Remember spending endless hours hooking up a fire hazard and essentially duct taping your best friends’ computers together. Then for the next few hours you all download patches to get yourselves on the same version of whatever texture mapped game you were going to play. While your 56k modem hesitates to combust on everything being downloaded, you shove pizza and Surge down your throats while playing Goldeneye.
Those were the days of all night nerd fests and fathers screaming to “Shut the hell up” at 3am.
Quicker internet speeds have just about killed the LAN party, but if you want a similar feel, buy Bioshock 2, connect to Xbox live, and have at it.
The few matches I’ve played aren’t much different from Doom or Quake where there’s not much of a strategy. Your strategy revolves around who can grab the rocket launcher or BFG9000 first.
The Big Daddy suit is the BFG9000 in the multiplayer. Unless somehow all the other players work together to bring down the Big Daddy, the kill count is going to quickly rise for the person in the armor. My only streak came when I strapped on the bubble.
Most people run around randomly on the map and shooting at anything that comes in front of their barrel. Usually this amounts to two maybe three kill streaks before someone else takes you down.
You just hope that the guy you bump into has a gun that does less damage and has a much worse firerate than you. Essentially the game boils down to thirty small shoot outs.
Sometimes you come out on top and sometimes not, but an interesting thing happens in this game play. Every player in the match is only within a few kills or losing or winning. There aren’t these camping snipers finishing with a 50-3 kill to death ratio. You don’t have some jackass spawn killing his friend on the other team for a nuke. Its just a bunch of guys running around with guns.
Bioshock tries to keep you coming back with a similar leveling system as Call of Duty where you can unlock different weapons, load outs, and perks, but I did just as well with my initial load out as people with level twenty load outs.
Really the only way to exceed at this game is by remembering the maps like those Goldeneye games. Find the best defensive positions. Know where the weapons (especially the Big Daddy suits) spawn.
I don’t expect people will be playing this game longer than a month or so online, but its sort of refreshing to not have the competition of a Battlefield Bad Company or Halo. It’s a way to get back to your roots without having to load up Duke Nukem 3D and hoping someone is online to play with you.
Dan,
I disagree on a game where you’re alone in the basement with a headset on being even closely similar to the glories of a lan party, but I see the potential similarities to the classic shooters and their addictive game play and how those games encouraged the glories of the lan party.
What this article did for me however was cause me to relive the glory of not only lan parties but lan rooms and large amounts of energy drinks before they started adding vitamins and tried to explain to you how energy drinks are good for you.
Broadband killed the lan room at the same time that it killed lan parties. I have to say far too many of my hours in high school were spent in two different strip malls in a retail space with very dark lighting, sixty computers with sweaty males playing at zero ping in intense matches of counterstrike and the lone girlfriend bored and complaining.
There are few things better than dropping a camper in a game and then getting up at the end of the round and smacking him on the back of the head in person. The lame things people get away with in servers in the safety of their own home just aren’t possible in a lan room and the rants of cheating are very easily disproved.
Your article essentially just gave me the itch to get the 30 port switch, the extra power strips and dust from crawling on the floor getting the computer out and drink energy drinks and play retro games until I pass out.