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Good Games for LAN Parties?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm trying to figure out what games are good for LAN parties and especially what games don't require a CD after installation or at least allow multi-player games with only one CD. I'd like to have friends over to play over a LAN without everyone needing to own the same game. Starcraft will let you do this but I couldn't find much info about other games so I thought I'd turn to Slashdot. Which games do you like for LAN parties and why, and especially which games allow a group of people to play if only one owns the CD?"
DOOM! Get the DOOM 1 and or DOOM 2 WAD and DOOM Legacy. Can run on Linux, Windows, Macs, Whatever. DOOM is quite old and someone is sure to have one of the WADs somewhere, or just go and find them and DL them yourself. DOOM COOP or DM, Either are good. And if some of you get real board, you can do the 3 display Pan view thing with 3 computers. Should be in the manual.
(Score:0, Interesting)
Many moons ago I seem to remember playing quake 1 at a lan party - no cd required except to do the install.
IMHO its still good, honest, fast, frag-tastic fun.
Sure the later additions looked nicer, but they required a CD and really didnt add that much extra in terms of deathmatches.
On the non-fragging front many of the rts games support multiplayer spawning e.g. a very limited install, this does have some downsides but - hey it lets you have a game
Like paintball but without the mess/bruises.
How can you go wrong?
You can play LAN games with one key and you can just copy over the network the directory once you have a proper install complete. The game is immense fun with 8-12 people and you can guarantee no cheating (unlike online). Since it's like a Q2 engine game, it runs fast on most machines and has a built in communication software (Roger Wilco or Battlecomm like). Then again, if you don't like waiting after you get killed, there's always Quake 3 (and Team Arena).
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
- Often, the game has to be chosen to run on the slowest computer in the bunch; running an older game ensures that everybody can play.
- Older games tend to rely a little less on flashy 3D graphics and a little more on gameplay, especially team play.
- Extremely old games (read: those that came on floppies) usually have a trivial form of copy protection which can usually be avoided. Not that I'd ever advocate such a thing.
;) Even older CD-based games with first-generation Safelock and such are easy to copy. Just make sure that all copies are destroyed at the end of the night.
- Finally, older games are less immersive. I don't mind forgetting myself when I'm playing Silent Hill 2 or something similiar, but I go to LAN parties to socialize. Games with MIDI soundtracks are just asking to be talked over.
All that said, some of my personal recommendations for fun games:Total Annihilation (one of my favs)
Starcraft
Warcraft 2
Counterstrike
Quake 1 (yes, 1)
Descent
Diablo/Diablo II
Duke Nukem 3D
Worms 2/Armageddon
Grand Theft Auto 2
One final note: go download GLTron before the party starts. While it's only a 4-player game at max, I guarantee your guests will get a couple of hours out of it, more if you show it on a large TV so everybody can watch. =)
Here goes a quick list of features (shamelessly copied from its website):
And, of course, it's open source (released under GPL, to be precise).
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
CnC aviable for DOS/95 (orginal series)1-4 players.
CnC2 Red Alert 2-8 players 95+.
A little harder to learn than a 3d shooter, much less than Civ.
Doesn't require much more than a really fast 486 (orginal Dos mode) or P100+ (95+ mode).
You can play teams, one on one, and all for one. Goal based games, Capture the Flag'ish, best as a basic battle game.
Games can run from 30min to several hours depending on size of map/resources. Buy the box set WorldWide Warfar @local store it comes with many CDs.
This is an easy question. I just hosted another LAN party, and have thought this through a couple times. There are some places on the net to get info about how to have a LAN party, but I want to preface my comments so that you understand where I'm coming from. We had 11 people in attendance, though I was hoping for 15, so that will give you an idea of where I'm coming from, and we did it from noon till almost 10 pm last Saturday. (Hey, some of use are old guys bringing our teenagers these days. )
Some comments about the mechanics are in order because it goes directly to the issue of the fun factor. If you're going to play a game that can have a dedicated server, do it. I was lucky to be hosting this LAN party in a big conference room at my work, and had a "spare" quad Xeon with 2 GB RAM and 4 36 GB Ultra3 160 drives striped together as a server. It hosted all of the game servers I talk about below, and never even knew it was working. However, it took me most of a day to get all the configurations tweaked just right. On the other hand, no one person could take down the game because his computer crashed. We pulled a 24-port switch from a wiring closet that gave us less than 10 msec ping times. So, though setting up dedicated servers will be more work, it's more stable, and though switches are a little more expensive than hubs, they give great performance. One more thing, the point of a LAN party is to interact. Get everyone in the same room if at all possible. I've done it both ways (with people in individual offices so that we wouldn't have to move computers). Pack 'em in; it's much more fun. With On to the games...
We played UT DM FFA with the bonus pack relics to get everyone up and running, then we had a (small) UT one-on-one tournament. Again, the server hosted the FFA room and 4 tourney rooms all setup exactly the same way. UT - as of the latest patch - doesn't require a CD. However, it does require you to use a CD to load the latest patch. After that, you're good to go. You can even copy the CD to the server along with all the patches and bonus packs, and everyone should be able to get to them. I say "should" because Windows domain issues bit us in the behind and made browsing the server problematic. If you don't know what I'm saying, just make a bunch of CD copies for your friends to get up and running. I don't know if this sort of use of UT is legit, but based on the fact that Epic consciously took the CD requirement out of the game as of the 4.36 patch, I assume that they had this in mind.
After the UT stuff, I had everyone warm up to the Quake 3 engine in an Excessive Overkill DM FFA. If you haven't seen this, it's really neat. It'll wear you out, though, so don't plan to spend all day with it. Although it's available for UT as well as Q3, I like the Q3 engine slightly better, and that's what I went with. We only played it for about an hour before moving onto Threewave CTF, and that's what I really want to talk about. Threewave was the hit of the day. (I must point out that Threewave has been available for Q1 and Q2 as well, and though I have no experience with the Q1 version, I like the Q2 version just as well.) Once again, the dedicated server hosted both of these games as well. Once again, you can serve up the CD and the patches for your friends, or make copies of the disc. id Software made the game such that you can just ignore entering the CD key, and unless you want to play on a public internet server, you're fine. It was designed to play on a LAN like this.
I must change course here and talk about administrating the games: Q3 wins over UT. Although I have thought for a long time that UT was better, I got my opinion changed at this LAN party. Yes, UT has a web browser interface for administrating the server, but that - for me - means going somewhere else to do it. I don't want to tempt Windows 98 fate by Alt-Tab'ing over to a browser to make changes. (Hey, I had everything setup to play under Linux, but my hard drive ate it that morning. Besides, you can't Alt-Tab at all under Linux anyway.) So I wound up walking over to the server to get rid of the bots under UT FFA when everyone got up and running. On the other hand, changing something on the server with Q3 is easy with rcon. Yes, you have to know the command you want, which takes some learning, but you can just get a console in-game, do your thing, and get on with life.
On a related note, with UT you can use the in-game setup to configure your server and then launch in dedicated mode. On my particular server, with no 3D video card, I couldn't do that with Q3. However, setting up a config file for a dedicated Q3 server actually paled in diffculty compared to getting the command line correct for launching a UT server without the aid of the game engine. (I didn't realize till later that the UT engine tells you what command line it's using to start the game in the console. Grrr.) So, even though UT looks easier to setup and admin on paper, Q3 wins on both in actual usability in my book. And being able to change things on the fly for the group is a huge win. (For example: although Threewave allows you to call votes on lots of things in-game, most people aren't die-hard gamers like you and I, and don't understand how to respond to vote requests. Being able to hit "~", type "rcon capturelimit 7", and move on is really great.)
Some people say Counter-Strike is great, and I would agree on principle, except that I couldn't get it to work with a single CD-key. I tried this on a previous LAN party, and we seemed to be limited to 4 people on it. It was goofy for me, and I gave up trying to make it work. I didn't have time to set it up this time around, but I had planned on trying Strike Force, which is a Counter Strike-like mod for UT. It seems to have a few bugs, but being that it's based on UT, you wouldn't need CD's or keys for it at all.
We also have a sub-group that likes to play Rogue Spear. While I'm not a huge fan, I appreciate that we need to play it so that everyone gets to have some time on their favorite engine. However, this is one is definitely not LAN-party friendly. You have to either make copies of the disk or use a crack. Of course, we all had legal copies of the disc, and so were just fine playing this game. ;-) One bad thing about RS is that there is no dedicated server for the game. And it's the flakiest game I've discussed here. So, when the person hosting goes down, everyone stops. Get the person with the fastest, most-stable machine to host.
Lastly, we have some goofballs that like to play Starcraft, but play it at its fastest setting. To me, that takes all the strategy out of it, and I won't play it that way. YMMV. To me, using a strategy game like this in a LAN party is ridiculous becuase you have to sit out so long between rounds. Counter Strike or Rogue Spear are bad enough, but when a game can last for 30 or 45 minutes, that's just boring, except for the last two guys in the game.
We don't play it, because I really dominate in it, but I still love Quake 2 Lithium. You can tweak it to your hearts content, and I still think it's the best DM ever. Really fast-paced like Excessive Overkill, but not so senses-numbing. If you can get away with it, try it. You'll love it. And no CD's or keys, either.
dk
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Several people have mentioned counterstrike and day of defeat, both of which are Half-Life mods. About 10 or 12 of us get together once a month for a LAN party and we have found the HL and its mods are best. Once you install HL, you do not need the CD to play multiplayer.
There are many great multiplayer mods available: Team Fortress Classic, Deathmatch Classic (which recreates Quake 1 deathmatch), FireArms, Day of Defeat, Global Warfare, Counterstrike, etc. The first two on the list come with the latest HL patch and the rest are freely available for download.
Planet Half-Life has an extensive list of mods.
Justin Ingersoll
and have them all on a network share ahead of time... hell, build CDs with the cracked executables in place of the originals and just install with those...
It's a little on the older side. http://www.planettribes.com/
Multi-player Actions in 3-D by two or more teams, installs from one disk & no serial number. However I have seen unopened boxed copies for under $10.....
Mods are all server side and are availible online (Shifter tops my list)
"Tribes 2" is a bit more complex and has more "entanglements".
There are no Bugs to hunt so the other team will just have to do. If you don't want to bother with the setup of the Mod yourself, there are plenty of servers open to the public. You can also password protect a server for private games.
Maybe I'm a freak, but I don't really like FPS or RTS games. For LAN party goodness, I'd have to recommend driving games as my weapon of choice. Check out the Carmageddon series in particular -- it's like really fast, angry bumper cars.
--saint
ChexQuest!
(For those of you who don't know, ChexQuest was a very cheesy and nonviolent version of Doom.)
More seriously though, Worms AFAIK doesn't require the CD to play, just to start, so you could just start all the computers ahead of time running it...
Or, you could get virtual CD drive software, create virtual drives for every game you want to play, and not have to worry about CDs at all. You'll need a lot of hard drive space, but I can't imagine that would be a problem.
I play practically nothing else at Lan's now. Get a rocket arena server up and going (this may take some time, do this the day before), or for a more inclusive game play jailbreak.
:)
Jailbreak is definately easier to set up and has some unique properties: The score of the team is the score of the middle ranking player in the team - this encourages genuine teamplay rather than individual heroics; The game also presents numerous opportunities for the lamer players to be heroes by rescuing their more gung-ho mates from jail.
Once you're in to rocket arena though, point of no return
There's also some mileage in bringing a PS2 along for something more chilled out. SSX and beer, for instance.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Starcraft (and Brood War) is great fun, and you can spawn as many copies as you want. And it's cheap.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
For HL mods at lan parties, I'm a big fan of Science and Industry. Lots of fun there, plus it has just the right ridiculous sillyness to it. :)
Heretic II is also excellent with a good local group.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
The subject says it all. UrbanTerror (.net) is a great Quake III mod. It is similar to Firearms. Firearms is a great mod for Half-life. Both involve soldiers (or SWAT people, etc) in which you get your weapons in the beginning of each game. StarCraft is a very nice strategy game and doesnt involve heavy graphics, so even slow computers with (shall I even say it) embedded graphics chips can run it. Cataclysm is a version of Homeworld and is also strategy, but requires nice graphics cards and (decently) fast computers (a 500mhz with a TNT2 or so should be fine). Unfortunately, if you are the few unlucky people (like me) who have 2000 or XP and a Radeon, Cataclsym will only run in software rendering mode.
:).
These were just suggestions based just being on good games for LAN parties, not for their price or CD checking. I have been going to LAN parties for several years, most lasting from 3 days to 1.5 weeks (my friends and I are pretty hardcore computer people). In fact, I am at one right now! If you really want to get good at FPS, play Urbanterror in team survivor mode with you and any other humans on one team and nightmare bots on the other. I have been doing this for a couple days and I have improved my skills dramatically! We (my friends and I) are actually better than the best bots (nightmare). We are much better if we snipe, but only a little better when we assault. Anyway, I'm rambling; I hoped this helped some
the most fun i ever had at a LAN party was in an 8-player Kingpin deathmatch.
You don't need the CD for multiplayer action, and the graphics and sound effects make for a good experience even on older machines (uses Quake2 engine)
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long