I am being physically attacked.

Then the one kid shows up and wants to play Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

The biggest Halo 1 LAN of the year is going on right now.

http://www.twitch.tv/beachlan

Humpf…. Kids. 1996 at the university’s computer lab, playing Duke Nukem and Descent. The situation became so bad that we entered an agreement with the direction. If someone needed a computer to study, someone had to leave the game. And it worked. Everybody was happy.

Why do I always feel like one of the very few who fondly remembers this feeling with Super Smash Bros. Melee? Still do, with Ultimate.

Glory days of Halo Reach / (hot take) Halo 4 / (even hotter take) maybe even a little bit of Halo 5 (but we don’t speak of the early days of Master Chief Collection) were my favourite era of Xbox multiplayer.

Halo Infinite is pretty good as far as mechanics go, but the community aspects are a shadow of its former self, and I’m not sure 343i ever completely understood this.

(I’d probably say “I wish we had Bungie back” but as a Destiny player I’m pretty sure Bungie is slipping too.)

In high school, took a networking class, the teacher of said class was the district’s IT specialist. Somehow our school accounts in that class has admin access to the entire network, which allowed me to do shit like install Counter-Strike across every machine on the network. There was always a gane going after that, and even some teachers were joining in. One of them asked me to get Diablo installed too but unfortunately, that game actually checked the CD-Key even for LAN so it couldn’t be played the same way as CS and I wasn’t going to use mine for it lol.

Unreal Tournament was so much better than Halo

I miss LAN parties… Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, CS, Diablo, Alien vs Predator 2, Quake and the successors of those games. Good times. Online is nice and all, but nothing compares to playing the night away with friends in one room

I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.

There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can’t share controls. EmuVR let’s you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.

If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other’s real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.

This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn’t an option, it could be a ray of hope.

Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.

HALO LAN in the barracks back in ‘01 and ‘02 brings back some nostalgia

Let’s see:

• WoW back when I had friends that played and a decent guild
• Playing pretty much every co op game with my best friend that we could find.
• Trying to beat the last level of Halo at 3am while having way too many energy drinks and one of us always managing to fuck something up while driving the warthog
• Playing Crota’s End raid in Destiny 1 blind with my friends when it came out and trying to get through the maze with the lamps
• That summer me and my girlfriend were both unemployed and we played hours and hours of Dungeon Defenders

Everyone either has kids now or travels too much or just isn’t interested in playing anymore. It’s sad those days are probably forever over for me now. Maybe once we’re all in nursing homes there will be a resurgence in lan parties, instead of bingo for our generation.

I stopped WoW in 2012. Last night I dreamt of Naxxramas.

And now the times are changin’,

Look at everything that’s come and gone,

Sometimes when I play that old six-string,

I think about you, wonder what went wrong

For me it was team fortress and counter strike at my first office job.