I'm just lost and I'm looking for happiness

The way me and my friends just turned into apes whilst playing games in the same room together is a feeling I miss.
We all still play online occasionally and still have fun but having the whole room drop laughing when someone hits a bullshit headshot is a hoot.
- I have only gotten the apes feeling playing Helldivers II when I'm with 4 other people who pull through the entire missions with me, regardless of we win or lose on the extreme difficulty.
  It's the sudden bullshit that catches you off guard that has your sides hurting. A few days ago, we were holding off bugs, the transport started countdown "bro, get on the ship!" "It's too late for me" "Bro you got 14 seconds!" "There's no other way" just as a 500kg crushes his body and blows up the charger a step behind him . "Bro, you had to sprint 3 meters!" "It was the only way" "Guys poor one out for liberty."
- Board games have been a pretty effective way to recapture that feeling for me. When a single dice roll or card flip wrecks everyone's plans and the whole table erupts at once, that's a good time.
  Video games, especially online, feel a little too disjointed these days -- like our consciousness isn't synced up the same way as it is when we all know we're looking at the same thing at the same time and holding our breath.
  
  What board games do you recommend?
  Do you use voice chat with your friends playing online?
  
  IMO it depends on the games. I've been playing co-op games with cousins, and you can get that same feeling. Like, everybody fighting together to take down a boss in Don't Starve Together.
- Got my kids into halo LAN.
  The only thing missing is enough players for a good infection or pirates. Just a big gutted my oldest is into mountain dew.
  
  Hahaha, can't win em all :)
- I had a job where we'd play Unreal Tournament at lunch and it was hilarious to hear them shouting at each other over the cubicle walls.

I feel like we all independently invented the absolute LAN party classic of halo system link:
Hang em high with rocket launchers & plasma grenades only.
Nearly as iconic as blood gulch IMO
- Halo CE Hang ‘em High on the original Xbox with Rockets and Grenades (we didn’t specify… frags were game too) will always be one of my favorites.
  That, and Sidewinder CTF. Those were some of the most intense hours of my young adulthood in college.

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.
- Friends don't want to, making new friends isn't easy for some of us
  
  Yep, two on second shift. Another on regular but everyone got families and kids with little time.
  Rare is the day when we get everyone together and it mostly just ends up drinking and doing some bullshit like who's the most similar to each character on The Man From Earth but can't decide so have to assign an alt for everyone and pull up a spreadsheet lol.
  After a couple games of Um, Actually.
  And even then, that was only 3 people out of the old group of ~10. Lost half of them to republicans and their dumb shit from being young turning into dumb shit as adults lol.
- It’s just not the same…
- We do too. Now it's catered with delicious smoked meats and kegs of beer instead of frozen pizza and mountain dew.

GoldenEye split screen.
- Maybe I had weird friends but for us it was Colin McRae Rally 2
  
  If by weird you mean awesome.
  
  The AKI lineage of wrestling games for us (WCW vs NWO, WCW Revenge, Virtual Pro Wrestling, Wrestlemania 2000, No Mercy, VPW2). Good times.
- On a black and white tv, too. Somehow.
  
  I split an RCA cable so my brother and I could play on 2 old Commodore 64 monitors, each half-covered with construction paper.

I miss LAN parties... Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, CS, Diablo, Alien vs Predator 2, Quake and the successors of those games. Good times. Online is nice and all, but nothing compares to playing the night away with friends in one room
- Seriously.
  I went to a party last year where we brought gaming laptops/steam decks to play online games together. It was really cool and recaptured the magic.
- i had some lan parties a few years ago at my apartment. best time of my life, everyone would come over and play something
- AVP2, nice. That's one most people don't mention.
  I played that a few times with friends/cow-orkers late at night in an office where I used to work. I scared the hell out of one guy when I just walked over to his office when he was playing as a marine. He was so keyed up thinking about sneaky aliens and it was so dark that he didn't see me coming. I wasn't even trying to scare him, just walking over to talk to him.

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.
- God, this is where I want to be in the future as well.
  
  I sent that image to the guy from college. It was the first time I’d messaged him since 2016. He responded within seconds with “those were the days.” Then he asked about the family and we discussed what games we play with our kids now.
  Mine is about to start 2nd grade, so still pretty young, but I can always enjoy some chaotic Halo with occasional friendly fire. (Skulls enabled to give unlimited ammo and grenades — extra chaotic!)

I am being physically attacked.
- deedeedeedeedeedeedeedee
  
  HEADSHOT

UT99 for me. Diablo II for others.
- Brought UT04 a few months ago for $2.99.
  Still amazing.
- UT3 was so smooth and fast, scaled so good 😁
- My neighbors and I had a LAN set up, and we played this regularly. It was 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. ♥️
- We did this with Resident Evil and Silent Hill. One dude was playing, the others watched it like an interactive movie, giving hints and suggestions. It was so great.
  
  I'm sure you got great memories from that. Awesome game choices ❤️
- My friends and I did the same thing except with the Marathon series
- We did something similar, it's how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn't play by myself.

Get kids and play halo and other old games with them. I bet the feeling will be similar, yet different. Sharing the games you played in your youth, reliving the moments and creating new ones.
- Plus you can kick their asses if you don't tell them about the game's secrets. I used to play Mario Kart with my young niece and nephew on my brother's old SNES. They loved it but they had no idea about the power-sliding so I could beat them at will. They also never grasped that when you're leading the race the players behind you get better pickups.
  I'm not a monster - I would sometimes let them win when the crying got too annoying.
- "Get kids"...

Who's cutting onions?
(Except for me it was Marathon and Descent)
- Man, we only got coop Descent going with my family. Would have been nuts playing with more people.
  
  I used to play by dialing directly to my friend's computer via modem. He only had a 66MHz processor, and I had 100MHz. So if I came at him blasting away with the plasma cannon his machine couldn't render the frames fast enough, and he'd die. So he'd creep around the map with charged fusion cannons to one-shot me.

I stopped WoW in 2012. Last night I dreamt of Naxxramas.
- I believe that's called a "nightmare"
  
  Only when the raid wipes right before downing the last boss of the 4th wing

It was halo 3 custom games and race tracks for me. Halo just is 't the same anymore.
- Tell me that's a typo
- Mongoose death races in forge on Sandtrap using lots of plasma coils…

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.

It blew my mind back in the mid 90s the first time I played Doom in lan with a couple buddies. His dad had some sort of tech job and set up a couple desktops in the basement for us.
MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER IN A HOUSE?!
Best sleepover ever.
- My friends would just bring their computers to each other's house for a sleepover. Along with their 50 pound monitor. I was amazed the little card table we sat at didn't collapse.
- My friends and I played a ton of Doom on my company LAN back then. Getting it set up and working was a challenge but so worth it. Very fond memories.

Humpf…. Kids. 1996 at the university’s computer lab, playing Duke Nukem and Descent. The situation became so bad that we entered an agreement with the direction. If someone needed a computer to study, someone had to leave the game. And it worked. Everybody was happy.
- Yeah, kids. 1986 playing Netrek on the Unix system.

You're just missing genuine community and human interaction. It is a huge lack of it in today's world. But you can fight back just you know group up with your friends and have that lan party you miss
- Moved to a new town, looking for groups to participate in... Instead I made an acquaintence out of the barista of a coffee shop I regularly go to
- My issue mainly is that people get married and have children and then don't have time anymore.
  It always used to be a hassle to get people to even show up and I feel having families won't make that any better.
  
  As a married man with a kid, we may have less time than others, but the loneliness is still there for many men.

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.

Mine was Goldeneye. LAN parties weren't a thing when i was a kid really. Now get off my fucking lawn.
- Sorry
- Oddjob, knives only in aztec

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.

Unreal Tournament was so much better than Halo
- No need to pit the two together. They both hold a positive nostalgic memory
  
  Thank you mister/sister!
- Facing worlds
  
  Sound tracks you can hear.
  
  It was all good and well until my mate who was hosting the server kept using bots and was telefragging everyone.
  But this game was amazing when it was first released
- Nah , OpenArena is the GOAT
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexuiz

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)
- Such great games.
  My friends and I were too poor/parents weren't nerdy enough to get into PC gaming. So we had red alert set up on two PlayStation 1s with a link cable, and two big ass CRTs pointed opposite of each other.
  
  Never got into consoles. My parents saw the utillity in a computer. And now i have 25 years in tech ;)
- I was to young to get the networking screen in just the right settings when me and my brother were playing Red Alert. Luckily for me, 3 streets over, the dad of a friend in class got it set up over there, so i did get to experience it once or twice!
- I had access to a very similar setup in my friend's older brother's basement. Lots of Need for Speed and Total Annihilation played in that basement 🥹
  
  I forgot about total annihiliation!
  Was never big on car games since supercars 2 on amiga ;)

I get this feeling when thinking about playing Starsiege: Tribes back in the day. I spent hours and hours playing that game.
- Exploding CDs, man
- V-G-S

And now the times are changin',
Look at everything that's come and gone,
Sometimes when I play that old six-string,
I think about you, wonder what went wrong
- A wise man once said, "life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."

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...

For me it was team fortress and counter strike at my first office job.
- Second. Sniping that damn scout midair as he concjumps the moat in 2fort.
- My very first job was working for an airline reservation company. The company was on the East Coast, but we were in Denver, so we stopped getting many calls after 7 or 8PM. So we did what any reasonable group of people would do in that situation. We installed Warcraft 2 on our computers and got paid to LAN. The game even had a pause function, which we had to use on the off chance we got a phone call.

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.

Yep exactly. But with WoW 12 years ago. It was genuinely the best time of my life. I still tal about that era.
- I still watch Machinima and the great kodo song and cinematics with nostalgia. My alarms are wow soundtracks and I alternate my messages between between portal and the horde captured the flag sounds. Great times indeed.

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

HALO LAN in the barracks back in ‘01 and ‘02 brings back some nostalgia

Serious Sam and quake II ,😭😭😭😭😭😭

Same thing but with StarCraft.

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.
- Warframe is certainly one of the more fun games I've played recently but it doesn't come close to the Halo lan party days or WOW raids when I was in college. I don't think that's a failing of Warframe though. It's just me being broken inside and having a hard time getting friends together anymore.

The biggest Halo 1 LAN of the year is going on right now.
http://www.twitch.tv/beachlan

https://youtu.be/EdQXMHN1GGU?si=0yOT2pz_vLx2m-UZ
- Joel Haver is always great
  
  Yeah he is. I haven't watched his movies recently but I should

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

Quake III Arena Certified Noob here, we were gaming too, next to you guys.

I had a night like that once.
- It was a good night, right?

QuakeCon was just last week and it def hits those feelings to me.

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.)

Then the one kid shows up and wants to play Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

It's easier to just slam a biggie of heroin cause that feeling is gone

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.

You were playing Halo back in 2001?
- Hells yeah. Halo CE was the shit. There was a reason Halo 2 had midnight release lines down the block.