It was halo 3 custom games and race tracks for me. Halo just is 't the same anymore.
Mongoose death races in forge on Sandtrap using lots of plasma coils…
Sure is ‘t
Tell me that’s a typo
Sure is ‘t
The way me and my friends just turned into apes whilst playing games in the same room together is a feeling I miss.
We all still play online occasionally and still have fun but having the whole room drop laughing when someone hits a bullshit headshot is a hoot.
Board games have been a pretty effective way to recapture that feeling for me. When a single dice roll or card flip wrecks everyone’s plans and the whole table erupts at once, that’s a good time.
Video games, especially online, feel a little too disjointed these days – like our consciousness isn’t synced up the same way as it is when we all know we’re looking at the same thing at the same time and holding our breath.
What board games do you recommend?
Do you use voice chat with your friends playing online?
Some of my favorites that have a higher frequency of “major upset” events. It really depends on your group, and how they like to play.
I stick with pretty quick and accessible games, because we frequently have to teach new people and I hate spending 3 hours on one playthrough of a huge game and then the newbie never gets a chance to try again with their new understanding.
Favorites:
- Wizard reliably makes our whole table lose their minds
- Love Letter takes sudden drastic turns and is so quick to play
- Bang! (the dice version) has as much treachery as it does chaos
- No Thanks! is an exercise in collective sadism
- Nanuk has perhaps the best “oh shiiiiiiiiiiiii-” moments with a combination of hidden information, bluffing, push-your-luck, pleading for help, backstabbing, and high-stakes card flips
Bluffing games:
- Coup
- Skull
- Cockroach Poker
Card games with sudden win conditions:
- Five Crowns
- Mahjong
- LLAMA
Asymmetric information games:
- Secret Hitler
- Codenames
- Mysterium Park
Not as frequent, but sometimes perfect for the right crowd:
- Three Dragon Ante
- Get Bit!
- GUBS
- Ca$h n Guns has foam guns that the whole table points at each other at once, Mexican Stand-off style
Checkout tabletop simulator there’s a ton of different games in the workshop.
I think my friend group has the most fun turning games we know into absurd games. Like in uno, we’d turn on all the bullshit settings on so people’s hands are being swapped left and right while other people are picking up 50 cards.
I’m partial to pretending I’m a less pos version of Steve Harvey on Family Feud. You get to ham it up when someone replies with an answer that obviously is going to have sexual answers.
Tabletop Simulator has like real board games too but I can’t get my friends to read any type of game rules so that’s when I give up and start doing stupid shit
And yeah we use discord to talk
IMO it depends on the games. I’ve been playing co-op games with cousins, and you can get that same feeling. Like, everybody fighting together to take down a boss in Don’t Starve Together.
I have only gotten the apes feeling playing Helldivers II when I’m with 4 other people who pull through the entire missions with me, regardless of we win or lose on the extreme difficulty.
It’s the sudden bullshit that catches you off guard that has your sides hurting. A few days ago, we were holding off bugs, the transport started countdown “bro, get on the ship!” “It’s too late for me” “Bro you got 14 seconds!” “There’s no other way” just as a 500kg crushes his body and blows up the charger a step behind him . “Bro, you had to sprint 3 meters!” “It was the only way” “Guys poor one out for liberty.”
I had a job where we’d play Unreal Tournament at lunch and it was hilarious to hear them shouting at each other over the cubicle walls.
Got my kids into halo LAN.
The only thing missing is enough players for a good infection or pirates. Just a big gutted my oldest is into mountain dew.
Hahaha, can’t win em all :)
Quake III Arena Certified Noob here, we were gaming too, next to you guys.
I feel like we all independently invented the absolute LAN party classic of halo system link:
Hang em high with rocket launchers & plasma grenades only.
Nearly as iconic as blood gulch IMO
Halo CE Hang ‘em High on the original Xbox with Rockets and Grenades (we didn’t specify… frags were game too) will always be one of my favorites.
That, and Sidewinder CTF. Those were some of the most intense hours of my young adulthood in college.
I am being physically attacked.
deedeedeedeedeedeedeedee
HEADSHOT
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.
Yeah, kids. 1986 playing Netrek on the Unix system.
Literally me getting all my friends around with laptops to play halo CE at 15fps, the one friend even powered through using only a trackpad. Legend.
What is preventing you from organising that again?
I’m still having LAN parties at +30. The only thing that changed is the frequency and the games.
We are really into Pummel Party at the moment.
Friends don’t want to, making new friends isn’t easy for some of us
Yep, two on second shift. Another on regular but everyone got families and kids with little time.
Rare is the day when we get everyone together and it mostly just ends up drinking and doing some bullshit like who’s the most similar to each character on The Man From Earth but can’t decide so have to assign an alt for everyone and pull up a spreadsheet lol.
After a couple games of Um, Actually.
And even then, that was only 3 people out of the old group of ~10. Lost half of them to republicans and their dumb shit from being young turning into dumb shit as adults lol.
It’s just not the same…
We do too. Now it’s catered with delicious smoked meats and kegs of beer instead of frozen pizza and mountain dew.
UT99 for me. Diablo II for others.
Brought UT04 a few months ago for $2.99.
Still amazing.
UT3 was so smooth and fast, scaled so good 😁
My neighbors and I had a LAN set up, and we played this regularly. It was awesome.
I was at Full Sail in 2003-2004. Say what you want, but the point here is that people there LOVED games. We’d set up 2 TVs in the living room, and 2 in the bedroom, and go crazy for hours. A single game of single flag assault on Blood Gulch could last hours. Then we’d play FFA to pick leaders, then go again. After 2-3 games the hype would dwindle, some would leave, and we’d go to Munchkin. Then occasionally poker. Then Denny’s for breakfast because it was early in the morning and class was in a couple of hours on Monday.
Talk about a feeling of belonging. Definitely chasing that feeling still, and not ashamed of it.
For me it was the early days of wow.
Who’s cutting onions?
(Except for me it was Marathon and Descent)
Man, we only got coop Descent going with my family. Would have been nuts playing with more people.
I used to play by dialing directly to my friend’s computer via modem. He only had a 66MHz processor, and I had 100MHz. So if I came at him blasting away with the plasma cannon his machine couldn’t render the frames fast enough, and he’d die. So he’d creep around the map with charged fusion cannons to one-shot me.
Peak strategy based on unfair circumstances, that’s funny
The cool part was that it both leveled the playing field - because he knew the maps better - and made it really fun game of cat and mouse.
For me it was team fortress and counter strike at my first office job.
My very first job was working for an airline reservation company. The company was on the East Coast, but we were in Denver, so we stopped getting many calls after 7 or 8PM. So we did what any reasonable group of people would do in that situation. We installed Warcraft 2 on our computers and got paid to LAN. The game even had a pause function, which we had to use on the off chance we got a phone call.
Second. Sniping that damn scout midair as he concjumps the moat in 2fort.
HALO LAN in the barracks back in ‘01 and ‘02 brings back some nostalgia
It’s easier to just slam a biggie of heroin cause that feeling is gone
