LAN parties
Games
Simpler games are often best - easy setup, little to learn.
Some variation in the amount of concentration and thinking you have to do is nice. You may want to avoid playing a single game for very long.
Caffeine and adrenalin are staples, but but simple yet hilarious games (alcohol optional) work well too (can be anything, from Worms, to Bomber Man to some random multiplayer Flash game).
FPSes tend to work, but tend to it helps to have more than one, or variants, as playing the same balance for long gets boring. (say, UT with mutators can make it interesting)
RTSes work only if everyone knows it, and the games aren't too long.
You may wish to avoid games that not everyone can run (not everyone has latest-directX-version graphics cards), or play with you (e.g. those with IPX networking)
Older, sillier, or simpler
Note that DosBox runs on windows, linux, and OSX, and has its own IPX-over-IP layer.
Even hot-seaters and both-on-one-keyboard games can be fun - think Scorch, Worms and their clones (hot-seat worms may be handier than networking if you're all there anyway), Rampart, and whatnot.
3D
- ReVolt [1]
2D:
- cultris - many-player tetris [2] (free, win+lin)
- Blobby Volley 2 - (2/4 player?) [3]
- Worms [4]
- Worms 1 - can run fairly well in dosbox (for me needed CPU setting tweaks before it ran smoothly)
- Second gen, 2D variants, for PC:
- Worms 2 [5] - can be picky about running under newer windows variants
- Worms World Party [6] is mostly Worms 2 with a few extras around it, and is - relatively well behaved under most windowses
- Worms: Reloaded [7] - [8] - prettier, slightly changed weapons and single-player style, probably slightly better behaved (than WWP) under XP, Vista, Win 7.
- A Worms clone, such as
- teeworlds - 2D scrolling shooter [11] (free, win+lin+osx)
- soldat - 2D scrolling shooter [12] (free, win)
- Pocket Tanks (sort of networked version of Scorched Earth) [13] (win+mac)
Older:
- Duke Nukem 3D [14]
- Abuse [15]
- Bomber Man (Atomic has IPX networking)
- Dungeon Keeper (networking used to be a little finicky even at the time, though)
FPS and FPS-like
There are endless lists of FPS/combat games, most of which are roughtly the same in multiplayer. It may be useful to consider how respawning and missions work, how team play works, how much you can mess with things.
Mods can sometimes bring out neat gameplay. Some games are primarily seen with a specific mod that make it more fun.
Picking map circulation, mutators and such ahead of time (where applicable) may be nice, and be more fluid then 'oh yeah, sorry, reconnect um, wait a minute'.
Things that fall slightly outside the category but are interesting and mostly instant-playable, like
Team:
- gang garrison (2D FPS - team fortress and 8-bit style) [20] (free, win)
- Tremulous - (FPS with RTS influences) [21] (free, win+lin+osx)
- Left 4 dead
- Team Fortress (classic / TF2)
- Counterstrike
- World War 2 expansion
Free for all-ish (possibly with CTF, etc.)
- Unreal Tournament (pretty much any version)
- UT99 will run on almost any hardware (win, lin, mac)
- UT03/UT04 with details tweaked down runs on a lot too and looks better (win, lin, mac)
- UT3 (win)
- Warsow - fast FPS [22] (free, win+lin+osx)
- Cube2 - Sauerbraten (FPS) [23] (free, win+lin+osx)
- World of Padman - FPS [24] (free, win+lin+osx)
- Alien Arena
- OpenArena [25]
- Quake - 3, 2, or even quake1 (winquake) (with some work runs even more places than UT99)
- Serious Sam [26] (win, lin)
- Smokin' Guns [27]
- Alien vs Predator [28]
Combat:
- Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (free, mac+lin+osx)
- Dawn of War
- Rainbow Six (and some mods)
- Battlefield 1942 (and some mods, Desert Combat seems a favourite)
- Call Of Duty
- Medal of Honor
- Day of Defeat
- Soldier of Fortune
- Operation Flashpoint
- ..etc.
Unsorted/maybe
- Halo
- Mechwarrior
- Fight Win Prevail [29]
RTSes
RTSes can be fun, but it helps to find ones in which most people already know the game, in which you don't have waste a lot of time in game setup (...only to be zerg rushed by a computer), and only if most players are relatively balanced, or teamed well to that effect. If people don't know a game, or haven't played it nearly as much as the one suggesting the game, it's not always going to be much fun.
- Starcraft (note: IPX for on LAN games)
- Warcraft 3
- Emperor: Battle for Dune (it's fast)
- C&C and such (any of 'em that you like)
- Age of Mythology
- Empire Earth
- Stronghold
- Homeworld Cataclysm
Maximizing gameplay time; potential problems
If you just bring along a bunch of computers and games, chances are you're going to spend half your time figuring out you need more cables, copying games, installing/patching games, telling people where to put those custom maps, and trying to get them to work for everyone, why networking is being weird, that you're restaring the game and what IP address that was again and where the field was they have to add it to...
If possible, try to streamline that. Think of problems ahead of time. Try things. Write things down. Technical hurdles, problems related to specific games, update instructions, and such.
Maybe get some friends to install games maybe a week before, just to figure out what may be problematic. Try a two-computer test game for a bunch of games.
Many games are almost prohibitively annoying to play in LAN parties. For example, you may not have internet access (or more likely, don't want the bother of changing its configuration to accomodate this few-day mess), while they they may require internet to set up games, and/or for your favourite overbearing internet-requiring DRM verification. (For example, it seems that Starcraft II has all of those annoyances at once - which strikes me as ironic when you compare it to the earlier Starcraft)
Sadly, a lot of games are significantly harder to play multiplayer without pirating - and you won't convince most people to buy games just for one day. (Starcraft (as in 1998) was the last game I played that was clever about being playable with more people than there are CDs -- and only for multiplayer, which seems pretty clever. On the spot you only have the choice of not playing them or pirating. This turns many off playing a newish game, or occasionally to buying them afterwards to save bother the next party.
Graphics cards
Graphics cards come in generations, now often referred to by DirectX level.
Not everyone will have DirectX 10 graphics cards, and you're not going to convince many to buy one for one day. If you're pulling in spare computers, not all of them will be DirectX 9 either (which more and more games have as a minimum). Integrated graphics cards on Atom-based computers, netbooks and such are reguarly not DX9, so you won't be playing, say, L4D on them.
Networking
Older games may use IPX. Your options seem to include:
- Windows:
- All use 32-bit OS, Windows Vista or earlier - that's the only way you're going to use the OS's IPX drivers:
- WinXP can do IPX (you just need to install it)
- Vista 32bit can be convinced with relatively little work (using the XP 32bit drivers).
- As far as I know, 64bit Vista and Win7 cannot really be convinced to work with IPX.
- If it's a DOS game, you can use DosBox's for its tunnel-IPX-over-UDP feature (does this work on win, lin, and osx?(verify))
- Kali [30] (originating in 1995, seems to have gotten new interest recently. Paid to host a game)
- Kahn (IPX over TCP/IP) (originating in 1996) (seems fairly dead)
Yes, you can try fancy things with emulated virtual networks. You'll probably want to figure out all the details beforehand, though.
Game distribution
This will take some time to set up, so plan and test this a little ahead of time.
Transfer speed limitations:
- physical network setup -- topology, and the backplane speed of cental switches
- reliance on single host
- daemon limitations
Also consider
- P2P may be capable of LAN cleverness. You may want to look for the ability to run without internet access.
WiFi is probably a bad idea.
Transfers are going to strangle latency.
SMB/Samba
Everyone'll support it ouf of the box (Windows file sharing, MacOSX, *nix window managers like KDE, GNOME).
The speed to multiple clients/users can scale to use the interface speed, even if the speed to a single client/user won't. (more specifically, transfer out of a single underlying smbd processes won't, and said processes are unique per underlying user, so setting up multiple users is handy - and that makes this option somewhat finicky)
If you use gigabit ethernet, it may be fast enough anyway.
See:
HTTP, FTP, SFTP/SCP
Most of these are faster than samba for single copies, and for smaller scale may easily work out as faster than P2P fanciness too.
SFTP/SCP takes a little more CPU overhead in the SSH encryption, but is otherwise pretty fast.
FTP may be hard to set up within a few minutes, but works well enough once it is.
For larger setupd, all of these will need some thought - you probably don't want to rely on a single host, so you'll probably want master/mirror servers and a way of synchronizing them (say, rsync, or perhaps even multicast), and some way of balancing people (HTTP may be the easiest option to do that on, with a little dynamic page redirect code).
Direct Connect
Tends to be faster than torrent, particularly at smaller scale.
Is an application with search and chat, which can be handy at a scale beyond a few hosts.
For hubs and clients:
Torrents
Tends to only be worth the bother on larger setups, because you want to offload a single host / network link, which is only true:
- ...when your topology makes sense, or have backplanes that support more than one or two full-speed links.
- ...once enough (strategically positioned) hosts have enough to seed (at first, many hosts may get the same data in parallel - particularly if you don't superseed)
Given such topology considerations and preferably multiple seeds to start off with, this can work quite well, and may be easier to set up than some other options (particularly when people are familiar with torrent clients).
On small, single-switch, non-superseeded and otherwise not-so-considered setups it's going to be slow transfers and can use more CPU than other methods.