LAN parties

With everyone in a particular group of my friends preparing to return to the throes of post-secondary education within a week or two, we have hosted the last LAN party of the summer as a final get-together event. I was away for the whole day attending this LAN party that started approximately from 10AM, and ended around 10PM. We have had many LAN parties over the summer, winter vacations, and on the occasional holidays or weekends for the past few years. It is an event where within this group of friend we congregate ourselves and our computers and game the day away. Most of our LAN parties are hosted by a particular friend (who lives on campus when classes are in session), who’s house has a cool basement to house our activities, and a nice mother that always cooks lunch and dinner for us. Unfortunately, while my friends all live within minutes of each other, I live an hour of driving away from them. So it is a bit more weary and costly (damn the high gas prices) for me to meet with my friends in general, but it is always well worth it for a LAN party. Our roster of games includes Unreal Tournament 2004, Starcraft: Brood Wars, Garry’s Mod, SWAT 4, Battlefield 1942, Rise of Nations, in the order of most played, and there are the occasional games we have only tried once or twice. We always play with the philosophy to include as many people as we can while playing, almost all the time we have everyone playing one game together at the same time. Thus, highly demanding games such as Battlefield 2 that cannot run on some other person’s feeble laptop, or whatever reason/glitches that prevents the game’s proper working on all the computers, are omitted. There is something extremely satisfying in knowing that if you get killed in a game, you can exact revenge by simply walking up to the aggravator, and laying a smack over the back of the person’s head. But this just one of many enjoyable quirks arising from the features of a LAN party: its social climate, the intimate interactions, and the bonding of friends are reasons why I believe we will be LANing for years to come. Good times.