Games We Play
Updated 5/9/12

We play several different games at my parties and online. I find deathmatch too boring, so we tend to play games that have some sort of objective to them other than just racking up kills. We also tend to prefer playing cooperatively instead of against each other, and we typically stick with family-friendly games.

Why do we play so many older games? That's a good question! Why do people still play Minesweeper (came out in 1990)? Why do they still play Super Mario Bros. (came out in 1985)? Why do they still play basketball (1891), football (1869), soccer (1848), baseball (1846), solitaire (1765), golf (15th century), chess (6th century), Go (around 500 B.C.) and backgammon (around 3,000 B.C.)? Because if a game is FUN, then people still play it, that's why! People have been conditioned that if a video game is more than a couple of years old, it's "too old" and "not fun anymore", so we shouldn't play it. But that's just nonsense! If a game is fun, and if it has serviceable graphics, then I see no problem with playing it. For example, we still play Counter-Strike because it offers objectives-based, co-op gameplay that more modern games don't have. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has deathmatch and capture the flag, but so did Quake 1 back in 1996. In fact, Quake 1 did it better, because it has far smaller system requirements, and it has bots so you can play cooperatively! Battlefield 3 has domination-style gameplay, but so does Battlefield 2, which came out in 2005. Battlefield 2 has co-op against bots and the awesome Nations at War mod, where Battlefield 3 has neither. Battlefield 3 doesn't have a dedicated server, and has no LAN modes, either. Why play the newer game when the older one is better, cheaper, and easier on the system requirements? Another reason we play older games is that game companies aren't releasing LAN-friendly games any more. They are focusing on Internet play only, and/or are eliminating local dedicated servers. It's sad.

The games we play have to meet the following criteria:

Listed here are our current favorites in alphabetical order.

Age of Empires 3 (AOE3) is the latest RTS in the Age of Empires line. At our first game party in July 2000, Mike Turner introduced us to AOE2, and we were hooked. AOE3 has a similar feel to AOE2, but is based in the colonization age (1500-1850 AD). It also adds the concept of a home city across the pond that can provide you with supplies and such by using "cards". Your home city can be upgraded by using experience points earned while playing. Experience points are used to purchase new cards, which can provide you with better supplies and upgrades in the game. While AOE3 didn't capture us the way AOE2 did, and is certainly not as good as Rise of Nations, it is still a fun game. The Asian Dynasties expansion lets you play as the Japanese, Chinese and Indians (from India).

We now play AOE3 with the user-created Expansion Pack 5, which changes the game up a little. For instance, you can take control of enemy buildings by standing next to them, and you can build a gate across a railroad track.

We play AOE3 because it is a fun RTS that isn't too complicated to learn, but is deep enough and has enough variety to keep things interesting. It also offers co-op play against bots. And it is Age of Empires, so it has sentimental value.

We started playing AOE3 at the October 2005 party. We played it last at the December 2010 party.

Minimum Requirements:
1.4 GHz CPU
256 MB RAM
2 GB hard drive space for install
64 MB video card that supports Hardware Transform and Lighting
Matthew's notes: AOE3 runs smoothly on all of my computers with the highest in-game settings (except for anti-aliasing on some older graphics cards). It's pretty easy on the system requirements.

Battlefield 2 (BF2) is a first-person shooter (FPS). It is based in the near future. Players can be the United States, the Chinese, or the Middle East Coalition. Players use modern weapons, and can control over 30 different vehicles. Each team starts with a number of tickets. Each time a player is eliminated, their team loses a ticket. But that is not the main point. On the map there are several control points. You take a control point for your team by standing next to the control point and waiting for the flag to go up. On most maps, when your team controls most of the flags, the opposing team loses tickets gradually. The goal is to be the last team with remaining tickets, or have the highest number of tickets when the time runs out.
Battlefield 2 adds a new dimension to gameplay over BF1942 by adding the commander. The commander gets an overview screen of the whole battlefield, which allows them to give orders to soldiers, do radar recon of an area, or drop air strikes on an area.
In May 2006, they finally added bots to the multiplayer like they had in BF1942. This breathed new life into this game since we could play it cooperatively.
In March 2008, we started playing with the Nations at War mod, which again breathed new life into the game. NAW adds a ton of new weapons, vehicles (including some fun, non-military vehicles such as knock-offs of the General Lee and the A-Team van), and lots of new maps. They also removed a lot of the irritations from BF2 in the process. For instance, my highly-trained soldier can now run for more than 10 seconds without collapsing in a wheezing heap like an athsmatic (which happens in all the Battlefield games). That makes going without a vehicle more reasonable. Then there is the grappling hook and the zip line. Way cool! Nations at War turns down the realism, and turns up the fun! Unfortunately, there have been no updates since April 2010, which is when version 6 came out.

We play NAW because it is fun, because it offers co-op play against bots, and because it has the domination-style gameplay that none of our other games have. NAW is consistently the most popular game at my parties.

We started playing BF2 at the July 2005 party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

NAW is one of four games that we currently play online.

Recommended Requirements:
Windows XP
2.4 GHz CPU
1 GB RAM (runs 20% faster with 2 GB)
2.3 GB hard drive space for install
128 MB graphics card (256 MB recommended), ATI Radeon 9800 or better, nVidia GeForce FX 5600 Ultra or better

Matthew's Notes: The Nations at War mod has much steeper requirements than BF2. I recommend a 3+GHz dual-core processor, 512+MB of graphics card RAM, 3+GB system RAM, and a GeForce 8800GTS 640MB/9600GT/GT240 or better. Anything less will not perform smoothly. Please see my Nations at War Performance Optimization page for more details.

Blur is an arcade racing game with weapons. Unlike Mario Kart, the weapons are not cheap kills. They can often be avoided, and when they hit you, they only slow you down. Your car takes damage over time, and if the damage is too high, you will crash, which means you will reset with a new car. It doesn't kick you out of a race just for crashing (like FlatOut 2 does). There are also health icons that you can pick up that will restore your car completely. There are some down sides to this game. The first is that it requires a very beefy system. Even on my fastest PC, I have to use lowered settings, and I still get FPS hiccups. The other issue is that it can only use an Xbox 360 controller. It won't use any other kind of controller. If you don't have an Xbox 360 controller, you are stuck with the keyboard.

We play Blur because it has weapons-based racing, which is different from our other racing games.

We started playing Blur at the October 2010 party. We last played it at the March 2011 party.

Recommended Requirements:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz CPU
2 GB RAM
14 GB hard drive space for install
256 MB GeForce 7800GT or Radeon 1800XT

Matthew's Notes: The above recommended requirements are WAY too low. You would be playing a slide show. I recommend a GeForce GTS250 or better. I also recommend at least a dual-core 3+GHz CPU.

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (CZ) is a first-person shooter (FPS). Counter-Strike has been the number-one online game since it came out as a mod for Half-Life on June 18, 1999. On average, nearly 1,000,000 people play some form of Counter-Strike every day! Condition Zero is a stand-alone game that adds to the Counter-Strike 1.6 formula by adding bots to play with, by adding personality to the hostages, by improving the radar, and by adding slightly-improved graphics. It has a single-player mode where you can play through the maps completing objectives (such as killing a certain number of people with a sniper rifle, or winning the round within a certain time limit), which is good practice. It also has "deleted scenes", which represent the original single-player levels that Ritual Entertainment made.

In the game there are two teams: terrorists (Ts) and counter-terrorists (CTs). There are three types of maps: bomb defuse, hostage rescue and VIP assassination.

In bomb defuse, a random member of the Ts has a bomb that must be taken to a designated bomb site in the map. The bomb must be planted, which takes several seconds. Then the bomb takes 30 seconds to detonate. If the bomb detonates, the Ts win. The Ts can also win by eliminating all the CTs. The CTs can win by eliminating all the Ts before the bomb is planted, by defusing the bomb after it is planted, or if the bomb does not go off before time runs out. The Ts can still win if their bomb detonates even if all the Ts are eliminated. If the Ts carrying the bomb is eliminated, the bomb is dropped. Another one of the Ts can pick up the bomb and continue.

In VIP assassination, one player is randomly chosen as the VIP, and must escape to a designated rescue point. The VIP only has a pistol, but has twice the normal armor. It's up to the CTs to protect the VIP from assassination and get him to the rescue point. The CTs win if the VIP escapes or the Ts are all eliminated. The Ts win if the VIP is eliminated or runs out of time before escaping. Bots are very bad at VIP maps.

In hostage rescue, the CTs must find the hostages on the map and take them to a designated hostage rescue point. The CTs can win by rescuing all the hostages or by eliminating the Ts. The Ts can win by eliminating all the CTs, or if the CTs run out of time before they can rescue the hostages.

In the early versions of CS, there was another map type: terrorist escape. In this mode, the Ts win when most of the Ts make it to a designated escape point. The bots don't know how to escape, so we don't play that map type. This was never a very popular game mode, anyway.

CS has an incentive for accomplishing objectives. For everything good you do (rescuing a hostage, your team winning, etc.), you get money that can be used to buy better weapons and accessories for the next round. Doing bad things (like eliminating a team member or shooting a hostage) causes you to lose money. If you are not killed, you bring all your stuff to the next round, but not the next map. When the map is changed, everyone starts with a small amount of money to get started.

We play a variety of maps (over 300) for CS that I have found from various places. I prefer maps where the objective has at least two ways to access it. That way it is harder to create a choke-point. We also play with team damage turned on, which makes the gameplay more challenging.

We still play Condition Zero because it offers co-op against bots, it has objective-based gameplay that is easy to learn but is deep and varied enough to stay interesting. We also have a lot of maps, which keeps it from getting boring. It's also easy on the system requirements, which is helpful to some people in our group.

We started playing Counter-Strike at my Thanksgiving 2000 LAN party, pretty much when version 1.0 first came out. We started playing Condition Zero at my May 2004 party. We usually play with humans vs. bots on normal skill level, but with bots outnumbering humans 2 to 1. It's been a number of years since we played it at a party, but we play it online every four weeks.

Recommended System Requirements:
Pentium 3 or Athlon 800 MHz
128 MB RAM
32 MB 3D Accelerator card (OpenGL or Direct 3D)
3 GB hard drive space for full install and extra maps

Matthew's Notes: If your system can't play Condition Zero, you REALLY need to upgrade!

I recommend using your graphics card control panel to add anti-aliasing and anisotrophic filtering to the game. That makes it much easier on the eyes!

Counter-Strike: Source (CSS) is a first-person shooter (FPS). It is Counter-Strike 1.6 upgraded with the Source engine, so it has much nicer graphics, and it has realistic physics. The fancy graphics and physics don't really add anything to the gameplay, but it sure looks nice, especially compared to the aging graphics of the original game. It also has much smarter bots compared to Condition Zero, so we tend to play with a 1 human to 2 bots ratio on easy. Sadly, it lacks the hostage personalities and intelligience of Condition Zero. The hostages will no longer react to what is going on or try to run away from the terrorists. They won't return to their original location when a T points a gun at them. They also can barely maneuver through the map. In addition to the lame hostages, there is no riot shield. Gameplay-wise, this is just CS 1.6 for Source.

We still play CSS because it offers co-op against bots, it has objective-based gameplay that is easy to learn but is deep and varied enough to stay interesting, we have a lot of maps, which keeps it from getting boring, and it offers better graphics than CZ, which is nice, but not necessary. In September 2010, Valve made a bunch of improvements to the game engine, including achievements and accomplishments that are displayed after each round. Although the new engine breaks some of the older maps, the new stuff is fun.

We started playing CSS at the May 2005 LAN party. We stopped playing it at parties a few years ago because a couple of deluded people decided it was boring. :( But we play it every four weeks online.

Recommended System Requirements:
2.4 GHz Processor
1 GB RAM
DirectX 9 capable graphics card

Matthew's Notes: This game scales fairly well. I recommend at least a series 8 GeForce card (8600GTS at minimum), and a dual-core processor. I also recommend 2 GB RAM.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a first-person shooter (FPS). It has the same multiple-objective gameplay as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but it is based in the Quake universe. The guy who created the FritzBot for WolfET was hired to make the bots for ETQW, so the bots are excellent. ETQW also includes vehicles and realistic physics. A nice improvement over WolfET is that waypoints are shown as icons on your screen along with the distance to the objective. You don't have to bring up the overview map like you did in WolfET. This makes it somewhat easier for people who don't know the maps.

Unfortunately, the gaming community hasn't supported ETQW the way they still support WolfET. Gameplay is limited to the 4 campaigns that came with the game. I have tried a few custom maps, but they are all hopelessly broken.

We still play ETQW because it offers co-op, objective-based gameplay that is more varied than Counter-Strike, which makes it harder to learn, but keeps things interesting. It doesn't have enough staying power to be played regularly online. Playing it 5 times a year is enough to get your fill without wearing it out.

We started playing ETQW at the October 2007 LAN party. The last time we tried it was the October 2010 party, but that didn't go well (we tried playing some custom maps, but they were broken).

Minimum System Requirements:
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz or Athlon XP 2700+ for XP, 3 GHz/3000+ for Vista
1 GB RAM for XP, 1.5 GB RAM for Vista
128MB nVIDIA Geforce 5700 or better, ATI Radeon 9700 or better
Matthew's Notes: On a 1 GB system, you will have to HEAVILY optimize your system to get ETQW to run well. They claim a minimum requirement of 512 MB RAM, but according to the Windows Task Manager, it takes 1.3 GB RAM to run. You will get better performance if you have at least 1.5 GB RAM in your system.

FlatOut 2 is a fun arcade racing game. It has the racing elements of the classic Need For Speed games (before they went all gangsta and decided to clone the dark and disturbing Midnight Club series), including street, rally and track racing, but also has destruction derby and the hilarious stunt modes, including such things as Ring of Fire, where you try to launch your driver out of your car through several rings of fire, and then land in a pool at the end. It's crazy good fun!

We added the Flatout Joint Community Mod at the May 2008 LAN party. It adds tons of cars and tracks to the game.

We still play FlatOut 2 because of its fun, arcade-style gameplay that is easy to learn, and its variey of game modes that keep it from getting boring. It is much less popular now that Blur and Split/Second are available.

We started playing FO2 at the New Year 2007 LAN party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Recommended System Requirements:
2 GHz Processor
512 MB RAM
3 GB hard drive space
64 MB graphics card, GeForce 5 series or better, Radeon 9600 pro or better

Matthew's Notes: FO2 is pretty easy on your system. All of my computers play FO2 with high settings and resolutions.

Left 4 Dead (L4D) is a team-based horror-themed first person shooter where teamwork is key to survival. The 4 humans must work together to make their way through the map to the safe house. If someone goes off on their own, they will absolutely die. There are regular zombies, which only have their hands and feet as weapons, but can be deadly in large packs. But then there are five "boss" infected. The Smoker can shoot out his long tongue and pull humans to him where they will be beaten to death. The human is trapped and helpless unless a teammate rescues him. The Boomer will vomit on a human, which attracts large hordes of regular zombies on them. If shot, the Boomer explodes the vomit around him. The Hunter can leap large distances, and can pounce on humans, who are helpless unless rescued by a teammate. The Tank is large and hard to kill. His powerful arms will throw back humans when they are hit, causing massive damage, and leaving them helpless for a time. The Witch is harmless unless startled, and then will pounce on whomever startled her and rip them to pieces. Humans can also play as the infected, although not as the Witch. When playing as infected, you can respawn after 15 seconds, at which time you are spawned as a random boss. If humans are killed, they are out for the round. The game is randomized, which keeps it interesting. Items will be placed differently, and sometimes your route can change. The bosses show up in different places each time. The game changes the situation based on how you are doing.

At our New Year 2010 party, we started playing Left 4 Dead 2, which has a few new things added. There are now melee weapons such as baseball bats and chain saws. The infected can now wear riot gear, which makes them impervious to gunfire, and Hazmat suits, which make them immune to fire. There are also some new "boss" infected. The Charger will run at you very quickly, and then start smashing you into the ground with his oversized arm until a team mate rescues you. The Spitter spits pools of acid that take down your health quickly. The Jockey jumps on your back and steers you toward hazards, such as ledges or fire, until a team mate rescues you. It is more gory than the first game, and it has more unnecessary profanities and vulgarities, which is a shame. The new characters aren't as interesting, either, and they tend to be very mean to each other, unlike in the first game. Left 4 Dead 2 basically feels like add-on levels for the first game.

We found that the game is really only fun with exactly 4 human players. The game is too unbalanced when you have humans on the zombie side, and if you have less then 4 humans, the bot survivors will hold you back.

At the October 2010 party, we started playing custom maps for L4D2, which breathed new life into the game.

We play L4D2 because it offers a co-op, survival-horror style of gameplay that we don't get from any of our other games. Unlike most of the other games we play, this game is definitely NOT family-friendly. We only play it after all the kids have gone to bed.

We started playing L4D at the New Year 2009 LAN party, and L4D2 at the New Year 2010 party. We started playing custom maps at the October 2010 LAN party. We last played it at the December 2011 party.

System Requirements:
3 GHz Processor (2.4 GHz dual-core recommended)
1 GB RAM
7.5 GB hard drive space
128 MB SM2-capable graphics card, Radeon 9800 Pro or better, GeForce 6600 or better (SM3-capable, GeForce 7600 or Radeon X1600 or better recommended)

Matthew's Notes: Don't bother playing this game without at least a dual-core. It won't run well. I recommend a GTS 250 or better and at least 2GB RAM.

Rise of Nations (RON) is considered an evolution of the Age of Empires series. It's a lot more like AOE than Age of Mythology is. In fact, it feels like a combination of Empire Earth, AOE, AOM and The Settlers (an RTS game from long ago). There are 18 civilizations to choose from (much like AOE). There are 8 epochs from Ancient Age to Modern Age (and it includes nukes, much like Empire Earth, but they can thankfully be disabled).

Unlike AOM, it incorporates the idea of having borders around your territory (like Settlers). You expand your borders by building cities near them. You can only build in your territory (no more building a castle in the enemy's territory and sending a stream of special units like in the AOE games). Any buildings built around a city are considered part of that city, and special bonuses can be achieved by doing so. If you take an enemy city, all the other buildings around it become yours as well, although the city has to be assimilated first (which takes a couple of minutes), in which time the enemy can win the city back. In the standard game mode, if you take an enemy's capital city and assimilate it, they instantly lose, which significantly reduces the game time (no more sending nomads around the map to rebuild civilizations and delay the inevitable).

Instead of relics, RON has rare resources that are located at fixed points on the map that you have to control. Also, resources (farms, wood, ore, oil) never deplete, so there is less micromanagement, although there is a limited amount of resources that you can gather per location. For instance, you can only have 5 farms per city, and the number of loggers and miners you can place on a forest or mine is limited to the amount of trees or ore available there. But once they are in place, you can leave your villagers there for the duration of the game, and they will keep on working. There is no gold to mine. All money is acquired from caravans between your cities and by controlling rare resources. The amount of gold earned depends on the size of your cities.

All of these things make for fairly quick and fun games. RON also has some interesting variations in the multiplayer modes. Besides the normal conquest modes, they have a mode where the goal is to reach Modern Age before anyone else, and another mode where one person is in a later age and has a fortified city, where the other players are barbarians stuck in an early age, but everyone gangs up on the fortified city.

The Thrones and Patriots expansion adds 6 more nations, and more units, wonders, and government types. RON is basically the epitome of RTS gaming. We have not yet found any RTS that holds a candle to RON.

We still play RON because no other RTS game offers such a complete, deep and rewarding gameplay system that is easy to learn and can be played co-op against the computer.

We started playing RON at the 2/04 LAN party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Recommended System Requirements:
1 GHz CPU
256 MB RAM
1 GB hard drive space for install
3D Accelerator with 32 MB RAM

Split/Second is an arcade racing game. You earn points for drafting, drifting, jumping and other tricks. Once you have enough points, you can cause catastrophic events, such as explosions, buildings falling over, bridges collapsing, and so on. If you time the event right, you can take out opponents (who will then be reset). But you have to be careful to not get caught up in the mess yourself! If you earn enough points, you can cause such a huge event that the race course is changed to a different route! The graphics are capped at 30 FPS, which betrays the game's console roots. Also, when you finish a race, you are stuck watching a statistic screen. You can't watch the other players finish. That's a bummer. But even with these issues, it is still a fun game.

We play Split/Second because of its catastrophic events, which makes it unique.

We started playing Split/Second at the October 2010 party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Recommended Requirements:
Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU
4 GB RAM
6.5 GB hard drive space for install
512 MB GeForce 9600GT or Radeon HD 3870

Matthew's Notes: The above recommendations are a little high. The game plays great with medium graphic settings on a Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU overclocked to 2.88GHz with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 8600GTS card. However, on my fastest PC, I still can't use the highest graphic settings.

Star Wars Battlefront II (SWBF2) is the second game in the series, and sadly the last (Battlefront III was nearly completed, and then canceled). It feels a lot like Battlefield 1942 with Star Wars graphics. It does have space combat and capture the flag missions that help to mix things up a little. Conversion Pack 2.2 adds a bunch of new maps, the KotOR era, new characters and classes, new heroes, new vehicles, new game modes, and better graphics. That helped to make the game fun again.

We play SWBF2 because of the Star Wars setting and the space combat levels.

We started playing SWBF2 at the July 2006 party, and we have played it at a few parties since then, although it has never been very popular. We added the conversion mod at the December 2011 party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Recommended Requirements:
Intel P4 2.8 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 2800+
512 MB RAM
128 MB graphics card with Hardware Vertex and Pixel Shader capability, GeForce 6 series or higher

Matthew's Notes: The above recommendations are a little low. However, all of my computers play the game at the High in-game settings. In Windows Vista and 7, you have to disable digital audio output, and you MUST have a microphone, or the game will crash.

Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is a first-person shooter (FPS) that is free-to-play, but you can purchase customizations and upgrades if you wish. It is an objective-based game with nine different classes and several different game modes. It is very fast-paced, and kind of feels like Quake in many ways. The graphics are cartoony, and the whole game has a light-hearted feel to it.

It has capture the flag, control points (which must be captured in order), king of the hill (which has only one control point), and payload (where you must escort a rail car, usually carrying a bomb, across the map). It also has team deathmatch, but we don't bother with that.

The classes are broken into offense, defense and support roles. Each class has a primary and secondary weapon and a melee weapon. The three offensive classes are the Scout, who runs fast but can't deal much damage and dies easily, the Soldier, who shoots rockets, and the Pyro, who uses a flamethrower. The three defensive classes are the Demoman, who has a grenade launcher and can use sticky bombs, the Heavy, who has a minigun and can take a lot of damage, but moves slowly, and the Engineer, who can build sentry guns, ammo and health dispensers, and teleporters. The support classes are the Medic, who can heal players, the Spy, who can can cloak himself, sabotage Engineer structures, and can disguise himself as enemy players, and the Sniper, who is self-explanatory.

There are various achievements to unlock as you play the game, and you find better weapons and equipment as you play. Some of these things can also be purchased.

We play TF2 because it offers a fun, frantic, co-operative, objective-based FPS experience that is unique to the other FPS games we play.

We started playing TF2 at the August 2011 party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Recommended Requirements:
Pentium 4 3.4GHz or Athlon 64 3400+
1 GB RAM
5 GB hard drive space for install
GeForce 6800 128MB or Radeon X800

Matthew's Notes: This is a Source engine game, so it scales really well. All of my PCs play it smoothly. Although the game is only rated T, it does have some pretty raunchy language. It's not for kids.

Trackmania Nations Forever (TMNF) is an over-the-top stunt racing game. It's the sequel to Trackmania Nations. Tracks have jumps, loops, and other crazy stunts in them. Rather than everyone racing the track against each other at one time, everyone does a time trial at the same time. You can see the other cars, but you can't run into them. Everyone competes to get the lowest time on the track. You have 5 minutes to get your best time. Sometimes you need most of that time just to cross the finish line successfully! You can reset as often as you want without penalty. This provides a non-confrontational, yet competitive environment that is a pleasant change of pace.

Trackmania Nations Forever has the graphic quality of United, but only includes the stadium tracks, which are arguably the best ones anyway. The game can be downloaded free from the Trackmania web site, or downloaded for free in Steam.

We still play TMNF because we have a lot of tracks, so it keeps things interesting, and because the stunts are fun, and it is challenging to figure out how to finish some of the maps. It's also beneficial that it is competitive while being non-confrontational.

We started playing TMNF at the 5/08 LAN party. It has been a while since we played it at a party.

Minimum System Requirements:
Athlon XP 1600+ or P4 1.6 GHz CPU
512 MB RAM
750 MB hard drive space for install
3D Accelerator with 16 MB RAM

Matthew's Notes: I was able to play TMNF at 60fps when using the lowest possible settings on my 2.8 GHz P4 with Radeon 9800 Pro and 1GB RAM. Anything less than that, and you will not be able to achieve 60fps. Multiplayer requires a beefier system than single player. Don't be surprised if you have to lower your settings when playing multiplayer.

Zombie Master (ZM) is a mode for Half-Life 2. It is a survival horror game, much like Left 4 Dead, except that instead of playing against the computer that is controlling the zombies, you instead are playing against a human Zombie Master. The Zombie Master plays the game like an RTS. They can move their camera around the map and spawn zombies and traps using points that are slowly accumulated. The other players experience the game like an FPS, and have to achieve some objective in order to win.

We still play ZM because more than 4 people can play it, and it offers a different experience from L4D2.

We started playing ZM at the 3/08 LAN party. We last played it at the March 2012 party.

Minimum System Requirements:
3 GHz Pentium 4
1 GB RAM
DX9 graphics card

Matthew's Notes: If your computer can play Half-Life 2, it can play Zombie Master. You have to own Half-Life 2 in Steam, and you must have "Source SDK Base" installed.

We have played several other games at past LAN parties, but for one reason or another, we have stopped playing them.