LAN titles are available in a wide variety of genres including First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy games, and Turn Based Strategy games. This article will offer a handful of reviews of a few of the most popular titles that offered multiple players over a local area network, as well as a brief look at some of the most popular titles currently on the market.
While this massive video game series wasn’t the first real time strategy game, or RTS as they are commonly called, it may very well earn the title of most popular. Indeed, when it first hit the market it was groundbreaking in a wide variety of ways. The first in the series featured high resolution graphics, several different civilizations to choose from, and many different units to include in your armies. It was also groundbreaking in the fact that it offered 8 player simultaneous action with TCP/IP LAN capabilities.
The idea behind the game is to choose a civilization and proceed to conquer your opponents in a variety of ways including wiping out the opposing civilizations, controlling all the relics or ruins sites, or building a wonder and protecting it for a certain duration of time. The sequel, Age of Empires 2, gave players a chance to play as medieval kingdoms, while the popular Age of Mythologies spin off gave players the chance to produce mythical units such as the Cyclops and Pegasus. The most recent installment in the series as of the writing of this article is the Age of Empires 3 Trilogy which offers you the chance to play as colonial powers such as the British, Dutch, and Spanish.
It was also unique for its time as it offered the player multiple weapons to choose from, each with their own pro and cons. This offered a sense of balance that was missing in many other games released previously. The sequels Doom 2 and Doom 95 followed relatively quickly and instead of improving on the graphics or game play, instead offered basically extra levels. Doom 3 was released practically 10 years after the previous Doom installment, so it offered a vast improvement in game play and graphics. However, it took a few dramatic changes from the original series, so it did not receive universal appeal amongst fans of the original.
The Halo series, currently made up of Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3, is without question the most popular among players of all ages. The game is a popular first person shooter, similar to the Doom series, but offers a story and weapons based largely on science fiction. It was originally a launching title for the popular Xbox console and remains one of the definitive FPS titles.
Civilization IV isn't the first game in the series to offer multiplayer over LAN, but it is the first to do it well, even if it still contains a few bugs. One issue is the fact that it is a turn based game, meaning that each player takes turns as in a traditional board game. Another problem lies in the fact that each game takes a long time to play though, the bare minimum being roughly 2 hours. This makes it difficult to play a game to its completion.