I had 11 years basically stolen from me when I married my first wife. She went from “spent time with your friends” to “you spend time with me now” almost overnight. No more LAN parties, no more gaming (because her brother got addicted to WoW and therefore gaming = bad), no hanging out with friends unless she ok’d it (spoiler: never happened), etc.
I should have left, but as a naive Mormon kid, I thought that’s just how it was supposed to be.
I’ve since renounced any religion and am happily remarried. I game with my brothers and occasionally random strangers. It’s great fun, and I can involve my kids.
My last lan party was 2 years ago
This picture is literally how men behave together
Wait was there some rule that you had to stop doing lan parties when you turn 30? Nobody told my friends and me.
I know a couple guys I went to HS with that never moved on. 40 year old, single, stoner gamers, working minimum wage jobs. I mean I’m still a stoner and a gander but I got a career and a family now
Kinda yeah. There are parts of the past that were excellent and that i miss. Some I’m no longer at the appropriate developmental stage for. So yeah it was excellent staying up all night as a 14 year old chatting with the next door neighbor, but it’s also going to be lovely being a part of his wedding. I miss staying out rambunctiously in college with my friends on a weeknight. But the skills I learned the next day are even more valuable than those memories. And someday I’m going to miss being 30 and spending most of my free time with my wife. We cannot stop time, we cannot avoid aging. Where I am now is a time I looked forward to in wonder and excitement when I was younger. So I will cherish this time and live it fully, so that when it is a memory it can be a good one. And i will continue making my futures as wonderful as i can, because I can’t avoid the reality that this stage of my life too is finite.
I wish I could have experienced that. Was too poor to own a computer or Playstation 2 at the time. Moving around to different school districts. Seems like it was fun though.
Aaah, back when a CD rack was an expected piece of furniture.
As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern…
… until eventually they became|just two more faces in the halls.
It happens sometimes.
Friends come in and out of your life|like busboys in a restaurant.
I heard that Vern got married|out of high school, had four kids…
… and is now the SEO maximizer|at CrytoFreedom.
Teddy tried to get into the NSA,|but his eyes and his ear kept him out.
Last I’d heard|he’d spent some time in jail…
… and was now doing odd jobs|around Castle Rock.
Chris did get out.
He enrolled in the graduate school courses with me.
And although it was hard,|he gutted it out like he always did.
He went on to college|and eventually became a lawyer.
Last week,|he entered a shitpost community.
Just above him in the thread,|two trolls got into an argument.
One of them pulled a sealion.
Chris, who’d always made the best peace,|tried to confront him.
He was stabbed in the throat.
He was permabanned almost instantly.I’m having a great time playing CS with my friends almost every evening, just without the need to lug my entire setup around to a friend’s house.
I have some grognard opinions of my own but this isn’t one of them.
Why do people think having kids will solve problems for themselves/others 😂
They can live vicariously through their kids and to try and make them into the person they never got to be? I don’t actually know.
I mean, if you have kids you can have LAN parties with them. 🤷🏻♂️
Played minecraft over lan for the first time around christmas with the kids ( 8, 6 and 5 ).
It was awesome until our youngest figured out how to pour lava on everyones buildings and refused to stop.
If you go directly for a partner who games you can skip the kids and save the time and money needed for gaming. ;-)
It’ll solve your problems by giving you more important problems to distract you from them until your memory of who you miss being fades.
Says the loser on 4chan who supposed to have wife and children…
Lan parties still happen.
OP just doesn’t have friends
The games suck now. I stopped going because it shifted from arena shooters that could actually be played on LAN to “modern military shooters” played by gamers more interested in their army dude RP then game mechanics. These people do not have interesting enough personalities to hang out with otherwise.
I did hear that MAG Fest has a whole room dedicated to Quake3, so I might be making trip next year.
man lan parties were awesome but I do not miss lugging my 19" crt anywhere. and the reason they existed is now moot - we can lanparty from our homes.
The point of the LAN party was not to be playing games on your computer, the point was to be playing games with your friends, in person. No matter how good your connection, no matter how good your battlestation and headset, it will never compare to the sheer joy of hunching down over your computer while it’s set up on a coffee table, a mass of messily-coiled cables around your ankles, a janky mouse-balled mouse in your hand, as you have the ability to turn and call your best friends slurs and share cold pizza, secure in the knowledge that you’re going to go to sleep on a scratchy couch, wake up around noon tomorrow, and start the whole process all over again.
It’s not the tech, it’s the meatspace community that made it special.
21" Trinitron + stairs = “I’m gonna die here aren’t I”
Yea, I spend several hours once a week with my bestfriend a city over. We’d play together in person but mostly we do other stuff that we can’t do online when we hangout in person. That’s not to say that I don’t believe in a certain magic of a LAN party but it’s not like I can’t play 110hrs of Baldur’s Gate unless he’s in same the room.
People act like the only online games are Fortnite and CoD but it’s like, bud, it’s just that your friends are busy and find it hard to set aside time like that.
Oh also many PCs have glass sides and are risky to transport. Ain’t no way I’m risking my Fractal North unless I’m moving. MiniATX though I totally would, all the time.
We miss the games the most. Just like with Web1 when the games and websites were built for fun and not engineered to just push us to spend money all the time or keep playing as long as possible by any means necessary.
Come on, those games still exist. They might be overshadowed by a layer of slop but they are still there.
I looked up Miniclip.com again just now. It now just talks about the mobile games it develops. You’re correct that much of it still exists but they’re right that it’s just not the same.
Remember when Bloons was available in a browser from reputable and popular website? Or that game with the little bubble game that you shot missiles at?
There’s an era of gaming that is disappearing. It’s the late XP to early 7 era, a lot of games, even ones that came on discs, don’t work anymore because the servers that handled the DRM are shut down. There are things you can’t go do anymore.
Oh, maybe I should clarify what I meant: we still get cool, enjoyable new games nowadays that are every bit as good as the classics we played and loved then. If not better.
I think my biggest tip would be to stay away from pretty much anything labeled AAA.
Problem is most of those games aren’t terribly mainstream and also you have no one who has the time to play them with you.
Yeah, I’m mostly a single player kind of guy, so I enjoy my games like Return of the Obra Dinn, Dredge, Balatro, Dave the Diver, etc.
From what I hear, some older multiplayer titles can be made to run using cracks and some kind of VPN.
