Gone Jackal was late again. Free ride, oh well.
Madison is the most poorly-planned (or overplanned...) city I've ever been in. Many one-way streets, dead ends and the nefarious State Street (where Ping-Time is located) on which no cars may travel. When Jackal finally found a space, he had infinite trouble getting into it... so much so that a woman in a wheelchair laughed at him.
Entering in, and decending into the dungeon where 20 powerful beasts slept... they would do our bidding. After some a little gaming, it was sufficiently late for sushi... too much sushi. Now, I like to try new things, and I'd had some sushi before. Chaboud got me to try the Unagi (smoked eel in a cool little box). I also ate several pieces of sushi, notably the octopus. We made a few futile attempts at talk, though it centered on typically geeky things (MTG drinking games, work, noding). We ended up having some 15 pieces of sushi left over, a gift for whoever watched the store while we ate.
Back to gaming, and Age of Empires: Conquerers. I love strategy games, but I am so very very bad at them. Just don't play enough on my own. After getting ripped apart by m_turner, I wandered around a few games waiting for something else to start. I found Serious Sam. If you liked Rise of the Triad, you'll love SS.. very similar, but the maps, timing, and weapons actually make sense.
I called for a game of it, and after some screwing with a dedicated server (SS's network code is pretty bad, I'm afraid.) We played a good game of deathmatch (I won) and then started a points match: you got points for kills picking up items, and how long you're alive. The kill points depend on how long your victim had been alive that life. As m_turner has said, several times my worth bumped 10,000 points. I won the match, but I had been psychologically beaten by Chaboud and his magical knives. He would appear from nowhere out in the hot sands of the desert and quickly dispatch his target.
We didn't talk a whole lot, but you can learn a lot from how people play games. As I mentioned, Chaboud went for the quick-kills and low personal worth in Serious Sam. In AOE, m_turner's strategy was a perfect compliment to mine: I built walls and archers, and he built siege equipment and units that had high resistance to arrows. Gone Jackal and his friend Carl (don't remember if he has a username) explored several of the games on their own, and then joined back up with what had been decided. Also, in SS, Jackal would never really worry about armor...
Around 5am, all except Chaboud went to breakfast at a diner. The waitresses were weird (yes, I know, noders calling other people weird). We talked about California, taxes, MUDS, and m_turner's work. They kicked us out so we'd pay our check (stupid rules), and then we sat in the parking lot as Jackal got his morning fix. One of the waitresses asked if we knew about another restaurant, to which we responded with "I'm from California", "I'm from Chicago", "I'm from Michigan". The girl deadpanned, and made a frustrated sound. Then Fred came (the owner), and Jackal finished his cig, so we headed off.
Gone Jackal fell asleep several times driving home. Free ride, oh well.