily decided that they would come up to Ithaca to hang out after some commitments that they had in the afternoon. Craig has never played Quake or any other computer based first person shooter so he was intrigued by the idea of playing with everyone in a seperate room and a full screen to yourself.

Bob picked up the ingredients (99 Blackberries and Mountain Dew) to Dewberry Juice and we mixed up some and prepared for a serious Quake II fest. Bob has been jonsin’ for some Quake action ever since he was reading the SGL Archives the other day and he is all excited that we are going to get to play tonight. Loopy only got the parts to put his computer back together this morning so her is really excited just to have a computer to use again. We got Quake II installed on all of the computers (Loopy just rebuilt his, Bob has a ‘new’ graphics card – VooDoo 4 and Craig is playing on Min’s computer in the closet) and then decided that we really wanted to try being able to hear each other so we all installed Microsoft’s Sidewinder Game Voice (Min and I have the GameVoice hardware, the others just use the software version) and got that working. Craig and Emily showed up (Min, Emily and Tammy hung out in my room with the kids, Ellie and Tess, while the men kicked each other’s butts,) we served out some Dewberry Juice and the games began. We played for hours, until about 1:00am (so probably five hours total gaming time.) With four players (we normally only ever get three) and the game voice, this was probably the best Quake matches we ever played. Bob totally kicked butt. It is really cool to be able to rip on each other while the game is going, though. The GameVoice really adds a new dimension to the game. I can’t wait to use it with lots of people when we play AoE2 or EE! Rise of Nations is coming soon and I am really looking forward to that as well.

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