Game Knight Crew

Greetings GKC and anyone else lame enough to be reading a semi-private blog about a group of aging geeks and their bordering-on-unhealthy appreciation of giant robots.

Supreme commander is our game, and I love it dearly. I’ve noticed though over the past few get togethers there’s a good chunk of time spent waiting for other guys to finish up a round. If you’re like me you want to squeeze the maximum amount of cyber-violence out of our evenings together. With this in mind I came to post some really fun games that one or two or 4 of us can play while we wait for Pheonos to steamroll some poor schmuck. This way everyone can finish their games and not feel rushed…and those of us waiting can have a blast too.

The criteria for what I’ve come up with are the following:

• We need games that are fun for small groups of guys, 2-4 players.
• Free games so that everyone can join in and blast away while we wait for the next big round of SupCom.
• Games that can be fun even if only played for short periods of time, this leads me to fast paced action games.

Hamachi:
This is a free application used to setup a virtual LAN over the internet. I use it all the time with my little brother and it works like a charm, no firewall configuration is necessary. I’ll make a network called “GKC” and the password will be “gkc1” Any game that any one of us hosts on this network the game will show up as a LAN game for the other guys. http://www.hamachi.cc/download/list.php (895kb)

Soldat:
Think “worms” meets “Unreal Tournament”. Its a 2d side scrolling death match fragfest. The only cost is a 12 meg download. (unless you want extra features like your own MP3 music list and colored jetpack trails) the registered version doesn’t add any substance to the game, just extras. www.soldat.pl (11.4mb)

FEAR combat:
The full multiplayer component of FEAR was released as a free download. It’s a deathmatch game that reminds me a lot of action quake2. There’s slow mo powerups and lots of gore. This is the game for us if you guys want to stretch the legs on those fancy new graphics cards with a game besides SupCom. FEAR is one of the Best Looking FPSs on the market. To illustrate the appeal of this game let me share the following:

You hear the enemy coming up an adjacent hallway, you hit the slow-mo button just before he rounds the corner…. you toss a frag grenade and quickly shoulder your assault rifle. Just as the unsuspecting enemy rounds the corner you fire off a quick burst, not at him, but at the grenade currently floating around head level next to him. Your time perception returns to normal speed as a cloud of goo that used to be the top half of your enemy paints the hallway red. (yes this is completely doable in fear) It’s a 1.77 gigabyte download but it’s worth it.
http://www.joinfear.com/main (1.77gb)

Warsow:
This is like fine scotch amongst the wall of malt-liquor deathmtach games. It captures the same zen of competitive Quake 3. Warsow is even better in a lot of aspects, and those of you who know me know how highly I regard my beloved Quake 3. It’s a cell shaded, fast paced, skill oriented deathmatch masterpiece. It even has CTF and all the modes you’d expect. It plays like competitive quake 3, It looks a lot like quake 3, exept with the cell shading to make the graphics more contrasty for competitive play. It is awesome. Please download this.
www.warsow.net (77megs)

Please let me know what you guys think of these suggestions over teamspeak or IM, I can’t wait to game with you all.

-TewL

Welcome Game Knight Crew!

It all began in a basement, before the internet and before Windows 95, in the dark days marked by MS Dos. It was a far simpler life, no firewalls, few driver problems, and boot times that were fast. The year was 1994 and SunTV was the catalyst that united men and transformed them to geeks. Doom, Rise of the Triad, WarCraft 2, and of course Total Annihillation.

Within a few short years, our gaming crew had grown. Fortunately, we found a nice sized garage in which we could gather and game till the sun rose. The octagon table, the smell of kerosene, dashing between the garage and house in the dead of winter, standing at the basement toilette ahh such fond memories! Alas, time stands still for no-one; families grew. The internet was born and online gaming began to take shape. Fading were the days of lugging your PC and camping out with a bunch of friends.

Nearly 10 years have passed, the year is now 2007 and the heart of a true gamer can not be squelched. Inspired by the long, long, long awaited release of TA:2 (Supreme Commander) a new generation embraces the spirit of computer gaming. And so our log begins….