Multiplayer Games For Christmas Lull at the Office?

smallstepforman asks: "Christmas is almost here, and most companies will be running a skeleton staff during the holiday period. Since there will only be 8 people in the entire building where I work, you can guess what we'll all be doing - multiplayer LAN gaming. The team leader (who will be the acting manager for the holiday period) is asking about good games to play during this period. Most of the machines on the LAN are P3@733 with integrated i810 video cards, while some older machines (P2@45) have a Voodoo 3. Which multiplayer games can Slashdot readers recommend? The games need to be easy to pick up, and not require a lot of hard disk space. Free/shareware games or demos should be considered due to legal issues."

Comments

heh

[TheDarkRogue]

Quake I
-Small [we all run it off of mini cds]
-Can run on anything from a p75 up
-There are things to make it nicer [GLQuake}
-Simple
-Tons of mods avalible [TF]

Re:fps

[ReverendRyan]

Whatever happened to the "BOSS" key? Back in the old (DOOM/Wolfenstein) days, F10 dumped one to the prompt w/o asking in case the boss comes by. A quick CLS and all the evidence is gone. Even if you Alt-Tab, theres still the taskbar icon. Also, on many games, alt-tabing causes the texturemaps to get messed up, so when you reenter the game, everything looks funny.

Worms Armageddon / Worms World Party

[Fritzed]

There is practically no way that you can't become addicted to these games. Worms Armageddon isn't totally 2K/XP compatible but there is a patch for that on their website. Have Fun, Fritz

Soldat

[taion]

For some bloody, visceral shooting action, I'd suggest Soldat, which is very similar to Quake/Counter-Strike, except it's a 2D sidescroller. The chaos is immense, and it's easily one of the best side-scrolling 2D action games I've played. It supports multiplayer quite well, and is free (as in beer). It should run fine on your hardware, as well.

Cube

[D.A. Zollinger]

One word, Cube.

It is free (ZLIB software licence - similar to BSD), runs on win32, linux, linuxppc, and can be played in both server and single player mode. FPS style of play, using OpenGL and SDL, it is smooth, fun, and looks great! We need more opensource games like this.

Most importantly of all, cleanup is simple, just delete the directory you unzipped the archive to, and it is all gone.

Enjoy!

Try a multiplayer tank game!

[PurpleFloyd]

Try something like Scorched Earth 2000. It's a Java based cross-platform network-multiplayer version of the classic tanks-lob-shells game. Even better, it's GPL (no worries about legal stuff!).

Tank games require a combination of skill and luck that tends to reward skilled play, while still remaining accesible to newbies if that's a concern. Someone can learn to play decently in 5 minutes, rather than the 40-50 frustrating hours it takes to become decent at Quake/UT/Counterstrike/FPS-of-the-month.

Note that there's an ad banner, but that's just HTML, so it can be removed without any real hassle.

Worms 2. Definitely Worms 2.

[nbvb]

You _need_ this game.

Runs fine on a Pentium-100 (Yes, I know, I've tried), and is an absolute _BLAST_!

We played this thing over the network, and it was probably the most fun network game I've ever played.

You'll be hooked, I promise. Just be careful the first time you order a napalm strike; JUDGE THE WIND. :)

"The first of many!"

--NBVB