What is preventing you from organising that again?
I'm still having LAN parties at +30. The only thing that changed is the frequency and the games.
We are really into Pummel Party at the moment.
Well this hits home for me.
My first experience playing Halo was checking it out at a friend’s place in college in 2001 and proceeding to play several hours of split screen co-op all night. It was awesome.
My most recent experience playing Halo was earlier this evening, playing split screen co-op with my son. We ran around the island in The Silent Cartographer just blasting the shit out of covenant, our fellow soldiers, and each other. Though admittedly a lot of the latter was me running around like an idiot while the kid blasted my corpse high into the sky. It was also awesome.
My friends and I used to hold sleepovers a play games, usually single player. We had roles: Player, guide reader, peanut gallery. And we would just rotate, stepping in if we knew one was better at this than the other. I played Kingdom Hearts with them like that, and Fatal Frame now that I think about it. Dang.
Edit: I love seeing how many people had a similar friend/game set up. Warms my heart. ♥️
Let's see:
- WoW back when I had friends that played and a decent guild
- Playing pretty much every co op game with my best friend that we could find.
- Trying to beat the last level of Halo at 3am while having way too many energy drinks and one of us always managing to fuck something up while driving the warthog
- Playing Crota's End raid in Destiny 1 blind with my friends when it came out and trying to get through the maze with the lamps
- That summer me and my girlfriend were both unemployed and we played hours and hours of Dungeon Defenders
Everyone either has kids now or travels too much or just isn't interested in playing anymore. It's sad those days are probably forever over for me now. Maybe once we're all in nursing homes there will be a resurgence in lan parties, instead of bingo for our generation.
I hosted a lot of LAN parties around that time. More for UT99/Diablo/Starcraft but yeah those were good times.
Maybe 2002 2003 my friend and I invited one of the lonelier kids from highschool to my friends house for an overnight gaming night. Turns out the lonely kid has an og Xbox and a dreamcast.
End up playing Marvel vs. Capcom for a few hours then completely beating halo!
One of my fondest memory's.
I've never been to a lan party..some of my friends used to go to lan houses (I don't know the English name for it but maybe cybercafes) to play Counter Strike, but not me..my favorite memory while playing games was when I finally realized I was above average on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Me and my friends used to skateboard and we played THPS just to watch the character's movie after completing all the levels. I was finally good at something, never had been good at videogames, that felt amazing! Completing some levels in one ride and being praised by it, oh the good old days.
The last time I ever enjoyed online gaming with others was Halo 3. At the time, my siblings, cousins and I who were all close, had moved to different places, were in our 20s and didn't have kids. We would call each other and all go on halo 3 as a group. Then we started getting married, having kids, nobody had time to game at the same time. We mostly all drifted away and don't keep up as much as we did in those days.
In high school, took a networking class, the teacher of said class was the district's IT specialist. Somehow our school accounts in that class has admin access to the entire network, which allowed me to do shit like install Counter-Strike across every machine on the network. There was always a gane going after that, and even some teachers were joining in. One of them asked me to get Diablo installed too but unfortunately, that game actually checked the CD-Key even for LAN so it couldn't be played the same way as CS and I wasn't going to use mine for it lol.
I was at Full Sail in 2003-2004. Say what you want, but the point here is that people there LOVED games. We'd set up 2 TVs in the living room, and 2 in the bedroom, and go crazy for hours. A single game of single flag assault on Blood Gulch could last hours. Then we'd play FFA to pick leaders, then go again. After 2-3 games the hype would dwindle, some would leave, and we'd go to Munchkin. Then occasionally poker. Then Denny's for breakfast because it was early in the morning and class was in a couple of hours on Monday.
Talk about a feeling of belonging. Definitely chasing that feeling still, and not ashamed of it.
One Friday, we had a beamer/projector as a loaner, we had friends staying over and an extra xbox was in the house already as XBMC client, and we could do 4v4. That was so crazy, all of us in the same room. It was almost impossible not to get swept up in the intensity. 'that high', no ragrets.
Our friends dad was a network guy and hooked us up with a switch and about 200' of cable. I had a pickup truck, so I was in charge of gathering the extra tvs. We'd have 20 people in my buddy's basement having a blast.
Literally me getting all my friends around with laptops to play halo CE at 15fps, the one friend even powered through using only a trackpad. Legend.
Crying!
I do not remember the year. But i think we played dune and command and conquer. using null modem serial port links, and long homemade cables. I had a machine with 3 serial ports. A few years later we upgraded to a thin lan nic using coax and a hub with a coax port. For those with cat cable nic.
Played Red alert, red alert2 then a decade stright of playing CnC renegade and wolfenstein ET on the internet. Then the battlefields series ehile that was fun. Nowdays Helldivers 2 almost scratches that itch. It just needs a 32 player rush mode ;)I miss spending hours using forge to build a pair of bases, then try and invade each other for capture the flag.
Hmmm, which of these 6 teleporters takes you to the flag, and which 5 dump you into a trap...
I vividly remember being over at a friend of mine, who for the first time had a members account on RuneScape and then we started doing level 1 clue scrolls on his account. We loved that game and from the point of becoming member the possibilities seemed so endless. Wasted far too much time on it ever since. Glad I don't anymore. occasionally watch Limpwurt, a dutch youtuber, do incredible things with that game.
HALO LAN in the barracks back in ‘01 and ‘02 brings back some nostalgia
Me and the boys with timed challenge modes and raiding in WoW. At least we got realm's best on Scarlet Monastery :')
I just had a similar enough experience this sunday, playing boardgames with my gf and her friends (because my own friends were busy)
Before that, the highest high I got was around 2016, getting the gang back together for a lan party at my apartment. 5 dudes playing a couple of games and then finishing with Counter Strike 1.6. One of my friends was a hypercompetitive asshole and kept getting angrier the more he lost, which was fucking gold. Everyone else was simply laughing at how "serious" he was taking it
Same thing but with StarCraft.
Serious Sam and quake II ,😭😭😭😭😭😭
I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.
There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can't share controls. EmuVR let's you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.
If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other's real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.
This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn't an option, it could be a ray of hope.
Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.
For me it was the early days of wow.
Eh, I've found highs just as good in many other games since then. Currently getting them in Warframe, started playing a couple of months ago and having an absolute blast. You'll never find the exact same "high" from something in anything else, let those moments be and welcome new ones. You have that memory, it'll never go away and you'll always be able to get some of that feeling from the memory itself.
It's the same with love, some people spend their whole lives trying to find a specific kind they once had, and by doing so they push away all the new kinds that are able to become just as strong and important.The biggest Halo 1 LAN of the year is going on right now.
Quake III Arena Certified Noob here, we were gaming too, next to you guys.
Went to vocational school after high school because I didn't want to do 13th and 14th grade. The program designation was "electronics" but the back half was loaded with CS. The networking classroom split time between the day and night courses... in the days before user profiles. It was a shitshow. The night folks did not take kindly to our NUKEM workgroup setup, but it made for fun lunch breaks.
This is why I still play Dota 2 with my buddies on discord, made new friends, some local but most online in Dota 2
Glory days of Halo Reach / (hot take) Halo 4 / (even hotter take) maybe even a little bit of Halo 5 (but we don't speak of the early days of Master Chief Collection) were my favourite era of Xbox multiplayer.
Halo Infinite is pretty good as far as mechanics go, but the community aspects are a shadow of its former self, and I'm not sure 343i ever completely understood this.
(I'd probably say "I wish we had Bungie back" but as a Destiny player I'm pretty sure Bungie is slipping too.)
It's easier to just slam a biggie of heroin cause that feeling is gone
QuakeCon was just last week and it def hits those feelings to me.
Then the one kid shows up and wants to play Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
Why do I always feel like one of the very few who fondly remembers this feeling with Super Smash Bros. Melee? Still do, with Ultimate.
