I recieved the recorded games from my brother and will post all the ones that I played in except two which I failed to get, my second one vs. chris and my very last one vs. chris. I also have 2 recorded games of champ vs. chris but I’ll have to talk to them to see if they want them posted or not.

Anyways the tournament started out rather unorganized, this was mostly due to the fact that no one really knew how many AoM players there would be I think. While waiting to find out when and where we would play, myself and Chris ran into Reed Richards who claimed to be a 2150 set player…. this seemed a bit odd to us especially considering that we had never heard of the name he gave us and he had never heard of myself, champ or chris (very odd). So we figured the guy was lying to us, sure enough that proved true.

After a long while of waiting, the organizers decided that myself and Chris should play each other in a best of three series as qualifying matchs. This first game is probably a pretty good game however the level of play is probably a bit low due to the fact that it was our first real game out there and the set-up was quite different for me I know which made it difficult to concentrate fully. Game 1 vs Chris.

After that game finally finished (it was a long one) They moved us out into the main area of Playdium. That area was surrounded by arcade machines and kids yellling and screaming the whole time, it was very loud and made it a bit difficult to concentrate but after a bit I got used to it and the background sounds became non-existent. Myself and Chris played a second game where he defeated me (I never got that recording). After myself and chris played it was discovered that an 8 year old kid had also joined the tournament, so he ended up playing 1 game vs. Reed to see if he could qualify…. he lost rather badly from what I can tell and was out of the tournament. It was kind of funny seeing this 8 year old who had probably never really played more than a few games of AoM try to play in this tournament with his mom watching and cheering him on.

After that the organizer for AoM, a SC player who goes by the name of Fire decided that amongst the 5 remaining players (Myself, Night, Champ, Chris, and Reed) we would have a round robin to determine seed and the 5th player would be kicked out of the tournament. So we started in on the round robin, Night played Reed to start things off, and soundly whooped on him. I don’t remember the order of the games but, I Defeated Reed, as well Champ and Chris both beat Reed so he was out. Champ was defeated by Myself (I didn’t get this game apperently), Night and Chris giving him a 1-3 record. Night was defeated by Myself, and Chris, giving him a 2-2 record. We ended up using the first two games that myself and Chris played as the decider between us in the round robin so I ended up with a 3-1 record and Chris with a 4-0 record.

That ended the first day of playing, we spent most of the day playing and so basically just went back to our hotels and crashed when all was said and done.

Saturday we continued our playing right at the start of the day, it was set up so we would play in a double elimination best of three tournament. We were seeded according to our record on the first day, so 1. Chris played 4. Champ and 2. Myself played 3. Night. The maps were not picked for us, the first map was selected randomly from a hat, the second game was chosen by the loser of the first game, and the third game was chosen by the loser of the second game.

Champ defeated Chris in two straight games, I can’t remember which map the first game was on but Chris picked Medit for the second map and lost that one. I then played vs. Night, game 1 ended up being on Medit, game 2 Night picked alfheim and I chose Odin as my god.

After this Chris played Night and defeated him in two games, so it was down to me and Champ to play in the winners bracket. Game 1 was on alfheim, not a bad map for me but I still don’t know completely how to play it with set. I think this is the match I should have chosen thor for as I think I could play it better with a norse civ (or even greek) than I did with Set. Game 2 I chose Medit, I found that I was playing Medit in this tournament better than I’ve ever actually played it at home, I think it was a combination of the computer speed and increased monitor size that gave me that extra edge. Game 3 Champ chose Watering Hole (or is it savannah?) and whooped on me rather easily, I knew that savannah and watering hole were my worst maps because I really truly don’t have a clue what I’m doing on them hehe.

This put me in the losers bracket where I had to play vs. Chris, game 1 was on savannah, Chris got an early edge and never let up on me. Game 2 I again chose Medit after having lost the first game, and the results were as I expected them to be. Game 3 Chris chose Alfheim. I made a rather huge mistake by forgetting to build my apes early on and it cost me an awful lot :(, in fact it cost me so much that I think I could have won the game if not for that one massive mistake for which I will kick myself for a long time I’m sure. Unfortunately I never got the recorded game as the disk that Night had given me (thanks a lot btw Night) ran out of room and he was nowhere to be found, after that there wasn’t much chance that I was going to get back on those computers as they started playing the Starcraft finals on those computers.

This left Chris and Champ in the finals, in order to win the whole thing Chris would need to win 4 games while champ would have to win only 2 in a series. As it turns out Chris had better concentration at this point and actually managed to win 4 out of 5 games, they were all close games and some of them really surprised me, if they have the recorded games it would be nice if they posted them, but I don’t think either of them are likely to do that at this point :).

Other than playing the games the two days almost all of the time, myself and chris spent most of friday at the playdium waiting to find out when and where we would play our matchs.. turns out it was a complete waste of the day, but we were told not to leave in case we had to play that night. Other than that there really wasn’t a lot of spare time between playing our matchs (we had 2 computers to use the whole weekend basically and were told to finish asap) and so didn’t end up doing a whole lot of stuff in and around toronto/mississagua.

Anyways it was nice meeting champ, night and chris, they were all really great guys, and to be honest I can’t see how Champ has managed to get a bad reputation around the AoM community as he’s a pretty good guy in real life. I wish both Champ and Chris the best of luck in Korea and hope they can win the Nations cup (I think they have a good shot to be honest) for Canada.

I’ll try to post some recorded games of AoT later tonight but can’t promise anything as it’s my brothers birthday.