Extra Life 2014 recap

Hello again, and thank you to everyone who joined us to play and/or donate for the children who need it most. Last weekend could simply not have happened without all of you, and happen it did. Before we recap the events of the night, let’s talk numbers.

Last year, when the donation pages finally closed down in Dec, we had collectively raised over $4,000,000 for sick kids around the world, doubling our previous year, and 1/4th of that was after the big Extra Life night. As of Sunday morning, without any extra time, the Extra Life total raised was…

$5,102,500

This is now officially the biggest Extra Life event we have yet to have, and it hasn’t stopped yet. In just the few days, we had an announcement from Extra Life’s Facebook page that we had broken $5,500,000! And on top of that, this weeken we will see a raindate of sorts for people who couldn’t play last week AND people who want to go again and do more! In fact, a friend of mine will be doing her 24-hour run this weekend, so please support her!

Of course if you want to support us as well, we are more then happy with that choice, too, and you can find our team page by clicking the Thermometer to the right of this page. But with these details, in tow, how was the marathon? Read on, my friends, read on.

While the event was basically Saturday to Sunday, for us here at the Red Sector started on Friday. I had taken the day off from work to prepare, and as such my day was spent doing lighting tests for the camera streaming (needed for anything but the PC and Xbox One this year), buying food and booze for the event, and even grabbing up a few energy shots. I decided since I upgraded the Internet around here, I had no need to pre-install my selection of games this year, and this turned out to be the better move as the games we played for the most part did not need such actions. Instead, the only other things I did was ensure my new single player game was ready and that Transformers Universe was up to date.

Saturday began in the main room where Max Powers opened up our stream with a special message making fun of those who are currently trying to shame all gamers by playing up how evil we were as gamers while I had the PS3 play the cheesiest villain music I could find (Unicron’s Theme from the 1980s Transformers Movie) before switching to the WiiU for our first game: Adventure Time: Explore this Dungeon Because I Don’t Know. We did not finish the game so much as level up Lumpy Space Princess and get to the second Ice Kingdom-looking dungeon before moving on to a few other titles.

At this point, our broadcast moved on to my PC where I proceeded to start Dreamfall Chapters Book 1. After playing for a while, it was abandoned for the one game that actually was planned, me and Joe’s Xbox Name attempted to take on Crimson Dragon. I have to say attempted because this is perhaps one of the most backwards “play with your friends… only don’t” game designs I have ever seen. You can NOT progress with a friend through the missions of the game, but rather only get the option to play what your single player game has gotten to. We found this out as when I hosted the game, we could only play the first two missions since I had YET to play.

Ultimately, this lead to us spending hours between the single player game to level up and gain access to more levels and then tag-team them in what is basically a bad clone of Panzar Dragoon (a game that looking back probably didn’t age very well as it is pretty much just an on-rail shooter) before giving up the endevour and me going back to continue and complete Dreamfall Chapters Book One. (If you are curious, I have reviewed the game so far… and it’s not worth the price yet.)

When we finished this game, I selected my next single player game and began the final round of the evening. From this moment on, Max and I took on Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, getting to about level 15 or so before the 9 AM wall on Sunday ended the event for us with me announcing the winner of the site’s raffle. His games should now be in his email if he hasn’t claimed then yet, but I still honored to be able to do that.

Over all, it was a blast, if an exhausting one. I recommend every gamer take this challenge on and will of course be there next year and doing what I can to support this year in the meantime. Goodnight everyone.

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