Online Gaming

[NightTrain]

Hey, do any of you play games online?

They're going to have my cable modem feed fixed tomorrow with any luck... about damn time.

 

[jimnyc]

I do, but I'm too cheap to buy any games! I'm stuck playing cheesy shockwave games.

I do have Delta Force: Black Hawk Down

Not sure if there is any online play. I'll reinstall tonight and see.

What games do you have? Maybe I'll spring for something if I know I can play online.

 

[janeeng]

aren't there games right online to do this???

 

[NightTrain]

The best game I've ever played was Civilization II Gold Edition. It's a world conquest game.

You start out by building your first city in year 4,000 B.C. You begin developing technology, and expand & explore your surroundings. So the first technology you 'discover' would be the Wheel or Horseback Riding, or something basic along those lines.

You keep expanding, founding cities, and you'll meet other rival civilizations. You have several different ways of dealing with them, war is just one of them. You can threaten them in order to get money or technology, or ally with them, sign peace treaties, ignore them, bribe them to declare war on an enemy, etc.

Naturally, treachery is a large part of the game. Especially when playing against human opponents rather than just the computer. Treaties are created & tossed aside much more carelessly by humans, and you really get pissed off at someone who Pearl Harbored you after signing a peace treaty with you. Oh yes, I've let Nukes fly over such indiscretions!

Your technology discovery rate is a direct result on what kind of government you have & how your economy is doing. Sending spies in to steal technology or to incite a revolt of a rival civ is almost guaranteed to get your ass landed in a war! lol

Anyway, by the end of the game, you have Aircraft Carriers, stealth fighters, subs, nukes, tanks, battleships, etc... this is where the game gets really good, because it's not necessarily how strong your country is (although that is a factor), it's how smart you are in deploying your armed forces & out maneuvering your opponent(s). You win when you capture all of your opponents cities - and rule the world! Muuuaaahahahahahaa!! lol

The downside to this game is that it's turn based, so sometimes there's a few minutes between your turns if someone is fighting a major war... but that gives you time to rethink your strategy and tweak some of your cities.

I also have Civ III, but it's pretty difficult to learn on. Civ II is a perfect one to learn on, and then step up to Civ III. This game is extremely addicting, especially when you're learning it because of the fascinating different outcomes of any tactic you choose.

Have you played this one or do you know where you can get a copy? If not, I can burn you your own official pirated copy and send to you.

 

[jimnyc]

I've heard of that one before but didn't know much about it until just now. Sounds like a game I can really get into.

A copy would be nice

Gonna start looking on p2p now!

 

[NightTrain]

Anyone else besides Jim interested? You can have up to 7 players in a game.

 

[jimnyc]

The only one I could find is Civ III on Kazaa, but it's sloooooooooooooooow!

Any demo's available?

 

[NightTrain]

I can't find any demo for Civ... the few I did find were for Macs... surely you've got a buddy nearby that's got it, Jim?


I don't have Desert Storm... now that I'm back to broadband, I'll have to look into getting a few new ones.

I've got Starcraft, Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Warcraft II and III, and a bunch of older ones.

 

[NightTrain]

Jim, I'd keep downloading that Civ III off Kazaa... I'm sure you'd have it in a couple hours, right?

 

[jimnyc]

Originally posted by NightTrain
Jim, I'd keep downloading that Civ III off Kazaa... I'm sure you'd have it in a couple hours, right?

I'm gonna turn it back on now and let it ride. The problem is the other guys connection, not mine. I can only download it as fast as their upload can dish it out. I was getting like 7Kbps last time. I'll keep ya updated.

 

[NightTrain]

Hey, thanks EA! I'll pass, though, I really never got into Halflife either... our oldest boy, John, likes those kinds of games.


I'm no expert on cracking CDs.. my brother Jim is pretty good at it though. The Warcraft games are put onto the hard drive & then you use Daemon Tools to emulate the CD drive - basically, it fools your computer into thinking it's a legit CD.

I'm wondering if he can crack Civ II and we can get an ICQ file transfer going, that would be a helluva lot faster than the 7 kbps... I'll call him and see if he can do that.

 

[Dan]

I'm a huge fan of Half Life, though I've never played it online. From what I hear, one of the games in that pack EA has is Half-Life: Counterstrike, which is apparently one of the best multiplayer games ever made. My connection's far too slow for online gaming, unfortunately .

 

[janeeng]

hahahah, tell Dad to hook you up to cable Dan!

 

[NightTrain]

I just got done burning Civ II Gold for Jim, I'll mail it down today. If any of you wants a copy of it, ask him for a copy... makes sense for him to burn copies there in your area & give them to ya - lots faster than me mailing down multiple copies.

Besides, I'm down to 3 blank CDs!

 

[NightTrain]

Tried to burn Civ III, there's some advanced anti-piracy protections on it. I burned a copy with Clone CD and it's bascially a coaster for my drinks now - the game crashes & burns.

I'll see if my brother can burn a couple of copies, he's successfully burned Civ III before but it took him quite awhile to figure out how to get around the protections.

 

[Jack]

Maybe back to the dorms next year, they have cable.

 

[ap0clypse]

who wants civ2 gold and who wants civ3? I believe I can send civ2 over the net, You should then be able to use daemon tools to mount image so your computer will not do a cd check to see if the disk is present.

 

[NightTrain]

I already burned Jim a copy of Civ II gold, he'll have it in a couple of days.

It would have been pretty nifty to ICQ him the image files of the CD that he could then just burn onto a disk, but I can't transfer to him faster than 7.4 Kbps. It would take 26 hours at that rate.

He's able to ram my modem at up to 48 kbps... wish we had that kinda bandwidth available up here!

 

[jimnyc]

I can actually upload at 1.08Mbps, but your download was holding me back

 

[NightTrain]

No, I've seen downloads on my end at 90k / second... maybe the ICQ network was bogged down or something, I know I can d/l at over 48 on a nice fast server!

I just compressed the Image files, got it down to 605 megs... Jim's trying to compress it using another program he says will make it much smaller than an ordinary zip file.