We woke up at 8:00 am for some early morning practice and headed out to Carousel Center at 10:15 am. We arrived right on time and headed into the building.

We entered to find the rest of the players set up and ready to go. After saying hello to some peeps, I grabbed a seat and, inbetween spinning around on the mad phat chairs, took pictures of the surrounding players. Infinity, of course, would have none of this and paid me back with a little photography of his own.

We waited about half an hour for the administrators to get the brackets ready to go. We had 9 people which was a very bad number to have so we had the two worst players play a sudden death to put one person in the losers bracket right away so we could start out with an 8 player winners bracket. It was all fun and good natured, lots of nice smack talk and pre-game warmups. I laid the smack down on Red[Meh] twice and a few of the other players sparred to get ready for the big time games ahead. At about 12:00 pm we were set and ready to go. Let the playing begin!

The first round was on Plunder Isle and it went pretty much as expected. I beat Nate in a UD vs Orc (him UD). He managed to get a level 7 death knight but it wasn’t enough to defeat my amazing micro. It was a tough game for me because I had Dark[TDL] next to me saying “stun wards, stun wards!” every five seconds. That lasted until I karate-chopped him in the neck. Then I did a little dance over his prostrate body and yelled, “Booyah!” Then I won by abusing stun.

X[Hunters], not surprisingly, beat the OrcGuy pretty easily. I looked over a few times during my game and it looked like he was checking some stock quotes in between battles. Then he got up and when he came back 10 minutes later he was eating some sort of pastry I’m sure you can’t buy at Carousel Mall. When he sat down he saw the “You are victorious” screen. Turns out that creeps are, in fact, greater than OrcGuy. Dark[TDL] absolutely raped Red[Meh] because, well, Red[Meh] is level 13 and Dark[TDL] is level 33. Okay. The most surprising game of the first round was Infinity’s win over AnalInfektion. Apparently, Mr. Anal forgot to scout and found out that mass ghouls do not own mass gargs/wyrms. This was very good for me because I would be meeting the winner of that game in the next round and I had not yet lost to Infinity with my orc. I was scared anyway. Infinity knows WWF style moves, he could whoop my pansy ass.

The second round began quickly after the first as we were promised a lunch break after it. The second round map was Lost Temple. X[Hunters] squared off against Dark[TDL] while I took on Infinity in the winner’s bracket. Red[Meh] faced OrcGuy while dread (the guy who got stuck in the loser’s bracket so we could have an 8 man start) took on AnalInfektion in the loser’s bracket. X[Hunters] had an AMAZING game with intense micro at Dark’s natural where X[Hunters] successfully killed all of Dark[TDL]’s militia. He took an early game advantage and held it throughout the game, owning Dark[TDL] in every battle they had. Unfortunately, Dark[TDL]’s expansion/macro is what makes him so good and it wasn’t long before X[Hunters] found himself confronting gryphons and he was forced to concede. I beat Infinity after a very long game with me just preventing expansions until he had nothing left. It still took me 15 minutes to root him out of his main.

In the loser’s bracket, AnalInfektion beat dread UD vs UD, eliminating dread from the tournament. Red[Meh] was eliminated after a humiliating tower rush from OrcGuy. With the games over, 8 of us rushed off to Hooters for some lunch! Lunch time conversation consisted of how much I was going to own Dark[TDL] in our upcoming match, how hot our waitress was, how hot I was, and how much Red[Meh] likes Britney Spears. This stopped when Red[Meh]’s dad calmly sat down in between Nate and Red[Meh]. Erm, squeezed in between Red[Meh] and Nate. Luckily, he left a short while later. On to the pics!

We were at Hooters for about an hour and a half. Our tourney administrators were really cool though and didn’t care. Upon my return I was quickly owned by Dark[TDL]. AnalInfektion took down OrcGuy, eliminating OrcGuy, but was then eliminated himself when he played X[Hunters] who had just eliminated Nate. It came down to X[Hunters] and me to decide who would play Dark[TDL] in the finals. He destroyed me with an embarrassing fiend rush which killed all my burrows. However, it was not to be for X[Hunters] who didn’t get as close to winning as he did the first game. Dark[TDL] took the win and the invite to Atlanta!

That wasn’t the end of our fun, however. After about an hour of just hanging out in the computer room with our uber administrators, we headed down to the arcade!

At the arcade, X[Hunters] and I played some Time Crisis 2 (I owned) while AnalInfektion soundly beat anyone who challenged him in Tekken Tag. It was a lot of fun and very manner. We ended it with some basketball competition which I won twice before giving my spot up to take pictures.

After that was over we all went our separate ways. X[Hunters] and I headed back to my house but quickly left to go see Terminator 3 with some friends of mine. The next morning he left at 7:30. He hung out at Carousel Mall for a while because it’s right near his train station and had a little talk with the admins. Apparently, some people had measured how far it would be to the computer room we played in and tried to dig their way in from the inside. They were seen and captured by the police. However, there seems to have been some employee theft because a lot of equipment has gone missing. It could’ve been us WCG’ers. We all have too much pride for that.

I’ll definitely be at WCG Syracuse next year. Unfortunately, X[Hunters] won’t be there because he’s in the Marines now. Good luck, man! I’ll be going to RIT with Dark[TDL] and AnalInfektion so there will be some crazy late night Frozen Throne games there. I hope you enjoyed reading this and checking out the pictures. Check out the WCG nearest you next year! It’s definitely worth the trip.