What's a good FPS for two people to play on a LAN?

July 7, 2009 6:31 PM

What's a good FPS for two people to play on a LAN?

My roommate and I would like to shoot each other. I have a PC; he's got a Mac laptop and a PC.

The problem is, most multiplayer FPS games are geared toward team play—so the maps and the gameplay are designed for 8–32 players. Two people in a game like that spend most of their time running around looking for each other.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is out of the question, because I played that on a near-daily basis at work for a couple of years, and I'm thoroughly sick of it. (Besides, all that experience would give me an unfair advantage.)

Older games are fine (in fact, none of our hardware is cutting-edge, so something a few years old is probably better).

I've played a few of the freeware/open-source FPSs out there, and they all sucked. I think we're looking for a commercial solution.

Surely there's a good two-player FPS out there?

posted by ixohoxi to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total)

Did you try bzflag? Open source, runs on modest hardware, is playable with two players.
posted by the dief at 6:37 PM on July 7, 2009

One amazing day at work some years ago, a coworker and I installed and played Duke Nukem 3D co-op and it was way too much fun. Look into Doom/Quake/Quake II/Duke3D co-op action and you won't be disappointed.
posted by Diskeater at 6:40 PM on July 7, 2009

One thing we used to play fairly regularily was the old Ghost Recon series as a co-op against the computer. We'd usually have anywhere between 4-6 people playing during LAN parties, but there were more than a few evenings I'd have a friend hang out and the two of us would play, and it was still quite a good experience. Another bonus is the game requirements are so low by today's standards, even a crappy $500 general purpose laptop should run it like a champ. Hm.. I should try it out on my AspireOne and see how it runs...
posted by barc0001 at 7:02 PM on July 7, 2009

Doom, doom, doom! I played doom two player for hours and hours and hours over a direct modem connection, and it was good.
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 7:39 PM on July 7, 2009

If you go with Doom, get the zDoom mod. It enables vertical aiming, adds particle effects and a nifty interface.
posted by Ziggy Zaga at 9:03 PM on July 7, 2009

There's a co-op mod for UT2k4 called Alien Swarm. It's a fantastic co-op experience.
Left 4 Dead is another obvious co-op choice if you do the campaigns and survival modes.

Outside of the FPS genre, many RTSs work well with minimal players. Total War series, Red alert 3 is designed to be played with 2 players, Starcraft. Hack'n'Slash RPGs work well with small parties, Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest.

I heard Doom 3's multiplayer was designed for 4 players, but I have not played it myself. There's also a co-op mod for the singleplayer campaign of Doom 3. I would suggest Quake 3, it having some smaller maps, but your UT2k4 experience would transfer over relatively well.
posted by Submiqent at 11:00 PM on July 7, 2009

There are a variety of games based upon the engine I run, ioquake3. It runs on older hardware and you can get a variety of experiences. My favorite is reaction quake 3 (which currently still requires the original game data from Quake 3: Arena).
posted by TimeDoctor at 2:26 AM on July 8, 2009

If you want to try out co-op play in a zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead. It's designed for 4 people, so if it's just you two, you'll have a couple of dumb bots going with you, but that's not that bad.
posted by chengjih at 3:15 AM on July 8, 2009

Halo might work. Some of the maps are so small that anything more than 2 players is too crowded. You can run Macs and PCs together as long as the version numbers are exactly the same (which excludes any hacks and patches).
posted by joaquim at 11:34 AM on July 8, 2009

Serious Sam 1&2 are fun 1-1, but the co-op is great. It'd be a blast to play with someone in the same room.
posted by Four Flavors at 2:10 PM on July 8, 2009