From left to right - Bzb, Spunge, Dosedmonkey, Xios
It was a fairly early start for most of us, well 08:30 is pretty early for a Saturday. Dosed and Spunge had to board trains before I had even woke up to travel north towards Birmingham. It started well with me arriving in plenty of time to pick them up from a station and some how Spunge even managed to navigate the London underground without getting lost. Around this time Bzb and his friend (Rob) arrived at Omega Sektor and only managed to drive down one pedestrian only zone. Now we had to attempt to find this place, congratulations go out to Dosed at this point for forgetting to find out exactly where the damn place was, not quite seeming to realise how Birmingham was. Read More
We asked for directions at a help desk and then asked some guy selling balloons, he was about as helpful as asking RKO to finish a film, and we managed to walk straight past it and wondered where the hell we were going. Luckily after some brief directions from Bzb over the phone we arrived there 20 minutes later. Lunch and informal greetings were undertaken in Burger king before entering Omega Sektor.
After walking in and staring in amazement at the huge number of Gaming PC’s (over 400 to be precise) we paid and entered ready to start. We some how ended up in the VIP area, where the PC’s were even nicer. The session was started with a few rounds of CoD 4, after getting raped from all angles for a few rounds we started to improve and frequently came top of the LAN server (yes there was more than just us on the server). When the excitement of this starting to die down we moved onto some Company of Heros, which resulted in me and Bzb getting taken out very quickly by Dosed and Spunge.
The gaming then developed into Team Fortress 2 for some high speed fragging fun and revenge was taken once the playing fields were levelled to something everyone can pick up quickly. Although Spunge did seem slightly more proficient at killing compared to the rest of us. It was decided around now it was probably best to take a break after several hours gaming. We proceeded to have a look around Omega sektor discovering upstairs there were even more PC’s, a lounge, DJ area, and a bar (a poor excuse for a bar, but still a bar).
Gaming was resumed with multiplayer Stalker, and after running around like idiots for 15 minutes we worked out you can buy weapons other than pistols. When sufficient killing had be done we tried to get an in game picture but failed to work out where the screenshots went, and when your paying for every second you play maximum fun must be ensured. By now it was getting late and people were getting hungry so we set of in a quest for food, KFC being the winning retailer as it was closest. There was a slight shock at the price of the parking ticket here, turning out to be £8 for around 5 hours (free parking was found half a mile away and the car moved).
We returned to Omega Sektor for some more late night gaming and started with Ghost Recon 2, and ended pretty quickly after numerous deaths cause by Bots. A suggestion to play Battlefield 2 was followed up with 20 minutes of squad play on a ranked server before turning into C4 jumps on the same server. Unfortunately the days of BF2 are over and it really can’t compete any more with the newer FPS games. Call of Duty 4 was fired up again and played until we left for the night at around 23:00 (and Bzb was hit with a parking ticket costing £6.40 for 2.5 hours.)
The way back to the hotel ended up taking long than expected after being forced to take a detour after the police quite inconsiderately decided to close a road Thanks to Mr. sat-nav (saved me so many times this weekend) we arrived safely ready for a good bit of sleeping. We arrived early the next day ready to carry on only finding it shut for another hour. So logically we went on the search of food again. People had to start leaving around 11:00 so we only managed a quick game of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (which I won, being the only one having played it properly before). Dosed went running off to his train at 10:45 after losing track of time and we all dispersed shortly afterwards to our various corners of the UK.
For a first attempt at something like this it went exceptionally well and a lot of fun was had by all that attended. It also turned out to be pretty cheap, apart from parking. Omega Sektor is pretty incredible to say the least, I’m pretty confident in saying no other LAN Cafes come close to this. Hopefully we can get a higher turn out if we hold another one some time in the New Year. Thanks to all that attended and made this happen.
