LAN? Recommendations, post-mortems, etc

Was wondering if anyone does the LAN party thing anymore or with any regularity? My friends and I appear to be starting to prepare for what will be our 2nd annual January LAN so we're starting to get a feel for what games we need to have keys for (you know, cause we're older and all our LANs are legal since it's easier to buy them off of Steam than bother pirating) so we can keep an eye out for Steam/Amazon/etc sales.

Who's still doing stuff like this, what games do you prefer? We tend to lean heavily towards cooperative games (SWAT, Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander vs AI, Tower Defense, Terraria, Killing Floor), with occasional team vs team or competitive stuff (Awesomenauts, Flatout 2). Looking forward to tryingDamnedthe next LAN, especially if we can make sure everyone's got headphones and a mic.

Looks like we'll probably give Path of Exile a shot, and there are some early access and other titles we're going to attempt likeTerrorhedronandArtemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator.

Figured I'd start a thread about this, and post what worked/didn't on our LAN next month, if others do the same it could be interesting. Or the thread will just die, no biggie. /shrug.

Still figuring that out, probably end up with 5-6 at all times, as many as 7-8 I'm guessing.

We've all played so much Supreme Commander that Starcraft is really claustrophobic actually, heh. It's been a while since we've done WC3 tower defense, but that absolutely took over a few LANs. We've since enjoyed games like Tower Wars and Sanctum, leading us to Terrorhedron

Anyone play Serious Sam 3 co-op? 15 players sounds kinda ridiculous for any FPS game, lol. It's part of the current Humble Bundle, seems like a no-brainer, especially w/ it including Magika, Sanctum and Natural Selection 2.

Brief post-mortem from our LAN:

Good games:
Payday 2 - fun when we were down to 4 at certain parts of the LAN. Played enough for people to get to level 4-6
Warcraft 3 Tower Defense - Our old standby, this consumed most of one evening with 6+ players
Dungeon Defenders - Fun, but for the 6+ player maps they start at like wave 7, crushing all of us with level 1 players, so we spent a couple hours learning the game and leveling in smaller group(s), got to level ~10-12 and then still got crushed. People a little annoyed they had to buy a handful of DLC just to play.
Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator: You've gotta be a pretty big nerd to enjoy this, concept was interesting at least.

Meh games:
Contagion: Kinda fun, but lack of better direction was a detriment to local LAN play and got people annoyed/bored
Insurgency: Fun, but had some impatient people, we meant to get back to it but didn't.
Damned: Fun, but had people without headsets/mics, and our monitor setup wasn't too conducive to 4 vs 1 play. Humans actually won for the first time in a game, but it took someone who'd never played before being the Lurker (so he didn't know the map or where we started like me or others would have focused on) for it to happen.

Games we planned/considered playing but didn't get to:
- Path of Exile
- Terrorheadron

We played a bit of Unreal Tournament at a LAN several years ago and it was a blast, we're a bit more co-op focused and less competitive though in our old (35, hah) age.

LAN just wrapping up now, concluding with a few hours of Sanctum 2, as solid as it's predecessor.