Last weekend Dave and I threw LAN Party V, which was, without a doubt, the fifth LAN party. We had six guys, with Bob, Zach, Noah and Daniel in addition to Dave and myself. It was a decent turnout, but we suffered from a bit of lack of focus. We got a few games of Q3 in, as well as Urban Terror, and then we paused for some food, and lost Daniel to the playstation and Bob and the boys to a South Park video. Dave and I tried to get Worms Armageddon installed, but we couldn’t get it working on all the computers, so we ended up just setting up an Age of Empires match instead. That actually went really well (for everyone except Dave, whose computer ally betrayed him), until a network problem killed the game about a half-hour from the conclusion. At that point, everyone was a little frustrated, so we just hooked the xbox up to the projector and played some burnout3 and halo2. It was fun, but I think Dave and I need to set some boundaries for these things, to keep focus up.

For instance, while playstation and xbox are fun, we also can (and do) play them all the time, so unless we have multiple xboxes for some 6+ player action, I think we’re going to have to ban consoles. The whole point of the LAN party is to play on the LAN, and have everyone bring their computers.

In addition, we have a very limited repertoire of games, and we need to branch out, since those of us who play Q3 and Urban Terror all the time have a large advantage over the more casual gamers, and everyone is at a disadvantage to Dave and Rose when it comes to Age of Empires (which they pretty much played non-stop at UW).

Dave and I are thinking that we should introduce at least one new game at every LAN party. This will keep interest high, and give everyone more even footing since none of us would know the maps or sniper spots and stuff like that. If a game is a big hit, we can bring it back for more, and if it’s not, we can just leave it alone.

We’re also thinking that we need to get our distribution system under control. Having everyone install/copy/download the games takes forever, and there’s only so much bandwidth to go around. We were toying with the idea of setting up a CVS repository, but that seems like overkill. Probably, we’ll just make sure that the game folder is shared on Dave’s or my computer, so everyone can just copy the installed game into place.

At the next LAN party, we should have a big turnout (including Sean!), and at least three hot-shit computers that are capable of running HalfLife2, so that will be one of the new games for LAN Party VI, and (if we can figure it out in time) some version of Worms as well.

Oh, also, some of my coworkers asked me what I was going to do that weekend, and when I told them I was going to a LAN party, it was really interesting to watch their reactions. I got everything from a bemused chuckle like “oh really?” to excited interest from a fellow gamer, to horror from another coworker. “You still do that? I thought that was a high-school kind of thing.” Heh. Well, it is – but we still like it.