h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Best one we had was a Quake session at my old workplace with everyone in a different office using the phone system intercom to communicate... got rather heated and abusive, but at least when the boss turned up he was carrying pizza and beers!

Hehe, sounds fun... my friends and I have regular LAN parties at each others' houses, the most people we've ever had playing (I think...) is six, with another PC as a dedicated server...

Most of the time we're in the same room, but for the last LAN party we were spread between several rooms... it was weird because the guy who was upstairs had a brother in the next room who sounded exactly like him...

Had we been bothered, we'd have gotten BattleField Communicator working. But frankly we were quite happy not to be able to hear what he was saying...

Ever tried playing Catch the Chicken?

With twelve or so people scattered around the building, it did get pretty frantic. The average number of frags was running at about 30 each per five minute level! You can imagine it was all getting very out of hand! The level of abusive language was also getting a little out of control too!

Best thing about playing it at work, was not having to spend months trying to sort out the networking! I've done that before and spent the whole night setting up machines with non standard network cards, faulty connectors etc! Grrr!

Yeah... first LAN party we had two computer connected via a serial cable (one of which was missing a mouse due to having only one working COM port) and one of these connected to a third (a P133...) using a couple of network card.

Fast it was not. But I got the fast computer with the mouse, so I wasn't complaining...

hmmmm.
lan parties are fun.... but you really need more then 8 people.... I like going to a weekly one with around 30.... about once a month 100.... much more fun... lots of abuse...

Yep sounds fun... this weekend about six of us are getting together, that's enough for some decent team games... but I agree eight would be better. We've never actually *had* eight people at a LAN party, but it would be fun... in two weeks time there's a big clan meeting LAN party, so maybe there'll be more than six people at that one... although judging from our league game attendance it's not likely.

Where are you based? If it's close we could combine LAN parties... we're in Warrington, in Cheshire...

Great place to go to huge organised LAN Parties is http://www.gameon.co.uk - they do 1 or 2 every month, with about 30 attending.. They organise 'em all over the country, and they run the network on a 100mbps backbone, so it's hellishly fast.. I've only been to one so far, but that's due to me moving to Italy straight afterwards.. If I lived in the UK again I'd be going to every single one! So addictive! 30 player TFc anyone?

Sounds neat... biggest LAN party I ever went to was about twenty people, a kind of clan meet up for the clan that I'm sort of not really in. It was great fun... but we had fans of lots of different games, and there was only one game over the entire weekend in which everyone played!

A lot of them were die-hard QII fans... it proved *impossible* to convince them that there are seperate flag capture points in TFC

LAN parties are definitely the most fun you can have with your clothes on (with the possible exception of getting very drunk). A group of friends and I often bundle round to someone's house and have an all-nighter. We've got a five-port hub between us, because taht's how many have computers, but there's normally about 8-9 people there in total, so we have to do some kind of queuing system where when someone either gets bored or falls asleep, the next person in line takes their place. The main problem we have is that one of the people has an iMac, but the rest have PC's, so it takes a while to get it all jiggled about enough to work. Well, he's got a PC but it's only a P75 so Unreal isn't particularly useable on that.
One memorable time, though, when the Mac-person's parents went away for a week, was the four-days-running session we had. I managed to get some sleep during that one, but the organiser had no sleep at all for the four days, and started hallucinating when he was at work, seeing people running towards him in saucepans etc (he washes dishes for a living).
Doom's always good when you're in a retro mode, though. Coupled with the fact that it's quite possibly the best 1st-person 3D shooter.

Sounds fun! The longest LAN party I ever went to was an overnight two-day one... I didn't sleep for perhaps thirty hours. Four days... sheesh... I don't think *any* of our respective parents would stand for that .

The two day one had twenty people, mind... it was a big clan gathering, very cool. Most of our LAN parties, though, have between four and eight people... but we almost always have a computer each, which helps somewhat.

We've also developed a great appreciation for the finer aspects of cup-a-soup drinking .

Recently, a new type of LAN party was born... well, it didn't quite work out, but the plan was... no competitive games! We were going to play just cooperative System Shock 2...

...and it would have worked, except one person's computer couldn't handle it, so we had to play it when he left. If that hadn't been the case, though... we could have played it all weekend.

Blowing each other up is all well and good... but a multi-player cooperative adventure where you have to work together has a fair amount more long-term apeal.

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It was rather fun, yes. Although my mate decided to call it a day when he started hallucinating .

Yes, playing Unreal Tournament gives a lot of scope for team games, as it were. Quite often I play it online with a couple of mates from back home, using one of the internet based servers usually, although I sometimes use my machine as the server. Since I'm connected through the university LAN, it means free and fast access, usually get a download speed of about 50Kb a second.

Co-op games do tend to last longer than deathmatches, since shooting the hell out of each other gets boring fairly rapidly, but sometimes it's fun just to stand on top of a building with a sniper rifle picking off people as they pass.

Hopefully when I go back home for easter there'll be a nice big LAN party organised, I'll have to persuade everyone else to buy a PC so they can join in the fun.

Ooooh... fast internet connection... nice. And free!

I need to make sure I go to a university where they have that .

Hmmm, I don't suppose you're at all interesting in Clan TFC? We're always on the lookout for LPBs...

*grin* We should have a joint LAN-party sometime... I don't suppose you're anywhere in the UK, near Warrington... ?

Not very likely, I admit, but y'can't blame a guy for asking .

System Shock 2 multiplayer is more than just a co-op game of UT... (although I've nothing against co-op games of UT!) you actually play through the entire single-player game, working as a team... you can all develop different skills, and all in all it's just immensely cool. It's basically a lots-of-plot first-person shooter with stats/training/items.

Network code isn't all that great, though...

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Sorry, nowhere near Warrington. I'm in Cardiff at the moment, but when this term ends I'll be going back to Hertford (near London) where the LAN parties are generally held.

As far as I know, all universities do free access (all the ones worth going to should do), either via uni-owned machines or by linking your own to the network. At Cardiff, only selected halls of residence have the network sockets, and it's about £60-odd a year. I suspect other uni's would be similar, but I can't be certain.