As a few of you may know, recently Bill and I (Alan) journeyed to a place which could be mistaken for Mordor, to tear it up on the slopes of Scotland with snowboarding. Whilst there we planned to do some gaming on our laptops using the ‘wonders’ of steam. So we made sure we had all the games installed on the laptops, ones which would run well, L4D, Defcon and Multiwinia. Great we thought, we’ve played these games over a LAN before, we’ve run these games in offline mode before too. Excellent, all we’ll need to do is hook up a network cable and play over a LAN. Wrong. It turns out you can launch all these games. But 2 out of them don’t work!!
Left For Dead LAN
Ok, so we load up the game with steam in offline mode, nothing is dodgy, we have the games legitimately. I choose to host a game, play with friends, choose LAN server. WHOOPS, it won’t host a LAN game. Why? No Idea, it’s taking the piss.
I actually managed to trick it, and get LAN game hosted, by using a mobile 3G connection, which only worked when I balanced the laptop on the window, and took 20 minutes to log into steam. Once I logged in, I could start Lef4Dead, open a LAN lobby no problem, hosted a game. Then I disconnected the 3G with the hosted LAN game, reconnected the cable. Bill could then see the game in the server browser (opened via the console). Only problem was the game refused to connect…
What’s the point of providing both an offline steam function and LAN game’s if they don’t work?? None I tell you.
Multiwinia Is Next
We tried this one next, thought we might get this one going. Start up the game in offline mode, no problem, host a game no problem. Bill, could see the game, but it refused to join.
*Ok for all you sceptics out there. We tried playing with other game settings with no avail. We also tried to each host games, that didn’t work either.
Defcon
This game loaded up in steam offline mode, and LAN game worked fine with no issues at all…
Steam is great, rarely have an issue with them. If you want to play games without an internet connection you may as well go make a paper hat / paper animal barnyard adventure playground.
Bill Nunney on 4 March, 2009
Total Annihilation worked perfectly though and it was released in 1997 (even has more features than most modern strategy games). Also its worth mentioning that neither could we watch movies on the Xbox because you have to login to xbox live to use the media update (if not original console), so no movie fun.
If the internet broke tomorrow the world would end…
Bowden on 15 October, 2009
For L4D, try opening console and entering ’sv_lan 1′ and ’sv_allow_lobby_connect_only 0′, this should both active LAN mode for L4D and allow players to connect to games without using lobby
and always use ‘openserverbrowser’ to play, far easier IMHO
Alan Hamlyn on 15 October, 2009
That’s a great tip! Thanks!
Unknown on 15 January, 2010
Steam sucks because it keeps you from lanning games. steam SUCKS! Thats it.