I used this and Hamachi for years
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.
I used hamachi because no one aside from me in my group of friends knew how to port forward, but it didn't work on my network and it took me 4 years to figure out it was because at&t has it's own network on it's dialup modems by default.
They still do that to this day with their fiber modem/routers! I hate it! And even if you do passthrough to have your own up for only your router, your ping is still never below 23ms because there's two stop points in the chain, that and at&t's dns resolution is ass.
Damn internet oligopolies.
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Terraria before proper multiplayer support was our prime Hamachi game. We had like 7-8 people from an internet forum playing on and off through our hamachi virtual network.
Awesome times!
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For those that didn't use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.
As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.
It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.
I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...
It also made it really easy to join your friends games before everything was on steam.
Did you pronounce it X-fire or Crossfire?
X fire, but in my defense I was eleven
I never even considered it might be pronounced crossfire...I am stupid.
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Hell yeah. Xfire, Counter Strike Source, and Toonami made up the bulk of my childhood. I hardly hear it talked about anymore
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Xfire had such a good system for overlay. and just so many good features. It was better 10 years ago than Discord is today.
It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.
Why do you think it was better than Discord today? Didn't get to experience Xfire so genuinely curious about it's user experience.
It wasn't. Nostalgia is hell of a drug
It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.
VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.
It had a built in screen recorder.
Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.
It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.
Hope it makes a comeback.
What wasn't feature-rich was the chat, just plain text, no emoticons or rich text or anything. Absolutely loved it.
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Man I'd forgotten about this.
This and vent were the first things I loaded when gaming (along with frapps).
Unregistered Hypercam 2
Xfire to Discord: I am your Father
Grandfather? Wasnt Mumble the in-between?
ventrilo: am I a joke to you
TeamSpeak ftw
This brought back memories I didn't know I had. Gosh I miss those days, I wish I had downloaded all the clips I recorded before it died. I'm sad now.
There are some archives of the service here -
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire
Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I'm not sure if there's a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.
There's quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -
https://web.archive.org/web//http://www.xfire.com/profile/
GameSpy man. Ftw.
The gametime stats in Xfire were my first clue that I maybe needed to get off the PC once in a while and, as the kids say these days, touch grass.
Was still kinda proud of myself though. Albeit a sort of shameful pride.
I had forgotten it until this post.
God that brings back memories. I mainly used it for Halo CE back on Windows XP still in like 09-10. Joined a clan through Xfire that I played with a bunch. Used it a little for Minecraft too! Those days on CE were the best.
This brought back so many memories. Late night DarkOrbit, CS..
Oh yea xfire was the software to have. I streamed myself doing full playthrough of bioshock and remember even getting quite a few viewers. Good times.
Oh god. I must have had 2000 hours logged on jedi academy with xfire. Brings back memories.
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My childhood!
Also, GameSpy arcade. My parents had McAfee blocking the internet, because the literal first thing I did was save porn to "My Pictures" directory. But it only blocked the browsers. So I used the built in web browser in GameSpy to download Star Wars BF2 mods, amongst other things
This was the best way to game with and chat with friends. I miss those days.
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