Hosting a Halo 3 LAN party in the big 26
When you live in New England, having a birthday during the winter limits your options when it comes to figuring out how you want to celebrate. Usually I go somewhere else, but this year I was going to be at home and wanted to mix it up. So yesterday for my birthday I hosted a Halo 3 LAN party at my apartment.
I love video games and most of my friends still do too, but I realized that most of the time when my friends and I get together to play games it's usually online, even if we're really not that far from each other. And that's fine... but I want to see my friends in person sometimes! I miss sitting on the couch in someone's basement with the Xbox going and some shitty bluetooth speaker playing metalcore. The idea of doing a LAN always seemed out of reach as a kid mostly due to costs (and the fact that my parents probably didn't want all that shit in their house) but now that we're in our thirties, we're living on our own, and most of my friends still have their 360s collecting dust it made sense to try one now. So it was definitely a team effort wrangling all the equipment together but everything ended up working perfectly for the most part.
I decided to play Halo 3 for a few reasons. Halo 3 was my favorite shooting game growing up (which I've written about on here many many times) and it ended up being a staple of our friend group's online gaming sessions to this day via the Master Chief Collection on PC. Halo 3 is also probably the most accessible shooter from that era so its easy for casual players to jump in - there's a lot of goofy team game modes, the time to kill is pretty long so you're not getting oneshot like you would in Call of Duty, and it really is built for easy LAN play. Getting the lobby set up took seconds and minus a few random disconnects, worked flawlessly.
Our setup ended up being 5 Xboxes and a combo of 5 TVs and monitors. Halo 3 supports splitscreen LAN so we were able to get the full 16 players this way and not take up a ton of space. It also made for really fun team games, where everyone sharing a screen formed their own team and we would do 3 or 4 teams clashing off against each other. Everyone had a great time - there was lots of laughs, lots of trash talking, a surprising amount of locking in from people who haven't touched a Halo game in years... I was surprised at how good everyone was still!
We did a bunch of games for fun but I wanted to do something bigger too since we were going to have like 24 people. While planning this whole thing I learned that you can order a custom trophy online for not a lot of money. So I made a really stupid Breaking Benjamin themed trophy to give to who we would determine to be the best Halo 3 player. Initially I was going to have us all vote but my roommate suggested we do a tournament. We did a 16 player free for all, the top 8 moved on, then the top 4 and finally a 1v1. As the number of players dwindled, we were able to take some of the setups out and the 1v1 culminated with one person on a console and the rest of us watching and cheering them on. It was super fun and really hype. For the record, I got my ass kicked at my own birthday party - I came in 9th the first round lmao.
Everything ran very smoothly and we all had an amazing time. I hadn't done a LAN since college over a decade ago (and even then it was just two Xboxes linked together to play Halo Reach) and I was surprised with how easy it was to set up and get everyone rolling. That being said, I still want to make improvements for the next one...
- We ran the Xbox 360 version of Halo 3 because it's cheap and you can run a cross generation LAN by linking Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles together and it all works perfectly. The one downside of this is because the servers for Xbox 360 Halo games have been shut down for a few years, we couldn't download all the custom games that we play on the Master Chief Collection, and my old save data with any custom maps I had downloaded have been long gone. If we can source some Xbox Ones on the cheap, maybe we'll run MCC next time so we can play Halo Jenga.
- Since we have a pretty small apartment for the amount of people we were hosting, our original idea for layout was using mine and my roommate's bedrooms as additional setup locations to spread people out. It was a better idea in theory than in practice. It's more fun to have everyone in the same room and you do feel a little isolated from the rest of the group. I think the solution here is using more computer monitors or smaller screens and spacing them out in the main living rooms.
- We tried playing Modern Warfare 2 also and it ended up being kind of a flop sadly. That game does support LAN play, but you can't do more than one person per setup which was a huge bummer since Halo did splitscreen LAN so well. This one we'd definitely have to source more consoles for, but at least the discs are insanely cheap (we got 6 off facebook marketplace for $60).
- And finally this is a general party thing for me but I always buy too much food and drinks for these lol. I got a 24 pack of Baja Blast as a bit and my friend came with Hard Mountain Dew which was an even better bit imo. But I'm good on snacks at least for the next couple months.
We're already talking about having another one soon. I would love to see video game nights make a comeback amongst my friends like how board game nights have been big for a while. I like a board game just as much as the next guy but let's be honest sometimes I just want to play a FPS with some friends over a few beers instead of having to learn complicated rules to something. I have a feeling Halo will continue to be our game of choice but I wonder if we can try a more modern console or PC sometime so we can do some different games... maybe we'll have to rent out a space for that. Excited to make this a thing with my friends!
