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At the ripe old age of twenty seven my back doesn’t take kindly to being abused, so after a sixteen hour coma on the red room floor it took me about ten minutes before I could actually get up. I had this weird dream; I dreamt that Dr Gonzo had come into the red room in the middle of the night looking for me, and had woken some random who wanted to hit him for it. Not sure why I was dreaming about Dr Gonzo, but never mind. It was dark when I woke up, so I had absolutely no idea what time it was.
I stumbled across to my car and had a smoke, saw a couple of people along the way (including jaFro who looks like he’s just finished competing in an Ultimate Fighter tournament against The Rock) who said someone was looking for me. When I eventually made my way up to my desk, I found out that it was about 8pm. So much for the Friday Night In show. As it turns out, half the LAN was looking for me, there’d been tannoy announcements asking for me, posts on ED, Cadred, SourceJunky and so on. My first thought was, why didn’t anyone check the red room, I mean surely that’s the most obvious place to start? A rather relieved looking Penguin informed me that he was about to start phoning local hospitals. Not sure what train of thought led him to that idea; perhaps he thought I might have been attacked by a killer pigeon or something. Considering I am supposed to be covering this event, it was really unprofessional of me to sleep through the entire first day. Still, I made up for it about an hour later by helping Dr Gonzo shout cast an exhibition match; Fnatic vs “The Dr Gonzo appreciation society”. As you can probably imagine the game was fairly one sided; Fnatic won easily but not before teamGONZ took the first three rounds, knifing Airraid in the process. The game was entertaining, although I am still not entirely convinced that the classic “turtle rush long” is too effective against the best team in Europe, neither is a P90/UMP/Para mid rush, for that matter. The group stages we well under way, and I was lucky enough to be in time to see the match of tournament so far; CTX vs Complete Control. There were a number of server problems which didn’t help the flow of the game, but nevertheless both teams played well and without anything to separate the teams it ended in a draw. In an unfortunate turn of evens the cC team were sat right behind CTX, and in true gamesmanship style they took full advantage, even getting an official warning for looking at the CTX player’s screens. CTX will feel hard done by, and they might be forgiven for thinking that a draw might not have been the result in other circumstances. CTX, by the way, have already done a lot to dispel the “online heroes” reputation they have. Rottich has actually been playing even better on LAN than he does online – I really think this team will be the surprise package of the tournament. If I was a betting man I might get some good odds for them to place in the money. Having only crawled out of my pit at 8pm, there wasn’t much of the evening left before it was time to taxi Penguin to the hotel. I’ve never stopped at the Tot Hill Travel Lodge before, so I had no idea where it was. With a little help from Google maps, I eventually managed to find it, and I only drove two miles down the wrong roads twice in the process. We threw our gear into the room and went straight back outside for a cigarette, at which point felix and Tom from Cadred turned up in a taxi. They seemed happy to finally arrive at their hotel, a look of weary relief on their faces. As the taxi drove away they politely asked us if we knew what room Goodeh was staying in. We didn’t know what room he was staying in, but we did know that he was staying at the Chieveley Travel Lodge – about ten miles in the opposite direction. If there was any time in my life that I would have used up one of my three wishes for a camera that would have been it. I have never seen two people look more physically ill in my entire life – and that includes the time my best friend walked in on me losing my virginity to a whale. I would have offered to drive them to their hotel, but I was too busy trying to fight the sudden urge to break down into hysterics. Penguin, much more composed than me, kindly offered them space in our room for the night. This is the sole reason that I now officially hate him. As it turns out felix snores approximately fifteen million times louder than Dr Gonzo. I tried my very best to fall asleep, but unfortunately the strong desire to smash a chair into this guy’s nose was too great for me to stick around. I have nothing against him at all, seems like a lovely chap – but I would rather drive nails into my urethra than stay in a room with him again. I did the sensible thing; I got dressed and left – which is why I’ve spent the last five hours or so bored out of my mind. I wasn’t the only one though – I am pretty sure having four guys absolutely riveted by my Peggle tuition qualifies them as being bored to the point of insanity as well. I managed to avoid strangling myself with my mouse cord to stave off the tedium, but only just. It’s now about 9.30am – I am going to go and get Penguin and the Cadred guys from the hotel. I promise to do some actual coverage of the event today, as long as I can muster up the willpower to ignore the welcoming call of the red room floor… |
Posted by ViniH on
Saturday, 10 November 2007, 09:40
