I apologize if this is not the right place for this... I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out what goes where, what threads are against the rules, etc.

I am looking for multiplayer games that support having multiplayer players on multiple PC's LAN together, similar to how older consoles used to have LAN support. I am limited to satellite internet in my rural area, but I have a lot of meet up's for local gaming. I enjoy both LAN and shared screen, but shared screen gets a lot more attention. Most of my friends don't have a quality PC gaming system, and the ones that do don't have very portable ones.

I'm also a big fan of large local MP games; RTS games are a personal favourite, but always run into the issue of not enough PC's to make a good LAN setup. I tried doing 8 player shared screen; not many games offer that kind of support, and XInput's 4 controller limitation made it irritating to try and use my already existing Xbox 360 wireless pad setup for them. But then I recalled of the split screen + LAN setups that Xbox had and were popular with Halo groups. I knew I could possibly emulate Gamecube LAN.. but the more I looked into it, it would require a lot of extra networking software just so I could play 3 racing games :s As far as I can tell, the only game I know for sure offers this kinda of MP on steam is Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed. It always requires a bit of configuration to force onto LAN, but it is possible to have 8 players on 2 separate machines this way.

I would be very interested in any genre of game that offer this kind of MP for PC. I would prefer not using a tool like SplitPC that could be run over LAN, because its unoptimized and has a lot of prep work just to get a game running. The less time I have to spend preparing and troubleshooting, the better.