The Midnight Hour

For a small sliver of time during the monstrous JANLAN 2007 (click here for a synopsis of JANLAN 2007 by rapture), eight THXers committed sacrilege and cranked up Gears of War in the middle of a perfectly good Halo 1 LAN. Yeah, it was risky. It turned out to be a nice change of pace from Halo 1, and we all enjoyed it, but we soon reverted to 3-shot sweetness (well…maybe 4-shot).

The roster was Old School vs New School. Mintz, PooBerry, Myth, and Phoenix took on Midnight, Oculus, Reverend, and JDogg/Disavowed. We all played on identical 32″ Westinghouse LCD HDTVs capable of 720p. Four Xbox 360s displayed Gear of War in local multiplayer splitscreen for eight players.

It took a few minutes to get the network configured, as our two switches weren’t talking to each other. However, after some experimenting with the uplink port we managed to establish connectivity. BTW, does anybody really understand the uplink port? If you do, you should be more vocal at LANs, because we always resort to experimentation to get it right when it comes to connecting multiple switches. We also encountered a strange problem with Oculus’s 360 when connecting it via VGA. I deduced the problem quickly: that he normally runs in 1080p and the 32″ Westy couldn’t support that resolution. Solving the problem, however, was more tricky. It turns out that the 360 stores a separate video output setting for use only when the VGA cable is connected. Changing the setting in the dashboard using a component connection will not affect it. Therefore, everytime we changed the dashboard display setting to 720p and then plugged the VGA cable back in, it reverted to 1080p–and no picture. We finally solved it by connecting the 360 to one of rapture’s 22″ LCD monitors with 1080p capability. From there we scaled the resolution down to something the Westy could support and the problem was solved.

The first thing I noticed was that splitscreen was very disorienting. To quote Mr. Horse from Ren and Stimpy in his review of a competing cat litter to Gritty Kitty Cat Litter, “No sir, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.” There really isn’t a border between the two half-screens, so my eyes had problems following my own action without noticing the adjacent screen. It also screws up your sensitivity, ala playing Halo 1 on a 16:9 television in widescreen mode. It took about ten minutes of playing for me to adjust, and it never became truly intuitive.

Problems aside, playing an eight-person match of GoW with almost no lag was certainly a lot of fun. Favorite quote of the mini-LAN:
“Why don’t you stop running, Midnight?”
“Why don’t you stop dying, Mintz?”

Another interesting part of the mini-LAN was that one of the New-Schoolers’ TVs wasn’t running in hi-def. Phoenix’s 360 wasn’t set to display in 720p because he doesn’t have a hi-def TV at home. When it was connected to the 32″ Westy it continued to display in 480i, although it was possibly 480p–I can’t really remember. What I do remember was that the picture looked like crap compared to the exact same image (the GoW pregame lobby) on the TV beside it running at 720p. I pointed this out to the New Schoolers a couple times, most notably Myth, who replied, “Ahh, we’re good with it like this.” Not one to force people to do the right thing if it doesn’t affect me, I replied, “…OK.” To my knowledge, they played in standard definition the entire mini-LAN. I think it was worth the 90 seconds to reboot the dashboard and change the setting, but perhaps I’m a perfectionist.

Overall, the mini-LAN was a good time. It provided our first GoW LAN experience, educated us on some nuances of the 360 display settings, and showcased the difference of standard and high definition. I really enjoyed the competition of the New Schoolers. They are some battle-hardened COGs. I also enjoyed introducing Disavowed to GoW for the first time. Perhaps we hooked him. A GoW LAN with separate 360s and displays for each player would be awesome, albeit difficult to coordinate. However, I did notice that at high resolutions a 22″ monitor is more than adequate for a single player. Oculus regularly plays on a 24″ Dell 2407 running at 1080p, and we know how he pwns. I am unsure of the relative value of LANing Gears of War versus Xbox Live (XBL), but it’s fun for a change even if it’s not our staple mode of GoW multiplayer.