Honestly nothing will beat Warcraft 3 (pre reforged refunded) custom games for LAN parties.

Some of my favorite maps: Warlock (any 1.0X version), either teams or FFA, Uther Party, Battle Tanks, Archer Wars Legacy, Survival Chaos, Legion TD, Farmer vs Hunter, Founders of the North, Hungry Hungry Felhounds, The Predator (Version FINAL), etc.

Honestly there’s just too many to count and even remember

there’s also a mod that makes it so you can have simultaneous turn enabled permanently, although it does allow for some quirks and bug abuse, but it’s such a massive time saver when every player can take their turn at the same time that its well worth it.

just google chinese ev car graveyard https://i.imgur.com/vjtkj6J.png

not only are they selling at a loss, most of the sales aren’t even real

For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…

But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.

I just never considered that possibility.

Lego games like Lego Starwars has already been mentioned and I will second those (especially the newer ones that have split screen).

Divinity Original Sin is also great.

Honestly most games I can think of have already been mentioned and those who have not seem like they might not be that great of an option since it seems your partner isn’t normally into gaming. (RTS in particular might be too hard)

But I will suggest some anyway just in case

Starcraft 2 has free online multiplayer which includes a COOP vs AI mode.

There’s also a 2 player campaign adaption of Warcraft 3’s normally single player campaign. Although it might only be available for pre-Reforged.

Also I didn’t know about it before now, I googled it just in case, but apparently SC2 also has COOP mods for its campaigns.

You mentioned having a Switch so I will recommend Advance Wars Reboot and Wargroove 1 & 2, although there are no COOP campaigns but you can play multiplayer maps.

Besides Advance Wars Reboot Camp on Switch (or the originals for Gameboy, which you could play with emulator), there’s also an online fan site called Advance Wars By Web where you can play advance wars in the web browser, although there’s no single player.

Wargroove is also on Steam and besides the campaign and regular game itself there are puzzles.

And speaking of Puzzles, card games tend to have Puzzles. I haven’t actually played Magic, Yu Gi Oh, etc. so I can’t say for sure whether they have any, but there’s puzzles in Faeria. (I would’ve recommended Might and Magic Duel of Champions, it had some great puzzles, but Ubisoft shut that game down many years ago)

I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.

But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.

Eclipse Vanguard 💀

I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.

Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.

Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)

But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.

Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.

And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.

I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.

LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.

As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.

Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.

One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.

But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.

There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.

Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).

Warcraft 3, Age Series (AoE, AoE2, AoM, AoE3), Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005)

I played the first age of empires when I was 6 or 7 y/o and I’ve played all of the games besides AoE4 (including Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds).

As a kid we had few crappy dell computers connected to just a hub (LAN without internet) and would play a lot of Age of Empires 2 and C&C Red Alert 1 & 2 multiplayer.

Age of Empires and Red Alert were also games I would frequently play at small LAN parties (although everyone was really bad)

I played a bit of online AoE2 when AoE2 HD came out on steam but it was pretty bad so I stopped playing it. When DE came out I started watching AoE2 content but I’ll never play it because I’ve come to greatly dislike Microsoft over the years.

I’ve replayed Need for Speed Most Wanted (and also Carbon) tens of times over the years, and I still play it every now and then (with mods now)

But the game I’ve played the most is probably Warcraft 3. I’ve played a ton of custom games on Battle.net (RIP) and it’s what got me a bit into programming since I liked making custom maps and making triggers eventually led me to learn JASS (Just Another Scripting Language)

If Blizzard didn’t completely ruin Warcraft 3 with WC3 Reforged Refunded I’d probably still be playing it and making custom maps every so often.

I have played a bit on private servers but it’s just not the same anymore.

There’s a pretty cool Warcraft 3 open source project called Warsmash though so maybe one day I’ll start playing again.

Already saw this a year or two ago, it’s a great watch and would highly recommend anyone who hasn’t seen it yet does watch it

How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.

I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.

Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)

Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes

Oh… I had a tiny bit of hope before reading this

To be honest I don’t remember the last time I finished a game.

Not counting Rogue-lite games where you replay them over and over like Slay the Spire I think the most “recent” game that I’ve finished might be Mass Effect 3, which is from 2012…

Oh actually I did finish The Banner Saga 1 a few years ago. It’s pretty good except for being somewhat lacking in Quality of Life features. The main selling point are the art style and gameplay-story integration. The tactical combat gameplay is okay but very repetitive, although it got a lot better in BS2 (which I haven’t finished) with more varied mission objectives than just “kill every enemy” over and over again.

Skyrim and Xcom 2 are probably in my top 3 or at least top 5 most played games but I have never completed them.

The games I’ve replayed and finished the most times are Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 1&2 (only completed ME3 2 times).

I’ve replayed DA:O more than 10 times and I would highly recommend it, although I would recommend getting mods and especially get the increased memory patch so it doesn’t crash as often.

Calling BG3 a sequel is very disingenuous, it shares nothing in common with BG1 and BG2 besides the name.

Being based on d&d and having two previous big hits in a row (Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2) obviously mattered though.

Removing the awful camera zoom and graphics around the border when using Witcher Sense

Really?

I would’ve expected 3DS at most

If Mass Effect Legendary Edition actually included ME3’s multiplayer I might’ve considered installing Origin again.

TWP is even better than just google translate because it lets you choose between Google, Bing, Yandex, and DeepL translations, if a translation looks sus you can take a look at what the other translation engines say.

At least on PC

I used to have to wait 5~10 minutes on the loading screens before missions before when I didn’t have an SSD and only 8gb RAM