my friends still have LAN party weekends, though many times it's for an online game they're playing together, so it´s not a "pure LAN". Though for official competitions of competitive games, the LAN format is still in use - to thwart cheating.
My friend group used to bring all our PCs to on guy's house and have LAN parties in the late 90s. We played StarCraft, Age of Empires 2, and Quake 2. Back stabbing someone on StarCraft had real life repercussion during LAN parties.
Net cafes started becoming popular in the early 2000s, and we started to go to net cafes instead of dragging all our tower cases plus monitors to someone's house. We played a lot of CS and WarCraft 3 during the net cafe days. I've had my fair share of headshots made in de_dust2.
I was a zerg main on both SC and SC2. I spent quite a bit of time playing on SC2 2v2 arranged team ladder with a friend that was pretty good at the game. He dragged my incompetent ass to platinum rank at one point.
The 90s and early 2000s were the golden age of RTS. Warcraft series, Age of Empires series, Command and Conquer series, StarCraft. They don't make them like that anymore... Stormgate looks pretty promising, hopefully it does not disappoint.
I played AoE 2 vanilla. But I didn't play too much AoE2 as I was really into StarCraft.
Back then, the Battle.net network was really quite ground breaking and I found other RTS games unable to compete for too much of my time without a similar network. Playing against computer is fun and all, but playing against other humans is where the real fun is at.
Shoutout to Seoul PC, Internet cafes were a huge part of Hustles’ childhood.
Sometimes I miss it, but the time investment at this point makes it a bit infeasible Dota 2 was the craze.
It's a very fun gaming console to play with kids and/or wife if they like console games. Lots of fun family friendly multiplayer games made for that console. But value is subjective, and whether or not value prop for you increases with pregnancy is for you to answer.
For me, I bought that thing back in 2017 shortly after it was released. Even though my kids were already 4 and 5 when I bought it, I would have bought it with or without kids.
I miss multiday lan parties! Those were so much fun and sometimes pushing the limits of what human body can do in 72 hours...
It was also a way to share media, movies, music, etc by browsing friends' shared folders.
Oh man. I miss the LAN party. It was a huge event. One time we had about 12 of us in a friends garage. We were so excited because he had a new 100mbs switch. We stayed up all night, drinking coke and eating pizza. Guys were passed out in their chairs at 4am while a couple others were still getting down on some Midtown Madness. There was a period where I lived with a good friend and we basically had a little LAN party going everyday after school. Good times.
We used to bring just motherboard and other parts of PC instead of whole thing (because case itself is heavy enough) and then play Doom and Warcraft using self soldered RS232 serial cables.
No mention of couch coop games which are my favorite way to play. One machine, one tv, multiple people. Those have pretty much fallen too. Nintendo is the only company that still takes the genre somewhat seriously and that seems to be waning too.
A few years ago when I had a housemate we'd setup two consoles and two tvs to play AAA titles together. Video games are much more fun when they are irl and semi-social like this.
I still enjoy this. We play Tetris and mario games a lot. One time, we had 3 people playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the same room, one on a Wii U, One switch , and one on PC emulation. Not really multiplayer. Still a lot of fun.
Oh yeah. Gotta mark it if it's a Ethernet the cable. The type I was talking about was a serial cable with the old 9 pin connector that also was used by mice. Even more old school.
Sometimes I miss it, but the time investment at this point makes it a bit infeasible Dota 2 was the craze.