XL, Birmingham NEC..
Ok, so I just got back from the NEC, after 4 days on the road, and I am KNACKERED, firstly. Fairly sure I only slept a total of 10 hours, over the 3 nights I was staying in Birmingham. However, this is probably MY fault, rather than XL’s, unlike last year. Last year, the events tended to take far longer than originally planned, and as I result, we staff really slept very few hours. This time around, things were alot more organized, events ran, in the main, on time and we were able to close the door, to all the ‘bad kids’ at 10pm. Which even left a small gap before vacanting the premises, to beat Moose at Pro Evo 6 a couple of times, too. As I said, the event as a whole appeared to run ALOT better, I think it’s fair to say collectively we’ve learnt alot from the original XL. Besides a few Xbox 360′s crashing and the odd networking issues I didn’t experience any real problems over the weekend. Chasing down teams wasn’t ideal, but you cannot expect the players to sit around for hours on the off chance they’ll be called up.
I spent my weekend running the ‘Gears Of War’ and I can safely say I do not want to see another game of ‘Gears’ for as long as I live. There were some games that were cracking, tense and alot of fun to watch. Those games were tainted though, by games where one or sometimes both teams ‘camped’ areas, effectively playing ‘hide and seek’. These games took an age to complete and were entirely boring! But yes… 24 teams, it was a long but well run contest which ended up seeing Infused Gaming taking slots one and two. Up in third, team NOK, represented by their own coach and maybe a new level of communication during their games?
We have HEAPS of pictures, from the event and a mass of Halo 2 statistics and media, so checking back here for that would be a very wise move.
- Oh, one more thing. If pictures depict me as not working, please take it with the pinch of salt it rightly deserves. A member our staff team is a git, and no despite it all, it’s not KONSPIRACY. 