Favorite Lan PC games?

[fast]

My question is the topic title, you could expand it to multiplayer if you so wish. The reason for my question is as follows:

For upwards of four years I have been on a unique quest for pc gaming. Instead of just telling you what that quest is I thought I would bother you with a story first. Many years ago I was part of a pc gaming club in college. Every Friday night we would take over a computer lab in the Liberal Arts building and play games for hours on end. Thanks to three years of this, when I graduated and moved on I just could not stand playing games online. Equivalently we had a lanparty a week for three years. So when I played online and I could not hear the anguish in my enemies voice, see the physical agitation, or even better be treated by the humble player who bought everyone dinner from a nearby pizzeria. These are things that online gaming can not replicate. Sure with third party programs: ventrillo, teamspeak, aim, googletalk, and others, we have access to voice and video chat, but it is a far cry from people actually being in the same room. Online gaming use to work for me but now it is mostly dead. The fact I kept running into people who I was almost old enough to be their father stating they slept with my mother last night, well that just cinched it for me.

Upon looking online I realized that this is not an uncommon belief held by others in similar situations. The easiest solution seemed to be to join a gaming group at a local college – if they allow non student members. Luckily for me Georgia Tech is not terribly far from my home and being a Technical Institute they were bound to have a gaming group. Well I met several of there members and it was vastly different than what I was use to. A short period of gaming coupled with a lot of talking about mods people were making. Not really my bag being a twitchy cowboy educated in Alabama. So, being the idiot I am, I decided to start my own with my friends and family. But horror struck when I polled them to find out what we had to work with hardwarewise.

Mostly laptops, plenty of decent processors, atleast a gig of ram, abundant harddrive space, gma 950s, and plenty of aversion for buying new games/hardware. So it stuck me in a pickle. Not wanting to back down on my idea, and really wanting to play something that was not Halo or Super Smash Brothers, I got to work on finding games that were cheap, free or abandoned, with fun multiplayer and low specs. Note the term FUN before multiplayer, it may not be the tournament quality of other games but it is fun with others in the same area. This is my basis for judging lanparties and I feel that it is the best way to spend my rare freetime.

Based on the hardware, I decided to look at games from the turn of the century. Sure Halflife and Blizzard games were the obvious choices, but what was there that hasn’t been played to death already. Scrolling through several top ten list for separate years yearned me nothing, neither did any of the searches for “good old multiplayer pc games.” The folks on EEEuser did provide a nice basis to work on being that they have ran into similar problems with the gpu. So I compiled a list with a few tidbits about each game, separated roughly by genre and asked the others. The result hit me right out of left field in that none of them wanted to play an FPS – that noise you hear is the twitch player in me screaming. So we decided to give two of the other choices a go the next time we met up. Total Annihilation, the seminal RTS from 1998 which is still considered one of the best ever created, and Dungeon Siege, the dungeon crawl released by Gaspowered games in 02. Sure they are not unheard of but out of the group of seven only three knew what either were.

When the night came only five others showed up, and after an hour or so of installing the spawn copy of Total Annihilation and playing with the network we were off. Three on three matches for several hours and it was greeted with great applause. Now I am no RTS guru, I prefer my strategy games to be based on hex or inches, but even I had a blast when out of the other room I heard screams of horror as my army of flash tanks rushed into the base (even better when they decided to dgun one of them and took out their vehicle plant). And no my team did not win the evening, we went 1 out of 3 that evening, but it didn’t matter since we all had a lot of fun. We never got around to Dungeon Siege, but I got a bunch of casual gamers interested in pc gaming and they were having fun.

We have met up several times to play games since then, but there is still a massive lag of time from when they arrive to when we start playing – mostly involving me fixing things, though this has been cut down by work foolishly giving me a copy of Thinstall. However the bigger problem here is that my PC collection is getting strapped. I have always been an FPS and dungeon crawl fan, with the occasionally strategy or racing game, and for the life of me I would rather not play TA till the end of time (I love the game but I desperately want to play something different). And with their aversion to all FPS games, that puts me in that pickle.

So my question to yall is what are your favorite games for a lan? We usually have 6 people show up, our current cap is 16 , soon itll be 48.

The games I have lined up for our next lan are:
Trackmania Nations
Burnout Paradise
Aliens vs Predator Gold
Myth II
Warcraft III Frozen Throne with DOTA
Dune 2000
Rise of Nations
Total Annihilation
Half Life and mods (namely CS and TFC – both with bots)
Soldat
and possibly Sacred

(We decided to not play Red Alert 2 or Starcraft since there was a rift in the players - half played one alot, the other half played the other, and both sides were very good at so the games were not very fun for the other three)

Like I said, I am always looking for suggestions for more games. Eventually I hope to have enough similar speced boxes in my house for this purpose – but that is waiting on the Ion platform to be released… And before it is brought up, as much as I want to play Left 4 Dead they would rather play it on the 360.

Your thoughts?

[the7k]

Seven Kingdoms is not only the inspiration for my name, it is also one of my favorite LAN party games. Nothing quite as fun as spying on and betraying blokes that are in the same room as you. The atmosphere can get about as tense as a high-stakes poker game too.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/sevenkingdoms/

[MrPopo]

The most fun I've ever had at a LAN setup was Quake 2. Easy to get ahold of, and there's no copy protection, so it's great for LANs. We initially started with just Deathmatch, but then we switched over to CTF, which is huge amounts of fun at a LAN. And then we rounded it off with some ChaosDM. Now, this was over the course of about two sessions of two weeks each, so you'd probably want to go with one of those for an evening. The nice thing about Quake 2 is that it's very much pick up and play. One button for fire, some movement, some jump, and weapon select. If you do CTF you'll want to add a bind for the off hand grapple (if it has one). But that's it.

[Xeogred]

I've had a lot of good times with a few people and Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander. We were kind of lame about it though, sometimes we'd have a rule where you can't attack for at least 20 minutes or so that way some of us would be more ready or whatever, lol.

I've never been too big on RTS games, but quick skirmishes against friends is always awesome. I've done this with Starcraft a few times too, but Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander were always more interesting.

[fast]

Quake 2 is one I carry with me regardless. It and UT are must haves for any lanparty in my book (speaking of which I need to thinstall it and throw it on a flash drive - thanks for the reminder).

Seven Kingdoms is really interesting looking. I will have to give it a go at our next lan.

Thank you for the suggestions.