Here we have our console gaming setup, consisting of a couple of XBoxes, a Gamecube, a PS2, and a Dreamcast. You can see Dan’s XBox with case on the left—it unzips so you can plug it in without taking it out of the case. The term "XBox Assless Chaps" was used to describe the case.

Perhaps as a replacement for Summer Games 2005 (at least for some of us), the EMB staff got together for the EMB Boston Gaming Weekend 2005. Woohoo! For some EMB writers it was the first time they had ever seen each other in person.

When Ryan and I first stopped into Jeff (and Erin’s) apartment, the gaming immediately started. We started out with a little bit of Sega Tennis on the PS2, then quickly moved to Wrath Unleashed. Sega Tennis is a pretty fun game, it’s very easy to pick up and the players had some cool and very realistic moves; probably the only thing missing were cut scenes of players getting pissed and yelling at the line judge.

Wrath Unleashed is basically a mix between a turn-based board game and 1-on-1 fighting game. I’d give it high marks except it took way too long to complete a 3-player game; by the end we just wanted to get it over with. Jeff had to keep Ryan from spilling his coke into the controller to get us to stop playing.

After a long bout of installing and patching, we broke out the PC desktop games. One thing to keep in mind for future gaming weekends: be sure to install, patch, get cables, and have all of the systems ready beforehand. We probably spent 3 or 4 hours of time just getting things set up! Any longer than that and some of us would be too drunk to play.

Jeff’s crazy PC and Mac game collection. Yes, he does keep the original packaging—experts say it’s a sign of insanity.

We played quite a lot of Command and Conquer: Renegade, which is a really fun first-person shooter but it seemed to get repetitive after about an hour. We also played some Ghost Recon, another first person shooter where you have to be more tactical as it takes only one shot to die and you must move very slowly. That type of scenario really works well with co-op missions, but the realistic novelty wore off when playing king of the hill with teams, where you would end up moving really slowly over to the hill, only to be shot and killed, again and again and again.

Unreal Tournament 2004 also loaded up, albeit slowly on our slightly-outdated PC desktops and laptops. Though for most of us it ran surpisingly well with some of the graphical elements turned down a bit. This first person shooter was one of our favorites. The game scenarios we played (where you have to protect your home base) seemed quite a lot like Renegade, but it didn’t seem as repetitive.

We also checked out Burnout 3. This fun racing game has a number of different car race scenarios which make the game a blast to play. For instance, it has a mode where you try to drive your car into traffic and cause the biggest pileup accident you can; more damage caused in the pileup means a better score. After getting our asses whooped a number of different times by Dan and Ryan, Jeff and I managed to eek out 1.3 million dollars in damage in one pileup to help us win the game.

Burnout 4 also looks to be really amazing; we checked out a demo disc and the graphics and gameplay looked fantastic. It took us about an hour, but Tim finally managed to get first place in the race, though the only reward for us ws to wait for the full version to come out, at full price.

Ryan plays Uru while Jeff watches.

Mario Kart Double Dash is another one of our favorite games; we played it a ton until the wee hours of the morning and it never got old. Next time we’ll have to load up the 8-player Mario Kart with two Gamecubes so seven gamers will be screaming expletives at the screen.

Toward the end of the last day we managed to have enough strength to load up Super Monkey Ball 2, Eye Toy, Uru, Katamari Damarcy, Splinter Cell, and Halo 2. I won’t go into the full details of the games, but all of them are excellent games and should be played at least once, perhaps even multiple times. Though I still think Halo 2 on a console doesn’t do it justice…

We weren’t able to check out a couple of games which would have been a blast to play: Aleph One (which is Marathon that has been updated to run on modern PC’s), and Sega Bass Fishing on the Dreamcast. Perhaps next year we won’t sleep and we’ll be able to get this stuff going.

Some of the Eat My Bomb staff, from left to right: AJ, Steve, Ryan, Dan, and Jeff.

I should also mention that we blew a fuse a number of different times during the evening due to the number of electronic components we had running at once—an impressive feat indeed! On the last night of the evening the power went out while I was in the bathroom, the timing was perfect, and let’s just say everyone was lucky that game aiming skill can also be used in real life situations.

A big thanks to Jeff and Erin for letting us take over their apartment while we created some gaming mayhem in Boston. Perhaps next time we’ll have a Chicago EMB Gaming Weekend…