Another great LAN gaming weekend! Here’s a breakdown of what we played; no stats for Friday unfortunately as I think I killed the process by accident.
Also Thursday night we were down the pub catching up. Onward!
Saturday
I normally get up fairly early (wife; children; dog; lost the habit of lying in) so I get there before most people are up. Darkest Dungeon for the first 40 minutes while everyone else arrives / wakes / sobers up then!
First up was one of the new games of the LAN; Unreal Tournament 4. It’s a new version of the classic FPS and it’s still in early alpha. That means most of the maps aren’t textured, the UI has some bumps and bugs are to be expected. That said, it was rock-solid all weekend. The lack of texture’s weren’t much of an issue as many of us preferred the detail removed. Plus it didn’t crash at all. You can’t argue with the price either (free!) and it had all the core gameplay options (CTF, FFA, Duel etc). Lots of fun.
We returned to this a lot during the day, mostly playing FFA with the occasional game of CTF thrown in.
Company of Heroes 2 was the next game. It’s a great RTS set during WW2. The games are pretty complex for an RTS with all sorts of balls you’ve got to balance. Trying to get your guys into cover while bringing the right units to bear against the enemy (there’s a strong paper-scissors-stone element) is tricky while your men are all screaming into your ears about the terrible things that are happening to them.
The battles nice ebb-and-flow to them, where one side would get the advantage and push hard while committing to a particular technology. The other side would regather and reinforce to counter that and then the battle would turn. It was cool because it relied on both tactics and strategy to win the game; in one game we committed to holding all the fuel lines and while we took a pounding to begin with our superior tank reinforcements won the day in the long run.
Rocket League is now a staple. Our LAN games make me want to play more in between multi-player sessions but I never get round to it. One day I will master mid-air flight 😀 We had some full 4v4 games with everyone which were brilliant fun. I managed to avoid much random flailing around so no own-goals either. Yay, go me!
Next, another new game; Offworld Trading Company. This is an RTS without any combat! Instead you buy and sell resources in order to build a colony. The market responds as you’d expect; if everyone buys steel then the price goes up, allowing the player who makes it to sell at a profit. All sorts of racketeering can go on and you eventually win by buying out the other players. It’s actually very fast-paced and we enjoyed the games a lot; though it takes a bit of learning in order not to suicide (getting too far into debt tanks your share price so the other players can buy you out instantly).
L4D2 is always good when there’s 8 of us. This session had an occurrence of the Worst Survivor Fail Ever; all 4 of us getting obliterated in the area outside the safe house. Zombies 1, Humans -23487.
Dawn of War 2 returned as well which was good. Some good team games with every game ending with the appearance of the ultimate units. Awesome 🙂
Sunday
Some Killing Floor 2 failure to mix up the games we played a bit. Dead on Round 7 on Normal; our ineptitude really has no bounds.
Quake Live got a look in on Sunday too. Everyone had focussed on UT for most of the weekend but it was nice to warm up with the old classic. I still prefer the feel of the Quake movement though the weapons feel quite pared-down compared to UT.
An epic (1.5 hrs!) CoH 2 game was played with lots of use of the cold mechanics (when blizzards occur your men have to be indoors or close to a campfire or they freeze!). Loads of to-and-fro and desperate stands to secure the victory locations.
Overall
Hardly very surprisingly UT4 was the big winner with us playing it repeatedly over the weekend. Quite lopsided in favour of FPS games this LAN but OWTC, CoH2 and DoW2 were honourable exceptions.
An awesome time was had by all 😀
Herring's Fishbait 