We started the night out around 6:00pm with some friendly games of Trackmania Nations. We tried Online first to see if my internet connection would handle several people playing online at once from my house. It handled 6 or 7 quite nicely to our surprise. Much fun was had, especially on the insane tracks we've been downloading off our favorite servers and from TMX: TrackMania Xchange.
We moved on to a heated game of Age of Empires III. It was Toxic, Skeletor, Chewy and Thundr versus That One Guy, Tsam314 and BigBadMrT.
The game took about an hour-and-a-half, mostly because Chewy had put up a concrete cannon barrier in the middle of his base. We, being the naive newbs that we are, sent wave after wave of units to their slaughter, because we kept choosing units that aren't meant to fight artillery.
We finally wisened up and Tsam314 and BigBadMrT sent some counter-artillery down to distract while That One Wave of Pikemen crept in the back door and started wreaking havoc on Chewy's base (with some help of a couple Monitors out just off the beach.
It's quite difficult to go back to playing with a Level 1 Home City, though I think we all levelled them up about 5 levels during the game. The limited (and weak) cards in our decks made the game pretty interesting with respect to aging up.
The "Fantastic Four" succeeded in aging up quickly despite the desolate decks intimidating the "Terrific Trio" into thinking they were not going to emerge victorious.
We were pleasantly surprised after the demise of Chewy's base, however. During the takedown, we assembled enough forces to max out our populations, then converged upon Toxic and Skeletor's bases to finish the game.
Meanwhile... back at the LANch (get it?!) -- Spencer and Micah were playing Motocross Madness 2 tag while we were finishing up our game of Age III.
We decided to join them for some tag, racing and stungs... no tourney this time, but a great time was had by all. Among the tracks played were: Tag Arena 3, Bear Mountain, Halfgrand Playground, Pepsi Max and Mackheu Basin.
We broke out some Trackmania Sunrise. It was all stunts mode and it was crazy. Hopefully more FNGers will snag the game so we can start playing it on Fridays as well.
At that point, it was getting pretty late... some of the crew started to head for home and things started to wind down. Toxic and Skeletor played some Counter-Strike: Source while the rest of us went back to playing Trackmania Nations online.
I'm not sure how the Counter-Strikers fared, but the rest of us did pretty well against anywhere from 25-40 players on the server at any given time. To finish it off, That One Guy scored 1st place on the Great Milenko server when time ran out, taking the Gold and about 20 points toward his ranking.
We all started packing it up at 4:00am. The last guests left about 4:30am. Not too shabby for a night's play. Thanks to all that came! Hopefully we don't have to wait another whole year before doing it again. At least we have FNG to tide us over until then.