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Comment by eerikkivistik | Hacker News Reader

Me and some friends host a pretty weird event, the name of which loosely translates to "Field Lan". We set up tents, generators and an antenna in the middle of a field in Estonia and compete in various games for 72 hours straight on an open field in fresh air. We sleep in tents. Its a private event once a year, but we have 30 - 50 people there every year. Next year is the 10th year we do this.

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The most well known (and I think long lived) LAN in The Netherlands is Campzone, where the LAN is on a camping and people being their tents and caravans as well as their PC's in the middle of the summer. I always wanted to go as a kid, but could never make it work with my parents. I bet there's multiple people here who are gonna comment how cool it was and possibly still is.

edit: Just checked their website and it looks like they tried to reboot it after COVID but the tickets got too expensive and they couldn't get enough people.

It's a pretty fun read on Wikipedia. Honestly I had no idea, there were other people doing something similar. Well, somewhat similar. We take a 2 hour break and shut down the computers in case a thunderstorm is passing overhead :D.

Sounds great! I do a small lan weekend with friends, around 15 ppl, about once a year.

But we struggle finding suitable games that are LAN based, and end up playing CS:GO. Would love some more LAN games, any tips?

Sure thing. So a few notes, you can host CS:GO and Dota 2 games on lan. You do have to be logged in to steam and have a network connection, but the games themselves can be played on lan, so the outbound connection doesn't have to be fast. As for some other games, I highly recommend a cracked version of the original WC3:FT, Starcraft, Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam. Some more insane people, start up a 3-day game of Civilization or Heroes of Might and Magic 3. If you have enough people, I also recommend Enemy Territory (2003 version) with some mods, its awesome. But you need at least 20 people for this. Just for laughs, if we end up with a tie, our tiebreaker is Liero behind a single keyboard.

Edit: Oh, forgot about Age of Empires 2, Rise of Nations. But if you want a good Lan-only experience you kind of have to use cracked versions of old games. I make up for this morally by buying a newer version if there is one even available, then use a cracked old version for playing.

Blobby Volley is the only true tiebreaker! (Also good for passing time while games were installing from disc)

!!Liero!! Wow haven't played that in a good 15 years, i used to dream of gauss gun trajectories.

Hell even online multiplayer games are waning, there's just nothing good anymore that isn't "free to play" and every game is desperately trying to create its own ecosystem to "make it big".

The last decent one I played was among us, and that was only during the pandemic. Simple gameplay, no dlc, accounts, microtransactions (at that point at least).

Now when I have people over we just break out a ps1/xbox/360...

So thats still a local network or just normal internet?

Both really. We mostly play on lan, but if people want to they can play online with decent latency. All competition still happens in lan.

That sounds amazing!

It sure is.

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