The Halo 2 LAN party on Friday was soo-per.  A huge amount of thanks goes to Jason for letting 13 invade his house and drink his beer.  The cool part was that pretty much everyone there had played before and it got pretty competitive at times.  The 14 of us were divided into two groups - one upstairs and one in the basement - and in general the teams followed that division.  I think we probably could have mixed up the teams a bit during the night, but there were a lot of close games and a few epic battles. 

I hope to post pictures soon.  John Schreifels took a few shots on his camera, and so did I.  I was planning on actually recording a lot of video footage, but I quickly realized that the video quality was very poor because the lighting was so dim.  My camera just doesn't work well in low light at all.  Maybe I'll just make a small slide show with a soundtrack or something...

The only bummer is that there just wasn't enough time.  For myself, life with a newborn requires me to get some amount of sleep, so I left around midnight.  A lot of us have kids, and everyone actually decided to leave at midnight.  But the big downside is that there was just so much more Halo 2 to play.  I think Bungie has done a fantastic job of providing all kinds of new maps for H2 (nine, I think), and there are just so many maps now to choose from.  I don't think we played even half of them on Friday, let alone all of the possible game types. 

H2 has almost completely lost its ability to be fun over XBox live.  LAN parties with people you know who are in earshot of smack-talk is much more fun :)  If history repeats itself, we'll be playing again sometime in December or January.