[Mayo]

xLan is New Zealand’s largest national LAN, featuring loads of different games and a massive prize pools. Tt.GIGA had three different teams there representing them at the LAN in Counter-Strike Source, Starcraft 2 and Counter-Strike 1.6. The boys performed extremely well, placing first in CSS, second in Starcraft 2 and third in CS 1.6, defeating many skills opponents on the way to the finals and the semi-finals.

Counter-Strike Source – “NZ Landragons” - 1st
Line-up: Graph1te, Afends, Philstah, BlackouT, gflux

The Tt.GIGA Source team were confident coming to xLan, after coming runners-up in the CGM Division 1 finals in the previous season. Facing Bangbros in the group stage, they had no hesitation in giving it all they had and trounced Bangbros 22-0 before Bangbros decided to forfeit. On fire, they faced Flickshot next, whom they also defeated convincingly 27 to 3.

In the quarter finals, they faced Frostbyte, and convincingly won 16-9 on Tuscan and 16-11 on Inferno.
In the semi-finals, they had a much tougher challenge. Streetsharks, comprised of some old Exile5 members pushed Tt.GIGA to three matches, with each match being extremely close. In the first map, Inferno, Tt.GIGA lost in overtime, losing 17-19. However, they picked their game up on Tuscan, running away with a 16-10 win. The third match was another very close one, at one stage with the score being 14-14 on Train. However, Afends crucial 2v1 clutch and Philstah’s 1v1 in the final two rounds clinched the map and hence gave Tt.GIGA the finals spot.

It was now the finals, and Tt.GIGA were up against Archaic.MSi NZ, another extremely strong team who had surpassed all their competition as well. The first map was on Tuscan, a map where Tt.GIGA had consistently played and won convincingly throughout the day. Although it came down to overtime, Tt.GIGA comfortably took the overtime and won the match 19-16. The second match was also close, but with Afends twenty-bombing on CT side, the match was secured 16-12, meaning Tt.GIGA won the finals 2-0 and earned themselves a cool three thousand dollars. Congratulations boys, you guys deserve it.

Graph1te had this to say after their victory:
“Very happy with the performance of the team. We knew our games verse Streetsharks and Archaic.MSI would be very hard. Practise prior to xLAN definitely paid off and made the win that much sweeter.”

The Team;


Starcraft 2 – The Pride of a Warrior – 2nd
Line-up: Kowi (P)

Kowi hasn’t been around much recently, being busy and not having a stable internet connection as often as he’d like. However, his appearance still shows that he still has what it takes to reach the top of Starcraft 2. He easily cruised through the first three matches, beating Bullfrog, Trig and Stroggos 2-0, 2-0 and 2-1 respectively. He was knocked down to the loser’s bracket by Finest who won 2-1, however Kowi worked his way through the loser’s bracket, meeting Finest once again. This time, Kowi won 2-1, where he had to verse nGen MaSteR in the grand finals.

In the grand finals, Kowi secured the first set, but failed to successfully counter the twelve pool that MaSteR threw at him three times in the row, and lost the finals 1-3. However, coming from the loser’s bracket to enter the finals again is an impressive feat, and coming second and earning a nice paycheck is excellent in anyone’s book.

The Man;



CS 1.6 – 3rd
Line-up: Philstah, Gflux, Firestarter, Forbidden, B1ake

With two players backing up from the Counter-Strike Source team, the Tt.GIGA 1.6 team faced some easy and some hard teams in the group, where they comfortably took out second place in their group, losing to Archaic.MSi NZ. They once again faced Archaic.MSi NZ 1.6 in the semi-finals, who were the top seeded team. The team played courageously, picking up the first, but unfortunately losing the next two score-score and score-score on map name and map name respectively. However, their overall rounds won meant that they came third overall in the competition, which is no mean feat.

The Team (A bit blurry);


This wraps up the short report on Tt.GIGA’s performance at xLAN, folks. We may/may not have detailed match write-ups coming up, so stay tuned on our website or Facebook page! (Links below)

I’d like to acknowledge and thank our sponsors:
Tt eSPORTS
GigaNet
Enuzi Clothing
Streamline Servers

Also feel free to come to our website and Facebook page for more information. Or check out our YouTube

P.S Apparently Zeebob deleted all of the demo’s form LAN so we can’t produce a video now. And thanks to KaRath for writing most of this article.

[Mayo]

You can see the post Grand Final talk with Tt.GIGA CSS here:

You Tube

You Tube

We will keep uploading relevant video's in the coming days!

[Benji]

In the grand finals, Kowi secured the first set, but failed to successfully counter the twelve pool that MaSteR threw at him three times in the row, and lost the finals 1-3.

To be fair, Game 2 he did a standard Speedling opening and Kowi did absolutely nothing to stop Master from running up his ramp and just killing him. Game 3 and 4 were 12 pools however (Proberbly as a reaction to seeing how poorly Kowi went in game 2).


Nice Writeup tho!