LAN parties are the source of some of the bestest multiplayer gaming ever (and I’m all about multiplayer). There are few things more rewarding than being able to shoot someone on your computer and hear, from a room down the hall, “Aw, what the fuck?!” Doubly so if you can hear the pounding of some mouse-on-mousepad frustration.

Okay… so maybe I enjoy my friend’s pain a little too much.

We used to play a lot of Alien vs Predator at these  nigh-yearly events and the default setting is for the server is for friendly-fire to be on. No one would ever let me set the CS server to FF, but since out of the box AvP had “FF = On” people were cool with it… whatever. Friendly-fire in AvP is a tricky thing because the walking speed of a typical marine is at about mach 5. This is only slightly slower than that of the Alien, which means when you see something run past in the dark most people shoot first and wait to hear if a marine screams back (and sometimes you hear the guy playing him scream a bit too).

Add to that the Prox Mine, a hard-to-see deployed explosive that blows up anyone that gets near it. One marine gets gibbed by a fellow teammate and he wants some revenge, so he sets up some mines (taking out an Alien at this point is just a bonus!) Then two more detonate and those victims both get pissed and they set up… okay, you get. Eventually we had to put a ban on the weapon so we could get back to killing the Aliens. And most people respected the ban… but there was this one dude, a Prox Mining Monger that just didn’t get it. He continued to place mines all over the map, and with the death count getting out of hand we had to take drastic measures. We decided that this “lost cause” was now open game for blatant team killing; he became “one of them”.

Time for a quick IRL geography lesson. Most of us were packed tightly into a small garage. This worked okay since we could chat with one another while we played (and it was even easier to hear people cry when you blew them apart). I say most because the Prox Mine Monger wasn’t in the garage with us – he was a floor above us in his bedroom. This gave us an amazing tactical advantage as he couldn’t hear our scheming.

Because it was hard to tell who was who in the game we decided that we needed a signal that would tell us if the Marine we were standing by was “one of us”. The chosen signal: the AvP Taunt, an action which caused the Marine to raise his fist into the air and shout things like “Hoo Ah!” or “Ha ha.”.

It was amazing. You’d run into a room of 3 marines and they’d all look over and start taunting and you better signal back if you didn’t want to be atomized. If someone didn’t ‘Hoo Ah’ back quick enough you lit him up with 5,000 rounds of bullets. Sure, there were some mistakes, but it was so worth it.

The Prox Mine Monger, however, eventually decoded our signal and started taunting back. NO. We weren’t done with our fun. That’s when we started taunting and jumping. It gets tough to take a game seriously when you walk up to a Marine and then both starting hopping around and Hoo Ah-ing at each other.

And then a few kills later he disconnected, stormed down the stairs, popped his head into the garage and proclaimed us all “mother fuckers” that ruined his fun.

I was so proud.

Yeah I most certainly enjoy the pain of my friends too much!

AvP computer games Good ol' days LAN Party