* Quick plug: check the rest of my blog for info on EuroNARPS *
So you're a racer, maybe you've even got a nice racingwheel for playing...
But where do you play, and how to attach the wheel? Read on to see how to build your own cheapass racingseat!

If you really like racing games, chances are you've got a racingwheel, however its most of the time not easy to use it, attaching it to you desk with a deskchair is just plain uncomfortable and if you've got the 360-racingwheel from M$, you'll know that putting it on your legs is far from ideal :-)
1. the stuff you need:

a) carseat, preferably bucketseat ( more 'realistic' )
b) 1 standard size multiplex wooden plate ( 240 cm x 120 cm or 94,5" x 47")
c) 2 big & 2 big but smaller then previous L-shaped Irons with a groove in them ( see picture below this list)
d) a number of 'flat' L-shaped irons ( basically as many as you like, but 4 at the least )
Optional: Handlebars & seatbelt



2. where to find it:
a) Carseat, you can find in any junkyard, or if you're lucky/patient you'll find a good deal on eBay.
b) your local woodshop
c & d) your local hardwareshop
Optional: hardwarestore and the junkyard/eBay

3. Woodwork
If you've got the materials, you can do it yourself, but if you're lazy like me or don't have the materials, most woodshops will pre-cut your plywood plate for you if you give them a plan of what you'd like.

So here's a plan I quickly drew up in Paint for you guys :-)
note that the sizes are in cm's ( since I'm a eurofag :-))



You basically just need 4 pieces of wood.

1 baseboard: 70 x 140 cm
2 sides: 60 x 40 cm
1 tabletop: 30 x 70 cm

4. Assembly.

I first attached the seat to the baseboard by mounting it on the L-irons and then screwing the L-irons into place.



I think the best idea is to place the seat as far backwards as you can.



The next step is to create the table to which we'll attatch our wheel. this is done in just 2 steps:





Then I stopped taking pictures because time was running our for the first EuroNARP to begin and loads of other stuff still needed to be done, but the rest of the pictures clearly show what was done afterwards.



Tadaaaaaaaa it's done already!


5. Optional stuff.

You can mount the handles as you saw on the picture above, I've got 2 in the front and 2 in the back to make it easy to move around.

here's a way of mounting your seatbelts:



6. Race Like Hell

on the EuroNARP we tested it out with the 360-wheel ( the seat on the right is the first one I ever built but wasn't strong enough to hold the power of my G25 ) the one on the left is the one you just built :-)



Well I hope you guys liked it, and if you build one yourself, or have built one yourself already in a differnt way, sent me a PM or show us some pictures!

Well it's been almost 6 months since the last EuroNARP, so we'll be doing a small version of it to celebrate my brithday! ( 2 days only in contrast to the 3 days of the true EURONARP )

For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, go check out the recap of the first EURONARP:
read it here

the final survivors of the first Euronarp:


Since it's my birthday next month, we'll be celebrating it by having another NARP, this time a smaller version of the EURONARP, but in the same location...

check it out here

There'll only be space for about 10 people, so registration is required and limited! Just send me a PM to register and you'll be in for the exclusive preview of EURONARP2. Which will be "Bigger, Better and more Badass" :-)

we've learned a hell of a lot from the first EURONARP, so the next one will be a lot better :-)
We'll ask for a 15 euro entrance fee for the miniNARP, but all drinks, food and snacks will be free ( as previous visitors can attest too, food was great :-) ) If you want to join, the miniNARP will officially open at noon, 22nd of february and last untill the evening of the 23rd. ( Once again, it's in Belgium, 15 minutes from the highway or pretty reachable by train if you can't get here by car )

Like the last edition, there will be lots of beer, games and fun to be had :-)



As for the details on EURONARP2, in keeping with the spirit of the last EURONARP, we want to provide an alternative to all the poor eurofags ( like us ) who can't join in the yearly PAX-meet, so once again, we'll be doing it on the same date as PAX, so this year the event will be hosted in the weekend of the 4th of September. If you want to join in, keep an eye on my blog since registration- other details will follow in the next months ( the miniNARP will also be a meetingplace to decide on items for EURONARP2 so details will surely follow shortly after that )

So if you want to experience an EPIC night of gaming with your fellow dtoid-eurofags, be sure to join us for the miniEuroNARP ( if you're fast enough ) or otherwise join us for the mega-awesome-epic-crazy-EURONARP2!!!

The Grandmother

It all started when I was much much younger... I didn't have my own PC yet, gaming for me was limited to the 5/6 games I had available on my SEGA MASTER SYSTEM II, my dad owned a PC, which I ocasionally used to do some homework on... Then 1 night I was at my godfather's place, where I would spend all my time with my cousin ( that DID have his own PC ( he was about 6/7 years older then me )) and that night when I had arrived he told me he had gotten hold of something absolutely amazing...

Basically the nights I spent in his room were my first experiences of Multiplayer-gaming... We'd play whatever game he had gotten through his "channels" ( no internet yet to download "WAREZ" or anything ) and then he showed me a disk labeled "Wolf3D demo"...



I was absolutely amazed, we played the same set of levels for hours on end, until I had to go to bed, but from the guestroom I could still hear the guns blazing-action going on in his room...

A few days later he called me up, brimming with enthusiasm "I've got it all!" he exclaimed... I jumped on my bike and drove over to his place ( 4 km, at that time a HUGE distance for me ), we played the whole wednesday-afternoon, until my mother came to get me in the evening, in my exitement to finally see the whole game, I had forgotten to tell my family where I went :-)



As the years went by, I became an even more avid gamer, playing all kinds of games, but with a serious love for FPS-games, but not a single FPS had given me the same exitement as I had experienced that wednesday-afternoon when I raced over to my cousin... In the mean time I'd lost contact with him due to some things that happened in the family, a situation that has only recently been resolved thanks to facebook...

The Mother

During my first year at College, my Multiplayer-gaming-enthusiasm was at its highest point untill then, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike I was playing anything I could get my hands on!

Then, completely out of the blue, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" was announced, instantly I was exited like a little boy! A few weeks later the multiplayer-demo appeared online, I was in an IT-education at school, so I had loads of mates to play online with, even before the full game was available, we had started a clan, called -= Short Ridge =-

The teambased action on MP_Beach was so unbelievably intense almost anybody I told to try out the MP-demo was instantly addicted to it...

And it had a flamethrower!!!:


Our passion for the game resulted in us playing it daily, it became so bad that my GF started playing just to be able to spend some time with me ( and she became a pretty adept sniper & medic :-) )

The maps are the true beauty of RtCW, with each patch giving us some new candy to fight on...



We went to LAN-parties to fight our way to victory... As I had started it all, I was the so-called "ClanLeader" but this was purely for official purposes as we were generally a pure-for-fun clan that just happened to be pretty good at what we were doing :-) This game learned me what it was to truly play as a team, to be part of a well-oiled machine... Most matches required all players on a team to work together perfectly to achieve victory...


The Daughter

This would be the free stand-alone spin-off "Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory". At this time most of my clanmembers had given up on school and LANparties, so I was forced to mostly play with semi-random players online, this is when I learned the concept of pick-up-games, players would log in to a specific IRC-channel, where 2 teams would be built after which we would look for an empty server which we would then fight a few wars on after having some strategytalks in IRC...

While RtCW showed me how great it was to play in a team, it was RtCW: Enemy Terrytory that perfected it. No longer was it possible to go off on your own and blast away to 'win', in RtCW:ET you're forced to play as a team, the better you fullfill your function in the team, the more points you score...



A medic receives more points for healing a teammate then for killing an enemy, and it is like this in every class, you HAVE to play your role, or your score will be among the lowest of your team. This way, players with 'lower then usual' aimingskills were able to score huge points just by being a good teamplayer. They way this is done is that you earn XP for everything you do. Every map is divided into several differnt sub-objectives, plus every class has their own objectives ( medic must heal, engineer must build, fiel-ops must deliver ammo, covert-ops can find landmines with their binoculars and mark them on the map or steal an enemy's clothing to infiltrate into the enemy team ) and scores were based upon the amount of XP you gained during one round. A full match ( called campaign generally ) consisted of mostly 3 seperate maps and you would keep you XP ( plus the benefits you received from scoring certain amounts of XP ) over the 3 maps which would entice players even more to be good teamplayers...




The Granddaughter

Last year the follow up to RtCW:Enemy Territory hit all consoles, sadly it was greeted by absolutely abismal sales. I blame for a large part the fact that there was virtually no marketing involved... barely anybody I talked to about Enemy Territory: Quakewars knew that it was coming out on consoles, or even that it had been available on PC for more then a year... I was playing the PC-version since the release, in the beginning it was absolutely brilliant, I just started playing pick-up-games again, but as the IRC-channels became emptier and emptier, I resorted to playing on regular public servers, but this was not anywhere near as fun as the pick-up-games were...



I learned the problems of playing with random players in a game that absolutely required teamwork... If the oposing team just had 5% better teamwork, they would win, always... Players driving off with an empty humvee or flying off with an empty troup-transport helicopter were legio and nobody seemd to complain about it... It was absolutely horrible... Sometimes you'd get lucky and you'd be on the side of a clan that was playing on their own server, then I could be part once again of one of those well-oiled warmachines...



ET:QW completely perfected the series in my eyes, the maps were huge ( 1 square kilometer on average ) with vehicles, the same classbased scoring, more 'sub-objectives' and stunning visuals... Another huge advantage was that this time the 2 oposing teams had completely different technologies and vehicles ( since 1 was an invading alien army and the other were mere humans ).

The big drawback of this, was that the game isn't pick-up-and-play, you actually need to learn what the role of each class is, how best to tackle specific maps etc etc, but ( and this is especially true on consoles ) that was just too much to ask of the gamers it seemed... everywhere you hear people complaining about the supposed difficulties while playing the game, which were mostly simply due to people not taking the time to actually learn the game...



When the game was fresh out on PS3, I was able to really enjoy some brilliant matches, with people truly co-ordinating wars like in 'the good old days' but the game also thought me the consumer-mentality on games... after merely 6 months, there were almost no more players online... on the 360 it was over even faster I heared from my mate who got it for that console...

Thus 1 single 'family' of games has guided me through most of my MP-experiences, from the simple hot-seating in Wolf3D to the basics of classbased combat, to the perfection of classbased combat and finally to the 'lazyness' and consumermentality of the general (console)gamers who simply didn't seem to be able to appreciate the brilliantness that is ET:QW and simply stopped playing it...

I hope that one day enough dtoid-PS3-players will own the game ( should be pretty cheap second-hand by now ) so that we can have a FNF in it, since this game truly rocks ( and to be honest if you set the bots to some decent settings, you'll have great fun as well ) when played with a good team...

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 :-)

Since this is my first week as the new teamleader of Toyota Europe Data Center Operations, I've got to go to bed on time... but since I don't wanna keep some people waiting for the pics they want...



They say a picture says more then a thousand words, so instead of writing you guys an epic 21 000 word blog, I'm posting the pictures I took already, tomorrow or the day after, I'll write the matching blog... Its just a bit hard still to put into words... the epicness that ensued was amazing...



We worked on organising this NARP for months... but I can truly and honestly say that the end was worth it! This were truly the best 4 days of my life ( final day of preparation and the 3-day-narp itself )



so here's the pics, as soon as I can fathom it all, I'll write the text ;-)



Some of the highlights:

-> MS Fail
-> Sonic Ownage
-> People getting imprisoned qnd set free again after a mad crosscountry 4 hour drive
-> Epic Halo drinking game



But I wanna thank everyone that was there for making this the most EPIC party ever :-)



To be short, the european alternative to the PAX-meet was fucking awesome!

It's coming closer every second... 8 more days till the euroNARP starts... This post is to give you a sneak peak at the first area ( that was completed yesterday ). But before I show you the pictures, I first gotta explain the concept a bit.

"Teh Lair²" was a culmination of my passion for blacklights and gaming back in the days when I just 'started' it. This still rings true today. "Teh Lair²" has 3 stages.

The 'normal' stage

The 'normal' stage, which can be described as the stage you would use to show it to anybody that is not a gamer, parents, girlfriends etc etc... This stage is quite basic, you've got the regular lighting and it just shows the place as having loads of stuff on the walls, a really busy gaming place.

The 'Dark' stage

The 'Dark' stage, is a state of teh lair that has been designed to enable smooth gameplay, without any disturbing glare. Yet it is still 'light' enough to enable the doing of other things, like rolling stuff. The lights are all turned of for this except for the blacklights, giving you a slight preamble of the next stage, and in fact also serves as the best 'charging state' for the next stage.

The 'Wireframe' stage

I loved Tron, I simply loved that movie, and the design for this stage was loosely based upon the premise of that movie, what if you could get into a game? how would it feel to move around in absolute nothingness, only seeing the wireframes? Well this stage will show it to you and make you experience reality in a way you've never experienced it before.

So now I'll show you "Teh Lair²" as it is now, ready for the euroNARP :-)

I'll show you a few different angles, each time in the 3 stages of "teh Lair²" so you get a good idea of what awaits you here :-)

Saloon







Gamecabinet

please note that I've only barely scratched the surface in the unloading of my consoles/games.







The Consoles

atm just the most popular ones :-)








Racing Seat

I'm just a poor guy, so I built my own racing seat :-) ( seat itself is from one of my brother's old cars :-) )








So I hope you all liked this little view into 'my little world' and hope to see lots of you guys at the euronarp :-)