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[quote="Anton P. Nym"]That late?  Wow, no wonder I'm tired.  :)

The LAN party was a blast.  If you can arrange one yourselves I heartily recommend it.  This is coming from someone who (through PC and Live play) viewed split-screen a bit askance before trying it... but even on a 20" TV it worked out alright.  (Once I got the picture colour balanced properly on that set... apologies to Joel, Sean, and gumdrop for not noticing that sooner.)  Orienting yourself can be a bit awkward at first but you quickly adapt.

Hookup is absurdly simple; just get a standard Ethernet hub (we used the LAN ports on a router) and plug straight-through Cat-5 Ethernet cable into each jack.  Go into the "system link" menu and the Xboxes will automatically be able to find each other.

I cannot recommend gaffers' tape enough, even though it led me to start the evening with Real Carnage.  (Big drippy paper cut from the spool, silly me.)  With every Xbox putting out a power cable AND an ethernet cable the trip hazards get pretty high without it... with the tape down, it's relatively easy to get from place to place while holding pizza and soft drinks.

It's best to have people bring more Xboxes than you can hook together, as we experienced some "ebb and flow" during the party; before the night was through, two of our 'boxes had to leave with their [strike]slaves[/strike] owners but we were still able to play system link games well into the night

The skill levels ranged all the way along the scale:  bentllama, thebruce, gumdrop, and MENSCH were in the top tier; myself, smiley, Joel, and kegger had moderate experience; and Tom, Sean, and James had very little time playing.  My original plan was to have the latter three over before the Christmas holiday and give them a basic workout, but schedules didn't permit so Tom and James were a bit greener than I'd hoped.  They did show remarkable progress throughout the evening, though.

With such a broad span of skills, I found that FFA games with "sudden death" weapons (rockets, swords, and Facehole) worked fairly well as well as shared-objective team games.  Territories was surprisingly fun, as even novice players found themselves able to capture and hold a territory even if only for a little while, and the ever popular Crazy King served as a valuable teaching aid in getting players to learn the maps.

I'm regretting not thinking to play Team Oddball for a bit, as you can "swap" between players and let the less-experienced ones run the ball (and so be able to point to an in-game accomplishment) while the more experienced players play defense.

Another suggestion is to make sure that you mix experience levels when seating people at 'boxes... an unholy trinity of bentllama, gumdrop, and thebruce ruled for a while as they sat at one screen together.

All in all, an incredibly fun night.  Glad you enjoyed it, thebruce; and folks should know that even those who didn't fare too well in the Carnage Reports found the game irresistable.  (Tom would've bought an Xbox in the Boxing Day sales if he hadn't just had a fuel-pump failure on his truck... but the odds are good he'll be picking one up in early spring.  Aha!  Another success for viral marketing!)

-- Steve is now struggling mightily to stay awakzzzzzz....[/quote]

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