Gears of War Party 1: Melaka Durian edition (part 1)

Date: 12th July 2008
Venue: Maxshinoda's home of residence
Activities: Gears, Bomberman, Durian consumption, Melaka Sightseeing.
Attendees: Maxshinoda (host), Friction, Ospe, Hasukyo

DAY 1
As planned (or more accurately, 5 hours after the planned time of departure... haha), we started to head off to Melaka to visit Maxshi and his promise of a truckload of Durians. The trip was uneventful, with nothing interesting along the way except a single incident where we mistakenly identified Maxshi as a motorcycle ice cream vendor.

After meeting up with Maxshi, he lead us to a nice condominium facing the beautiful ocean, where we would be spending the night. With Maxshi back off to work (and to pick up the durians), the three of us ended up walking 2 km to the nearest mamak for a bite to eat and drinks to quench our thirsts. After receiving peculiar stares from the table across (probably because of our discussion on whether devouring children would be beneficial or not: please refer to 'Bioshock'), we decided to leave the mamak shop and head back to the condo to freshen up.

It was a night of good food, delicious Durian, Gears extreme 4 player hosting matches, split screen headaches and Bomberman fun...

Good food:
Maxshi fiancee was nice to cook us dinner. The food was excellent, and I ended being the last one to finish (and Hasukyo the fastest as usual). It's been awhile since I ate 'sambal petai', I did have my fair share of them, but not to the extent of Ospe, who was feasting delightfully on them... haha... Maxshi also proudly introduce the other inhabitants of his home, which were a family of flying squirrels.


Gears:
After having a dinner, we proceeded to power on both Maxshi's and Ospe's 360. Using a router and split screen accounts, we did the unfair and started a room where all four of us had host advantage... haha... Complaints ran through out the games, with unfortunate visitors discovering that 4 local hosts resulted in more lag and more annoying hosts to cope with. Unfortunately playing in split screen proved to be quite a challenge and four of us ended up paying the price, especially in escalation. Overall, extreme fun, though split screen was slightly undesirable. Maybe one day we can have a LAN game with 8 Xbox 360s connected (Yay! no host advantage).


Delicious Durian:
Our Gears run was interrupted temporarily by the smell of durian, which meant that Maxshi had started cracking them open. The durians tasted great; my first durian in 4 years, it tasted as good as I remembered it to be. Hasukyo and Ospe joined shortly after we had our fill of as much durian as we could eat (as promised!).


Bomberman:
After we were burned out playing gears, Maxshi suggested that we play Bomberman. Surprisingly, Ospe never played Bomberman. At the beginning, most of us ended up on a personal suicide run, falling pray to our own planted mini explosions. Slowly we started to pick up on the gameplay, and honestly in my opinion, Bomberman was as if not more fun than the Gears session we had. Ospe was indeed at a disadvantage, being a newcomer and having no place to hide to chainsaw people, ended up strangely silent through the ordeal... haha... After a few rounds of rounds, everyone agreed that it was time to sleep and we headed back to the condo.

Next day we headed to Melaka (pics too) and a brief stop at PD>> Stay tuned for day 2 of the blog.

Blogging off....