Sorry, my reply is a little long winded which starts off with one long baddish experience into two cool gaming experiences. My story is somewhat old school, back in the days of Halo: CE. My friends and I would grab 4 projectors from work and network our boxes in one of the conference rooms for 8+ straight hours of gaming. 16 people huddled around a table of Xboxs and Projectors having a good time. Some of the best games were the hour long Blood Gultch CTF matches. We played Halo: CE for 2.5 years straight, every week on Friday or Saturday night. Until one fateful night, when we invited the MC Team to play with us some halo at my work. Now back in the day, the MC Team was like some top 5 nationally ranked team and one of our regular players was an acquaintance of one of them. So we invited them over one night to play with us to see how we stacked up with them. Let’s just say our stile of play did not meld well with theirs and I almost got fired over this. Let me set the scene of what went down. [b]Location:[/b] Government Building. Escort needed at all times. [b]Our Group:[/b] 8 individuals (6 guys, 2 girls) [b]MC Team:[/b] 15 individual players + girly hot girlfriends who could not and would not play and whined most of the time. [b]MIX AND SHAKE.[/b] First off, I had no clue that the MC Team had a roster of 30+ individuals (mostly collage aged males). I thought they were a couple of friends (4-8) who were just awesome, not a rowdy bunch of college guys. This led to my number one downfall of the night... TOO Many people in the building after hours with just one escort… ME. Lets just say the security guard was not to happy and I got an ear full from my manager the next working day. With all the rowdiness going on the only thing missing was the kegger for our frat party. Second, there is a reason they are in the top 5 teams in the nation. They are very good. We could not compete with them. This led to my number two downfall of the night… SPLITTING the teams up to try and even things out. We split up so that half of the players were MC Team and the other half our players. That went down horrible too. MC Team was team killing our players to get weapons that our players had and that they wanted. They also had issues playing with the girls of our group. They seemed to be offended that they had to play with a girl on their team. They new we were not as good as them and they considered us like 2nd hand citizens. The night got old really fast and it was probably one of the shorter nights we played, I think we even left before the security guard left that night. Third, the MC Team wanted to start a mini tournament that night for money and wanted us to pitch in as well. By this time, I had enough of the shenanigans and told them we had to clear out of the building soon and would not have enough time for the tournament. They got a little POed from this, but shoot; we were providing the place, all the equipment, and all the fun. They provided all the headaches, no equipment, and sucked all the fun out of the night. Before you get all hurt that you were on the MC Team or you want to defend them, I just want to say this: We only played with less then half of the whole group. I am going to assume that we played with the worst of the group and not the nice players. Also, the setting was not a good setting to have such an activity and there was some bad planning on my part. After that weekend, we moved the gaming to my apartment which turned out good, because the neighboring balcony apartment was a couple friends of my wife from her high school band days. Yes, my wife was in band. Yes, I tease her about “This one time, at band camp…” Anyway, we would throw a network cable over to their apartment were they would have two Xboxs going and I would have two Xboxes going for some 16 player Halo: CE. We would also theme our Xboxs and Teams. We would name the Xbox to whatever we wanted. For example, if we were doing a G.I. Joe theme, I would name the Xbox, GIJOE HQ and then our characters names would be, Duck, Bazooka, Mutt, Sgt Slaughter, Spirit, Scarlet, Lady J, what have you. Then another box would be: COBRA HQ and their names would be: Commander, Storm Shadow, Baroness, Serpentor, Destro, Zartan, Tomax, Xamot, and so on… We even had Smurf Night… Papa Smurf, Baby Smurf, Smurfet, Handy Smurf. You get the picture. Once Halo 2 came out everyone went online (finally) and we never really got together to play in the same room. The online fetcher of Halo 2 was very nice and needed, but it sure killed our Friday/Saturday night gaming marathons and the fun that went with it… which you really can’t get from playing online. Sure you can hear the voice of the other players, but it’s the hand jesters and the facial expressions that are priceless.