O'er The LAN of The Free

Last Saturday, I went to a LAN party for the first time in ages.  How long has it been, you ask?  It's been too damn long.  Particularly since this LAN promised all sort of good deathmatching action.  An old and trusted friend of mine turned me on to a mod for Half-Life 2 titled Empires, which is a neat little mashup of class-based shooter and realtime strategy with a little bit of RPG customization thrown in for flavor.  I downloaded and installed the mod, then fired it up a few days before the actual LAN party, joining a couple public servers and getting my feet wet.

The shooter element was butter smooth, as you might well imagine for an HL2 mod.  Picking a class was pretty easy.  As long as you remembered to fall back to a barracks or armory if you wanted to change your class, it was a straightforward affair.  Years of target shooting, I fear, have predisposed me towards a sniper's role.  As an engineer, I felt kinda useless, even though I was racking up advancement points pretty quickly in that capacity.  As a regular run of the mill soldier, I felt even more useless.  As a rocket toting, mortar chucking, big explosion making grenadier, I was proven useless.  While I wasn't too awful bad taking on the role of commander, it wasn't exactly awe inspiring, either.  Robert Browning certainly had a point when he said "a man's reach must exceed his grasp, or else what's a Heaven for?", but I felt I was doing more good sitting out in the weeds, hunkered down, driving tacks at long range through enemy domes.  Yeah, I got killed a lot, and I did miss out on some of the big tank battles, but I still did good.  Somebody's got to go out, find the enemy, mark him, and cause a little havoc along the way.  That was me.  The lone gunman, putting steel on target, sneer and be damned.

Alas, the gaming goodness ended long before it had been scheduled to end.  For one reason or another, over half the players bailed out unexpectedly.  This left us with a population far below sustainable gaming levels, which meant that the party was over and the LAN had to be dismantled.  It was kind of a shame, since there had been some other mods that folks wanted to play but we never got around to.  As I'm still in pretty tight financial restrictions, the usual summer activities like camping and airsoft games up in the woods are not happening, which is why the LAN party is such an effective little get together and time waster, or avenue for entertainment if you prefer to get fancy about it.  Most gamers I know have the games that can be played over and over again, whether through the original content or through third party mods.  It's a no-brainer.  Free mods beats out large amounts of burned gas, airsoft pellets, food, drink, and other camping paraphernalia.  Mind you, it's a lot of fun going camping, and I have designs on introducing the joys of it to Otaku Girl here at some point.  I just can't do it right now.

For now, I'll content myself with the abbreviated LAN party, the nice folks who I shot and killed (sometimes in particularly embarrassing fashion), and who returned the favor numerous times over.  And I'll be looking forward to doing it again at some point in the near future.