Got invited to a Starcraft 2 LAN party and it was absolutely awesome!

I am old enough to remember when LAN parties were actually a huge pain in the ass but totally worth it because you would get to game with a ton of people on a solid connection. Back in those days the gams played were mostly First Person Shooters (FPS) games and it was absolutely wild. Attending one of these things normally required you transporting your absolutely massive desktop and monitor and these were the days before the monitors the likes of which is likely in front of you right now even existed.

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The really good LAN parties were organized by corporations or even manufacturers of PC gear or even game companies. These would have extremely good infrastructure and sometimes it wasn't even necessary for you to bring your own monitor. That was the most difficult part of the transportation process because my, I think it was, 23" monitor weighed about as much as I am capable of lifting and it also cost $700.

These parties were normally completely devoid of booze and just had a ton of Pepsi and pizza. Those were innocent times indeed.

The more recent LAN party that I was invited to only involved a few friends of mine and a few people I didn't yet know but we became friends by the end of it.

Starcraft 2 was an absolutely perfect game for us to be playing at this because it is an amazing game and even pirate versions of the game still function when you are using a local connection. Not that any of this matters anymore because Wings of Liberty is free for download now anyway. The only downside with this that I can think of would be that if you have only ever played Wings of Liberty then you only have experience with playing as the Terrans and for me, that is my least favorite of the 3 races.

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For reasons I wont get into right now, I prefer playing as Zerg the most. I think it is because if you know what you are doing, you can produce a fuckton of units very early on in the game if you play your resources right. That is one of the main advantages of the Zerg. A properly built hive done early in the game can result in you wiping out other races that take a bit longer to build up their units. With the right amount of queens attached to a hive, you can produce a huge amount of cannon fodder units all at once and rush a nearby base.

This strategy can backfire horribly of course because if the rush doesn't work or your opponent is better prepared for it than you are expecting, the rebuilding phase that you are going to go through can be the end for you.

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Gathering resources very quickly as the Zerg is one of their main advantages but there are downsides such as the creep being kind of a pain in the ass to maintain and a lot of the units available to Zerg early in the game are easily wiped out once the enemy starts to develop higher level units.

At the LAN party I realized I had made a big mistake by not bringing a separate keyboard because the hotkeys are a lot more difficult to use on a laptop than they are on a real keyboard. The people who brought their own external keyboards certainly outperformed those of us that did not. Out of all the people there everyone was just using a laptop and it occurred to me that this is so much easier now than it was in the 90's where we had to transport 150 lbs of gear and 27 cables just to join in the fun.

There were a couple of guys there that were clearly a lot better at the game than others and of course they spanked all of us that were of lessor ability. I was kind of middle of the road as far as ability was concerned. There was one guy in attendance that had never played the game before and while we all could have easily eliminated him we took it easy on him in order to let him learn the game a bit. He never posed any real danger so there was no reason to be mean to the guy.

There were several times that I pulled my troops back once I realized I was invading his base. I could have just totally wiped him out but decided against it.

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one of the bad things about playing as Zerg is that the only way to really win in battles is to completely overwhelm your enemy with much higher numbers of units. This can be difficult to manage with hotkeys because it isn't exactly easy for a run-of-the-mill player like myself to manage 10 different groupings of units compared to someone who is playing as Protoss who would only have to manage 3 for the same amount of impact.

As the night went on we had a lot of fun and the top level players were kind enough to sit games out when it was clear that they were completely superior to the rest of us. There was only around 8 of us there so a 3 on 3 was just as fun as a 4 on 4 where 2 of those 8 players are on a whole different level than the rest of us.

This was the most fun I have had in gaming in quite some time and while I do realize that we have the ability to do this online anytime we feel like it, it was really wild having everyone be physically there in the same room while we had a game.

If you have the opportunity to do this with your friends I highly suggest that you do so. One of the major downsides for me as far as gaming in general is concerned is the lack of human connection that comes along with sitting at home with your headset on playing with strangers. In the LAN situation, which wasn't really LAN since we were all attached to the WiFi, was that after the games we would stop and chat about strategy and get tips from the more experienced players who were more than willing to share their secrets. Sure you would find this all out on a YT video but it's a lot more meaningful when it comes from a person who is standing right in front of you.

We plan to start doing this every 2 weeks even though the game we are playing is 14 years old. Some things withstand the test of time and I believe that Starcraft 2 is one of them. Just ask a Korean gamer if you need confirmation of this. It and even Starcraft 1 are still extremely popular in Korea and they have massive tournaments several times a year there.