Ok, it has been about a week now since the euroNARP ended, and it looks like finally I've got some time to do the full recap of all the awesomeness that happened over the weekend :) I haven't had much time this week as this week was my first week in my new job :)

Even though the euroNARP officially only started on friday the 29th of August, my story will start a day earlier, the final day of the buildup... 5am, my alarm sounds, I'm sleeping over a my gf's place, about a 100 km away from the NARPlocation, I'm getting up this early since I still have to go pick up Po0ky and all his stuff. Po0ky is our resident webmaster, the second in command of the euronarp and the guy that generally helps me with all my crazy schemes ( like going to india for 4 months on a 'school-assignment' :) ).

Anyways, i get to his place around 7 am, we start loading the car in high tempo cause we still have a mountain of work to do, after about an hour we're on the way and in a traffic jam, we're planning some of our shopping runs, when Po0ky suddenly remembers that he forgot his wallet at his place... nothing to worry about, no-use will be able to pick it up on fridaynight before he comes back the euroNARP we think...

The rest of the trip goes fine and by the time no-use arrives at noon, the main-room and bar-area are kind of
finished... We finish the racing area and the nintendo area. The narp is basicly ready to go by the time the evening comes round and viersee joins us. We've got a main area where we set up a HDTV with a 360, ps3, wii and dreamcast hooked up to it, a regular TV with a psx and pstwo and and old-old-old tv with a master system, mega drive and saturn hooked up to it. In the bar area we set up an xbox with a regular TV, the racing area had a regular TV with an xbox and a 360 hooked up to it, with another TV later on that was brought by 3rotic N3rd, that had a 360, dreamcast and a gamecube connected to it. And finally there was the nintendo area, which had 2 TV's with every console nintendo ever made hooked up to it ( except for a virtual boy :p ).

We 'tested' out all our stuff for the whole night, only going to bed around 4 am, at 10 am we had to get out of bed though, only 2 more hours to go for the NARP, and we still had loads of stuff to do :-) Anyway, by the time the NARP officially started we were still hard at work, but we had an official Opening ceremony for it :-)



About 2 hours later it was time to get Maxio from the trainstation, we had no place to sleep in yet since the tents weren't set up yet... Po0ky and I went to holland to pick up Maxio from the station, we had to do it this way since the 7 km trip from Roosendaal to Essen costs about 10 euros going and return by train ( fucking ripoff! ). On the way back we got pulled over for a "traffic" check that was actually a search for drugs... they couldn't find anything and the cops kept getting notably more agitated every minute as it turned out that they had chosen the wrong target. And I was feeling quite smug about myself, until I heard that dreadful question... one of the cops asked Po0ky "Can I see your your ID please?" Alarmbells sounded like crazy in my head... As you've read before, Po0ky didn't have his wallet with him, since it was 100km's away at his place :-(

So Po0ky was arrested, and I had to go to his place to get the wallet, I drove like a madman for hours to get there and back, while maxio and viersee set up the camping site at the narp...



By the time I got po0ky out of jail, Rex and ZubZub arrived with an extra 22" widescreen for a 360 in the bar. A strange grey van had also appreared with a German license plate... 3rotic N3rd and Fana7ic had arrived from Germany! Bringing 2 TV's and a bunch of consoles :)




A little while later we were joined by Atte, Simon and Bob coming by train from holland. Our first night started of brilliantly with a 15 pizza's order from the pizzeria, a whole bunch of beer. After several hours of intense gaming, we wanted to start our first NARP-competition, the Halo3-drinking-game, we played team-death-match with 4 teams on 5 xbox'es, round of 10 minutes, with the weirdest setting we could find in H3, and at the end of every round, the winning team had to drink a beer... Maxio and 3rot1c N3rd won about 6 matches in a row before the effects of the winning started working, resulting in 2 consecutive losses, after which they went on to dominate the competion and emerge victorious and most drunk of all :-)

Sadly this competition resulted in the death of a 360, and in its death-struggle, it dragged a H3-disk with it...



After this we all played games untill about 6.30am in the morning, Po0ky and I talked a bit about the first night
that just passed and around 7am we finally went to bed...



Sadly enough, organising a NARP is a heavy responsibility so at 10 am me and po0ky dragged ourselves our of our beds and went to prepare breakfast for everybody :-) Around 11am we got everyone out of bed for an epic breakfast, my mom even brought some freshly made soup, made from vegetables that were still in my grandparents garden earlier that day :-)



After breakfast, we were joined by Fenux and strikeman, just in time to join in for some epic racing action in the race-room, and an absolutely epic display of Ikaruga-skills by maxio and erotic n3rd...





After this display of Ikaruga-skills, Simon felt it was time for him to display his awesome skills...



We all smoked it and after that resumed our regular gaming duties :)



the main room was abused for Guitar Hero 3 a LOT :-) Its fucking great to have a NARP in a location where there's no sound-limits whatsoever...



The final ( and my personal favourite ) area for the NARP was the outdoor-big-screen-gaming-area that we set up on the second night. We started off with hours upon hours of the craziest mashed-matches I've ever had the pleasure to witness... Strikeman, an ex-teacher of mine and the guy that had introduced me to the crazyness that is mashed, showed that he still had all his epic skills and wasted the competition!



Mashed FTW!



After that it was time for the Unofficial Destructoid Beat Everybody Down Tournament. A massive fighting tournament in which players face off in a randomly chosen fightinggame ( one for each round ), The first round was Soulcalibur ( the original for Dreamcast ) followed by an round of 2D-hotness in King Of Fighters, and the finale was played in the original Dead Or Alive... After some gruelling matches, viersee emerged victorious!



To cool down a bit, we finished off the night on the bigscreen with some rounds of the original japanese Powerstone 2...

Around this time it was about 3am again, I joined Maxio for trying out GTR Evolution ( which had been released the day before ) on my brand new G25, sadly the racing seats were in the racing area, so we had to make do with my deskchair :-) But we still had an awesome time, I was fucking impressed by Maxio's epic Racing skills :) He won his first race on the highest difficulty setting after a mere 2 hours of training... and trust me, this game is HARD on highest difficulty with a mighty and powerfull racing wheel like the G25 set to its highest settings...



I noticed that Po0ky was missing around this time and went looking for him, while simon played that PS3-game with the strange creatures that eat the other strange creatures, from the guys that made that eden game. I found Po0ky and ZubZub in the Bar area, checking out some bizarre movie on the xbox :)



After several more hours of epic racing action, pain abuse, braid tryouts, we all hit the bed around 7 am again... once more I was forced to get up at 10am, this time to get ZubZub to the station and pick up the fresh breakfast for everybody that was at the euronarp...



right after breakfast we handed out some more prices to the winners of the euroNARP:



The Gold Medal was decided upon by vote, whoever displayed the most "NARP"-spirit would win it... after a gruelling round of voting, Po0ky took home the Gold :-)



We ended breakfast with a group-picture of everyone still standing at the end of the NARP... we were all fucking tired and ( like the whole weekend ) pretty drunk and stoned at the same time :)



we ended the NARP with some absolutely awesome Castle Crashers mp-action, while gradually people were already leaving... the perfect ending for the perfect weekend :-)



However, for us it wasn't the end yet when 3rot1c N3rd and Fana7ic left as the last guests around 17h, we still had some cleaning up to do, so even with the minimal amount of sleep we'd had, we still worked untill 21h before going to bed...

Once again, I want to thank from the bottom of my heart, Po0ky, no-use and viersee for all the hard work they've put forth to help make this NARP into the most fucking awesome 4 days I've ever had, and everybody that joined us and helped make this weekend into the craziest gaming weekend ever :)

So the end result of all this? Well I've loved this weekend so much that I really can't wait till next year to do it
again, so I'll be having miniature-narps throughout the year, for 10 people only ( so that we only need the main-area and bar-area which will be kept as they are ) but the catch is that nothing newer then last generation ( xbox, ps2, NGC ) is allowed in there anymore till next year, so the mini-narps will be filled with the absolute joy of retro-gaming-goodness... Hindsight is a wonderfull thing, and by playing retro-games, you know they're worth your time :-)

The first edition of these will be at the end of November, so keep an eye on my blog for more info ;-)

Also, be sure to keep an eye out for information on next years Edition, which will be more epic, though I sure hope no-one will go to jail this time :-)


PS: I'm sorry for any spelling mistakes I might have made, but I'm tired as hell :-)