Expensive water and free beer
05.05.06 4:00 PM


By Kawigi
TopCoder Member

Maybe some of you are wondering what the most talented programmers in the world do when they have a night out together. By now you might have read about the AMD game night last night, and the answer to that should be apparent - they play DDR.

But a lot more things happened last night than watching SnapDragon and antimatter cut a rug... er, dance pad. We also had a great dinner in the same building as the arcade (I was sitting a little too close to the prime rib for my own good, though). While the first big attraction in the arcade was at the Dance Dance Revolution machine, there was a wide variety of other games to play.

Among the most popular was another game in the same general vein of DDR where you play a guitar in rhythm with music and a screen layout similar to DDR.

Air Hockey was also a popular activity, and a few people did quite well at it. I lost pretty much every game I played, but it was definitely fun to watch some of the games, especially the ones that involved reid and antimatter (who won an entertaining game against Olexiy and bladerunner). Toward the end of the night, when the time had run out on most of our cards (the ones that allowed us basically unlimited games for three hours), mine still had another 20 minutes or so, which I used to sponsor more air hockey games :-)

After people finished up at the arcade, some went back to their hotels, but others had more creative ideas. Ruberik and a somewhat large group of people went and walked around "New York, New York" and rode on the roller coaster there. It sounds like it was somewhat larger than I'd expect to see in a hotel, but I didn't get to see that.

Once we ran out of minutes to play Air Hockey, a reasonable group of people including myself, antimatter, SnapDragon and JongMan walked back toward the Aladdin and picked up Icees at Walgreen's on the way back. We were actually happy to find a Walgreen's on the strip, since SnapDragon was thirsty and no one really wanted to pay $5.00 for the liter or so bottle of water in our rooms. Interesting note - we saw that you could buy a gallon jug of water at Walgreens, which we figured we could have bought and it would have a market value of about $18 at our hotels, and we could sell it for half that much and undercut "the man."

A few people also caught the end of a performance by the Pussycat Dolls.

Others went out to hit the bars and whatever else they could find. A few people, including mathijs and krijgertje learned a new trick to get cheap to free drinks in a casino. They sat down at the penny slots, and people just come around and give out drinks. mathijs says that they probably got rid of about $12 of loose change between them, and they probably got 12 beers for it.