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Retro LAN Party game suggestions

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hunterjwizzard

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I'm getting ready to throw another retro LAN party and am looking for some more game suggestions. I am mainly looking at games from the early 2000s era as my collection of PCs is mostly windows 10 system, I don't want to have to work super hard to make the games run. Last party we played Unreal Tournament 2004(an unsurprising hit) and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory(interesting but less fun with uneven teams). We also did a round of Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, which taught me me friends are not very interested in RTS games. After a few hours of shooting each other, no one was terribly interested in learning a slow, tedious game.

So the next party is probably going to be more UT2004, but I'd like to find another game or two that is fast-paced but accessible/easy to learn.
 
I've got Quake and Quake II in my inventory, but the gameplay is not so different from UT. "Run around shooting each other" is endless fun, but I'm looking for some thing that play different.
 
skate323k137 said:
Same.

I also love starcraft
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NeXT said:
Command and Conquer?
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RTSs haven't worked out particularly well so far. For one, the gulf between "skilled" and "newb" makes for a much less fun gameplay experience. You can die 100 times for every kill in Quake and still have fun. You die once in Starcraft and then you're sitting out the round while the big boys play the real game.

There has to be something other than "FPS" and "RTS". Any good simple hack'n'slash games?
 
Games we played back then...

- Counter Strike 1.6
- Half Life death match
- Diablo (II)
- some variants of Micro Machines
- some variants of Worms
- Dota (the WC3 map)
- Garry's Mod
...

No idea how any of this runs on modern systems
 
How did Diablo II work out in short-duration things? Like is it fun to get on and play for a couple hours, or do you really need a lot of time to get into the game?
 
I've not had much luck getting Diablo II to run on period systems using original media. Does not seem it runs very well on windows 10. /sad
 
I remember playing Anno 1602 (1602 A.D.) in multiplayer once, but its DirectPlay-based multiplayer support wasn't particularly great (game desync), and it is very time-consuming as well. However, Settlers II in split-screen was a lot of fun (local, max two players).

Since travelling with a computer was not really a thing for us, we often played turn-based games, such as Wheel of Fortune (local, max three players) or Heroes of Might and Magic (local or network, max four players).

Additionally, we did variations of "one person plays, others watch", and taking turns. This worked great with games such as Hugo and Kellogg's (which require skill), or games such as Sokoban or The Incredible Machine (which require creativity).

When we did meet up with our own computers, we often ended up playing single-player games (often adventures) while socializing and having fun.

Except for Warcraft III fun-maps ("maul"-type for the most part), basically tower defense. These were incredibly common and require cooperation instead of competition.

I probably forgot a bunch of other games.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
How did Diablo II work out in short-duration things? Like is it fun to get on and play for a couple hours, or do you really need a lot of time to get into the game?
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I guess it's fun for a couple hours if you like old school rpgs, but at the time when we started playing it went on deep into the nights...

Regarding your windows 10 setup, have you thought about using virtual machines?
 
powerlot said:
I guess it's fun for a couple hours if you like old school rpgs, but at the time when we started playing it went on deep into the nights...

Regarding your windows 10 setup, have you thought about using virtual machines?
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I have thought about it, but I provide the PCs, and having to configure and tweek 8 different VMs is... not my idea of a fun saturday afternoon.

That being said, turns out Blizzard still loves Diablo II enough to release a patch that makes it run on windows 10. Its a PITA to find a straight download for it, but it does work! Debating adding that to the repitoire for the next round. I also have a savegame editor for it I could use to preload some powerful gear so we could just mow through the early levels.

I never actually played D2 back in the day, so this is all a new experience for me.
 
Diablo (the first one) was fun to play cooperatively but I don't know how well that works with modern Windows versions.
 
Ironically I got diablo 2 base to work flawlessly on windows 10, but cannot make Lords of Destruction work for love or money. I have a clean image of the CD and the actual disk, but it appears my disk is scratched(game freezes on launch with physical disk in the drive) and LoD's copy protection is smart enough to recognize a virtual CD drive and reject it.
 
Some (perhaps odd) options.
1. Some old network arcade racing games can break things up a bit
2. CivNet or later networked ones can be a chill long network game
3. Descent is an fun net shooter with a twist (literally). We played this alot mid/late 90s but banned the atom bomb (can't remember what it was called!)
4. Newer but Borderland is a great upto 4 player co-op network game
5. Newer again but modern Street Fighters have network play
5. Chaos Reborn if turn based tournaments are okay. (We do one every Christmas but we are biased)
 
DeanoC said:
1. Some old network arcade racing games can break things up a bit
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Know any specific good ones?

DeanoC said:
3. Descent is an fun net shooter with a twist (literally). We played this alot mid/late 90s but banned the atom bomb (can't remember what it was called!)
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I love Descent but its pretty tough with keyboard/mouse. I have a few other flight sim-type games I am looking forward to trotting out, but will have to wait until I can afford a few more joy sticks. Maybe I'll load it up today and see how its faired, my recollections from 1999 are joystick or die.
 
Screamer comes to mind, 8 player LAN runs on anything Pentium up and IIRC a lot of fun.
 
My friends en me used to play Red Alert, later Ghost Recon. Not as retro, but in the time these games where the thing. We are becoming retro ourselves :)
 
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