{"id":213,"date":"2004-10-18T22:42:04","date_gmt":"2004-10-18T22:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/?p=213"},"modified":"2004-10-18T22:42:04","modified_gmt":"2004-10-18T22:42:04","slug":"game-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"Game Night"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not quite <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quartertothree.com\/inhouse\/columns\/132\/\">Shoot Club<\/a>, but Gaming Night is something special nonetheless.  It&#8217;s a gathering of friends.  It&#8217;s a gathering of controllers.  The five console machines under my TV do all the work.  The rest is a fellowship of a normally destructive kind.  There&#8217;s yelling and screaming. There are takedowns and cut downs.  Mothers are mentioned in casual conversation.  Few mothers emerge unscathed as a result.<\/p>\n<p>Gaming night has become something of a tradition around these parts, despite its lack of a proper nickname.  What started as a regular meeting of a couple guys looking for a gaming fix has morphed into an event, an event that requires planning.  Those same guys are a wee bit grown up now.  Some have kids.  Some have wives.  Oh yes, wives.  Honey, can I go over Ken&#8217;s and play games on Saturday?<\/p>\n<p>The set up for gaming night can range wildly, jumping from a single TV and a few players on a couch to multiple machines and network cables.  For this past weekend, which marked the Last Gaming Night Before Child Number 2, I&#8217;m leaned towards the later.  I brought a second TV downstairs and hooked up a second Xbox.  I set up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.konami.com\/ddr\/\">DDR<\/a> upstairs to entice the occasional passerby.<\/p>\n<p>The DDR pads saw a small share of dancing, mostly due to the determination and gusto of one particular DDR addict.  The second Xbox was barely touched, reflecting the group&#8217;s dissappointment that Burnout 3, an otherwise awesome game, could only be played by two players at a time.<\/p>\n<p>Most of our time was spent in front of screen number one.  The quirky Japanese game <a href=\"http:\/\/www.namco.com\/games\/katamari_damacy\/\">Katamari Damacy<\/a> made its rounds, in more way than one.  Mario Kart saw a fair share of action.  Throwing giant turtle shells from the back of a pink Cadillac being driven by my partner is my idea of fun.  I&#8217;m not alone with this sentiment.  We capped off the night with a little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xbox.com\/en-US\/topspin\/\">tennis<\/a> and a good helping of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.espnvideogames.com\/nba2k5\/\">basketball<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>All in all, it was a fun night.  With my second namesake on the way, I don&#8217;t expect to do this again for a good while.  I&#8217;ll live.  I appreciate the time I get for diversions such as these and, quite frankly, I don&#8217;t think my mother&#8217;s reputation should take another beating like that for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not quite Shoot Club, but Gaming Night is something special nonetheless. It&#8217;s a gathering of friends. It&#8217;s a gathering of controllers. The five console machines under my TV do all the work. The rest is a fellowship of a normally destructive kind. There&#8217;s yelling and screaming. There are takedowns and cut downs. Mothers are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plan.thewoottons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}