A friend of mine holds a quarterly gaming weekend out at his cottage, it's not a remote cottage, it's in a small hamlet about 45mins from the city. Up until a few years ago high-speed internet wasn't available to the region, that didn't really matter though, all of our games played nicely over the LAN. Then games like BF2 started to emerge, and anything Steam related where they "insist" on doing a little online check. In earlier patches of BF2, you literally couldn't start the game without being online! Even though the game has a fully supported single player campaign as well as LAN multiplayer. Now-a-days it's a bit better, but it can take up to 3-5mins staring at a blank screen when starting BF2 before it is satisfied that it can't connect to the internet before it starts up. You can get around this by unplugging your ethernet cable when you start the game, then plugging it back in once it starts, but what a pain in the ass.
And then there is Steam, basically if you want to play Half-life or Team Fortress 2, good luck trying to do that without an internet connection, even if you intend to only play locally. What a joke. Luckily John now has access to high-speed through his neighbour's connection. When we go out there to play, they setup a wireless N bridge between the cabins. However the last time we were up there the bridge failed (for unknown reasons) around midnight, and we were left there wanting to play TF2 but unable to.
Sounds like there needs to be a petition sent to the game companies which implores them not rely on an internet connection in order to play their game. People still have LAN parties, and yes, sometimes they do this without access to the internet!
</rant>