I loved to play it over lan with my friends.

Or as a true Guild player describes it: “keeping save game backups and doing regular checks to figure out if the game state is still in sync”. “The Guild” was the reason I got a “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” T-Shirt for LAN parties.

And don’t get me wrong: I am saying the game is SO GOOD it was totally worth all that trouble. I wish so hard for someone to release/leak the source code some time so someone with enough pain tolerance can try to rework the network stack. Or maybe a remaster of that game. It has a so much better feeling than its successors.