</p> Get our picks for the most balanced competitive FPS games ever. Also, find out what we are playing and get some info on our upcoming lan party.
Lan Syndicate info & tickets: http://lansyndicate.com/
Question for the next episode: What are the best lan party games, and why?
Enjoy the show!
The best LAN games are any game where you can share victory with all your friends on your team/group.
Co-Op > Vs. Mode
Both of my choices are based on what can be played by everyone, and what provides the most fun for the most groups of people. Easy to learn, difficult to master.
On PC: Team Fortress 2. tf2 is a much slower and more casual first person shooter than something like quake, but it still retains things like rocket jumping and high speed, twitchy shots, making it more fun for participants at a live events than something like counterstrike. It can be fun at any skill level.
On Console: Super Smash Brothers, for the same reason. Noobs have fun because it's a cool game, and people who are serious about it get to show off their skills.
Some of my favorite LAN games:
PC Games:
Console Games:
When you guys were talking about CS, were you talking strictly deathmatch? Because the game isn't balanced around DM... That's why most dedicated deathmatch servers limit awpers to 1 or 2 per server.
Now that CS:GO has had a ton of changes I'd say it's very balanced except for a few minor things. Pistols, and SMG's. Pistols are a little overpowered which leads to too many eco rounds/force buys being won. This favors the weaker team. The team that keeps losing full buy-rounds shouldn't have such a fair chance to win rounds when their economy is in the gutters.
SMG's reward wayyyy too much cash. It's stupid being able to shred apart a team on a save/eco round and farm up a ton of money for the next rounds.
As far as T side vs CT side, they're quite balanced now but for the longest time the game was very CT sided.
For console/emulator: Super Smash Bros Project M. It's a very large mod of Smash Bros Brawl that aims to make every character viable and brings back the technical skill ceiling and physics of Melee. Unfortunately this game is now banned on Twitch (but welcomed with open arms on Hitbox) and tournament organizers are now afraid to include it as a main game. It's a shame but what can you do.
Umm, going non-competitive (or competitive if you want it to be), Minecraft? I personally just bought it for the hell of it recently. Just have a few servers running for the more casual moments at the LAN party.
The best game to play at a LAN party? Some of the best games to play with a bunch of people in the same room, at least from my experience, are Halo: Combat Evolved, Battlefield 1942, Quake and Age of Empires 2.
I think TF2 before the additional weapons was a pretty fantastic LAN party game. You could just always make it interesting by adding rules, all spies, all scout with only the bat, things like that. Plus it's whole style is goofy so you couldn't really get mad about it.
Another one that I never expected, the original Killing Floor game. I'm sure the new one will be just as good but right now it's Early Access and for good reason, Killing Floor 2 has some issues that need to be worked out. I used to go to lock-ins at my local LAN and when the original Killing Floor got released we got a group of guys there to try it out and it was incredibly fun on LAN. Online it was solid, but nowhere near as fun as when you're in person.
As a special mention, I haven't played it at all yet, but I guarantee Rocket League would be an incredible LAN party game.
I've only been to LAN parties that consisted of a small group of friends. It was usually 8 to 10 on average, with about 16 at the maximum. It would never fail that we'd end up playing the same games each time. We'd always start off with Zombie Master, which is a Half-Life 2 mod. It's and RTS-FPS hybrid, where all humans played in first-person while a single player was the RTS-style Zombie Master. It definitely had its fair share of bugs due to most of the maps being community made, but it was still exceptionally fun.
We would also play Savage (Now known as Savage XR, which is available for free, along with Savage 2). This was another RTS/FPS/TPS hybrid, which can be easily compared to Natural Selection 2. Beasts vs Humans, each with an RTS commander and players who could choose between hack-and-slash or shoot-em-up.
Finally, one of our absolute favorites was Rune. Hack-and-slash built on the Unreal Engine, complete with decapitation and limb removal. Nothing can top the feeling you get when you chop off another man's arm and beat him to death with it. The same goes for (somehow) picking up a mug of mead without any arms and (again, somehow) growing your arms back.
(Don't tattle on me, but for Midterms in my class, I had my students play Rune.)
To sum it up, my absolute favorites are Zombie Master, Savage XR, and Rune. I have to give a shout-out to SWAT 4. While it never worked out with a large group, it was fun when most people had passed out by about noon the next day.
Best Lan party game:
Battlefield 1942 was really good, but I probably have to go with the original Aliens Vs Pradator. I always was good at melee in FPS games, and I really liked playing the Alien. The Alien was considered under powered, but certain people can really climb the score board with it.
halo 1 was it for me. the graphics were not the greatest, but it was balanced and skill based and since the graphics requirements were so low, everyone was running at hundreds of fps so no ones hardware gave a significant advantage. the mechanics were nice enough to shoot someone from so far away they were only a pixel or two if your stars and sights are aligned just right.
My best LAN party games:
1 - CSGO
2 - Dota 2 and other MOBAs
3 - Killing Floor
4 - Unreal Tournament
I've hosted a good number of LAN parties and we play different games almost every time. I would actually like to preface with the games are BAD for a LAN party in my opinion (If not controlled)
Minecraft and League of Legends can be poisonous if you don't keep them under control.
That being said, Minecraft hunger games, Mincraft Bingo, and some other minecraft custom games are great for LAN parties.
ALSO good is Crawl, Don't Starve Together, Tabletop Simulator, Unturned, and Hammerwatch. (Sometimes Borderland 1 or 2)
I've always wanted to play these games at a LAN party but not enough people seem to own them:
Sanctum 2, Space Engineers, 7 Days to Die, and Ark: Survival Evolved.
Out of all of these Space Engineers seems like it could be the funnest to me as far as LAN party games go.
Cmon @DeusQain It only takes a few hundred hours and a read through an encyclopedia to start to understand dota
As for CS:GO talk, I've never had a problem with anyone in the community, though I'm at MGE at this point, so I'm out of the trash can I bit I guess
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Best LAN game overall, is probably going to be modded Battlefield where you can get 128 people on a server
http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654490046886599/
Typically I play CoD4, CS:GO, Unreal Tournament, or Crysis at my LAN parties. Unfortunately most of them turn into everybody playing their own single player games in the same room together, but it's still a lot of fun.
Sometimes we'll try a random game nobody has ever heard of to mix things up, so then everybody is on the same level of "What the hell is happening?!" instead of everyone feeling completely outgunned by the one guy who plays CS all day long.
But.... DOTA was just really boring..... like... REALLY boring.
Does anyone play insurgency? Its pretty far up on my list of balanced fps games
Depends on the hero you play and position, things with more action are the Mid Role, and Hard Carry after the early game.
And then things get crazy when a team fight happens, once you know what you're doing in a mid role or ganking role you can do a lot to change the course of the game and get things going.
Only downside to dota really is the giant learning curve, and the early game can get boring for some since the game requires some build up, like warcraft 3 or a few of those RTS games in building your base and army up.
Is that why you like starcraft over warcraft 3?
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Also dota 2 is slowly building up a library of custom games, a number of tower defense games have been ported, hopefully someone makes Warcraft 4 in to complete the circle
My favorite LAN party games are Re-Volt, Warcraft 3 mini games (Are you a lucker?, Jungle Race...) and COD2.
Best LAN game is either CS:GO or Half-Life 1 deathmatch.
As for CS balance, CS:GO is infinitely more balanced than CS 1.6 ever was. Valve is really trying hard to make sure old maps get design changes aimed at balancing competitive game more. de_train today looks almost nothing like the original because the original had terrible balancing problems.