LAN parties are the source of some of the bestest multiplayer gaming ever (and I'm all about multiplayer). There are few things more rewarding than being able to shoot someone on your computer and hear, from a room down the hall, "Aw, what the fuck?!" Doubly so if you can hear the pounding of mouse-on-mousepad frustration.

Okay... so maybe I enjoy my friend's pain a little too much.

We used to play a lot of Alien vs Predator at these yearly events and the default setting is for the server is for Friendly Fire to be on. No one would ever let me set the CS server to FF, but since out of the box AvP had "FF = On" people were cool with it.... whatever. FF in AvP is a tricky thing because the walking speed of a typical marine is at about mach 5. This is only slightly slower than that of the Alien, which means when you see something run past in the dark most people shoot first and wait to hear who screams back (in real life).

Add to that the Prox Mine, a weapon that nearly ruined an entire LAN party (no joke). See a Prox Mine, once set, blows up anyone that gets near it, and they are nearly impossible to see on the ground. A huge source of FF kills. So one guy gets gibbed by a teammate and he wants some revenge, so he sets up some mines. Then two more pop and they both get pissed and they set up... ok you get. Eventually we put a ban on the weapon so we could get back to killing the Aliens. And most people respected the ban... but there was this one dude, a Prox Mining Monger that just didn't get it.

Time for a quick geography lesson. Most of us were packed tightly into a small garage. This worked okay since we could chat about with one another while we played (and it was even easier to hear people cry when you blew them apart). I say most because this Prox Mine Whore wasn't in the garage with us - he was a floor above us in his bedroom. This gave us an amazing tactical advantage as he couldn't hear our scheming.

We decided that he was a lost cause and was open game for blatant team killing; he became "one of them". But because it was hard to tell who's who in the game we decided that we needed a signal that would tell us if the Marine we were standing by was "one of us". That signal was the AvP Taunt, a button which caused the Marine to shout out things like "Hoo Ah!" or "Ha ha.".

It was amazing. You'd run into a room of 3 marines and they'd all look over and start taunting and you better signal back if you didn't want to be atomized. If someone didn't 'Hoo Ah' back quick enough you lit him up with 5,000 rounds of bullets. Sure, there were some mistakes, but it was so worth it.

Even more amazing is that even eventually decoded our signal and started taunting back. That's when we started taunting and jumping. It gets tough to take a game seriously when you walk run into a Marine and you both starting hopping around and Ha Ha-ing at each other.

Shortly after version two of this "secret handshake" he disconnected, stormed down the stairs and called us all "mother fuckers" that ruined his fun.

I was so proud.