Just going to pitch in Diablo 1&2 and Myth: the Fallen Lords and Myth 2: Soulblighter. So many hours.
Mmm... Myth aka revenge of the pyromaniac dwarf sappers!
A Lament for the LAN Party
91–100 of 161 posts
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#92It makes me sad that everyone is acting like they're no longer a thing. If you can get a few friends together then it's still great fun, possibly more so than it used to be.
There's a big organised LAN party here that runs three-four times a year, with space about 80 people in a big school hall, and then some friends of mine get together now and again at each other's homes. With modern kit you can just turn up, plug in, and be playing.
Our most recent LAN party was a friend's stag night, a full weekend of gaming, drinking, and general craziness. Also the first one we've done and explicitly left space to use the TV which was great fun later on once everyone was over Counterstrike.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#93Oh how I hated to set up the network: We've usually gathered around saturday morning, everybody hauling up their gear and waving their parents goodbye. The oldes guy in our group had removed all network cards from the PCs at his office and we spend the next six hours installing the network, hooking up BNC cables, trying to get the IPX to work, executing all kind of arcane rituals in order to get the games to work.
Later on network cards got cheaper so we had our cards pre-installed. Still the expensive 3com cards didn't mix well with the cheapest Planet ones. (We had to keep the cheap cards on one side of the BNC part and the the others on the other side...)
Ethernet was a godsend.
A couple of years later Laptops made spontaneous LAN parties possible. I wouldn't wanna go back.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#94Oh the LAN party... Me and my mates in Rio, around '99, would carry our PC towers, monitors, and backpacks of cables, keyboards and tech paraphernalia to our one of our apartments in Ipanema and set up wherever we could. There'd be maybe 4-6 of us. We'd spend maybe 4 hours trying to get all pcs "visible" to other pcs on the Windows network. At first we used coaxial cables and T plugs with a terminator at the last com…
This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboards (which were identical brand and model, ordered from the same place) had been manufactured with identical MAC addresses. After all the black magic that we had applied to the problem, without luck, throughout the LAN, it gave a great sense of joy and relief to fix the problem by simply spoofing the MAC and changing one digit :). We had an epic 8 hour long Age of Empires session afterwards ...
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#95LAN parties are still a thing among tight-knit gaming communities where the personal relationships are strong. For example, I still play Descent [0] competitively, along with perhaps a few hundred others off-and-on. There's a group of about 20 of us who have become really close friends in the last few years, and we try to have a big LAN party every summer. We've also had quite a few small get-togethers where a handfu…
Wow. Descent? I haven't even thought about that game in a decade and a half. I feel like the hardware required to play that game doesn't really require lugging, these days.
Most people run a newer .exe in higher resolution and a high framerate. You can run it moderately well with reduced settings on a Raspberry Pi, and we have people bring mini-PC's to LANs. A big CPU tower is no longer necessary.
What almost everybody lugs is their preferred controller (gaming keyboard, mouse, joystick, etc.) and a good monitor.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the advent of broadband and routers now mean networking is literally plug and play, not spending 2-3 hours trying to either set up a DHCP server, or assign static IPs and trying to figure out why it's not working, only to find out that someone mistyped it.
When Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom?) came out, I spent a month writing a socket library for DECnet, so we could play the game in network mode at a defence lab in which I was working. We had some great times, as in 1992 (1993?) it was uncommon to have a high speed connection between that many computers. Never did get around to releasing that winsock driver (no sourceforge then), which is a pity, as it may well have p…
It must have been DOOM because Wolf 3D didn't have multiplayer. Was your software an IPX emulator? That's how Kali worked, since DOOM was written to use IPX.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word "nerd" is so overused that a supermodel who likes Dickens considers herself a nerd. It's really not the word it used to be.
Ye olde definition implies physically attractive people can't be nerds, and unattractive people can't not be nerds. That's only useful for making an us vs them label. It's a good thing that anyone can nerd out on Dickens. I've heard before that it's a question of degree (“prove just how much you like Dickens!”), which is kind of an uncool way to discourage intellectual curiosity. Not everyone was forged in the pale g…
I don't think it's so much attractive in the physically attractive sense as attractive in the sense of taking care of your appearance. Nerd carries the implication that someone is so obsessed with their passion that they neglect other "unnecessary" aspects of life, the most visually obvious being their appearance, hygiene a close second.
Being "attractive" is usually more than just good looks, it takes a lot of time and commitment. Even the most naturally attractive people can be pretty unattractive if they entirely stop caring about their looks. Hell, just keeping long hair looking somewhat presentable takes a few hours a week (as I found out when I decided to grow my hair out back in highschool, didn't expect that). Add in time to go to the gym, buy groceries, cook and eat properly, find/buy well fitting clothes, etc and it adds up. If you're nerd-level passionate about something, that's all time you could be spending on your passion of choice instead.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom?) came out, I spent a month writing a socket library for DECnet, so we could play the game in network mode at a defence lab in which I was working. We had some great times, as in 1992 (1993?) it was uncommon to have a high speed connection between that many computers. Never did get around to releasing that winsock driver (no sourceforge then), which is a pity, as it may well have p…
It must have been DOOM because Wolf 3D didn't have multiplayer. Was your software an IPX emulator? That's how Kali worked, since DOOM was written to use IPX.
It could well have been IPX. As you can tell by the number of edits, my memories of the technical details are a bit fuzzy.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#99The LAN party is still well and alive in the demoscene, in the form of demoparties which are basically LAN parties plus computer art. Some of them have become extremely large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Assembly2004-areena01.jpg http://www.ozone3d.net/public/jegx/201308/asm2013.jpg
Oh man, the room full of CRTs brings back so many memories of nights spent playing chicken with a heart attack from the cocktail of energy drinks we consumed in the glow and buzz of CRTs on every surface in the room that could actually support them.
Do you happen to have any more resources about the demoscene community? It's something I've wanted to get into ever since I had my mind blown by a no-cd crack that somehow added a 9 minute high res intro video to a 25k launcher exe.
I guess I'm feeling pretty nostalgic today.
Re: A Lament for the LAN Party
#100> The LAN party, where you and six mates cram yourself into a dining room for a weekend, hook up your PCs with a complex series of switches, routers and CAT9 cables, somehow became quite the thing. What is a CAT9 cable?
It's when you have to splice a cat4 and a cat5 together with scotch tape because your longest cable wont reach from the hub on the table to the couch where you had to set up because you got there late.
I'm still actively using a LAN party spliced cat5e from over a decade ago, though I've properly soldered and heat-shrinked it since.