LAN 2018.1 Review

And there we have it - another BobLAN sadly comes to an end, and what a few days it has been!

There were an amazing number of people from early on Thursday (when we found a new "devil-may-care" attitude to bed allocation) through to Sunday afternoon, when the regulars (Al, Bean, Rich and Dan) were helping Bob with the initial cleanup. Numbers good enough to allow a near constant ability to have 5 on 5 matches.

Games wise - more new games than we've had in the last few meets and some real successes...

• Unreal Tournament was surprisingly good - with lots of built in LAN support, a great engine that played well on all machines, and a zero cost to play. The variety of game modes from standard individual and team death match, capture the flag, Blitz and PvE Siege was a real winner. Slight risk this game may die, as the Epic developers have been focusing on Fortnite from what I've read, but hopefully will be around for a couple of years.
• Darwin Project was another class free addition to the line up. Again a big draw was the support for private matches with a decent number of people. 10 people includes most players at any time. Interesting to see the direction of travel over the next year from the devs. And I'm guessing there's a few of us who will put the time in to get to level 10 so we can have a broad range of Directors by the next LAN.
• Titanfall 2 - always good fun. First time I've played the Horde mode (protect he harvester), which I thought was quite fun.
• Grid - still the go-to race game.
• Rocket league - enjoyed, but was personally black and white in terms of form - from scoring last second winners one day, to losing 7-0 the next. More practice required perhaps?!!
• PUBG - couple of games played. Restricted by the cap on 4 player teams.
• CS:GO - standard
• Day of Defeat - a few rounds played. Perhaps time to put this to bed? The look and feel of the game are getting a bit old, and I didn’t really enjoy it compared to some of the others played
• VR - a fair amount of VR games were played. But although the hardware is getting better, I think this is difficult to fit into a LAN mainly due to space. Even with just 2 players in the main room, it is pretty restrictive (as I found to personal cost as George stabbed an enemy, only to find the back of my head in the way). One to think about. Might be more inclusive for sit down games like project cars. Guess we'll see.

A few games we didn't play:

• Battlefield 1 - given the size of the maps, just feels difficult in a LAN environment. That said, I'm sure we'll give BF2 a try when it comes out.
• Battlefield 3 - maybe time to put to bed with some of the newer alternatives. Although we are missing a good war game
• Board games - a spattering over the weekend.

In hardware news - Alistair's PC woes of the last fortnight fixed simply in the end, by using the other DisplayPort on his new Corsair PC. And apart from some light humour with regards to the speed of game loads - an absolutely beautiful, impressively powerful and whisper quiet new machine. A new benchmark.

Food - think everyone enjoyed the homemade curry on the Thursday, followed by pulled pork sandwiches on Friday, standard awesome breakfasts (including some superb black pudding), and then a mixture of Chinese/India/Kebabs on Fri/Sat.

Chat was varied - enjoyed the tech talk; all things DevOps, Agile, slack, ms teams, JIRA, Rally, kubernetes, cloud, GDPR, media playlist histories, and the rest! Although I did forgot to ask Bob what the hell he is doing in the back garden, with what looked like a stone wall in bits.

And as always - a HUGE THANK YOU - to Bob and Lynda for organising the event, and letting us have the run of their house for a weekend. It is very, very much appreciated!!

Don't forget folks - the festivities begin tomorrow lunchtime for the first BobLAN of 2018. As always, the webcam and game updates will be available all weekend on the LAN Party page.

The dates for the first BobLAN of 2018 have been announced. The LAN will take place from Thursday 10th until Sunday 13th May. The LAN Party page and Forums Topic are up and available - what do we fancy playing this time?!