A friend of a friend invited me to a LAN party; I accepted his invitation. A few days before the party, I learned that our mutual friend had bailed. However, I still went.

Nad can attest to the fact that I avoid meeting new people. It took a lot for me to make the thirty minute drive out to the house to spend several hours with a bunch of people I didn’t know (I knew the names of two guys, and that was about it). Aside from wanting to be in a LAN party after not attending one in many years, the thing that drove me to go out there was the promise of playing Rock Band.

We played maybe two games of Unreal Tournament and one game of Serious Sam. The trouble I had installing UT, an eight-year-old game, solidified my stance against PC gaming. It shouldn’t take 44 minutes to apply a mod and a couple of patches to an ancient game.

The rest of the time was dominated by Rock Band. I put together the below video of them playing two songs. I should note that the first half of the video has some flickering due to a bad SD card. I switched out for the second segment.

We brought in the New Year the way you might expect us to: playing games! We started off with some Scene It! Lights, Camera, Action. Up until tonight, Nadia and I were undefeated in that game, soundly beating any person who would test their movie trivia skills against ours. That all changed when we met our match; John and Sylvia, our friends and now neighbors, came in and showed us what it is to be movie trivia experts.

We moved to Rock Band. Nad and I have never been able to get a group of four going before. Knowing that both of them are fans of Guitar Hero, it only made sense that they’d want to give this game a shot. Nadia hit the drums as usual, I was up on bass while John took his usual post as lead guitar. This left Sylvia on the mic; she had never done karaoke before.

We rocked out up until and after the ball dropped playing songs like Creep, Paranoid, Don’t Fear (the Reaper) and Highway Star. Guitar Hero’s fun factor cannot match a band of four in Rock Band; I never really understood how fun this game could be until tonight. Below are a few pics from tonight’s gig.

I hope you all enjoyed your New Year. I wish you all the best!

I had a personal goal of hitting 10K Gamerscore before the end of 2007 without resorting to cheap tactics, like the infamous “Easiest 1000 gamerpoints ever” technique. I achieved that goal today during a game of Scene It! after Christmas dinner. I know this doesn’t mean much, but it is nice to actual meet a goal that I set for myself.