Once in a blue moon, something comes along that changes the landscape of gaming. For O7ah, the Nomar Challenge is just that. It is an exclusive round robin tournament that will change the landscape of gaming. Everyone knows what the Nomar Challenge is all about, but if you don't, you missed something great. Of course, in the Nomar Challenge, O7AH instituted a draft in order to determine who would be on what team. Steve TALL had the first pick, Poops had the 2nd and Compton the 3rd pick in the first round. I, Nomar, was a part of this draft, and luckily we had the cameras there to capture the day in the life of a potential draft pick...this is the diary of Nomar83.

Tuesday, Jan. 17th - 11:13 AM

I woke up in my hotel room...nervous. Who knew where I was going to go today. I could be a first round pick or a third round pick and it would all be completely justified. This draft is so top heavy. I think the first 4 - 5 picks are all interchangable and putting together a winning team means putting together good consecutive picks..not just one pick. Only one man could potentially swing a draft like that, Steve TALL, but he was a captain, so he in charge of putting together a team. I comb what hair I have, shave and throw on my lucky underwear and head out the door..it's gonna be a good day already.

Tuesday, Jan. 17th - 12:46 PM

I arrived in the Halo 2 Municipal Center and took my seat at the table that had my name on it. I looked around the room and saw some familiar faces. Cowboy and his girlfriend were sitting at his table chatting about where he might go. She looks awfully different without a helmet. Shingy was at his table and appeared to be taking a nap. No, he's just passed out. He has a fifth of Captain Morgan sitting on his table, empty. Hopefully he's awake when he gets drafted, but I won't get my hopes up. Cozmo's table was completely full. Eight people sitting around it, talking about potential Big Team Battle strategies. I looked around for Numbers and finally found him sitting at a corner table by himself facing a wall. I ask him why he was there and he said "this is where Compton put me."

Tuesday, Jan. 17th - 1:30 PM

This thing is finally getting underway...The Commissioner of the Nomar Challenge steps up to the podium and announces Steve TALL as the first pick...

Sometimes, in this drab little world of ours here in Warrensburg, the O7ah clan get a little crazy and stray away from Halo 2 and video games in general. This is usually a bad idea on our part, and we were not to be disappointed the night we decided to play Risk the Board Game over at Steve TALL's humble apartment. The game started out innocent enough, and for those of you who don't know how to play Risk, I suppose this article is completely pointless to you, but still may be a good read in the end. For those of you who know how to play, congratulations on the ability to beat Nomar83, Jamin Returns, Steve TALL and Compton OTAH at the game, because that is pretty much all you need to beat us...some form of knowledge of the game. I'm not claiming that we're idiots, but we did do a lot of stupid things. You'll see.

There are many different variations of starting the game, you can draw cards with the territories on them or you can freely place your pieces on the territories, and that is what we did. Compton got to place his first, Jamin went second, Steve third and I, Nomar, went last. Obviously your first turn is the most important, because it sets the tone and pretty much shows others what you want to do. Compton put his first piece in South America, while Ben followed that up with Australia. Steve went third and put his first piece in Australia while Noma...wait, what? Steve put his piece right next to Jamin's piece, practically begging for Ben to challenge him. Nomar placed his on Africa. In the end, Jamin and Steve split Australia and Compton managed to take one piece of Africa from Nomar. Madagascar to be exact and that one move set the tone for the entire game. Here's a picture of the map at the very beginning.

Nomar is blue, Jamin is green, Compton is white, and Steve is red. As you can see, Steve has a pretty good stranglehold on Australia since he took most of Asia. Jamin managed to put one piece in S. America and pretty much dominated N. America which you cannot see. Nomar has Africa except for Madagascar and a good amount in Europe. We rolled to see who went first and Nomar won, so we went clockwise from him which meant Nomar, Compton, Steve and then Jamin. Jamin rolled the worst to go last, it would not be the end of his terrible rolling. Of course, before we began, we got to reinforce our armies all across the board in our territories. This is how it ended up.

As you can see, right from the beginning, things were going to get awfully hectic. Well, if that was your guess, you could not be more terribly wrong. It was quite possibly the most passive game for about 10 turns. Since Compton was next to everyone but Steve, he of course aligned himself with Nomar and Jamin and attempted right from the start to brainwash them in to taking out Steve. Compton also weaved a tangled web with Jamin that said if Nomar attacked Jamin, Compton would use his Madagascar fleet to take over Africa and thus leave Nomar absolutely useless.

 As you can see above, this definitely confused Nomar to the point of going along with it. This caused a great deal of drama as Ben was decreed to leave S. America and leave it to Compton. Thus leaving Compton extra men each turn. Jamin did not trust Nomar and actually ended up hurting himself by leaving soldiers at the Nomar /\ Jamin border just in case of an attack, but Nomar was not stupid, he knew what was looking at him in Africa.

Each turn, Compton was not amassing an army in S. America where his soldiers were, but putting each and every soldier in Africa. As the author, I can say I was pretty worried leaving 3 territories around Madagascar with only one soldier per in each one. If Compton really wanted to, he could have easily had taken Africa if he wanted to at any time. I mean, freaking look at his army!

 That was after about four or five turns and in retrospect, Nomar should have probably eliminated the problem in Madagascar to begin with, but he felt comfortable knowing he had something to fall back on. Little did he know though, that he was being used as a pawn in this so called "fun game between friends."

Compton was pulling the strings and the Nomar and Jamin puppets were doing exactly what was being asked of them, join together and destroy Steve TALL's Australian army. So Steve, being able to hear, decided to pull out of Asia and form a large army outside of Australia and await the attack. So, as Compton laid in wait (to potentially win had he got his way) Nomar and Jamin amassed their armies near Steve and prepared for the ensuing battle of rolling dice that would pursue.

Here you see Nomar's blue army meeting head on with Steve's red army, what you cannot see is Jamin's green army just up the border to the north preparing for his trip down the border in order to take Steve TALL out. As the battle started to wage, a point was brought up as to what will happen after all the fighting is finally done. Nomar was currently in the middle of his turn, but would not be allowed the advantage of having Jamin come in after him to clean up because Steve's turn was in between Craig and Jamin. As Compton sat back and began to watch his world crumble, I could see the nervousness in his eyes and the rage start to build. He had more treaties than he knew what to do with right now and he was certainly not done making them. Jamin and Nomar began to make a truce with Steve TALL that would turn them both against Compton. Jamin promised to not attack through Venezuela and then attempted to run down the European and African ocean line to attack Compton head to Brazil, but Nomar's one-man armies thwarted his plan and he never actually even got to attempt an attack on Compton. It was quite embarrassing that Jamin's army of about 25 was taken down by 5 one-man armies of Nomar, but as I said earlier, Jamin's rolling problems were far from over. What ended up happening was that everyone wound up being involved with every other person at one point in the game causing a standstill for two complete rounds while everyone reinforced their armies.

This is what else happened. The fight of the century was only seconds away between Compton's Madagascar refugees and Nomar's blue man group. Compton's armies nearly, I say again, nearly doubled Nomar's army. As everyone was still doing their rounds, it came to be Nomar's turn, now the truce of no attacking was still going on for two more rounds when something happened...In a successful attempt to gain a card, Nomar took over a one army country owned by Jamin, which broke the previous treaty of Nomar attacking Ben, so Compton therefore attacks Nomar's Africa. The war had begun. Compton's Madagascar army took on the blue army of Nomar's head strong and what was a miraculous rolling by the blue team, they won beating an army nearly twice their size. Compton, since he was the one who attacked, was left with one army in Madagascar, he also unsuccessfully took on Jamin in N. America. He was left with nothing and it was time for the cleanup on aisle 5 as Steve TALL's red army came through and took care of Madagascar, and then rolled through S. America. The game regretfully ended when Steve TALL let Jamin take down S. America with his green army and we decided to end it after Compton was eliminated. It was fun to be had by all, but had we played the same in the beginning as we did during the end, the game would have obviously have been about 3 hours shorter. It goes to show, Compton is just a puppeteer, so I am sure this transfers over to Halo 2 as well, so whenever he tells you do to something. Just say "remember Madagascar you bitch...I will not do your bidding."

Not many things adapt with time. If you grow up being a jock, most likely you carry that title with you for the rest of your life. If you're a priss, you grow up being just that while en route to being a bitch to everyone along the way. But there is one group that is so encompassing that sometimes the other groups overlap it. That's right, being a nerd does more than transcend the popular groups, it dips it's sweet hands in and pulls out some of the beautiful girls and some of the muscular men.

            So back in the day, what did it mean to be a nerd? Well, in the mid 80's, it was about wearing a pocket protector with your hair slicked as far down as you could have it while maintaining a level of comfortability with your button up white shirt and slacks. You hung out in the computer lab playing with Apples trying to work MSDOS mode on Windows hoping to do anything somewhat cool so you could lean over and impress that girl who was doing her research paper. “check out this picture of George Michael I made using binary code!” Needless to say, these people were not cool.

            Something has happened though. I am not exactly sure how long this transformation has been taking place, but it is more than obvious that it's going on. Being a nerd does not exactly represent what it used to anymore. As a matter of fact, sometimes being a nerd (depending on social setting) can almost be considered “cool.” How did this happen? Well, initially the jocks and prissies started to include more and more people in to the nerd category. Instead of just throwing pocket protector wearing kids in there, they started throwing video game players and kids who just spent their time in the computer labs in there as well. The kids who made better grades than them did not become “smart,” but rather became nerds as well. As the nerd label started to encompass more and more people, different groups of nerds began to arise from the ashes of the death of regular nerdom. Here are as many groups of nerds that I can think of today.

·       Popular Nerd – Everybody knew a nerd like this and might have been one without even knowing it. This was the nerd who the popular kids let hang out with them and any time they needed homework help, this is the guy they went to. He did everything from straight up typing papers for people to just helping the popular kids' brains contemplate easy math problems. A prime example of the popular nerd was Screech from Saved by the Bell. He is the popular nerd flagman.

·       Jock Nerd – This was the nerd who tried out for the basketball team or football team and just was not built physically enough to play the game, so the coach gave them hard task of either 1. keeping stats as the end of the bench or 2. filming the games at the highest point of every gym (so the team would not have to claim to know him). The jocks accept him as one of their own, but would never associate with them any time other than practice and / or games.

·       Self Confident Nerd – Quite possibly the worst nerd of all. This nerd thinks lots of different things. For example: this nerd thinks he / she is funny and attempts to make jokes during class to make the popular kids laugh. They also think they can dance and attempt to dance during homecoming / prom dances, but all everyone thinks is that they're having a seizure. Popular kids egg on this nerd to dance more, so they do not realize that their self confidence is in error. People create this monster and have no means of destroying it.

·       Band Nerd – Completely self explanatory. Only problem with these kids are the fact that they think being in band is cool.

·       Non-conformist Nerd – This is a nerd in self denial. They try and be cool and they try and fit in, but they cannot deny their roots. They spend their after school hours in the computer lab when they know no one else is around. They go home and play video games and when someone even slightly cool asks them what they did, they say that they either went out drinking with some buddies or watched the football game.

·       Frat Nerd – Right up there with self confident nerd. These guys are the epitome of nerdness but are in absolute complete denial of their nerdity. Now, don't go thinking my definition is a broad category for everyone. I will explain more at the end. These nerds play video games all the time and spend a majority of their time on the computer. They play video games online and they are world renown for talking shit while playing. This is where the denial of nerdom comes in to play. They think that since they say cuss words and act tough online, then they gain immunity from being called a nerd. They call others nerds in order to deny themselves the title. “I can't be a nerd like this guy...” and then they usually wind up beating the kid that they called a nerd, thus solidifying the fact that they are actually a nerd. Size and weight know no boundaries with this particular type of nerd. They are by far the most rude and hateful because in the end, they hate who they are.

            So is being a nerd still considered being a nerd by today's standards? I think so. What used to be considered a nerd has adapted with time and became something all encompassing. In the end, if you are a nerd, more than likely, you know you're a nerd. If you really are a nerd but you don't think you are, you're probably in one of these other subgroups of nerds. But remember, by today's standards, it's not so bad being a nerd. Anytime you encounter a frat nerd though...be sure to remind them that they are just as nerdy as any other type of nerds.