Last weekend 10 friends and I tried to have an old-fashioned LAN party. I've been having LANs since I was in 8th grade, and many of my best gaming memories have happened with 10-16 Xboxes or PC's connected together. These LANs have kept a lot of my friends and I in contact because we do them once every 4 months like clockwork.

Now these LANs are dead.

The issue with the modern day LAN comes in the form of Xbox Live and the issues associated with license management. You see, we have traditionally played the Halo series at our LANs because we have gamers from every inch of the gaming spectrum. For some, the LAN is a natural extension of the nightly gaming session. For others, this is the only time of the year that they play games. Throw in a few WoW guys, and you can understand why Halo is such an easy choice.

Given the simplicity of the rules and the balance that the game provides (as well as the inherent lack of strategy), we've only really ever played Halo. Our first few Halo 3 LANs were fine, but as the DLC maps were released, we ran into problems. Still we soldiered on with fewer and fewer 360s until were down to just 4. At this past LAN, we had 6 boxes show up, but none of the boxes had access to the maps that they had already paid for.

Because the 360 requires Internet authentication to allow you to play the new maps, we ended up spending the majority of our night looking for a solution to our problem given our lack of router hardware. Ultimately we played Halo for 3 hours. For 1.5 of those hours, we had access to the DLC maps, but mysteriously the network crashed and we were left with the original maps only. Unfortunately, as most people know, the maps that shipped with Halo 3 were a bit....lacking overall.

Eventually we just ended up taking turns playing Rock Band 2. Rock Band turned out to be approximately 456 times more fun than Halo that night, and we vowed to never LAN Halo 3 again. While this makes me sad, I know that I can still enjoy Halo 3 online, and that we can always LAN Halo 1 and 2 still, but for some reason, I can't shake the feeling that perhaps our days of console LANning are done.