The way me and my friends just turned into apes whilst playing games in the same room together is a feeling I miss.
We all still play online occasionally and still have fun but having the whole room drop laughing when someone hits a bullshit headshot is a hoot.
I have only gotten the apes feeling playing Helldivers II when I’m with 4 other people who pull through the entire missions with me, regardless of we win or lose on the extreme difficulty.
It’s the sudden bullshit that catches you off guard that has your sides hurting. A few days ago, we were holding off bugs, the transport started countdown “bro, get on the ship!” “It’s too late for me” “Bro you got 14 seconds!” “There’s no other way” just as a 500kg crushes his body and blows up the charger a step behind him . “Bro, you had to sprint 3 meters!” “It was the only way” “Guys poor one out for liberty.”
Got my kids into halo LAN.
The only thing missing is enough players for a good infection or pirates. Just a big gutted my oldest is into mountain dew.
Hahaha, can’t win em all :)
Board games have been a pretty effective way to recapture that feeling for me. When a single dice roll or card flip wrecks everyone’s plans and the whole table erupts at once, that’s a good time.
Video games, especially online, feel a little too disjointed these days – like our consciousness isn’t synced up the same way as it is when we all know we’re looking at the same thing at the same time and holding our breath.
What board games do you recommend?
Do you use voice chat with your friends playing online?
Checkout tabletop simulator there’s a ton of different games in the workshop.
I think my friend group has the most fun turning games we know into absurd games. Like in uno, we’d turn on all the bullshit settings on so people’s hands are being swapped left and right while other people are picking up 50 cards.
I’m partial to pretending I’m a less pos version of Steve Harvey on Family Feud. You get to ham it up when someone replies with an answer that obviously is going to have sexual answers.
Tabletop Simulator has like real board games too but I can’t get my friends to read any type of game rules so that’s when I give up and start doing stupid shit
And yeah we use discord to talk
Some of my favorites that have a higher frequency of “major upset” events. It really depends on your group, and how they like to play.
I stick with pretty quick and accessible games, because we frequently have to teach new people and I hate spending 3 hours on one playthrough of a huge game and then the newbie never gets a chance to try again with their new understanding.
Favorites:
- Wizard reliably makes our whole table lose their minds
- Love Letter takes sudden drastic turns and is so quick to play
- Bang! (the dice version) has as much treachery as it does chaos
- No Thanks! is an exercise in collective sadism
- Nanuk has perhaps the best “oh shiiiiiiiiiiiii-” moments with a combination of hidden information, bluffing, push-your-luck, pleading for help, backstabbing, and high-stakes card flips
Bluffing games:
- Coup
- Skull
- Cockroach Poker
Card games with sudden win conditions:
- Five Crowns
- Mahjong
- LLAMA
Asymmetric information games:
- Secret Hitler
- Codenames
- Mysterium Park
Not as frequent, but sometimes perfect for the right crowd:
- Three Dragon Ante
- Get Bit!
- GUBS
- Ca$h n Guns has foam guns that the whole table points at each other at once, Mexican Stand-off style
IMO it depends on the games. I’ve been playing co-op games with cousins, and you can get that same feeling. Like, everybody fighting together to take down a boss in Don’t Starve Together.
I had a job where we’d play Unreal Tournament at lunch and it was hilarious to hear them shouting at each other over the cubicle walls.
I feel like we all independently invented the absolute LAN party classic of halo system link:
Hang em high with rocket launchers & plasma grenades only.
Nearly as iconic as blood gulch IMO
Halo CE Hang ‘em High on the original Xbox with Rockets and Grenades (we didn’t specify… frags were game too) will always be one of my favorites.
That, and Sidewinder CTF. Those were some of the most intense hours of my young adulthood in college.
GoldenEye split screen.
I miss LAN parties… Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, CS, Diablo, Alien vs Predator 2, Quake and the successors of those games. Good times. Online is nice and all, but nothing compares to playing the night away with friends in one room
Seriously.
I went to a party last year where we brought gaming laptops/steam decks to play online games together. It was really cool and recaptured the magic.
AVP2, nice. That’s one most people don’t mention.
I played that a few times with friends/cow-orkers late at night in an office where I used to work. I scared the hell out of one guy when I just walked over to his office when he was playing as a marine. He was so keyed up thinking about sneaky aliens and it was so dark that he didn’t see me coming. I wasn’t even trying to scare him, just walking over to talk to him.
i had some lan parties a few years ago at my apartment. best time of my life, everyone would come over and play something
I am being physically attacked.
deedeedeedeedeedeedeedee
My friends and I used to hold sleepovers a play games, usually single player. We had roles: Player, guide reader, peanut gallery. And we would just rotate, stepping in if we knew one was better at this than the other. I played Kingdom Hearts with them like that, and Fatal Frame now that I think about it. Dang.
Edit: I love seeing how many people had a similar friend/game set up. Warms my heart. ♥️
We did this with Resident Evil and Silent Hill. One dude was playing, the others watched it like an interactive movie, giving hints and suggestions. It was so great.
I’m sure you got great memories from that. Awesome game choices ❤️
My friends and I did the same thing except with the Marathon series
We did something similar, it’s how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn’t play by myself.
UT99 for me. Diablo II for others.
Brought UT04 a few months ago for $2.99.
Still amazing.
UT3 was so smooth and fast, scaled so good 😁
My neighbors and I had a LAN set up, and we played this regularly. It was awesome.
I stopped WoW in 2012. Last night I dreamt of Naxxramas.
I believe that’s called a “nightmare”
Get kids and play halo and other old games with them. I bet the feeling will be similar, yet different. Sharing the games you played in your youth, reliving the moments and creating new ones.
Plus you can kick their asses if you don’t tell them about the game’s secrets. I used to play Mario Kart with my young niece and nephew on my brother’s old SNES. They loved it but they had no idea about the power-sliding so I could beat them at will. They also never grasped that when you’re leading the race the players behind you get better pickups.
I’m not a monster - I would sometimes let them win when the crying got too annoying.
“Get kids”…
I hosted a lot of LAN parties around that time. More for UT99/Diablo/Starcraft but yeah those were good times.
I’ve never been to a lan party…some of my friends used to go to lan houses (I don’t know the English name for it but maybe cybercafes) to play Counter Strike, but not me…my favorite memory while playing games was when I finally realized I was above average on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Me and my friends used to skateboard and we played THPS just to watch the character’s movie after completing all the levels. I was finally good at something, never had been good at videogames, that felt amazing! Completing some levels in one ride and being praised by it, oh the good old days.
Let’s see:
- WoW back when I had friends that played and a decent guild
- Playing pretty much every co op game with my best friend that we could find.
- Trying to beat the last level of Halo at 3am while having way too many energy drinks and one of us always managing to fuck something up while driving the warthog
- Playing Crota’s End raid in Destiny 1 blind with my friends when it came out and trying to get through the maze with the lamps
- That summer me and my girlfriend were both unemployed and we played hours and hours of Dungeon Defenders
Everyone either has kids now or travels too much or just isn’t interested in playing anymore. It’s sad those days are probably forever over for me now. Maybe once we’re all in nursing homes there will be a resurgence in lan parties, instead of bingo for our generation.
Who’s cutting onions?
(Except for me it was Marathon and Descent)
Man, we only got coop Descent going with my family. Would have been nuts playing with more people.
I used to play by dialing directly to my friend’s computer via modem. He only had a 66MHz processor, and I had 100MHz. So if I came at him blasting away with the plasma cannon his machine couldn’t render the frames fast enough, and he’d die. So he’d creep around the map with charged fusion cannons to one-shot me.
Peak strategy based on unfair circumstances, that’s funny
The cool part was that it both leveled the playing field - because he knew the maps better - and made it really fun game of cat and mouse.
The last time I ever enjoyed online gaming with others was Halo 3. At the time, my siblings, cousins and I who were all close, had moved to different places, were in our 20s and didn’t have kids. We would call each other and all go on halo 3 as a group. Then we started getting married, having kids, nobody had time to game at the same time. We mostly all drifted away and don’t keep up as much as we did in those days.
Humpf…. Kids. 1996 at the university’s computer lab, playing Duke Nukem and Descent. The situation became so bad that we entered an agreement with the direction. If someone needed a computer to study, someone had to leave the game. And it worked. Everybody was happy.
