Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nenjin]

At the last several LAN parties we've done, we've noticed a disturbing trend: it's hard to get everyone in the same game at the same time. Lots of competitive and even non-competitive games only do 4-player lobbies and it's a big drag at a LAN party to be the one sitting off by yourself, not playing with anyone. Seems like if you're not playing an RTS with a server browser, you're not playing with more than 4 people.

So please rattle off some titles. They can be PvP or PvE, as long as we can all roll together. FPS and competitive games play better with this crowd than other things, so stuff like cooperative 4x games probably aren't going to be a hit. Likewise, while just about

It's early (for me) so my list of stuff isn't exhaustive.

Known games:
-Terraria
-Killing Floor
-CS:GO
-Company of Heroes/Starcraft/4v4 RTSses.
-MoBAs.
-Mechwarrior Online (your choices are either 1 to 4, or _12_)

[Shadowlord]

Some of these are older, but:

• Quake 3 (possibly including Quake Live but that's entirely online)
  
• Unreal Tournament (probably any of the versions of it, there are some more recent ones (where recent means 2009))
• Possibly G-Mod, but that's perhaps too complicated for trying to mess with at a lan party.
• Gimbal
• HL2: DM, I think.
• Star Wars: Battlefront II (but I'm not sure I would recommend it)
• There are source mods that may be suitable as well. Dystopia, maybe? I haven't played it in ages, so I don't remember how many players are on a team.

[Anvilfolk]

You mentioned MOBAs, but in case you haven't checked Awesomenauts out, it's awesome, and goes up to 3v3 which is a little more than 4.

AI War maybe, in the RTS, but fully cooperative.

I'm not immediately recalling any others though.

[BigD145]

Hold a Samurai Gunn tournament?

Starmade is still free I think.

What's that castle assault game that's 2d side scrolling? Arthur's Gold or some such?

[Draxis]

What's that castle assault game that's 2d side scrolling? Arthur's Gold or some such?

Close, "King Arthur's Gold".

I strongly recommend Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2 - both are available free ever since T:V came out, relatively light to download and install, and you'll get mad street cred for suggesting them.

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries is technically available for free, though ever since Mektek cut it loose there may be no legitimate download site anymore.  It's good, though, many people apperantly like it better than MWO.

Some of the modern Quakelikes, like Xonotic or Warsow, could also be nice, although they tend to be a lot harder than Quake 3 and so maybe not ideal for a LAN party.

Alternatively, a Quakeworld client - nQuake is a good one - would be good if people are into very overactive deathmatches.

[Sonlirain]

Just about any game on the spring engine. Not sure if it can be set for LAN but the game has its own online lobby similar to battlenet.
And its free of course.

[Draxis]

Spring can be set up for LAN, but it's supposedly a lot of work.  Requires running your own master server, basically, and you need a pretty powerful host computer because of the physics simulation.

[Mindmaker]

I started listing games, but then I realized that the last LAN party I was at was like 9 years ago.
Is this a problem?

[Lap]

I strongly recommend Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2

Unless everyone has never played it before this can be a terrible idea. The skill curve is so high that a single experienced player can dominate due to knowledge of skiing and other such skills mostly unique to Tribes.

There are so many source mods as well as mods for every FPS out there that I would recommend finding a game most people at your LAN have and then just start crawling modDB. Some of the mods we thought would be absolute garbage were hysterical during LANs. Some more memorable ones that we've played are Fistful of Frags, SourceForts, ThieveryUT, Pirates Vikings Knights, multiple Garry's Mod mods, Zombie Master.

I agree with MW 4 mercs and am just going to start listing out some games.

-Iron grip warlord is ok and it is $4(http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/vendetta-bundle/)
-Air Buccaneers
-Alien Swarm (Free, though can get too messy with too many people).
-Men of War (Also supports coop)
-Armagetron (Multiplayer Tron light cycles)
-Phantom mode for any RTS that supports it (This is where one person is secretly the one that needs to die but gets bonuses to survive. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance was most fun to play this with.)
-Minecraft's various adversarial or objective based mods.
-Robot Arena 2 (Make a battle your own battlebots. Might only be 4 players).
-ReVolt

[Shadowlord]

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries is technically available for free, though ever since Mektek cut it loose there may be no legitimate download site anymore.  It's good, though, many people apperantly like it better than MWO.

And it was such a pain to download and install through their service even when they supported it that it wasn't worth the trouble.

[Delta Foxtrot]

Wargame. There's three games: European Escalation, AirLand Battle and Red Dragon. Released in that order. Each expands on the previous, AirLand adding air combat and Red Dragon sea warfare. I've only played AirLand so I don't know how the other two compare. The first two should be available lot cheaper than Red Dragon.
RTS without base building. Cold war aesthetics. Supports up to 20 players in a 10v10 MP.
I googled a bit about AirLand battle's LAN capabilities and came up with this:
http://www.wargame-ee.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=163&t=37904&p=430408&hilit=lan#p430408

[TripJack]

DOOM, Quake, and UT are hard to beat for competitive FPS. For co-op FPS your best bets from fastest paced to slowest paced are Serious Sam, SWAT 4, and ARMA.

I strongly recommend Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2

Unless everyone has never played it before this can be a terrible idea. The skill curve is so high that a single experienced player can dominate due to knowledge of skiing and other such skills mostly unique to Tribes.

This, and I would add that for Tribes to really shine you need a lot of players.

[nenjin]

It's telling that recommendations go back 15 years plus in an attempt to find the last known source of true goodness. :\

Also note: it doesn't necessarily be restricted to a LAN network. Just seems that once you dial out to play a game, the restrictions start.

[BigD145]

It's telling that recommendations go back 15 years plus in an attempt to find the last known source of true goodness. :\

There hasn't been much LAN multiplayer in games of the past decade. EVERYTHING HAS TO BE XBOXLIVE PAY TO PLAY ONLY or some such thing. Everyone must buy their own copy of the game. LAN eats into profits.

[Shadowlord]

Well, the next Unreal Tournament at least is going to be completely free (not even free to play, so they say), so if/when that comes out...