Fated to End Sometime

So this weekend Willow asked me to install Darkstone on her computer, because she's lately been pretty keen on all things related to Lord of the Rings, however indirectly.  So I obliged, and then she asked for help getting connected with Autumn over the network so they could play together, which I haven't done with the game in a long time.

Turns out this would take a bit of doing.  Everyone runs either Windows XP or Ubuntu in this house (or both), and what I did not initially expect was to have to add an exception to the Windows XP firewall on each machine in order to get the games to communicate with each other.

Darkstone, by the way, is very similar to Diablo.  Released between the original Diablo and Diablo II, it has remained one of my personal favorite video games of all time, and if I had to point to one video game that has managed to suck up the most of my free time out of all video games I have ever played, I would point at Darkstone.

Like Diablo, Darkstone has network support, but unlike Diablo it does not use a dedicated host to do so.  The game includes its own built in server/client system, and can allow for connections either on an LAN by way of IPX, or over the internet by way of TCP/IP.

Because I had not successfully gotten the kids to be able to play networked Diablo via IPX (and I now suspect the problem was firewall related) I started them off by using TCP/IP to connect to Willow's computer.  Not only was this very cumbersome, but it seemed that the game had a tendency to kick the players out if there was too much latency, which was driving me nuts.  Any time Autumn got kicked out, I would have to go to her computer, manually punch in Willow's IP address (192.168.2.106, for those of you who are very curious) and reconnect her.

I looked around for a simpler way to connect via LAN.  The only thing that seemed even remotely useful was Gamespy Comrade (formerly Gamespy Arcade) which offered better support for internet play.  LAN play, however, would still be a complicated affair because Willow, Autumn and even Elish (yes my 3 year old plays this game, and does pretty well) would each need separate Gamespy IDs and would have several steps to go through before even launching the game itself.

As it turned out, three of the computers did not even have IPX/SPX installed, which I rectified.  That, combined with the firewall exceptions, made everything gravy.  Now the kids can launch, host a network session and connect to it all without needing my assistance.  And as you can see, I even jumped in for some playtime too ;)

I highly recommend LAN play on some classic games with your kids - especially games that are cooperative in nature.