Day Two

Oooohh wow, what a strange day!

First off, my fellow sourcer - sasquatcH, and I checked out all of the booths here.
Let me just give you a quick rundown, and I will be sure to elaborate on the important releases.

-Steelpad releases the new surface, 5L. It is basically just like the XTrac Hybrid released a month ago. It features a rubber grip bottom and 5 (count-em, five) layers of interwoven cloths and plastics. The top surface feels like someone spilled koolaid on a supermat and it hardened. All-in-all the nice surface graphic and the smooth glide will prove to be a great asset to any deathmatch gamer.

-nVIDIA had their usual lineup of state-of-the-art PCs running their new 6800GS. It is basically nVIDIA's answer to ATI's x800XL. A great performance card that won't break the bank. Games showcased whsere: Serious Sam 2, Narnia, Battlefield 2: Special OPs, and Quake4. Pretty impressive performance on Quake4 for an entry-level gaming video card.

-JoLt pretty much provided the entire event with their new products, mainly their new gum. The idea behind it isn't the taste factor, it is the caffeine. The booth-babe started talking about how you're supposed to chew it for 5 minutes and spit it out. I lost concentration because I was already on my 6th pack of two. Blackouts are imminent.

-Gibbs School of Technology was also here, which is quite a different showing. Apparently they are going to start holding tournaments at the college, and wanted some input. They pretty much just hung out with everyone and shot the bull about what games we all favored and so on. If you live in the Dallas area be sure to check out the schedule on the site.

-Razer had the coolest booth by far, and the most to look forward to. Myself and sasquatcH had a nice hour-long talk with RazerGuy himself about the upcoming products and innovations of the company. Unfortunately I am not able to spill the two headliner products, but I can tell you that they will be releasing another mouse soon that only features three buttons and is a throwback to the Viper with the new laser engine. The other products I can only say this: there is a huge chance you will never use another logitech mouse again, and that your the other mouse will fit like a glove.

After we visited all of the booths, we joined my 1.6 team in the tournament area to watch their first match of the main event. Devastation played 4o7.dc on dust2 and my-oh-my was that interesting. Basically it was one point off of match- point for Devastation, and someone shutdown the switch that Devastation's computers were plugged in to. LoughtoN was in a 1-v-1 with the other player on catwalk and he was in B. LN had 90 hp or so and the other had around 25. Needless to say HP doesn't matter in a situation like this, but this definitely was a huge ordeal when LN lagged out and was killed to end the round. Devastation all lost connections to the server and the admin came over to deal with the dispute. After about an hour of debate between the CPL official and jStar they came to a ruling. They would redo the round and use startmoney 800. Both teams agreed and the match went in to overtime, and ending in a Devastation victory. Nice job guy, bit of a scare there!

Be sure to check out Devastation's progress through the tournament and any other upsets/surprises here on my next entry tomorrow!