All Day Games 2009

I went to my first All Day Games last night. Even though I did not stay for all 24 (or 27?) hours of the event, it was still insane and fun. Many of the games that were played at All Day Games were new to me. Here were some highlights from my gaming experience:

• Mario Kart 64: We did 4-player match race on all tracks in Special Cup and golf-style scoring with the place you finish in to determine the overall winner. Going into Rainbow Road, I was tied for first place with 5 points (a 3rd place finish and two 1st place finishes). Still leading halfway through final lap on Rainbow Road, I lost it after getting lightning-bolted and run over, then hitting a chomp.
• Rack-O: Going into the last round, I was leading by 55 points. However, an epic topdeck from the draw pile gave the runner-up player a 3-card straight and the Rack-O, resulting in him leapfrogging me in points despite my huge lead.
• Sorry!: It was a race between me and another guy for who can get their last pawn home. We both had 3 pawns in home already and 1 pawn en route to home. After I got my last pawn into the safety zone, I kept drawing 4's so I had to back it up out of the safety zone, making it vulnerable to attacks. However, the lucky topdeck of an 11 put my last pawn straight into home first for the win.
• Guitar Hero 3 Tournament: Played Even Flow on expert difficulty. I hit 52% of the notes. Needless to say, I got knocked out after that.
• War Tournament: Somehow I managed to win 4 games of War to end as the tournament winner. The final match lasted about 10 minutes, which was really fast for a game of War. There were several instances where I came back from having only 8 cards in my pile.
• 20-man Cutthroat Darts: I was one of the last two players standing at the end. We both had sections of the dart board right next to each other, and I managed to knock myself out by hitting my own section for the event loss.
• 15-man Cutthroat Pool: Luckily, no one went for my ball until the later part of the game. After playing defense with the cue ball for a few turns due to a lack of good shots for me (3 players left in the game at that time), I sunk the other 2 players' balls one after the other for the event win.
• 16-man Shy Guy Says (Mario Party): Teams of 2 players control 1 controller each for Shy Guy Says. I was paired up with the eventual All Day Games 2009 winner. Twice I failed to press the B button in time due to poor reaction time at 3 AM, which cost us a round win twice. However, twice I got lucky when I preemptively pressed the B button when Shy Guy raised double flags and dropped the A flag.
• Super Mario Bros. High Score: The objective of this event was to obtain the highest score in 1 life or 5 minutes, whichever comes first. After learning that the easiest way to rack up points is to finish levels with lots of time remaining (50 points per second remaining on the timer), I sprinted each level and used no warps, with some close calls to death. I died in level 2-2 by hitting a squid while swimming underwater as my time was about to run out, but 99850 points edged out 2nd place to win this event.
• TI-83 Uncle Worm High Score (medium difficulty): Not having played this game since high school, I was a little rusty at first, but had the winning touch with 431 points.

Epic week

Last week was a pretty eventful week.

• We won the 2009 Mechatronics competition (first place out of 40-something teams) with our Roomba motor-driven robot. Our record for the competition was 7-0, with 2 match losses and 1 match declared a rematch after our epic comeback from what appeared to be a loss. The Roomba motors gave us unparalleled speed and torque, with some matches won in ~4 seconds. Our opponent in the final round was very similar in design (structure, algorithms), except they used the stock motors provided in lab (I think).
• Our MAE 4300 final presentation was on the same day as the Mechatronics competition, except the presentation was at 8 AM. I was up until 6 AM working on the Mechatronics robot, and intended to get up at 6:45 so I could get ready for the presentation (shower, put on a suit, etc.). Unfortunately, I somehow missed my alarm, but magically woke up at 7:35. Still mostly asleep, I walked into the bathroom about to take a shower. That's when I realized that I had a final presentation in 25 minutes. Good thing is that the professor was very impressed with our presentation, even though I was still mostly asleep.
• Wednesday night I stayed up figuring out microcontroller code for the robot, and slept for 2 hours. On Thursday I took a half hour nap in the afternoon, and slept 1.5 hours at night. This brought my 2-day sleep total to 4 hours. Friday night I slept for 16 hours, and it was awesome.
• Fluids/Heat Transfer Laboratory is over. The course consisted of 6 labs and 6 lab reports. Lab report page counts: 23, 19, 48, 43, 45, and 22.