Multiplayer games are no fun when other people are not in the same room.

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tzhu07

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GoldenEye 007 for N64 is still to this day the best multiplayer experience for me.

For the most part, you would need two computers and two copies of a game in the same room to get that experience on a PC, and often times that's just impractical for a lot of people.

It's kinda like Internet forums. Not as engaging as talking to someone in person who shares a common interest.
 
LAN parties, I host about 3-4 a year, everyone gets together for 3-4 days and we play all manner of PC games, a great laugh.
 
Quake 2 was great 4 people in the same room...apart from ambushes didn't really work as someone would screenpeek...

Buuut several serious sam (not sure about 3) and left4dead (also works with controllers) and a quite a few other other games work splitscreen.

Also with most non budget laptops being able to play pretty much anything before and around 2006 and having LAN ports, you can just have some friends bring laptops (even netbooks) over, hook up to a router and thats it! With games being $3 on steam, or sold in 4 packs, it's easier than ever!
 
Serious Sam 3 does have split screen. But I think I read that you one person has to use kb/m and the other 3 have to use 360 controllers.
 
Goldeneye on N64 was cool till an asshole friend came over and wanted to use Oddjob.
 
I usually go to a huge BYOC every year at my college. Gotta love playing with others in the same room. Seriously, it's something I grew up with, but some people think they are the popular ones now since they just sit in front of a screen and think they have real friends by playing with others. The people I usually play with online are people I actually know and have fun with.
 
Yeah, I mostly agree with the OP. LANs are great and all, but I can hardly organise more than 2 of my friends to meet up in the one place at the one time anyway, let alone getting them to drag along their big arse gaming boxes and monitors. Its just not practical.

I have a couple of friends who game online, but even then we hardly ever actually game together. For us to all own a game that we all enjoy and happen to be playing at the same time just never works out. After a few months trying to get online together we kinda just gave up.

The only real game I play on PC multiplayer is Live for Speed when the guys in the office want to fuck around for a few races on their laptops, its one of the rare cases where things just fall into place to actually allow me to do person to person gaming and its about a billion times more entertaining than online multiplayer. Slinging shit talk at each other, sneaking up behind someone and applying their handbrake for them in the middle of a corner after you've crashed yourself. You can't joke around like that online :p
 
Super Smash Bros on N64 and the Original Halo for Xbox were a blast for me in grade school.
 
I remember running LAN parties in high school, a truly superb gaming experience among friends.

Around ten friends and I all chipped in for a switch, and we would set up in my basement seated at two rows of the big COSCO folding tables. We actually tripped a breaker the first couple of attempts, after that I got some rackmount power strips with long cords from my father's work and was able to route three strips to three different breakers.

We played a lot of Quake 1/Arena, Diablo II, UT, Jedi Knight, Age of Empires, and I believe we all made trial accounts on Planetside when that came out and played that. (There were many more games played, but those were the most memorable.)

I remember having a third table filled with nothing but Taco Bell, too... OK, so that part I don't miss, or otherwise am no longer capable of, but everything else I am extremely nostalgic about.

I really, really wish I could make this happen again among my friends, at least once. Most of my current friends would likely be adverse to hauling their PCs around to my place (we are all fans of cable management these days), but that actually isn't much of an issue as I'd likely want to play older games. (I have plenty of PCs around my place capable of playing Arena, for instance.)

The real issues revolve around time and commitments. It is almost impossible to schedule any large number of people for more than a couple of hours at a time.

For now at least, I generally play multiplayer games with at least one person from my Steam list who has voice chat. It isn't the same as being in person, but it can get pretty close if you know the person well enough.
 
tzhu07 said:
GoldenEye 007 for N64 is still to this day the best multiplayer experience for me.

For the most part, you would need two computers and two copies of a game in the same room to get that experience on a PC, and often times that's just impractical for a lot of people.

It's kinda like Internet forums. Not as engaging as talking to someone in person who shares a common interest.
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This is common sense , not sure why it deserved its own thread but alright.
 
Golden Eye on N64 is still the king for fun multiplayer that's for sure.

But for now, I still enjoy playing online (with voice chat) with my brother. It's not the same a couch play but some games doesn't offer it AND it's now harder to be on the same couch when you don't live together anymore ;)

Always fun to play a coop game with my dad and brother online tho :)
 
LAN parties were always fun but when DSL moved into the area in the late 90s our LAN parties ended up being file swap parties/download parties and few games ended up being played.

Glad I got my wife some what into gaming as it does make games a lot more fun. We played TONS of Left 4 dead 1/2 and portal together.
 
Me and my buddies have 2 annual LAN parties a year during the Summer and Winter. We generally have about 8-12 people and its some of the most fun gaming I have during the year. Nothing beats owning your friends and then boasting about it in their faces, literally.
 
While Goldeneye 007 on the N64 was a great game, the multiplayer experience on the computer > than a N64 multiplayer experience.

As others have noted, LAN parties are pretty awesome.
 
Man i was i was born maybe 5 years later...........where i could bring laptops instead of my desktop to lan parties. Desktops kind of limited me and my friends from doing that.
 
Meh, I prefer if they aren't in the same room.

Nothing against socializing, but it just makes it awkward to masturbate while gaming or on the forums when people are watching.
 
tvdang7 said:
Man i was i was born maybe 5 years later...........where i could bring laptops instead of my desktop to lan parties. Desktops kind of limited me and my friends from doing that.
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Oh God, I'm dating myself, but our LAN parties were painful.

We had to bring steel cased desktops, as aluminum cases were very rare back then, and gaming laptops... yeah right. And I had splurged on a monitor, a nice and heeeeavy 20" CRT, which was strapped to the dolly on top of my desktop for transport. Keyboard and peripherals were in another bag on top of that, heh.

So finally we would lug this equipment up the stairs to my friends house whose parents would give us the place for a night from time to time. Problem was, the AC could not cope with twelve people, twelve computers, and twelve CRTs heating up the room, and it got UNGODLY hot.

Still fun, but a huge hassle.
 
There's something to be said for coop on consoles though, I mean I'm a PC elitist through and through and I bought a PS3 last year purely for coop and the few console exclusives, my last console before that was the N64 as a kid and the coop back then with things like Goldeneye were brilliant.

At today's LAN parties we break out the PS3 on the projector screen and have some button mashing battles of Soul Calibur 4, usually at the end of the night when we're all spent and proper FPS gaming is just too much effort :)
 
Did LAN parties back in the Quake days and when I lived in Minnesota I had a group of great guys that would meet every month or two that would LAN together. We did that for the last 6 or 7 years. Always a fantastic time. It's not just the gaming, which I actually think is a lot funner with all the players in the same house, or even the same room, but it's also having other geeks to sit and BS with. I spent as much time up walking around talking to people as I did gaming at most parties. Now that I've moved back to Indiana, I'm trying to set something up. I've had a couple buddies over to game once or twice, but I'm hoping to get more people joined in. My preference would be to get at least 6 players, if not more. If I can get everyone to free up the time and all show up at once, we have 6 - 7 people who can make these. To me, there's nothing funner then a LAN party.
 
i have had very memorable experiences with both online and in person multiplayer. They offer different experiences where one cant replace the other.
 
LAN parties are great and I have many memorable moments. Good laughs with friends and many sleepless nights. You can not replace this with online experience and even voice com.
Back when internet was 56k modem and nobody would even dream of playing online, so what we did was go to internet cafe's which had LAN connection to another internet cafe accross the street, then another LAN cafe. A whole cable network between these places in one city. We had reasonable amount of players and I loved it because I got my ass kicked often on Quake 2. At that moment I appreciated it. When eventually I got ADSL internet and started playing Quake 3, Unreal Tournmanet etc. I can't tell you how big the skill gap was. In your area maybe you will find 1-2 decent players that you can benefit learning from. Online however, there wasn't a single guy who wasn't better than you. After improving a lot at aim, tactics, messing with configs, trying to have the advantage constantly, all I can say is LAN didn't feel the same anymore.
Now a days people can't even decide on what game to play giving the huge choice. If I did a home LAN right now, the only games I would play with friends is Co-Op. Serious Sam 1 in particular. This way everybody is happy, no bad feelings, and nobody gets bored getting fragged to death.
 
I completely agree. I love playing RTSs and FPSs with friends at a lan party when they are in the same room but I don't play all that much when it is online, even if I have voice chat and am playing with the same people.
 
Kokain said:
Now a days people can't even decide on what game to play giving the huge choice. If I did a home LAN right now, the only games I would play with friends is Co-Op. Serious Sam 1 in particular. This way everybody is happy, no bad feelings, and nobody gets bored getting fragged to death.
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We tend to play a lot of stuff, we often have a few more people than we do PC's so if someone doesn't want to play they can just sit out and give their seat to someone else.

To even the battlefield we play drinking games from about 6pm onwards, they're usually scaled so the better you perform in competitive environments, the more you have to drink, the good players don't dominate for very long before the battlefield inherently evens itself out, I think we struck a really good balance in our LAN parties that create an environment everyone can enjoy.

Then on to some drinking card games and finally settle down to a movie and some takeaway or playing some silly games on the PS3 projector to wind down the night.
 
I still host LANs fairly regularly, and until all of my friends are married, no longer playing games, or tied with other commitments, I will continue to do so.

It's easier now that we all have gaming laptops capable of playing most games, as well as a few extra boxes for those that don't want to have to haul stuff over. I think we've been holding then fairly regularly for nearly 15 years now - a few starts and stops here and there, new people rotate in while oldies rotate out... I think I have enough gamer friends (that don't want kids) in this area (Seattle) where I won't have to worry about filling these LANs up for a while to come.

Guess I'm lucky!
 
I agree with OP, this is why I now have setup 4 PC's in my room that can all run Battlefield 3. It is much more enjoyable and my friends come over all the time.
 
Splitscreen local MP lost its luster for me when I started to take games seriously. I don't have an 80" TV and splitscreen is too fucking small.

I just love the scope and the breadth of people you can meet in online MP gaming. VOIP can make it almost the same experience too. Sure, you can't unplug someone's controller if they piss you off or punch them in the face if they unplug yours, but as a tradeoff you get to play vastly superior games whenever you want.
 
Used to tote my rig around to local counterstrike lan parties and state events. 1999-2002 era.... yeah, the $600 I spent on my 21inch CRT was sweet and all, but kinda hard to carry when you are drunk. As I proved on one occasion by dropping it infront of about 15 people, trying to sling it up onto my shoulder.

Yeah, I agree, the combination of gaming (mostly anti-social) at a lan (social) made for some damn good times. Also, anyone cheating gets beaten with bricks. Alot more effective than "punkbuster"....and satisfying.
 
krameriffic said:
Splitscreen local MP lost its luster for me when I started to take games seriously. I don't have an 80" TV and splitscreen is too fucking small.

I just love the scope and the breadth of people you can meet in online MP gaming. VOIP can make it almost the same experience too. Sure, you can't unplug someone's controller if they piss you off or punch them in the face if they unplug yours, but as a tradeoff you get to play vastly superior games whenever you want.
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Yeah, I often play retro games with my friend and the one thing that struck me is how much shitter split screen is than I remember it. I used to play hours of split screen Perfect Dark, 1080 snowboarding and ReVolt, played them again recently and was thinking "I can't even see what's going on, everything is blurry (even by N64 standards) and the framerate feels like its less than 10fps". But back in the day I never noticed those things :p

Still, I wish I had some good modern split screen games to play.
 
The only problem with multiplayer games such as TF2 of BF at a LAN with friends is when you hop on a server and each person has their headset on listening to the game and trying to talk to them while in the same room is difficult.

And its retarded when you use in game voice chat to speak to the dude five feet from you.
 
tzhu07 said:
GoldenEye 007 for N64 is still to this day the best multiplayer experience for me.

For the most part, you would need two computers and two copies of a game in the same room to get that experience on a PC, and often times that's just impractical for a lot of people.

It's kinda like Internet forums. Not as engaging as talking to someone in person who shares a common interest.
Click to expand...

Multiplayer games are NO fun when people are in the same room. Ya it is real awesome knowing it is impossible to surprise a person or use any tactics when they know exactly where you are all the time. That is a little sarcastic but the point is that, in person is not all that. It can be nice sometimes though.

The other thing is, even if a game is more fun who cares. People have jobs and lives and their is a ton of convienience to being able to sit down and play with your friends for just 30 minutes at any time you please if that is all you have available. The trip to someones house takes time. Finally with MP games you can slot yourself into any competitive level you want with thousands of other people online. Most of the time if I play a console game in person with friends, it results in either me destroying that person or them destroying me. It really is not competitive.

I have hosted LANs in my house with up to 20 people. It is fun, but then reality sets in and you realize that is only something that can happen every so often. And in the middle time I sure do appreciate being able to play with the same people online.
 
Aaron_ATX said:
Yeah, I agree, the combination of gaming (mostly anti-social) at a lan (social) made for some damn good times. Also, anyone cheating gets beaten with bricks. Alot more effective than "punkbuster"....and satisfying.
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That gives me an idea. Maybe next time I go to a LAN I'll bring a bat with 'Punkbuster' stenciled onto it.
 
Ducman69 said:
Oh God, I'm dating myself, but our LAN parties were painful.

We had to bring steel cased desktops, as aluminum cases were very rare back then, and gaming laptops... yeah right. And I had splurged on a monitor, a nice and heeeeavy 20" CRT, which was strapped to the dolly on top of my desktop for transport. Keyboard and peripherals were in another bag on top of that, heh.

So finally we would lug this equipment up the stairs to my friends house whose parents would give us the place for a night from time to time. Problem was, the AC could not cope with twelve people, twelve computers, and twelve CRTs heating up the room, and it got UNGODLY hot.

Still fun, but a huge hassle.
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Reminds me of the time a bunch of cousins and I shut ourselves in a room and gamed it up for about 6 hours. Sometime during the night, someone shut the door and locked it. (Please note, that the lock on this door refused to work for the last 15 years that they had been living in the house). That night, it decided to finally work. 11 guys that hadn't showered all day, stuffed into a tiny room with hot computers... it was miserable. When we couldn't get anyone to open the door from the outside (they didn't believe it was actually locked) we had to climb out of the window. Good memories. In fact, I'm pretty sure that was the last time I had the opportunity to play good ol' Rune.
 
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