About a month ago I invited a bunch of people to an impromptu LAN party to be held at my parent's house (as they were out of the country at the time). Despite some organizational hurdles (primarily the lack of a network switch with enough ports) we eventually managed to overcome the party was sweet, short and to the point.

During the course of about 20 hours we played loads of Call of Duty, some StarCraft: Brood War, a bit of WarCraft III and a whole lot of my personal favourite: UT2k4. UT flavours included regular deathmatch, quite a bit of Onslaught (not my favourite of gaming modes, but nevermind that), a little bombing match and what I consider the best gaming-mode: instagib deathmatch. It's hillarious, and you can't beat the andrenaline rush (well, except maybe Q3 DM17 with 5 bots at hardcore).

As usual we saved StarCraft for the wee hours of the night. The two games I played prove that I can still hold my own; my personal preference is for team melee where I control base contruction and expansion at first and combat later, with a second player supporting me on construction and exploration at first and maintenance later. I find that I'm extremely capable when it comes to fast micromanagement but am terrible when I have to do more than one big task at once (for example managing combat while micromanaging fleet construction). Playing with my brother that way was an extremely effective combination and we took the game by a large margin, which was very satisfying.

My personal forté is first person shooters though, so it's no surprise that's what I played the most (I couldn't be bothered joining in on WarCraft III). We played Call of Duty and UT2k4 for several hours each; Call of Duty proved to be an excellent multiplayer game, but only if there are a lot of players in the game. 8 players are enough for a good game, but say 5 or less simply aren't enough to keep the action up and the game becomes very dull indeed.

I wish I could convince the others to give Tron 2.0 a multiplayer spin, but other than that I don't even know where to start in looking for good multiplayer games. Halo proved to be a big disappointment for me (way too slow - not in performance but in gameplay - and too much emphasis on vehicles) and trying Counter Strike: Source for a bit only strengthened my resolve not to play tactical shooters.