Aside: og xbox is not so expensive 2nd hand and a great way to set up a kids lan party. 1 old router, 3 xboxes, 3 tvs, 12 controllers, Halo gets you 10 year-olds' mayhem. Noisy fun. Arguably easier if xboxes are modded.
modded oG xbox's or even X360s are a great living room centerpiece.
oG Xbox, Xlink Kai is still a thing. It was my first experience playing online as a poor 12 year old script kiddie myself.
For X360 LAN parties, It took a long time to find, but the hard-coded 4ms ping limit for "LAN" mode was removed, so LAN parties can be split into neighborhood LAN parties without problems
I have the same use case but with Xbox 360s since they are cheaper and easier to get here in Germany.
Haven't found a better "easy LAN party" setup than this.
A PC gaming LAN setup for 20 year old games is also dirt cheap but mostly requires 1 PC per player. The splitt screen support on PC is unfortunately very bad.
MotoGP, crash team racing, powerdrome, crimson skies all work great https://www.teamxlink.co.uk/wiki/Supported_Games then sort by both total players and players per console descending
Is this single location lan something that has been lost since those days?
Any better ways to set up a temporary lan party for kids?
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005142269614.htm