A friend hosted a LAN party yesterday that, thanks to my spiffy new video card, I was able to attend. It's the first LAN party I've been to in years, and it was great fun. We played Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 (instagib deathmatch and team deathmatch) exclusively, and Joe and I stayed for about ten hours. Our copies of UT2004 came in on Thursday, and we didn't even try the game out until Friday, so our experiences in the game were very limited (though we both played the original UT years ago). We managed to stay in the middle of the scoring most of the time, and over the night, we both improved.
If you've never been to a LAN party but you like to play games, I highly recommend it. Sure, you can play these same games online, but it's not the same as being in the same room together.
Two tips:
1) If you're ever up against IceViking in UT2004 and he kicks your ass, don't worry. He kicks everyone's asses. Constantly. We joked that his name was hardcoded into the program to auto-win if anyone came close to winning the game. He's just that good.
2) I'm not "the girl." I haven't been a girl in a long time, and it's rude to refer to me as such. Refer to me as "the woman" if you must differentiate me from the other eight people in the room. Or hell, address me directly. When I call out "good shot" to your kill, you could, yanno, talk to me instead of about me. And no, the girl is not June_Cleaver. The girl's husband is June_Cleaver. The girl is and always will be, DeadlyAccurate.