| rev:text
| - I want to like this place more. It's a cool looking place filled with games with a super friendly staff that attempted to be helpful, with varying levels of success, the whole time we were there. The pizza was surprisingly decent.
But the execution of "A cool place filled with games" left some things to be desired.
1. Gaming updates. We wanted to have a bunch of people on Dota. The "VIP" room didn't seem to have updated games on their computers - and they didn't charge us for the time spent trying and failing to play a game, but it took about an hour for us to finally be able to start playing the game.
2. The UI. It wasn't just that we weren't able to get a subset of computers to work for an hour, but that we had to use their proprietary gaming interface. Other LAN cafes just let you use a computer and launch the available game. This one seems geared at protecting their computers and networks from potentially malicious actors and everything felt clunky. Oh, and when we did try to play an old school game (age of empires) computers started DCing from each other within a few minutes.
3. In the name of protecting themselves, they don't let computers download games or run unapproved games. This makes sense, except that apparently custom games within approved computer games are caught up in this policy. They mentioned that people can't play Starcraft 2 Arcade games - and we noticed while playing Dota 2 that the custom games were also unavailable. That's unfortunate, because the best games for groups of casual players are custom games. No tower defense games here, sorry.
4. With computer games being difficult, we thought about trying to get an 8 v 8 or maybe just a 4 vs 4 game of Halo going in our group. After all, why go to a gaming center rather than someone's house if you don't try to set up some epic group games? But this didn't happen either. The newest version of Halo doesn't use split screen (and thus I don't really consider it a worthwhile Halo game to play - if I wanted an FPS game with only single player interface I'd be on a PC) - and unfortunately Howie's policy is to sell the previous game in the series to buy the new game. So they sold all of the Halo games with the possibility of playing large versus matches when they got the new Halo. Oh, and apparently the general policy is that you need an Xbox live account to play the game online (or in this case - even with other people on another system) at the game shack? Maybe legally they have to do that, but it is unfortunate.
I really wanted to like this place. With the friendly staff and the hardware they have there is no reason for there to be the issues I saw. I've seen other LAN cafes done simply and so much better.
Oh, and the bathrooms were oddly dirty.
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