Update: The videos are up at the bottom of the post!

So here it was, Thursday, The Last Day.  Getting really excited about Gears of War 2 was one thing, but even more than that, I was excited about the bad-ass Canadian Community Launch that was going to take place in Lower Bay Station in Toronto.  This location is an abandoned old subway station, now used mostly for filming movies and music videos.  To locals this part of the station is known as Lower Bay station, and to some like me, was completely unknown previous to this event.  But on Thursday night, from 7pm to midnight, Microsoft handed the place over to us, Canadian gamers and fans of Gears of War.

It was a pretty cool setup, with TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) subway cars on both sides, each with it’s A/C blasting; one was available for anyone to sit in and take a break, while the other had a food table and drinks table set up in it.  Consequentially, due to the A/C on in full force in the subway cars, the middle platform, where all the gaming was being done, was quite hot, so jackets were not needed.

On to the middle platform then.  First, in the front were two TVs, set up facing back to back, for people who wanted to get in on some campaign gameplay.  Moving past that, there were two sets of 5 TVs, again facing back to back but perpendicular to the campaign TVs. These ones were set up with 5 vs. 5 multiplayer.  Throughout the night, this was probably the loudest area as people were cheering for kills and round wins.  The general idea of this was to have each side be one team, but there were some points in time when people did switch sides though.  Further on, there were 2 pairs of TVs, turned face to face for gamers to do whatever on.  Some did campaign co-op, while others fooled around in Horde and some did some local matches against bots.  And finally, the last set of TVs was set up in a curved row of 5, for people to get the true experience of Horde mode.  The highest I saw the mode get was Wave 37 or 38.  Some of the pictures below show off exactly what I mean.

Other than that, I was pleased to see some gamers I caught up with at both or either X’08 and the Fable 2 launch, as well as meeting some new gamers from both Twitter and the Xbox.ca forums.  A shout out goes out to them for making this event awesome and full of laughs!  The swag we got for the event was a sweet sweet Gears of War 2 t-shirt and the game itself.  To anyone that was there, I was wearing a custom designed t-shirt that showed off my gamertag, DjDATZ, some 360Sync love, and some Gears of War 2 love.  I’ve got pictures of both shirts below!

Finally, a huge thank you to Jade, Jake and the Xbox Canada team for organizing this!  Also a big thanks is deserved by High Road Communications for taking care of the event and Epic Games for making such an epic game!  Thanks again for a great time!

Event Pictures

T-shirts