LAN gaming for school

[Oops_my_bad]

i am looking at the possibility of setting up a "breakfast" or afterschool club at the college I work at to get some of the kids more engaged with IT (as part of something wider). i would like to set aside an entire computer lab of say 20 PC's.

Can anyone recommend a decent LAN based multiplayer game which could have this many PC's playing together? I was looking at Linux based games that are open source because we can't afford the multiple copies of softare, and one that looked quite good was America's Army. I have a spare server which is running Ubuntu server and is a good spec (quad xeon, 2GB RAM) and the PC's are pentium 4's 3.2GHz (not sure about the graphics but I think they are 128meg add-on ATI's)

[Ric_]

Check out Alien Arena 2007... based originally on the GPLed Quake 3 source.

[webman]

Second vote for Alien Arena! I installed it for my brother on his PC after reading about it in LXF and he loves it. We used to play Halo, UT2003/4 and QIII a couple of years ago so I think I'll be having a bash at Alien Arena myself

[Oops_my_bad]

This looks really good.. have any of you experience of setting the server up? I've downloaded and installed packages alien-arena-server, alien-arena, libc6 and ruby however but can't find any config files for the server to edit. It's installed in usr/games and seems to be just the one executable?

[Ric_]

@TeddyKGB: I haven't looked into it but there is a dedicated server mode... Did you download from their website or just grab the packages? The download of 2007 is far nicer

[Geoff]

Install 'alien-arena-data' and edit 'usr/share/games/alien-arena/arena/server.cfg'

[gwendes]

Starcraft! It'll run on anything

(I know it's limited to 8 players but you'll soon get a tornament going if they find it nearly as addictive as I did!)

[Geoff]

If you want to play RPG's consider one of the Stratagus games.

http://www.stratagus.org/games.shtml

[ICT_GUY]

Quake 2!

Still plays well today, it will run of a network share and plays well on anything built the past decade.

[tomscaper]

How about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

http://www.splashdamage.com/?page_id=14

[mark]

Trackmania Nations is free, suitable for minors, and works well on a LAN if ya want a racing game.

[ChrisH]

Trackmania Nations is free, suitable for minors, and works well on a LAN if ya want a racing game.

I would like to hear about more games like this as I dont think the violent games would go down too well at our Catholic school

[K.C.Leblanc]

If your students are as sad as me, try OpenTransportTycoonDeluxe. It runs on a P3-500.

[Oops_my_bad]

Thanks for all the input chaps, im going to try setting some of those up once i get to grips with this one - i managed to get the alien 2007 server going an im a total linux noobie so thanks Geoff

[Scotmk]

Paintball2 is a kid friendly no blood gore First person shooter (like quake) runs great on lan.