Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 16 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

We got back this evening from our trip to Los Angeles, CA where we spent Christmas with my wife’s family.

Back in 2004, my brothers-in-law and I started a (somewhat dubious) new tradition: the holiday frag fest. We were all at my in-laws house that year and we all had laptops and my father-in-law had just put in a wireless network. One of us (I think it was me) came up with the idea of playing a game over the network on all of the laptops. Since this wasn’t pre-meditated, the only free, easily downloadable game we could come up with on short notice was Doom II. So sure, it was some classic retro gaming, but it was fun! I think we went a little (ok, a lot) overboard that first year, deathmatching into the wee hours of the morning (our spouses were not amused).

Christmas 2006 found us back at my in-laws and the tradition “officially” became a tradition (you have to do it more than once, right?) as the laptops returned. That year’s game-of-choice was Doom 3. Once again, much joyous fragging of family members occured into the wee hours each night.

This year, I suggested Assault Cube, a small, free, cross-platform, open-source FPS. While AC doesn’t have the crazy range of weapons like the Doom, Quake, or Unreal series of games, it has enough to be fun (including grenades!), plus a lot of maps and several different game modes (our favorites being capture-the-flag and one-shot-one-kill).

We really put AC through its paces: we used two Vista laptops (both of which needed video card driver updates to run smoothly), a MacBook Pro, and my Eee PC running Ubuntu. In fact, I hosted the AC server running our LAN game on my Eee (while playing via the client at the same time). That shows you just how a small a footprint AC can run in (my Eee only has a 900MHz processor with 1gb of RAM). There were times when my framerate got choppy (and thus caused me to be gibbed by my opponents) and the 7″ screen is a little small for gaming (yes, I probably could have used an external monitor), but overall the experience was pretty good. We tried to cut back a little this year so as to stay on the good side of the other family members so we didn’t play as extensively in past years. Still, a good fragging time was had by all involved.

Now to start planning for FragFest 2010.