Happiness Friday: Hosting a Call of Duty 4 LAN Party with Friends!

Written by: Daniel Richard

Hey friends! Thanks for checking in on WE for updates. We would love to have your Digg, share, and Stumble after reading the latest entries. Do consider subscribing for the latest updates too. Thanks! :D

Image courtesy of Unscripted 360

The team at Winning Everyone loves hanging out every fortnight to play a round of LAN (local area network) game parties at the nearby LAN gaming shop.

Each round usually lasts from one and a half hours to two, or three hours when we have the time to play a while longer. We would also call a couple of friends to join us in our LAN party. The turnout for the last LAN gaming session we had was 6! The cool part was that we had organized the game not more than an hour before we started.

The game we had started to love playing recently is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In short, CoD4, or to make it sound cooler using military jargon, Charlie Oscar Delta.

Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Windows for desktop play, while Mac OS X users would need to wait till Fall 2008 to get your hands onto this action-packed and popular game.

This game had won numerous praises and Game of the Year awards, and had sold 7 million copies as of late January 2008.

Call of Duty 4 - List of 7 reasons to love the game

Here’s a list of stuffs to why we liked this game, and most probably why you could join in the action by picking up a copy yourself, or host a similar LAN party with your friends.

1. Stunning graphics, breathtaking scenery in the game maps

When you are in the game for the first time, there would be no doubt you would go on and say “Wow!” and feel the temptation to start wanting to explore around the huge place to see every single areas of the map.

The colors of each terrain and level are well selected and painted to make individual maps stand out on their own. And there’s definitely reasons to why the artist had made the map to look and feel a certain way. Here’s one critical reason that I can think of now: strategic purposes.

An example would be that there was this particular multi-player map with a huge wasteland filled with empty crates, damaged and abandoned vehicles, and looked too open to be spotted easily by anyone. However, I managed to find a good hiding spot that allows my character to start sniping away at an opponent team’s spawning ground as I blended beautifully with the huge abandon crate that I found during one of the rounds we played.

2. Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 is now based on modern situations and settings, bringing us out from the World War II era and placing us into a new battle term called Modern Warfare.

Movies like Transformers (2007) and Black Hawk Down (2001) featured battle scenes that are realistic to what we see around us now.

The weapons used are relevant to current day times. From having the stun grenade to semi-auto sniper rifles, and also bringing in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV Recon) to spot out the enemies’ exact locations.

Image courtesy of James Gordon

3. Help from above: air strikes and helicopter support!

I love this one! When a player notched individual kill scores of 5, an air strike bonus will be available to the player to send a huge bombardment of bombs sent from the skies. A helicopter bonus is given to the individual player when he gets 7 kill streaks, where the helicopter will scout for a couple of minutes around the map and automatically fires at the enemy players when they are spotted!

That is uber-coolness!

4. Fight till the end - The Last Stand

The Last Stand is a perk that you can add to your character whereby your character will automatically whip out his side-arm and battle it out till he gets one more lethal shot or bleed out.

I had fended off two enemies with this feature at the first time I used this. My character must really had been determined to live on till the end.

Philosophical and yet useful to the game play.

5. The Double Tap, Dead Silence, and Extreme Conditioning perks

One thing my friends and I have in common is to run around and hunt for anyone who’s in a stationary position and are waiting to snipe at us from far, and knife his character from behind.

Those perks add to the speed of our characters which would help us even more in our “knifing expeditions”.

Image courtesy of Simon Davison

6. Blasting stuffs apart. BOOM!

That is what I am known for in the group while playing CoD4. There’s this Rocket Powered Grenade (RPG) launcher that holds two gigantic missiles which I am so used to having around my character wherever I go.

Sometimes when my character goes on looking for my friends’ characters and found someone who spotted me, I would use that RPG launcher and blow them apart!

Not only the RPG launcher is used to blow others apart, they can destroy certain covering objects like abandoned cars and debris, and the missiles can also be used to take down the helicopters that are called on by someone from the opposing team!

Any game that allows you to choose a class that is armed with an RPG launcher is a game you so gotta play!

7. Blowing others up from behind their backs!

Have I mentioned that you can use the RPG to blow others apart? Here’s bringing the game one step higher, by creeping behind your friend’s character’s back and instead of using the knife to take a silent kill at him, use the RPG launcher and blow him apart.

Used only for humorous situations, and while playing adrenaline pumping Free-for-All games.

Image courtesy of mrebert

Tons of awesome weaponry and game play, but what we liked best is…

Having our nights out having a clean and friendly competition between all of us!

Do you know that there is actually some psychology involved in coming up as the top players in the group?

One of which is that the ones who eventually scored the highest in our groups are the ones that builds up anticipation before the gaming session by having a spew of friendly competition words that challenges and motivates each other to out-do each other.

The funny thing about our last LAN party was that the two who started the challenge between each other ended up playing on the same team for most of the two hours, before the game turned into a Free-for-All mode.

Jeremiah, being the avid gamer from the Winning Everyone team, won in the four-way Free-for-All battle against Jephthah and myself, alongside another player who we had called on to join our game session at the end of that day.

No worries for the ones who score is at the bottom of our games. Maybe we should come up with some interesting forfeits at the end of the day, like pasting lots and lots of post-it notes on him, similar to how that guy from the above photo had faced when he was found sleeping at the end of their LAN session.

Enjoy starting your own game parties and playing a fun and having a friendly competition with your friends. These games does build each other up too!

We love our LAN gaming sessions! Subscribe to Winning Everyone and read us together with your friends in your next party now!

Popularity: 33% [?]