LANPARTY2000.COM

Games Played

• Quake III Arena: Excessive Overkill Mod
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Battlefield 1942

Recap

Participants were DarkIron26, Rev, Robdabomb, VincefromTinder, and reverent. We had only one no-show this time, which still left us with plenty of players for another great LAN party.

We started with some warm-up Quake III Arena Deathmatch using the Excessive Overkill mod before moving on to Capture the Flag. Unfortunately, the bots did not seem to understand the mod very well, so we switched back to vanilla Quake III CTF for a couple of games.

The best part was that several players had never played Quake III before, so their first experience was Excessive Overkill, where every weapon is turned up to 11. If you know, you know.

After a short break to refuel and hydrate, the next game on the list was Unreal Tournament 2004. We played cooperatively against the bots, and our skills were pretty evenly matched. We split the wins about 50/50, although I'm still convinced those bots were cheating much more than normal.

We also encountered our first real technical problem. At random, different systems would begin making a hardware-style beep whenever a key was pressed, followed by the game crashing and Windows becoming unresponsive. A forced shutdown and restart was required to resolve the issue. We powered through the problems and still had a great time.

This was also the first LANPARTY2000 where the third game was selected by player vote. The choices were:

• Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
• Star Wars: Battlefront II
• Battlefield 1942

Star Wars Jedi Knight II won the vote, but stability problems quickly brought that session to an end. We then tried Star Wars: Battlefront II, which had a completely different set of technical issues of crashing during server connection.

Finally, we moved on to Battlefield 1942 and decided to see what would happen if we invited 64 bots to join us. That decision was later determined to be both unwise and hilarious.

The host laptop simply did not have enough CPU power to keep up. Bots began behaving unpredictably, with planes diving straight into the ground and ships wandering aimlessly out to sea while carrying us along for the ride. Swimming miles back to shore was truly peak gameplay. It was complete chaos, and the room was filled with laughter at the ridiculousness of it all.

Despite the technical issues, everyone had a great time, made some new friends, and left with smiles on their faces. I am confident I will have the problems sorted out before the next LANPARTY2000.

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Games Played

• Quake III Arena: Deathmatch and Capture the Flag
• Counter-Strike 1.6

Recap

The inaugural LANPARTY2000 was a success!

Participants were mohawkmike, JSON, DarkIron26, and reverent. We had two no-shows, but that did not stop us from having a great time.

We started with some warm-up Quake III Arena Deathmatch before moving on to Capture the Flag, where we showed the bots who the real kings of the bits were. The frags came fast and furious, and even the players who had never played before quickly learned the CTF maps and started making the bots cry hard to ChatGPT.

We spent much longer than planned playing Quake III CTF, but everyone was having too much fun to care.

After a short break to refuel with doughnuts and Mountain Dew, we moved on to Counter-Strike 1.6.

Most of our remaining time was spent on Dust II, with plenty of hilarious mistakes, tense firefights, and white-knuckle bomb defusals completed with only seconds to spare. There were several well-earned high fives around the room.

We ran out of time before we could play the scheduled Battlefield 1942 game, so I tabled it for the next event.

Most surprisingly, we made it through the entire first LANPARTY2000 without any technical problems. For the inaugural event, that may have been our greatest victory of all.

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