Gameranger

[fastbilly1]

For those of you who enjoy GOG as much as I do, Gameranger may become your new best friend. If you play something like Nox or Ice Wind Dale 1 and want to play it in multiplayer, you will run into issues. Nox for example used Westwood online for online play, and since that has been gone for almost a decade, well it makes it alittle hard to hop on for a quick match. However Gameranger comes to the rescue. Gameranger is very similar to Gamespy Arcade or Steam, in that it allows you to communicate with other gamers, and play games with them. However Gameranger allows you to play lan only games online. I see that now I have your attention.

In technical terms Gameranger is an adhoc VPN tunnel built ontop of a social network. Like Hamachi or Tuungle, it fakes your PC out so it thinks you are on the same network as those in your chatroom. No playing with fake nics, very little troubleshooting, just fire it up, start a chatroom, invite people, start the game. Last night, it took us about ten minutes to get six people up and running in a game (which included a reg edit because it was the GOG version).

The only downside is that it has ads, unless you pay $40 a month to get rid of them. But since I am going to use it twice a week, I can live with ads. Especially ads for Tacos!

[noiseredux]

This sounds awesome.

[fastbilly1]

We still used Steam for Voicechat, but used Gameranger to play through the first half of Nox with six players last night. My bears reigned supreme!

Last time we tried to do this, it took an hour of setting up and configuring Hamachi on three pcs for Ice Wind Dale and at the end we still only had two people able to join together before we gave up and played something else. It really gave new life to some older games for us.

[Stark]

My ITTT script told me that someone is talking about tacos in here and I felt obliged to say that tacos are awesome.

Gameranger sounds great, I'll have to check it out, thanks fast.

[flex wood]

Hypothetically could I use this gameranger service to play pirated games online with some friends?

Also since it was brought up I think steam voice chat is absolutely terrible. I prefer teamspeak and always know of a couple dead ts servers that I can squat in if I don't feel like connecting to the normal server I use.

[noiseredux]

I like steamchat cuz i always have it running anyway and dont have to install anything else. Not that i voicechat often.

[fastbilly1]

Hypothetically could I use this gameranger service to play pirated games online with some friends?

Also since it was brought up I think steam voice chat is absolutely terrible. I prefer teamspeak and always know of a couple dead ts servers that I can squat in if I don't feel like connecting to the normal server I use.

Hypothetically, yes.

Ill agree that Steam is not the best voice chat, but it is quick to use, works well enough, and everyone already has it installed. Getting some of my friends, like Ack, to install anything new, is like pulling teeth while wearing boxing gloves.

[mjmjr25]

, is like pulling teeth while wearing boxing gloves.

I don't know how common a saying this is - but I know i've never heard it.

I also know i'll be passing it off as my own...often.

[Hobie-wan]

That sounds cool, but $40 a month? Holyouchies!

[flex wood]

That sounds cool, but $40 a month? Holyouchies!

It's free, the 40 just removes the ads.