Meet the guy who tests all the multiplayer games with me

When I was really young, I used to play Rogue Spear quite a bit. The game was one of my weekend favourites, though much like most games, it’s under-appreciated. While some games go viral such as DOTA or Counter-Strike, there are still the underdogs of every genre. Rogue Spear happens to be one of them, in my opinion.

I recently reviewed Rogue Spear on a netbook, and it ran excellent. The game has a really good single-player, but multiplayer is really where it gets most of its replayability from. You’d note that in the past, MSN Gaming Zone was always packed with a lot of Adversarial (i.e. deathmatch) games, and the game lasted well into around the mid-2000s, even after the death of the Zone. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said today, since this game is quite old, and Call of Duty and Battlefield are both vying for the lead as the head-honcho of first-person shooters. One thing about those two games is that… first, you can’t play the latest versions on a netbook and that realism-wise, Rogue Spear still has much to offer which COD or BF cannot.

So I went over to Bosty’s house, who happens to also be featured in the Terraria opinion essay. We were bored and wanted to play SWAT, but I suggested he try Rogue Spear, because as I remembered, Rogue Spear was one of the best games out there when it came to shooters and realism. It’s a bit like SWAT 4 and Operation Flashpoint, except SWAT is more of a small-scale assault game, while OpF is an extremely wide-scale and widely encompassing game. Rogue Spear is a middle-scale game where you’ll tackle everything from isolated terrorist acts to Russians with nuclear material.

We played through a few cooperative games and adversarial games. Co-op games were much more enjoyable as it allowed us to exploit the fact that we were close proximity, and therefore we could communicate enemy positions and tactics much easier than if we were playing via the internet. We mainly tried three maps: the Met, an art museum, a 747 map and a nuke plant.The good thing was that we had fun, the bad thing is that this game really is something I miss from games of the past: it was extremely challenging, and at times it can border frustration.

Good times, revived. Ten years later!

Playing cooperatively, you could choose to play the actual missions, with its objectives such as rescue all hostages, or you could play the more back-to-basics Terrorist Hunt mode, which demands that you… kill ‘em all. You will be able to toggle how difficult you want the game to be and how much AI Backup you want. We decided that we wanted to play the game at its worst, and went to play at the Elite difficulty and with no AI Backup. In the end, we decided to be a bit more practical…

The other option would be to play Adversarial. Adversarial allows you to compete against your friend in a series of challenges. There’s Terrorist Hunt, where both your team and your opponent’s have to hunt down the most number of terrorists, or kill your opponent to win. There’s Stronghold, which challenges you to attempt to go into a pre-marked spot on the map deep inside your opponent’s territory. There’s also a kill-the-VIP mode and also many others. However, our Adversarial experience was a bit limited because it was a 1v1 game, and what’s worse was that both of us could see what each other were doing and our whereabouts. It wasn’t too much fun, but the most critical problem had to be the fact that we didn’t have enough players.

In the end, the game was fun, but what I used to love about the game could not be fully enjoyed today. The unfortunate truth is that many players have left and that without the raw numbers, many games would not be as fun as they were, when we had 4v4 adversarial games.

You Interested?

If you would be interested in hooking up for a multiplayer game, why not contact us via the Challenge Us form on the left side, or send an email to [email protected].

Apparently, the game is classified as abandonware, and therefore you can download it. There is a link in the review.

Perfect for Terraria, SWAT 4 and Warcraft

With age, some games lose their support for multiplayer gaming. Remember Gamespy? Well, that’s long gone. Or MSN Gaming Zone? Now that’s over ten years old and is as far gone as the Greek economy. These defunct gaming lobbies are pretty much the problem when you have a few friends who have an interest in multiplayer, but because of these dead services, cannot play the game online. Or perhaps you have gotten the game off The Pirate Bay and therefore cannot access a more modern game’s lobby because of cd-key issues. Well, as long as the game supports LAN connections, you’re still in luck.

Another area in which LogMeIn Hamachi works great is when you want to host a game and you’re behind a router. This causes a lot of issues when you want to hand your friend your computer’s IP because inevitably some port forwarding oversight will lead you to hours of frustration and eventually giving up. With Hamachi, all you have to do is to give a virtual IP made by Hamachi, and your friend can connect directly to your computer. So you won’t even need to port forward. Of course, other issues can arise such as ZoneAlarm saying it’s a bad idea, or Avast make a fuss, so don’t forget to check those first.

Get the free version at the official site.