Game Night December 2007

This is a 2-for-1 post. First, last night we (my buddies and I) held a LAN party - and considering the nature of PC gaming (installing games, version compatibility, hardware setups), I'm amazed we had as few troubles as we did. Of course, it helped that we tried to stick with a game we all knew we could run: Unreal Tournament 2004... old enough that I acutally found a used copy at a local Value Village (aka: "Savers" in the USA).

Hi-lists and lo-lites:
- While figuring out how to plug in the various PCs that everyone bought, I accidentally kicked a power bar's toggle switch, killing the juice to both my PC and to Weirdguy's PC. We don't know if it's related, but for some reason we couldn't get his machine to stabilize afterwards - it would reboot itself for no apparent reason from time to time. And then after a while, it went back to normal.

- Once all 8 players were in place and all the PC's plugged in, the power went out. We didn't throw the main breaker because the hall light could be turned on. Heh.

- Only 1 out of 8 PC would refuse to connect to the others. We spent all night taking turns at the problematic machine trying to debug it while the other 7 would play. We never did figure it out.

- Took a break for a pizza supper. As anyone can guess, there was bound to be a round butting heads over toppings. I drank two cans of "energy drink" during the party... one Tab Energie and one Sobe Arush. I wouldn't fall asleep until about 4:30am!

- broke out the old SNES to play Super Bomber Man 2 by 2AM. It was also awesome. I complained that the game wasn't particularly realistic.

Now for PART 2...
I was just reading in Running Room Magazine an article about caffeine. For the longest time I've been wondering just how "extreme" are these so-called energy drinks. Well, Toronto nutritionist Tara Postnikoff reports that Health Canada recommend no more than 400mg of caffeine daily for an adult. And that an 8oz cup of coffee has about 150mg... so... wait, that would mean a typical 250ml can of Red Bull with 80mg of caffeine is about half a cup of coffee. Of course, that doesn't take into account all the sugars and other stimulants in an energy drink.

Anyway, beyond this, I've also decided that Tab Energie sucks. I mean, it does what it's advertised to do but it also tastes terrible, if you ask me. Firstly, I hate diet drinks - artificial sweeteners have this chemical aftertaste that remind me of cough syrup. Well, Tab Energie suffers on two counts:

First, it has a really really strong "diet" taste. And secondly, it's a cherry flavour drink. Whereas Red Bull and Arush taste more like cherry cola, Tab actually tastes like a cherry drink - like those Crush or Minute Maid fruit-flavour soft-drinks. But of course, a being a chemical-tasting cherry drink, it tastes more like bad coough syrup. I'll take an Arush over this any day.

To close up, however, can somebody out there tell me if this is the same "Tab" drink Americans have and we don't?