A Lament for the LAN Party

These days I like the sub-LAN, a.k.a. calling 1→3 friends to enjoy Steam couch party games supporting 2→4 xbox controllers. Here's my selection, sorted from most to least approachable to non-gamers and marking with * my personal long-time gamer favorites:

* Gang Beasts, http://store.steampowered.com/app/285900/

* Nidhogg, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94400/

* Hidden in Plain Sight, http://store.steampowered.com/app/303590/

* Mario Kart Wii, non-Steam, played on www.dolphin-emu.org

- Sportsfriends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/277850/

- B.U.T.T.O.N., http://store.steampowered.com/app/92400/

- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, http://store.steampowered.com/app/341800/

- Kalimba, http://store.steampowered.com/app/324140/

- Mount Your Friends, http://store.steampowered.com/app/296470/

- Starwhal, http://store.steampowered.com/app/263020/

* Lethal League, http://store.steampowered.com/app/261180/

* Clusterpuck 99, http://store.steampowered.com/app/337960/

- Broforce, http://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/

- Crawl, http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780/

* TowerFall Ascension, http://store.steampowered.com/app/251470/

- Monaco, http://store.steampowered.com/app/113020/

- Blur, http://store.steampowered.com/video/42640/5707

- Distance, http://store.steampowered.com/app/233610/

- Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, http://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/

* A Fistful of Gun, http://store.steampowered.com/app/229810/

- Jamestown, http://store.steampowered.com/app/94200/

- Sky Force Anniversary, http://store.steampowered.com/app/355050/

I can't speak much for the power setup since I'm on the networking/infrastructure side, but it's pretty hefty and accounted for with tons of wiggle room. The switch alone is a decent chunk of the power. Back when we were setting it up in winter, it was able to heat a full house while sitting idle :).

For bandwidth, I'll be setting up an http cache server this weekend so that steam downloads (at least) can be retrieved locally as often as possible. The internet we have is 100Mb/s, which I personally think is more than plenty if managed correctly. We'd like the network and its capabilities to pretty much be as open as possible with a noticeable disclaimer that traffic can easily be intercepted and that Bad Stuff won't be tolerated. Ideally, we'd want the network to be as old school LAN-y as possible, which means that we unfortunately have to make some security compromises. We're going to place heavy restrictions on southbound traffic coming in, but northbound is going to be pretty limited. That said, we haven't set it up entirely yet, so we'll probably change a lot as we go.

We haven't really talked about wifi that much, but I've heard more and more that ubiquiti routers are incredible for the price. We'll probably buy two or three decent ones.

My first LAN gaming experience was during the last 30 minutes of a double-period computer class on Fridays in São Paulo when our teacher let us play Doom in the school's computer lab. This was in 1994 or 1995. I also used those machines to send my first email to a girl I had a crush on who lived on another continent.

I also remember many evenings playing [Space War][1] on an IBM machine with a friend and waking up at 6am to play [Sopwith][2] before heading to school when sleeping over another friend's place.

[1]: http://hypertexthero.com/logbook/2006/06/spacewar/ [2]: http://www.sopwith.org/

Forever! Actually I recently found out that there's still an active (semi-)professional scene which blew my mind. Amazing game, I've started playing a lot again and thinking about hosting some LAN parties for it.

Come join us at reddit.com/r/aoe2 , it's fun!

Oh man this takes me back. I remember lugging steel case builds and CRTs around to many 2-3 day cs 1.6 LAN parties in high school. So many cases of bawls were consumed; so much time was spent sitting in #findscrim