James Galvin

I was at the WCG Ireland LAN yesterday attending the BYOC area, mainly to play a bit of Quake 3. After suffering so long on ISDN and unplayable Clearwire broadband, I was delighted to hear of a free LAN just five minutes from my house. It was refreshing to see all friendly faces running the thing - BioHazard/MindPhuck/Legion/PPC, etc., are all oldschool LAN organisers who know the Irish gaming scene very well. No power cuts, no problems with IP addresses, no ping issues… to say the LAN ran smoothly would be a huge understatement.

When I arrived at the Digital Hub I was given a bag of free stuff and a nice smoothie, ushered to my seat by a guy who carried my PC. I was then directed to SECURE parking out the back (incidentally, three more cars broken into underneath my apartment block the day after my own stereo was stolen). There was a tuck shop, a rest area with comfortable couches and bean bags, top of the range console corners with great chairs and TVs, computer doctors on site, and loads of help from staff. You’d think you were in a different country. Myself and Spaceman each bought a can of coke at the shop, and were informed that we had just won free spot prizes… I was given an xbox 360 game. This was most definitely a Carlsberg LAN.

There were a handful of reporters wandering about, I posted the Sunday Tribune’s article here, and no doubt there will be some more reviews popping up in the other papers. One thing that struck me as a bit odd were these two women from Millenium People recruitment who were going around with leaflets offering gamers their “dream job” as an MMORPG games master or team leader, etc. CV farmers perhaps?

Theres a review of the WCG qualifiers from a Counter Strike perspective over on cs-ireland.com. Even though its years since I’ve touched that game, it is nice to see a bit of life breathed back into the once-vibrant clan scene. Eight teams turned up for the qualifiers, although there were really only two possible contenders from the start… Wink and suiGeneris, who fought it out in the final with sG coming from the lower bracket to win twice for the trophy. I didn’t follow any of the other competitions, although I kept an eye on Starcraft where Bunny lost out in the final to some guy I never heard of.

I don’t know how strong Ireland’s representation at the World Cyber Games in Monza, Italy, this year will be, but the most important thing is that we are there. For too long we have had no representation while the likes of Mongolia and Qatar were present. Here is the group draw:

	Estonia
	Hungary
	Japan
	Finland
	Ireland
	Moldova
	Switzerland

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 21:26 pm and is filed under Competitions, Games, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.