Participants aged 15 & under are reminded that they are required to bring a signed and completed parental consent form to the epic.LAN events in order to participate.

The current form has been updated and is now available to download:

• Word Format
• PDF Format

Participants are also reminded that they will be required to bring proof of age to the event when they check-in to ensure that they are issued with the correct wristband, particularly for those aged 18 & over who wish to purchase alcohol from the bar.

For a change to our TF2 night during the holiday season, this Tuesday (28th December), we're going to be playing the new Medieval Mode.

We'll start off with cp_degrootkeep. specifically designed for the mode, and then move on to some normal maps with the Medieval Mode enabled.

About Medieval Mode - TF2 Blog

When wars were waged with fists and steel

In this old-tymey Controlle Pointe map, players will battle through an ancient castle. How did the menly men of Team Fortress appear at a tenth century battlement? Simple. The Soldier angered a magician.

Team Fortress creator Robin Walker recently watched The Terminator, and so demanded that weapons could not be brought back in time. That's right: it's melee-only! Against Robin's strenuous wishes, however, clothing can go back in time, which is one way that Medieval Mode is different from The Terminator.

So grab your swords, and keep your clothes on, because things are about to get clothing-non-optional Medieval on your fully clothed ass!

See you in the server!

The epic.LAN management and staff team would like to wish all of our community members a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

This is the second Christmas for us here at epic, and we'd like to think that we've had two very successful and fun years of organising LAN events and activities for our gaming community and we hope for many more.

We look forward to beginning another exciting new chapter in 2011, beginning with our new tournament series at epic.FIVE, and we hope that you will all be a part of it at our future events.

Enjoy the holiday season, stay safe, and we'll see you in the New Year!

The epic.LAN Team

Most of you had probably heard whispers anyway after a lot of interest on Cadred, however we can now confirm that we will be adding a £1000 Counter-Strike: Source Tournament to the Hall 2 event activities at epic.FIVE.

The team members are no strangers to running CSS tournaments, with experience in running a number of previous competitive events, and we look forward to giving the CSS community a professionally operated gaming tournament.

Tournament signups are now open for both the CSS and TF2 tournaments. As soon as you have confirmed your place for epic.FIVE you can either create a team, join a team or sign up as a merc. Note that you can only participate in one of the main tournaments, though there will be plenty of other activities taking place throughout the weekend for you to enjoy.

If you haven't already, then go and grab your place now for epic.FIVE, and make the most of all the money from your Christmas cards!

Winners

Congratulations to the team lead by pad for winning this year's hunt online! They win 2 tickets for 2011 epic.LAN events and £50 to spend at Kustom.

The Solutions

If you want to keep playing, we'll leave the hunt up for a few weeks yet to see how you get along. But in the mean time, we've produced an answer sheet to explain our twisted thinking on all of the questions.

Feedback

As always, we value your feedback, please let us know what you thought in the discussion thread. Do remember when giving your feedback, that for us as organisers, it's very difficult to predict what anybody is going to do in tackling the questions. We have a logical thought process in place in our minds, but that is often miles away from what people try on the day. Be assured that throughout the entire hunt, the team was watching answers, deciding on appropriate clues (while trying to be fair to teams who already had an advantage from completing the questions) and talking to individuals on teams trying to guide them through, particularly some of the newer players who were trying this for the first time.

You will be glad to know that the total hunt took around the amount of time we intended when we wrote it this year, and while people may have been stuck on one or two questions, they were often balanced out by very quick solutions of others.

We look forward to the next hunt at epic.FIVE!

Yes, in mere hours we'll be releasing our pack of hounds, well clues for the chase around the... ok the analogy isn't really working.

At 6pm Friday 17th December, the teaser questions will be revealed for this year's epic.HUNT Online, followed by the main questions from 12 noon on Saturday.

The top players (number to be determined) will then get a 30 minute head start for the final charge on Sunday, which starts at 12 again for everybody else.

Make sure you have an epic.LAN account and go to the hunt site at hunt.epiclan.co.uk to begin.

Remember, you could be in with the chance of winning 2x epic.LAN tickets to be used at any 2011 event AND £50 to spend over at Kustom PCs.

We're looking to add to the number of live DJ sets at epic.FIVE in Hall 1. DJs Haden & Superchief have entertained the crowds at our last few events, and following their success, we'd like to give more members of the opportunity a chance to spin the virtual decks at our next event.

So if you're interested in giving it a try, then contact us with some information about your style, and perhaps some links to your previous work and we'll consider you for the event timetable.

Signups for the epic.FIVE Team Fortress 2 Tournament are now open on our tournament system.

When you have confirmed your space for epic.FIVE, you will be able to join in with the Team Fortress 2 tournament in one of the following ways:

• Create a New Team
• Join an Existing Team
• Sign Up as a Merc

So if you have a pre-arranged team, create the team, hand out the passwords to your team members and get yourselves signed up.

If you don't have an organised team, but you want to take part anyway, then sign up as a merc, put a comment in the box about your skill/preferred class and we'll help you to get involved in an existing team or mix team to be in with a chance of winning the prize.

Your team must be registered for the tournament by 8pm Thursday 24th February.

This year's online hunt will start at 12 noon on Saturday 18th December for Round 1, the second round will begin at 12 noon on Sunday 19th December and there will be a head start for the first few players to complete round 1.

A series of teaser questions will be available from 6pm Friday 17th December which must be completed before you can access the main questions.

You can now sign up to the hunt as follows:

1. Create or log in to your epic.LAN Account
2. Go to the Hunt Online site using this link which will automatically log you in.
3. Or if you have an epic.LAN account already, you can log in straight away at hunt.epiclan.co.uk using your normal epic.LAN account details.  
4. That's It! You're ready to start playing from 6pm on the 17th. 

Prizes

For the winning person (who may choose to work as part of a team), we can confirm that the prize will be

• 2 Tickets to any 2011 epic.LAN Event
• £50 Kustom Voucher

Congratulations to CyberDrac and Elsie who have both won a key to participate in the Battlefield: Play4Free closed beta after their names were pulled out of my hat. The correct answer was of course Battlefield: Vietnam (none of the entrants got this wrong!).

They're the lucky two that get to join the other thousand (or there abouts) gamers, including a couple of us from epic.TEAM.

The keys are working their way to you via the email address on your epic account! In addition to playing in the closed beta, both CyberDrac and Elsie will be able to feedback to the developers and have their suggestions worked into the final release.