The Australian band “tonight alive” blasted through my iphone speakers at approximately 5am on the early Friday morning of June. Waking out of a sleep that to me, seemed to be 2 minutes long, I dragged myself out of bed and began the ritual to make myself at least half presentable to the public eye. Of course, I am not an early person like most gamers out there – the only way I see the sunrise is if I stay up all night! But, before I know it the time has flown by and Gabrielle “kira” has arrived to take us both to the transport center in the heart of Brisbane city.
After twenty minutes of sitting waiting for the bus to take us to casino in NSW, I decide it has taken too long and go to ask the lady when the bus will arrive. She took one look at my ticket and calmly stated, “You’re on a train all the way there love. And you better hurry.” The ticket stated the train left at 7:30 – after looking at the time we were startled to view an ominous 7:25. We started running. Huffing and puffing we nearly jump into the “first class” carriage before another transport officer suggested we go to our actual carriage at the front of the train – damn, thought I was going to travel in style! As soon as we take our seats the train starts moving – phew! Close call, hello Sydney!... in 14 hours.
So after experiencing some very interesting people on the 14 hour trip we arrive in Sydney to be greeted by Ella “grumpybear” and Maddy. Unfortunately a bad judgment call made me think it was a good idea to eat dinner on the train – which lead to no other sickness than food poising when we arrived at Ella’s apartment. So after an eventful night and half a sleeping tablet to knock us all out, I wake up at 6am to Gab kicking me in the head and as a result, I fall out of bed. What a way to start the day!
Nevertheless I cannot control my excitement as I remember the importance of the day. World Cyber Games!
After getting ready we call a cab to take us to City Hunter in Burwood. The taxi driver claims there is bad traffic on the easiest route there, so he takes a detour which just so happens to be a closed road (we are under the impression he planned it!) so after feeling our day isn’t getting off to a good start we finally tell the cab to pull over and we pay the ridiculous fare and enter the LAN venue.
After being greeted by friendly and helpful staff we are ushered into one of the private gaming rooms to meet team Carnage, who turn out to also be our first match of the day. Unfortunately that means as a caller, I have to be sneaky and we had less communication than usual because we could hear everything they said and visa versa.
After losing the game 16 – 9 we shake our worthy opponents hands then get ready for our next match against Team Immunity on Inferno.
We found out vanq lost to team immunity 16 – 2 so our goal was to get at least one more round than vanq. And guess what... we got… 16 – 3! We were probably the only team to be excited to lose, but for us it’s all about the rounds, especially as our last LAN event as a team left us with an embarrassing 16 – 0 against sublime, so to gain 3 rounds on immunity was nothing other than visual improvement.
The day continued on and we versed vanq on nuke after a somewhat disappointing game we lost 16 – 9. Our morale was shot down after losing every game; we start packing up to find that we have another 2 games in the finals against no other than Team Immunity again. Great. So we just let it go and decide to have fun.
The crowd around us grew large as the 1.6 teams started arriving for their event that started at 3pm that day. It was our final game against Immunity on de_dust2. We had a total of 5 rounds then Maddy’s keyboard cut out for the last four rounds and on the final round Gabs computer died. Our luck had run out for the day but I felt alright about the loss because at least I got a knife kill against one of the Immunity players, which made me feel like we already won the entire game haha! After meeting some really awesome people and gaining unmeasurable experience we finished the day on a high note, we all felt happy for attending the WCG Sydney event.
Especially for me and Gab it was our first time traveling for a Counter-Strike Source competition. In our families gaming isn’t exactly well respected so it was a big thing for our parents to agree to let us go (even though we’re almost 18 they still could have said no). It just proved to us that they must trust us and Vox Eminor as an organization. I can say with confidence it was the right idea and I have grown as a person from that experience. I’m not even going to go into detail on all the misfortunes that happened on our way home to Brisbane via domestic airport. All I can say is a big thank-you to our awesome manager and organizer Richard Lawes, and all the sponsors of our team that has made this, and many more, opportunities available for us.
I cannot wait for the next adventure.
Until next time, thank-you for reading this!
- Jayde “jaydee” Elizabeth.
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