Stanman’s Birthday

So yesterday, we celebrated Stanman’s birthday. We first had dinner at this really good Korean BBQ place up in Shoreline. At first, we wanted to actually do the BBQ ourselves, but the choices were limited and we had to sit separately because the BBQ tables only hold about 6 people, 7 max, and we had 10. We scrapped that idea and let them do the BBQ for us and got some really fun and interesting dishes that had short ribs, beef, calamari, spicy pork, seafood tofu soup, and a seafood pancakes. Yum… Shoot, I’m getting hungry at 3am. Not good.

Then we came back to my place to play games. Originally we had hoped to link 2 Xbox 360 consoles and play a LAN game with 8 people. I had suggested Call of Duty 2 as it was a new game I had acquired and the back of the box shows System Link 2-16 players. On a single console, you can have 1-4 players on a split screen, so we thought with 2 consoles, we can have upto 8 players. Stanman even went out to rent Call of Duty 2 for this. Boy was I wrong about System Link mode in Call of Duty 2.

First, I’ve never really linked 2 or more consoles together. If I recall correctly, they required a special cable to connect multiple systems together back in the days of SNES and N64. However, there was no such port on the Xbox 360, so the only thing that I could fathom that connect connect these 2 Xbox 360s was via the network. I connected both Xbox 360s onto my network and they were able to see each other, which was pretty cool.

Then I tried to create a game for the other console to join, however was unable to figure out how to do add more than one player on that particular console. I can go back and go to split screen mode which would allow 4 players on that console. Being stumped, I went online to search for how to get this to work. Apparently in System Link mode, you can only have 1 player on the console. Many people on the forums and threads have already shown disappointment with this limit. So in other words, in order to have 16 players in System Link mode, you would need 16 separate consoles. Ouch!

We wanted all 8 people to be playing at the same time, so we tried to come up with another game to play. If you’re wondering if I have 2 TVs, not really. Some of us would end up using my Dell 24″ LCD, which I’ve been using for my Xbox 360 before I got my new Vizio 47″ LCDTV. Stanman recalled they were able to play Halo 2 with multiple players on the console and linked to other consoles at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo). So to confirm this, I did a search online and found: How to play a system link game in Halo 2 on an original Xbox console and on an Xbox 360 console

When you use an Ethernet hub, you can have any one of the following 16-player combinations:

  • 16 players who are using 16 consoles (one player per console)
  • 16 players who are using eight consoles (two players per console)
  • 16 players who are using four consoles (four players per console)

Neat! I had a copy of Halo 2 and there was a Blockbuster about 5 minute drive from me. We were pretty sure a game like Halo 2 would probably be available at Blockbuster so we drove over. We did a search on the shelves and didn’t find it. We then asked the cashier and it turns out they don’t even have an entry for it in their systems anymore. How can you not carry such a popular game!?!? We drove back disappointed and just split up the people to play at the different consoles.

After multiple rounds of Call of Duty 2, which is really fun game, we swapped to Top Spin 2, a tennis game I had also recently acquired.

Someone then suggested poker and we played a couple hours of that. It was tournament style and the buy-in was $2. I actually ended up winning, though it was a close game between Chris and I. We were both conservative players and basically when it came down to the two of us, we were just swapping blinds back and forth. The game ended with me having trip 2s and he having a pair of As. I ended up winning $8 ($10 total including my buy-in).

While the poker game was going on and people were dropping out, people started to watch Talladega Nights on my Media Center PC. The night ended when the movie ended and we said our goodbyes. It was a really hilarious movie and I’ll be reviewing it later.

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