What are your favorite LAN party games?

A

Archaea

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Some of my favorite LAN party games over the years have been:

Rune
Unreal Tournament series
Command and Conquer Renegade
Counterstrike 1.6
Warcraft 3 tower defense maps
Carmageddon TDR2K
Farcry
Battlefield 1942

I am hosting a LAN party next month for about 12 guys and looking for additional suggestions. Free is great.
 
R

renz20003

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Aug 5, 2016
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Archaea said:
Some of my favorite LAN party games over the years have been:

Rune
Unreal Tournament series
Command and Conquer Renegade
Counterstrike 1.6
Warcraft 3 tower defense maps
Carmageddon TDR2K
Farcry
Battlefield 1942

I am hosting a LAN party next month for about 12 guys and looking for additional suggestions. Free is great.
Click to expand...

Counter strike source
Battlefield 3
Borderlands
Titanfall
UT 3
 
J

jamsomito

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Messages
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UT2k4
MOHAA
C&C Generals
Borderlands/2/TPS
AoE II/III
Payday 2
Alien Swarm
Minecraft
L4D2
Insurgency
Sniper Elite II
Company of Heros
 
B

Burr

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Necrobump. I've had a lot of fun LANing with Call of Duty 2 lately. I had to setup a private server on Digital Ocean to ensure a consistent connection, but everything went smooth from there.

I think the trick is to pick games that can run on a potato. Most folks I know bring laptops without dedicated GPUs. If you can pick games that run decent on any post-2010 laptop, you'll be in a good place.

IMO, this criteria excludes games like BF 3 and UT 3. They aren't too demanding in 2017 terms, but I'd avoid choosing them until I have a good feel for people's specs.

I'll second UT2k4 and Q3A. These games are great for small groups. You can have a good time even with just 2-3 players, without joining public servers or spawning in bots.
 
Morphes

Morphes

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C&C generals is awesome!

Starcraft 1&2
Alien swarm (runs on everything and up to 8 players co-op)
Counter strike
Payday 2
Diablo 3

But we all mostly play PUBG/ROE now
 
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A

Archaea

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I'm hosting a 16 player LAN in my basement this July.

Games lined up

  • Artemis (Star Trek bridge esq sim)
  • Blur (arcade racing)
  • Chivalry (swordplay FPS)
  • CounterStrike GO (FPS)
  • Doom (2016) (FPS)
  • Renegade X (FPS)
  • Rune (swordplay FPS)
  • Star Wars Battlefront (2015) (FPS)
  • UT2K4 (FPS)

Anything else that supports 16 players that would work with Windows 10 for 16 players and be a good time? Any RTS games support 16 people?


Battlefield 1942 might be a fun throw back, but I'm not sure if it works with Windows 10.
Carmageddon TDRK 2000 is a great game, but doesn't work well in Windows 10.
Star Wars Battefront II would be great, but as far as I know it doesn't support local LAN play (BattleFront 1 does)
PubG only allows for four player teams, and there's be no way to get all of us on the same hosted server right?
 
L

lilfiend

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Archaea said:
I'm hosting a 16 player LAN in my basement this July.

Games lined up

  • Artemis (Star Trek bridge esq sim)
  • Blur (arcade racing)
  • Chivalry (swordplay FPS)
  • CounterStrike GO (FPS)
  • Doom (2016) (FPS)
  • Renegade X (FPS)
  • Rune (swordplay FPS)
  • Star Wars Battlefront (2015) (FPS)
  • UT2K4 (FPS)

Anything else that supports 16 players that would work with Windows 10 for 16 players and be a good time? Any RTS games support 16 people?


Battlefield 1942 might be a fun throw back, but I'm not sure if it works with Windows 10.
Carmageddon TDRK 2000 is a great game, but doesn't work well in Windows 10.
Star Wars Battefront II would be great, but as far as I know it doesn't support local LAN play (BattleFront 1 does)
PubG only allows for four player teams, and there's be no way to get all of us on the same hosted server right?
Click to expand...

fwiw stellaris will do up to 32 people officially, though its said there is technically no limit, it may not be stable past 32 players

There are also mods to get supreme commander forged alliance to work with up to 16 people though that isn't very well multi-threaded and will very quickly devolve into a waiting game unless you have very low unit caps or if everyone has very high single threaded performance.

There are videos of people playing Planetary Annihilation with up to 32 people online. In my experience the game runs very well even with crazy amounts of units though it can use a lot of ram. Ram usage is based on # of planets/size of planets for the most part, very quickly getting into 8GB+ ram usage.

bf1942 from GoG is a little hit/miss on windows 10, i've found that it works most of the time if you have direct play enabled (under windows features).

Halo CE might be a good throwback if it works on windows 10.

half life and half life 2 deathmatch can be fun too, I know I really enjoyed setting gravity a bit lower in half life deathmatch so everyone was jumping around like crazy.

The swat aftermath map for warcraft 3 was huge fun back in the day too, although I think that max's out around 8-10 players. It does require you update your wc3 though so it can be a bit of a headache to get the first copy of wc3 working with it.
 
A

Archaea

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The game we had the most fun with at my July LAN was Fistfull of Frags. It’s a free half life mod.
 
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VulnoX

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Messages
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CounterStrike/StarCraft are pretty steady for us. With the right group of friends, have had fun playing WoW before. Yeah it's an MMO and the idea of LAN play rarely makes a lot of sense, but if you get a group of local friends that already play together, the banter/joint questing just feels more fun.
 
S

sonitt

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Messages
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Don't play LANs much nowadays, but when I was in college, I worked at student help desk, and every Friday we would play Starcraft all day during work hours when we had nothing to do.
 
F

Fuzzy_3D

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Messages
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Star Wars Jedi Knight!
Star Wars Battlefront 1
Flatout (demolition derby)
Worms
HOMM3 (Haven't tried the newer ones yet)
Serious Sam
Diablo 2
Red Faction 1
Age of Mythology
GTA2
Halflife 2 Deathmatch
UT 2004
Kingpin
Postal 2
NOX
 
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auntjemima

auntjemima

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Quake 3
Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun
Age of Empires 2 w/ expansion
Quake 2

Those were the go-to games when I was younger.
 
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RoxieToast

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Quake 3, Minecraft, Starcraft and Warcraft custom games, Age of Empires 2, Terraria, various moba games
 
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DCookSta

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Messages
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We just had a LAN party last weekend. We had a mix of consoles and PC.

PC: GoldenEye: Source, Age Of Empires 3, SW Galactic Battlegrounds, Deceit, Brawlhalla, Gang Beasts, UT2K4, Overwatch, Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop
Console: Mario Cart, Halo, Smash
 
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A

Archaea

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any new suggestions? I'm holding my annual LAN on July 13th this year. 16-20 people.

Games I expect to play currently:

Blur
Rune
Renegade X
Golf With Friends (only holds 12)
Fistful of Frags
Overwatch




DCookSta


SW Galactic Battlegrounds - the early 2000's version? Does it hold up okay?
Deceit - thoughts? Was it fun at LAN?
Brawlhalla - " ^ "
Gang Beasts - " ^ "
 
D

DCookSta

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Messages
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Archaea said:
any new suggestions? I'm holding my annual LAN on July 13th this year. 16-20 people.

Games I expect to play currently:

Blur
Rune
Renegade X
Golf With Friends (only holds 12)
Fistful of Frags
Overwatch




DCookSta


SW Galactic Battlegrounds - the early 2000's version? Does it hold up okay?
Deceit - thoughts? Was it fun at LAN?
Brawlhalla - " ^ "
Gang Beasts - " ^ "
Click to expand...

SW needs a few patches to run smoothly. We spent about 30 mins getting everyone on the right version so I'd skip it if you don't want to spend time troubleshooting.

Deceit is pretty good, easy to pick up and play. Teamwork makes that one more fun.

Brawlhalla is like smash and it's also a good party game. I don't remember how many characters we had but it was enough for a lot of matches. Everyone had a good time with that.

Gang Beasts is a hit everytime. The slightly crumby controls and different fight scenarios keep things interesting.
 
auntjemima

auntjemima

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Sweet baby Jesus! This thread popping up made me immediately think of Rune! Anyone else ever play that? The multiplayer was insane.
 
A

Archaea

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Messages
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I’ve hosted probably 35-40 computer LANs, and we’ve played Rune at probably every single one if that says something. We set the maps to 5 minutes or 15 kills as the rotate spec and usually play through all the multiplayer maps in an hour or so. Rune is one of the best LAN games I’ve ever played and my attendees all love it as well. It’s the one staple through all these years of LANs. Other games like Chivalry have tried, but they lack the simplicity and fast paced fun of Rune.

If you have a day LAN and 2-4 buddies to play with the single player campaign can be played co-op and it’s one of my favorite small LAN memories. Some of the level design in Rune was Epic for its times and I still remember some of the amazing level design (like the constantly shifting castle level)
 
Niner21

Niner21

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Red Faction 1
UT99
UT2004
GORE
Delta Force series
HALO (PC)
Will Rock
COD Series (Especially United Offensive)
 
D

discobiscuits

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Messages
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Duck Game is seriously amazing. If you get a projector or big TV (preferably with low response time like a TCL model or something), the 4-player (and higher) gameplay is absolutely hilarious and pairs well as a drinking game. We had a lot of fun at QuakeCon playing it; just offered controllers to random people passing by as we played.

For me, though... gotta go old school. If you have enough people to play classic games like UT99, nothing beats that sweet LAN ping since you're normally dealing with awful netcode otherwise.
 
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jarablue

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Messages
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I built a pc for my friend awhile ago, 2001. Gave him Rune for him to play. He literally played it nonstop. His wife bitched so bad about it. LOL. Do they even have LAN mode anymore in any recent game?
 
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