Prepare, for this is a long journal entry...

Thursday 10th to Monday 14th 2005

When you lose your only source of money, life gets complicated, not to mention, very frustrating. A lost card ensured that Thursday would be a stressful day and after having moved house the day before that was the last thing I needed.

Thursday was also the day that I had my final chance to prepare for my 18 day roadtrip around the world, commencing that very evening with the shortest leg of my journey to Newbury, UK. Singapore Dollars could only be reserved by card or by visiting in person to the local post office and with my card being “lost” it would require me to use cash from the bank, but to do that I had to “prove my identity” at the local branch. It would also require a 24 hour wait for the Singapore money to be shipped to the office. As I had less than 8 hours before I left on leg 1 of my 18 day tour, this was not an option, so I had to settle for a dismal .277 conversion rate at the airport, but that was a few days away yet.

I had to tie up a number of loose ends on the old house before I could head to Newbury and also had to get the rest of my packing done for i26, Singapore WCG and Dreamhack in Sweden. With a relatively small 23kg limit on luggage for my first plane to Bahrain, this proved to be a tough suitcase to pack. T-shirts and shorts for Singapore in 35 centigrade and 100% humidity and of course some warm tops and jeans for Sweden would be required. I got away with using a big coat (wearing it) on the plane, which didn’t count as part of my overall limit and packed a solitary jumper for Sweden. If I run out of clothes (entirely possible) I will have to find a launderette in Singapore.

My schedule then for the next few weeks would be as follows. Thursday Nov 10th 4pm : head to Newbury for i26 event in the UK. This usually lasts until late afternoon on the Sunday, however id have to leave a lot earlier than usual, as my flight for Singapore via Bahrain would be at 9.30am Sunday. Once in Singapore, I’d be staying until the 22nd and leaving at 5am local time to arrive back in the UK by 6pm local time. Once landed, have a bite to eat and then locate my flight to Sweden from Heathrow. Finally on the 28th id be flying home from Sweden after 18 days away. I am often reminded that I have a great job and that is perfectly true, one that I would of course not swap for anything, however it is hard work with the traveling and the time away from my children and wife. I am lucky they understand and tolerate it all.

Finally then, after sorting out a new card (to arrive in 7 days time, DAMN), tying up loose ends on the old house and getting my cases all packed for 3 events, I left my home for the 2 hour drive to i26. The PC and equipment would have to come back home of course before I left for Singapore, so that was just one further addition to the hectic schedule. Luckily for me though, I had a couple of days to relax and chill with some good friends at a lan event, before the hard work kicked in.

Early Arrival service at i26 on the Thursday night allowed me to arrive at 7pm and by 8pm I was setup PC wise. I caught up with Steve (Killing) and with Pinny and a few of the other UT section regulars, one of which I was really thrilled to see again after almost a year. Wychdoc (from GKC) attended his first lan in what felt like an eternity and it was a real pleasure to meet up with him again, swapping a few stories about our ever changing lives over the last year or so. Stu is the kind of guy that drinks sailors under the table and this event was no different, although this time I only managed to stay reasonably in touch with his level of consumption on day 1. It was my birthday the following day and I had my fair share of drink, just nothing on stu’s scale.

I got to bed really late on Thursday night (as you do at these events) and slept on a hard floor, so even though I had a good sleep I was feeling a little stiff when I awoke. Friday is the start of the competitions, but usually only something fun and at this event it was no different. Wychdoc and I paired up for the iCTF/Q4 mixed matches, promptly letting our alcohol take over our aim and going down heavily in a few games. It seemed to upset Stu more than me, maybe it directly correlates to the alcohol consumed :D

Several people gave the game away about my birthday, notably Rogue and Odee at the event and Nicky on IRC. It was even announced on the tanoy with Steve (killing) singing happy birthday over it… Shame I was outside at the time! Outside because my good lady and far better half had driven 100 miles to surprise me with pressies on my birthday, so actually my 34th birthday had been very nice, despite me not wanting to celebrate it.

Saturday proved to be a very short day with the time seemingly slipping by without me noticing and suddenly we were all squeezing into the curry house at 10pm for what would be a final meal before I had to head back to pack my bags. The curry featured nearly 30 people from memory and all the usual crowd attended plus some “curry virgins” such as Dave and Mark from Levitation, although one person was conspicuous by his absence, namely Meshed. He might be beaten senseless by Oxy and pinny if he doesn’t turn up to the next one. :D

Curry over with, I said my goodbyes to everyone and headed back to Cardiff in the car. It was just after mid-night and I arrived back home about 2 hours later, packed the other car, had a quick smoke, setup the PC id bought back from the lan so that Sara could watch the WCG stuff and then we set off at 3am for Heathrow.

Once at Heathrow (3 hours later) I met up with a different Stu, aka TosspoT, aka my room mate and partner in crime on the microphone at many events this year. We had a bit of a trek ahead so we made a pact that we would not talk to each other during the time in Singapore, so that we had something to talk about on the 20 hour flights back. It didn’t work of course.

Bahrain, 7 hours later and a quick 50 minute dash across Bahrain International Airport we were on our final leg to Singapore thanks to the nice A340 from Gulf Air. Shame it was an awful journey, because although the plane was great, the people in the row behind TosspoT and I were not. To call them morons would probably be a bit strong, but considering how close together seats are on modern aero planes it takes a little thought when you pull the tray down or adjust the TV in the headrest and give consideration to those sitting in front of you, especially when they are sleeping. What you don’t do is bash the headrest repeatedly for 30 minutes before take off, scream and shout and make ridiculous hyena laughing which echoed back to earth from the 35,000 feet we were later cruising at. It didn’t help by them poking us in the arm and back and tapping us on the head when we put our seats back. Seemed they felt we shouldn’t have reclined as this was impeding them somewhat… what a shame. Toss and I figured it was a team on its way to the WCG from the shirts they wore and indeed when we landed, it proved to be Team Greece. We never got the chance to humiliate them on the main stage with our recollection of the antics they got up to on the plane. Shame. We would also get them on our journey home too, again directly behind us, but more about that later…

Arrival finally, after a long journey that took me from Newbury to Singapore, via Cardiff, London and Bahrain and some 12,000 miles we had arrived at our final destination. The whole time thing had us both completely shattered upon arrival too, it was 8am local Singapore time and we had left London at 9.30am the previous day. Obviously it was going to take a day or two to adjust and once outside, the heat and humidity would also take some getting used to.

We had one stroke of luck after leaving the airport with our baggage, with a man holding up a card in the arrivals area with our names on. I say luck, because neither TosspoT or I could remember where the hell we were supposed to be staying! It turned out that Frank (CEO of China Internet Gaming) had sent a car to pick us up which was a real blessing. The driver also turned out to be a bit of tour guide, noting places of interest on the way, famous landmarks and giving us some general advice about where to party and where to eat.

We checked in to our hotel (it was the Swissotel, The Stamford – Tallest Hotel at 73 storey’s high in south east Asia) and met up with djWHEAT who’d flown in the night before. The rest of our crew would arrive later that same evening.

Day 1 in Singapore was one of checking out the event, meeting with the WCG officials and our TV producers from Korea’s top rated TV station ongamesnet. We didn’t do much else really, just tried to get used to the heat which was extremely humid at around 35 deg centigrade and 100% humidity. The 3 of us took in the view from our 28th floor bay viewed room (see pics) and generally just tried to grab a bit of sleep to adjust to the local time so that we were super ready for Tuesday and some setup work and rehearsals.

I can’t remember what we ate on Tuesday but I am pretty sure it was either Thai or Japanese and a mixture of shell fish, either way it hadn’t agreed with me too well. This may have had something to do with the copious amount of alcohol we all consumed in the two bars we visited in the evening. This would be our only chance before Sunday evening to do any partying or drinking, so we decided by unanimous vote, we would hit the bars and clubs of Orchard Drive Singapore on Tuesday, simply because on Wednesday all we had was setup work and rehearsals again and no casting to be done.

I wished I hadn’t by Wednesday morning as did a few others, although Toss wouldn’t admit to having a hang over even though he looked like shit. We’d had a pretty good night though, having met up with the guys who came in late and Theo from Blizzard had also flown in and joined us for the evening. We had a hilarious time in the Bar-One club with a live band who were pretty terrible. That’s not strictly true or particularly fair on the musicians in the band, it was just the singer who was shockingly bad. He even offered a bet to NiceGuyED and frequently called him the “AMERICAN” in a somewhat derisory and taunting fashion, as if it were a disease. But oh well, if the idiot singer was going to challenge any of us to pull a girl to dance with him, we’d have all hoped it would be Ed. And so it was, challenged to get a very nice looking lady at the bar to dance with him, Ed managed not only to achieve this, but to get her two friends to dance with him at the same time. The singer looked crestfallen, but bought them all drinks as he had agreed in any case. This little trip out also saw Toss on form with the ladies, although I swear she was no more than 4/10 even if he reckoned id said 7/10 on the night, drink does odd things to your ability to see real beauty.

The event proper would get under way on Thursday of course, but still we had a bit of setup work remaining and the rehearsals with the TV guys. These went ok, but they also went very slowly, so an 8.30pm call to rehearsals actually meant us not getting out of the event until 1am. Needless to say it was not the greatest prep we could have done with, having to be on form early again next morning, but despite this, it was a real thrill to work with such a professional TV production crew and they have a great sense of attention to detail. ongamesnet ooze quality and professionalism.

First surprise of the morning was the trip to get everyone’s make-up done. It was not something any of us (bar Marcus) had been expecting, so to some this was a huge jolt to the senses. Most of us seemed to have worn make-up for other productions of varying sizes, but it was clear that some were less happy with this turn of events than others. For instance, on departing our make-up session 3 hours later (we all stayed to support each other) a lady joined us on the 10 minute walk back to the event area and remarked that it didn’t look like I had make up on, which of course I was thrilled about, however that Tosspot had “a lot of stuff on his face”. Stu wasn’t best pleased….poor lad.

Day 1 of the casting got under way at around 1pm on the main stage and finally we were into our stride. We had to mix up the casting roles on day 1, which meant I was in the Razer and Intel area’s filming and interviewing, whilst the rest of the gang (bar NiceguyED) got their first casts under their belt. It proved a good use of our talents on day 1, although when we heard Fifa was going to be cancelled on the main stage for Day 2, it didn’t look too good for Ed.

The “cyberspace” area would be our second area to cast games out from and despite not being a major seating area (it seated maybe 100 people) drew in some impressive sized crowds for a first day tournament. I took control of one of the early CS games and although I hadn’t yet made my debut on the main stage, it was great to finally be casting at the event.

Breakfast would be a little earlier the following day as we had to be ready to cast out at 11am. Day 2 of the WCG finals would also be my first time on the main stage, together with djWHEAT (whom I was rooming with at this event). We had the pick of the draw as it turned out, with local heroes, Singapore Titans taking on last years bronze medalist’s, the Koreans, Maven Crew. Obviously there was a huge bias from the crowd towards their home grown talent and it wasn’t long before they were cheering like maniacs as the Titans took an early lead. The game itself was not a great one, but both of us seemed to thrive on the passion of the huge crowd (estimated at some 4,500 people) and were both happy with the way things had gone after the game. In fact, the producers were so pleased they showed the recording again the following morning on the main stage big screens.

There was plenty going on in the “cyberspace” area too with bunny and wack getting their Warcraft 3 games done under the spotlight of some mega crowds, despite the lack of seats. Whack has also kicked us off on day 1 with some Starcraft, accompanied by newcomer, tasteless, a popular guy amongst the Starcraft players.

Day 2 also saw us give a number of interviews to both local press, TV and international stations, including Singapore TV, ESPN and V-Music Asia. The Chinese speaking Singapore TV had shown a whole hour of our work on mainstream TV during the evening and by Saturday it was starting to show, with a number of us signing autographs and posing for picture after picture. A very odd feeling it has to be said, what with some of the worlds most famous players to be found in the player area at the same event, although I am sure they got plenty of good press too. A meal in th evening at a Thai restaurant also saw several people “spotting” us and banging on the window and waving at us. It really was surreal at times…

Saturday would see a number of shocks during the CS competition (my main raison d’etre at this event) with the Kazaksthan team, K23 taking down GoodGame from France and Mouse.sports from Germany in successive rounds. They would also take out Virtus.Pro in the semi final on their way to a shock final appearance against Team 3D. The Americans had a reasonably simple route to the final, it has to be said, however they had a titanic struggle with hearest neughbours Canada (Team EG) in the semi finals. Map 1 on inferno (a game which I casted with TosspoT) was heading the way of EG, complete with Shaguar of 3D in the team, when at 15-12 down, Team 3D turned on the power and rescued it back to 15-14. The 30th round would be won in thrilling manner by the Americans, to send it into over time. The game was a particularly long one on Saturday night, but still somehow pulled a huge crowd in the cyberspace area once more. Overtime would be less thrilling as 3D won 3-0 and 1-0 respectively to claim map 1. This would be the closest they came to losing a map throughout the entire tournament and map 2 was an anti-climax with the Canadians seemingly broken by the USA comeback on map 1. A real shame, as they had played superbly all tournaments. They would get a little something for their trouble with a 3rd placed final win over Virtus.Pro and they deserved nothing less.

Sunday. Finals Day. Team 3D versus K23, from Kazakhstan. Yes, lets just repeat that, Kazakhstan. I don’t think I am being unkind when I say that, not only was this a huge shock, but that it was also the stuff of fairytales. Surely, this almost unknown nation of nobodies couldn’t beat the worlds best? The stage was set and WHEAT (now recovered from a throat infection, which ruled him out of action during Saturday) and TosspoT would rip it up on the main stage in front of a packed audience. Sadly then, the final became a Team 3D practice game with K23 unable to keep pace in either map. Never the less, silver was an incredible achievement by a group of players, hardly anyone would have predicted would get out of their opening day group. As for Team 3D, this would be yet another notch on the belt and another trophy for the ever growing cabinet. Arguably the best Counter-Strike Team in the world right now.

I covered the 3rd place final for CS:S (won by Team EG) and then on to the main stage to cover the FIFA 2005 final, with NiceGuyED. Russia versus Germany and the crowd loved every goal, particularly the German team in the audience. My first time commentating a football game, and as you’d expect, I loved every minute of it. FIFA needs more big lan tourneys, it really does.

6pm, closing ceremony and the day almost done for us. A pity then, that both Toss and I had such an early flight out that very same night. We’d need to be in the airport for 3am for our flight to Bahrain and we therefore decided to pack first, shower and go out on the town and get drunk before heading directly to the airport. Fred from GGL, Theo from Blizzard and Frank from CIG all joined our party of 10 at the Bay area restaurant where we ate fresh lobster, crab and stingray in a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere. It was also here that I learned from Fred, that I was to become a fully salaried member of the team!!!

What an end to a fantastic week. A full time salaried position obviously means I will be doing lots of other things as well as shoutcasting, but it also means I don’t have to worry about losing money, taking time off work as it will BE my job. I hadn’t really thought that it would be possible for another year or two, but this is as good a time as any. It will mean moving of course, possibly to another country, certainly a move away from our current locale, regardless. After discussing it with Sara though, we are 100% ready for what I can only describe as the opportunity of a lifetime.

We finished off our last night in Singapore drinking tequila and partying which proved to be the perfect way to relax, wind down and get ready for a long flight.

Actually I have to thank TosspoT here, because I have no recollection of either the journey to the airport or the first 5 hours of the flight to Bahrain. So god knows what it took for him to get me on the plane.

We touched down in Bahrain at around 8am local time, having had a 7 hour journey from Singapore and would now have to wait a further 5 hours before boarding our next plane back to the UK. I’d also made a bit of a mistake, which sadly I only noticed the night of our departure. It was a fairly large mistake too. I had mixed up my dates of the departure from Singapore and therefore my flight to Sweden would not be the same day as I landed, requiring Sara to come and pick me up, drive 4 hours back to Cardiff and then come back to Heathrow again the following day. Whoops.

The 22nd of November and my 12th day of the roadtrip. I made it back to Heathrow with plenty of time and although the flight was a little noisey (I had a seat at the back next to the rear mounted engines) it was none the less a pretty easy flight in comparison to the previous day, touching down at Arlanda Stockholm in a little under 2hours 30 minutes. It was not without delays however and I arrived rather later than planned at 1.30am, luckily, Falcon (Play.it) was still waiting for me as planned. Tired and very cold (there was still remnants of snow on the ground) we made our way by bus to Stockholm Central to be met by the GoD girls and PURRI. A further, shorter journey ensued back to the apartment being rented for a few days before Dreamhack started and finally we could rest and warm our selves with a few drinks at 3am. Needless to say the others, tr1to, ms.x, missy, liefje and PURRI were all rather drunk and it was a long night, eventually getting some sleep at around 6am. We all had a lot to talk about after not seeing each other for some time, particularly swapping stories about recent events we’d all been to.

Somehow a door leading to the kitchen had not been spotted in the 4 days these guys had occupied the apartment before we arrived. How the hell you fail to spot a door in an apartment is beyond me, but it bought about raucous laughter from everyone, all the same. The following day we spent part of at an internet café, playing some Quake 4 before we caught the 4 hour bus to DreamHack. It was a particularly painful experience if I am honest, in part due to us not finding the recliner buttons until about 30 minutes before the end of the journey. Sore necks and stiff bodies, we alighted and found our Hotel (directly opposite the venue) at around 4am. I can’t remember much after that, other than crashing out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Thursday and time for us to check out dreamhack proper. I must admit at this point I was surprised it was already under way, for some reason I thought it was starting on the Friday, but never mind. We clocked in to the VIA/S3 booth and met up with Tim from Via, a hard partying chap who enjoys his gaming events. Once settled in, the girls got practicing for the shootouts and I tried to link up with the gamingeye organizers to see what we could cast out. As it turned out, nothing much was happening, tournament wise and with the problems I had setting up the casting machines, it was just as well. So Thursday was a bit of a blow out in all, although the evening would prove to be a wild night of partying.

Friday saw a much better, technically speaking. The challenges faced on the previous day were pretty much all sorted, although we still couldn’t get game sounds to the cast machine and large TV in the booth still refused to clone itself to display the Q4 matches on two machines at the same time. Id eventually suss this one out too though, so that on Saturday, everything worked fine and we attracted a lot of people to the booth to watch. It was a shame though, that we weren’t able to fix the issue of not being able to get my cast out to the event at the same time as onair over the net. It was our first chance to view some of the players and I covered an early game between liefje and Sujoy, which inevitably fell the way of the Englishman, reasonably comfortably. I also covered a 2v2 match up as the two g0d girls had drawn each other in the early stages.

The evening continued with the partying, with fatal1ty in particularly relaxed mood and lets face it, after clearing up in the WT finals with $150,000 who wouldn’t be happy? The following morning, Saturday, I awoke early so as to sort out the remaining technical issues and finally we managed to sort the TV AND the gamesounds issues out. An event without help from other people in iTG really opened my eyes as to how much everyone should be valued in iTG. The day’s casts were pretty good in all, with games including Civ, fox, toxic and eventually the WB finals between tox and fox, the latter taking it pretty easily and showing by far the best form in the tournament. This was where it all started to go wrong though, for the gamingeye people also ran the 2v2 tournament and both tourneys were well behind schedule come Saturday night. Thus, we had to wait for an eternity to get the games finished. 10pm was the scheduled time for the grand final in the 1v1, but at 11pm it still showed no sign of being played, mainly because there were still outstanding games in the lower bracket. Despite constant assurances throughout the evening that the game would be at 10pm, finally we were told at 11pm that there were still a “few games to be sorted out”. At 1pm I asked again for an update and was told the players decided to play the 2v2 before the rest of the 1v1’s.

I don’t blame the players as much as the organizers, because really, its down to them to force the rules or ensure that players are in on time or forfeit or turn up on time to the games or forfeit and generally stick to the rules of the tournament, such as making demos of every game, which also failed to happen, despite being asked many many times. Thus, when I was told at 3am that the final would be delayed to around 5am, I gave up the ghost after 20 hours on my feet (standing up casting is hard work and there were no stools for me) and went to bed. I could tell people were disappointed and I discussed with fox what we could do, before I went to bed, perhaps a boycott under protest of the bad organization, but in the end, we decided it wouldn’t achieve anything and the final was played at 7am in the end, with me safely and annoyingly tucked into my bed sheets. Toxic claimed the final.

I was particularly sorry for those who stayed up at home to listen as well as the Via guys, it was hardly any of these people’s fault, but I just could not stay awake any longer and the quality of the cast would have been terrible even if id stayed up.

Sunday morning was more about waiting around the lobby, topping up on coffee, listening to details and snippets of info from the final and then we made our way back, via a 4 hour bus trip, to Stockholm once more. After several hours of roaming we eventually got a hotel for the night. Monday morning we awoke to a covering of snow and as we had rooms with a balcony, the people who remained, sujoy, myself, rocketqueen, devilmc joined in the snowman making competition, although Sujoy and RocketQueen were the main architects. Pics can be seen in the DH Gallery on ESR.

Sujoy also wrote his name in the snow, although he returned 10 minutes later when he realized we shouldn’t have been on the roof and removed it. I guess having a game name the same as your real name doesn’t help!

Our flights were all spread over the Monday, with mine and Sujoys being later than everyone else’s, so slowly and surely the band of people dispersed over the course of the day until I was left alone at the airport, with nothing but a coffee and my ipod to keep me company. A delay of 2 hours on my flight taking off didn’t help either and initially, with the amount of snow having fallen all day long I thought it was due to the runway, but it turns out that Heathrow had shut its runways due to….sleet. I swear Stockholm had half a foot of snow that day, yet all the planes continued to take off, so why do we have to be such pussies in the UK when half a millimeter drops out of the sky?

Another 4 hour journey ensued after I touched down in the UK, back to Cardiff and with it, finally and exhausted, my road trip around the world had come to an end. Next stop: China in two weeks time.