Back in the day after college but before wives and kids were a thing, myself and 6 or 7 of my buddies would get together every week for "gamenight". Gamenight consisted of getting completely tore up while playing various console games and then eating some sort of delicious meal for dinner. FIFA was a huge one for its multiplayer ability, but we would play anything from Rock Band to Braid to Uncharted to Gears of War to CoD to Trivial Pursuit to Mario Party/Kart and so on. It was a phenomenal time to be alive.
The guys I lived with for my last 2 years of college, and then the group for two years after that, did the same. The second group was both board games and Halo 3, we had a blast with each. We ran an Axis and Allies game for ages, the kind of thing where someone would make a move at any random time that they could, if we couldn't all be there at once, depending on whose turn it was.
The first group was all video games. Your mentioning Gears of War is what reminding me of this. I never participated myself, I was a PC FPS snob at the time and hadn't done console seriously for a bit so I didn't want to subject myself to the trash talk if I sucked. But I had one roommate who forever and always tried to get me to play, and trashtalked me until finally I said "Yep. That's it. We go, now." We went one on one, first to 3 kills wins. I had two hard-fought kills, and then he got two. On the last round we both ended up on the opposite sides of some fountain or whatever. I figured out that he was watching my half of the screen on the rounds where he killed me, so I decided to bait him. I pulled out my grenade. He immediately yelled "YOU'RE f***ED" and charged. I switched to shotgun and blindfired his head off. It was so goddamned satisfying after all his trash talk. He flipped the controller and ran out yelling gibberish. It was fantastic.
It also wasn't instructive. When he saw me playing Rome:TW he started doing the same thing about LANing me. I agreed after a couple days, with the only condition being that I picked the map. He said "I don't care. I'll wreck you on any map." I chose a map with a bridge over a river. He created an actual, decent, balanced army. I selected half an army of pigs, most of the other half as archers, and then a couple cavalry units. The battle starts and I hear him scream "PIGS!?!?! YOU'RE f***ED!!" from across the house...and he immediately send his whole army across the bridge. It was met by my horde of pigs, which stopped his whole army on the bridge as my archers slaughtered him. Soon enough he was routed and my cavalry was mopping up, as I could hear him screaming "NOOOOO" a floor below me.
After those two wins there was no way I could play in the competitive game nights. Those two wins were wayyyyy too satisfying to sully with losses or lesser moments. I resumed spectating. And now I'm garbage at video games with crap reaction times and the hand-eye coordination of Ali in his later years, but I've at least got those memories.