Chasing the *frag*on

For me it was Nintendo 64, Goldeneye sleepover party. Pure, unbridled, unadulterated happiness. A time with what felt like genuine acceptance and kindness.
- Goldeneye was classic, but Perfect Dark was always better IMO.
  Man, I wish Rare never sold themselves to Microsoft. They tried to get Nintendo involved and start a bidding war, but Nintendo didn't bite. Conker's Bad Fur Day is still perhaps my favourite game of all time, all the timely movie references, and the juxtoposition of a cutesy squirrel character actually being a hungover reprobate. I played so much of that teddies v French squirrels on the beach landing multiplayer.
  
  Will just leave this here for you... https://www.dsogaming.com/news/an-unofficial-pc-port-of-nintendo-64s-perfect-dark-is-available-for-download-featuring-mouselook-widescreen-fov-60fps-support/
- I still dream about those parties. We would gather in the youth centre, supervised, with a digital projector borrowed from the school (with permission), in sleeping bags, lying on the floor, projecting onto the roof, staying up until 4am...
  Slappers only, no Oddjob. ;)
  No, usually it was: autoaim off, pistols, one-hit-kills, no Oddjob.
  
  Projecting onto the roof is pure genius!
- Amen brother

- I actually never ran into that much toxicity with MW2. A little trash talk but not much cringe.
  I think this was the kind of thing that happened when someone in the lobby started it first and let the losers feel like they weren't alone.
  
  To me the most toxic part of og MW2 was all the cheaters. I played mostly free-for-all but you saw it in TDM as well. Two guys sitting in the bushes using "tactical insertion" to kill each other over and over and rack up killstreaks. It pissed me off that they never patched it out or even acknowledged the fact that nobody ever used tactical insertion for anything but cheating.
  
  You absolutely did not have the typical MW2 experience then

Jesus Christ this hits home. We used to link 4 xbox, from the basement to the 2nd story. My parents, extatic that I was interacting with other people, would order bottomless pizza and soda, and kids WAY outside of my social tier would show up and be nice to me. Then, on Monday, I'd just go back to being the weirdo nerd again...
- Yeah but at least you got to touch Becky's tit and make out with her that one time. So at least you had that going on for you... Which is nice.
  
  Hell no! OTHER dudes got to touch Becky's tit and make out with her in MY bedroom while I was diligently standing overwatch with a sniper rifle on Sidewinder in the living room.

Nothing will ever match the feelings when you were young and things were new. It's easier to accept that than face the constant disappointment trying to recapture it.
- Y'all say that, but anytime someone makes even a decent approximation of an Ace Attorney game, I'm out here chasing the high of pointing out contradictions that pin a killer.
- Yall are wak there are like actual real drugs and they just sell em at Walgreens
  2 Tylenol PMs is stronger feeling than anything
  
  Not even close...

Old people residences will become fun as the LAN generations enter them!

The 90’s was 30 years ago
- What did I do to deserve this!
  
  You tea bagged that grandma after a triple frag kill and laughed about it
- Oh fuck off!
- Not all of it

For me it was warcraft. I just bought and assembled my NZXT Vulcan rig and I think that LAN party was the peak of my existence.
- I want a machine with a handle on top that looks awesome

It's gone. Computers will never again be as exciting as they were in the early 00's, because every new advancement now comes with an infringement, a "gotcha", a sacrifice of your privacy, and a subscription to cap it off. Computers used to feel personal, they felt empowering, they felt like they were yours, and they were a gateway to a million little worlds created by people of all sorts. Now they feel like corporate advertising platforms that are just a gateway to other corporate advertising platforms.
- Until you install Linux.
  
  Or any free software really.
- I dunno I have done a lot of work to cleanse my home of all of that. I have a pi hole for DNS blocking, I use Firefox with AdBlock on both desktop and mobile, I choose to not use ad riddled apps like TikTok or Instagram (fuck Facebook). I have a VPN which I use for most everything. My home is pretty ad and corporate free. As it should be. Granted I'm pretty tech savvy so none of this was hard for me but I could see my mom having problems.
  
  I've done all of that except for pi hole, and that's just because NextDNS seems to be doing the job, although they probably sell my information too. I really should set Pi Hole up, especially since I already have a Raspberry Pi running all the time for my 3d Printer, running OctoPrint, and Klipper. I'll need to test and see if it can run all 3 at once. Unfortunately that doesn't really negate what I said. Every new exciting technology is rife with spyware, and the old Internet, while not gone, is certainly buried under a massive pile of corporate garbage. Google, Bing, DDG, hell, even Kagi have a hell of a time finding little useful websites built because of passion, instead of profit now.

For me it was a little known game called ThinkTanks. It was created as a demo for a companies game engine and never got much support. It was a silly little catoon tank game with basic 3D.
The community figured out how to bypass the demo restrictions on the game engine. The game was modded to an insane degree. Thousands of new maps, new game types and objects. I dabbled with it at the time and created around 70 maps personally.
Last I check the original game was someone like 8mb of space. The full mod pack with all of the maps was 2GB
- Wow you have just unlocked a hidden memory for me. My dad had this game on his Mac G5, and I would play (vanilla) all the time. Back then I thought the internet was small, so when I saw someone online with the name "Will" and thought it was one of my friends from school.
  I wonder if there is anyone still playing.
  
  They are:
  (img link)
  If you’d like to play you may wish to join &/or reply to that user and share the Discord I found with them :)

Replace Halo with Unreal Tournament and that's me.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein for me, but UT is up there for awesome nostalgia shooters.
  
  I love how they are called "boomer shooters" but it was Gen-X and Millenials that played that shit.
  
  HALLO
  HALLO
  HI
  HALLO
  HI
  HI
  Also I really miss how most people would like trim the settings right the way down for the best performance, and the funky little twist in your bunny hops to get to the front line.
- I miss original UT!
  They were working on a new one. Then fortnight got huge and they're too busy milking that cow to continue with a new ut.

:,)
I understand this man. Good times at lan parties.

16 guys in a 10x15 room with two TVs and two consoles. The four highest ranked players swap out so the cannon fodder can improve their skills. Whoever throws a controller first has to buy beer for the rest, and the best player gets shackled with the MadCats controller

Ah yes, a flitting glimpse of happiness

Do you ever wonder why we're here?
- Nope, work your way up to a heroic dose of magic mushies and the universe/god/cosmic conciousness practically screams it in your face and spells it out for your retarded depressed monkey brain. You're here to have fun, experience new things, bask in the sunlight, and to be a unique one-of-a-kind being woven into the tapestry of reality. A unique stich patterned by your particular mental emotional complexities and life experiences, never to be replicated again ever. Our existence is both an artistic expression, a unique fingerprint in spacetime, as well as a playful avatar of the universe feeling itself out.
  But thats just like, my opinion man
- It's one of life's greatest mysteries.

For me it was og Counter Strike which runs on anything. Even we managed to snuck flash drive filled with the game copy so it can be installed on School lab PCs :)
Funnily last time I did that, it was one year ago when I convinced my college friends to do one CS LAN game on our student lab room before everyone graduated, played it with whatever laptop and mouse they brought :)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Diablo 2, Red Alert 2 (YR?), Stronghold, Red Faction...
Man 2001 was an awesome year.
- Red Alert 2 (YR?)
  "There will be no more free will. Only my will."

Nothing will ever touch those 16 person LANs for me in Blood Gulch.
- I liked ctf on sidewinder because the lines of sight are so long, a 3 point game could last like 2 hours.

GMod LAN parties. To be fair, I'm sure I could have the same fun now. Only everyone's schedules are different and we can't get together for a good 24 hours of intermittent sleep, play, and loud music.
The fuck happened to us?
- Responsibility Isa bitch. Her stripper name is adulthood.
  I would give anything to have one weekend of pure gaming with the boys without feeling like I'm neglecting something important.
- Slavery mandated by the rich

.
- You looked at my screen you bastard!
- "Your dumb switch lives up to it's name."

So what is stopping them from doing it today?
I still have plenty of LAN parties, and PLAY local multiplayer as well.
- Yeah, I played a round of Virtua Tennis on the couch with 3 friends and beers this week all in our late 30s. Was a blast!
  LAN party is next saturday with about 70 people.

I miss Timesplitters 2 mp :(
- Timesplitters 2 multi-player had so many great modes!

One time back in Halo 3 in a FFA game I killed everyone else on the map twice before I died, and that death was from a grenade I threw to finish someone off when I ran out of ammo and had to melee him. I have never felt that powerful before or since.

It was quake3 but I get the feeling.

Blood Gulch veterans Unite!

we need to set up new lan parties and create our own fun

Day of Defeat circa 2003 for me.
- I played the shit out of that game and DoD Source for a solid 5 years

Morrowind player checking in, that game was able to support lan for my entire friend group in high school
- ...what? Morrowind isn't multiplayer!
  (Unless you're talking about this mod for OpenMW, which is relatively new.)
  
  I'm talking about my friend group size (at that time)

For me it was Black Ops 2 zombies mode on LAN XBox 360s hooked together. Shouting to other players across the hallway.
- By the time BLOPS came out Activision had stolen the zombie mod from modders and then denied mods for the games so they could sell maps (which were worse than the ones the modders made).
  This was after they literally had security escort the founders of Infinity Ward out of their own studio for publicly complaining that they hadn't been paid the agreed royalties for the original COD:MW2.
  
  Doesn’t stop me from having fond memories. I’m not going to retroactively change how I felt with my friends.

That experience is replaced with playing games in class these days. I remember one time in high school the whole class was finished with their work and so we got like half the class to play Shell Shockers. It was a chaotic time.

This was definitely a Babylon Bee article. Can't tell if they made it or just copied it from reddit. If they originated it, best Babylon Bee article by a long shot.

It's me I am man

Worked at BestBuy, we would link up and play on our own TV's at the store monthly.

I never got mine. 😔

My 16th birthday was a Halo 2 LAN party with a LotR marathon.
- Damn, that's a once in a lifetime memory right there.
  
  I peaked early.

pain

Playing league with my cousins 10 years algo may have been the only time I've got any enjoyment from League of Legends.

BF2 mayne.
- I'm one of those weirdos who actually preferred BF2142. There was some cool shit in that game, with some really innovative gameplay elements that encouraged the full range of classes, like one had senors for infantry and another had sensors for vehicles (although you had to buy all the expansions to get all the good shit). Also, hover tanks and AA mech robots.
  Saying that though, BF2 had a bit of a bug in it where you could fly a helicopter straight towards any AA and it would consistently fall underneath you. I was lethal with that. Also, I really love the fact that DICE basically hired the developers of the BF1942 mod Desert Combat to make BF2