Ahhhh. Delicious LAN. Two mods hit big at the LAN party. I've already mentioned Zombie Master on this blog. My only main problem with the mod at this point is that it runs on the Source engine, which means it lags horribly, even on gigabit LAN. I just don't understand. TF2 plays great. Why are so many other Source games so laggy? I mean, I was the server, and I still had to aim well in front of the monsters.
The other big hit was Nations At War, a mod which throws everything but the kitchen sink at Battlefield 2. There are quads and motorcycles for quick ground travel. There are cruise missiles for making ridiculously big explosions. There's a climbing rope that can be used to scale buildings and cliffs. Almost every player kit has seven or eight weapons / tools in it, so there are plenty of guns. And unlike in normal BF2, firearms actually kill people. I know. It's crazy. For the most part, we put ourselves in against a couple dozen bots and enjoyed the mayhem. One favorite tactic included sneaking into the enemy base and rigging their aircraft with C4, destroying them just after takeoff. It's still Battlefield, so at least one player (or the server) will crash every couple hours, but it's finally fun enough that we didn't have to alternate between Wolf ET (which was played a bit) and Quake ET (which wasn't). Those games are okay, but they're made to continually focus players on the next objective, not on using the climbing rope and supply crate to make an unassailable stronghold from which to hurl sticky bombs and snipe unsuspecting bots, or seeing how many bots you can run down on a quad before the enemy armor shows up and pastes you. Good times indeed.
There was also some Rise of Nations played against the computer. In the round where I wasn't almost immediately rushed into oblivion I took second place, so my practice with the game definitely paid off. More recently I took a little trip down memory lane with Total Annihilation and was a bit let down that I couldn't tell my Rise of Nations unit producing buildings to automatically add units to an army group. That one feature saves so much time and hassle. Maybe there is a way and I just missed it.
My enthusiasm for Forumwarz has cooled a bit as it's become the standard RPG grind, which feels like an odd thing to say as I'm playing a fair amount of Titan Quest. If it has better netcode than the Source engine, I may force one of my friends (the one who loves the grind) to buy it. There are eight classes, each with multiple skill paths, and you can dual class starting at level eight, so there are plenty of skills to futz with. Then there are equipment choices to consider. Basically, there's plenty to do, and experimenting with different combinations has been interesting enough to keep me playing, which is saying a lot as I have a low tolerance for straight grinding.
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