Monday night and another DunDraCon has come and gone. In general I'd say that this one was a good one. Better than last year, since I was actually at the con more this year. Yet I didn't force myself to participate as much as I could, so it was more of a vacation than the usual con.

Friday I spent getting Chris from Sacramento. That took a while since there was all this President's Day Weekend traffic going out. It took me three hours to drive 76 miles, and another couple of hours to get to San Ramon. By the time we got there it was past eight and we needed to relax, not immediately go into a game. So we found Dave and wandered around a bit, helped Eric partially set up the Wizard's Attic table in the dealer's room.

Then we went to the arcade and tried to beat Area 51, Part 4. Don't like games where to beat it you have to do well, instead of just being able to pump more quarters into it. The last level you have a minute to kill the bad guy, which is really hard if you haven't stocked up on explosive ordinance. The other strategy would be to try to die quickly, since you get more explosives when you continue the game. But we didn't officially beat the game, still I'm satisfied.

The other video game we played was Metal Slug X, a side scroller shoot-em up. Six episodes which Chris and I generally had an easy time with. Dave feed the quarters since we died a lot, especially on one level where the boss was hard to hit and killed us quickly. This is a sort of modern-day-like game, set in what appears to be the Middle East. You're trying to rescue POWs, which give you special weapons when rescued. Eventually aliens show up, working with the bad guys, then at the end the aliens try to take over and everyone fights them. Nice way to spend the better part of an hour.

Saturday, Chris spent the day as a volunteer, manning the information desk. Dave and Julie spent some time together, while I worked. I went home to watch some of my tapes and set up the next recording, then I came back just before eight for the drinking. This year we started early. Dave, Eric, Woo, Pick, and I started at about 20:30 and somehow went through the rainbow. This year it was the resistor, as Pick called it. Eric left a bit early, I got really drunk and they cut me off, which was a good thing. Only Dave and Pick managed to go through the rainbow plus another four drinks to complete the resistor. By then we were all out of it, and maybe next year we shouldn't invite Pick, or at least we should start after 22:00.

Chris spent the night playing in an AD&D game, while the rest of us slept. We got breakfast delivered, the first time for me. Not very impressive once it gets a little cold. Woo had left the night before after taking a short nap. Pick had another engagement to attend. Chris, Dave, and I had signed up for a GURPS Traveller adventure at 16:00, so I went home to watch some tapes and set up for Monday's taping.

The Traveller adventure went well. Six marines from a technologically advanced world are sent to a nearby planet where the Vargr are building a starport. Our mission is to destoy the starport without revealing our presence, gather any information on the Vargr, get mineral samples, and contact any survivors from the planetary colony that disappeared generations ago. We went in on the bounce and explored a bit of the underground ruins. Met a Vargr with a human turncoat and some slaves, who we fought it out with. Then proceeded to nuke the whole complex, probably killing all the colonists we were supposed to contact. It was a lot of tense searching with only one combat. Quite an interesting background which the GM explained, although it didn't matter much for the actual adventure.

After that we went out to see The Whole Nine Yards, which I'll review next. Then Monday we helped Eric pack up and get the stock back to Oakland. We went out to Little Shin-Shin to eat dinner, then I drove Chris back home, and finally got back to my apartment around 21:00. So it was a full weekend, entertaining and more relaxing than most. I've gone to enough cons to just enjoy myself and not try to cram everything into my schedule. They say the best way to visit another country is to take your time and not worry about seeing all the sights, and it's the same with a convention.