Family, Cool Stuff and Assorted Geekery; the finer things in life. Updated when I have something interesting to write :)
Stories of the Gaming Past
Giants: Citizen Kabuto was a favourite at our LAN parties for a long time. It’s an interesting game; predominantly a single-player game it had a rudimentary multiplayer tacked-on, seemingly as an afterthought.
That meant multiplayer was a massive sand-box to play in with very little thought to balance.
Hence, it was totally awesome.
Continue reading “LAN Yarns: How To Lose Friends And Ingest People”
My friends and I have regular LAN parties. Back in the day these were real LAN-only games without any connectivity to the Internet, matchmaking or progression systems. People occasionally played team-games but the real measure of a man at the LAN was in Free-For-All.
Every man for himself, the true test of skill! (Actually a test of stamina over 4+ hour games).
One man standing atop the conquered nations of his peers while earning their grudging respect! (Actually while they all seethed and grumbled about cheap tactics and underhand ‘diplomacy’).
One of the key tenets of playing these FFA games was the necessity of Casus Belli. Continue reading “LAN Yarns: The Vital Importance of Casus Belli in Free-For-All Games or How One Wrong Step From A Peon Costs You the Game”
The geek generation is getting older. More and more game protagonists aren’t saving their true-loves but instead are saving their kids. As we’ve gotten older in the real world, more of us are having a hand in raising little nerds in the One True Way, whatever that may be (Wars vs Trek, UT vs Quake, Linux vs Windows etc.). This, of course, is awesome.
But a gamer might not always be the best influence on a child, as we saw when we played Black and White….. Continue reading “LAN Yarns : Black and White; or How To Raise A Psychopath”
We play a lot of Starcraft 2 at LAN parties especially the free mods in the arcade. There are some great games on here, many of which with totally different gameplay to vanilla Starcraft 2. One of our favourites is Phantom, a game less about Starcraft 2 and more about deception, bluffing and intricate plots to back-stab your friends.
Of course you can always be too clever for your own good…. Continue reading “LAN Yarns : How not to bluff, or “I’m The Phantom!””
Back in a time that my children referred to as ‘ago’ we used to like staying up at LAN parties late into the night. Games stretched into the small hours with the only light coming from the glow of our monitors and the odd peripheral. The silence was infectious so the normal shouting was replaced with long bouts of silence; quiet occasionally broken by the frenzied mashing of keyboards or the odd sigh of dismay. Pure gaming atmosphere.
Of course this kind of immersion had its downsides if someone was feeling unscrupulous… Continue reading “LAN Yarns : Fear Of The Dark”
Or; Those Who Don’t Learn From History are Doomed to Repeat It : RTS Edition
A LAN party-staple for a number of years was Warcraft 3 : The Frozen Throne. Apparently, there were some very popular mods for it but as that whole WWW-thing was in its nascency we just stuck with FFA. Out multi-tasking and micro-managing skills were a bit sub-par (read:non-existent) so most games followed a similar pattern. But occasionally, a cunning plan was able to get into the mix.
Herring's Fishbait 