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VU Games Gives Away Ground Control, Soundtracks

Posted by simoniker on from the excellent-tactic dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the free download page for PC RTS title Ground Control over at FilePlanet, "released for free" to help promote newly released Ground Control II, in a similar move to the recent free availability of VU Games' Tribes I and Tribes II. VU Games has also released the soundtrack to The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay for free download, as composed by Gustaf 'Lizardking' Grefberg, and previous free MP3 soundtracks have included Metal Arms: Glitch In The System and The Hobbit.

6 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad it's on file planet. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wish game developers would realise that a lot of people refuse to use the service because it requires you to sign up and sign in when you want to get something. It's not worth it. Their loss. They could have just set up a bittorrent.

    1. Re:Too bad it's on file planet. by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Lots of companies that offer demos are moving to bittorrent. The only problem is there are zero seeds and zero peers. For something like this, a full game being given away for free, I could see using bittorrent.. One existing problem, though, is most people who are downloading have upload speeds that are just a fraction if their download speed. And there's no real motivation (other than "You Just Should") for sharing after your download is done.

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    2. Re:Too bad it's on file planet. by Talonius · · Score: 4, Informative

      Most of the free games released on FilePlanet I mirror on my website, http://www.schkerke.com. My bandwidth is good and they usually end up there fairly quickly. Fileplanet has me limited @ 215Kbp/s at the moment so Ground Control is taking some time.

      The biggest problem actually comes in with the CD keys. I own Ground Control and I'm fairly damned positive that it used a CD key for installation purposes. Tribes 2 required a key and FilePlanet was the only place authorized to give them out; *that* killed that freebie.

      Tribes can be found at http://www.schkerke.com/olate/index.php?category=6 . Tribes II is on the same page. Ground Control will be listed as soon as it is finished downloading; if you're into game soundtracks the Vivendi Universal soundtracks are available at http://www.schkerke.com/olate/index.php?category=1 8; Vivendir's site required Flash to even use the site. (Blech.)

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    3. Re:Too bad it's on file planet. by nacturation · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Lots of companies that offer demos are moving to bittorrent. The only problem is there are zero seeds and zero peers. For something like this, a full game being given away for free, I could see using bittorrent.. One existing problem, though, is most people who are downloading have upload speeds that are just a fraction if their download speed. And there's no real motivation (other than "You Just Should") for sharing after your download is done.

      I don't know if this is supported by the bittorrent protocol, but combining bittorrent with freecache.org would be ideal. The freecache service allows for caching of files over 5MB in size, and works by prefixing your URL like so:

      http://freecache.org/http://gamez.com/HalfLife2Dem o.exe

      After the freecache system downloads it itself and seeds it to multiple other high-speed servers, an end-user can click on the link and their browser will get redirected to one of the other servers.

      If bittorrent allows for HTTP redirects to be used in combination with the URL for download, this would be a perfect solution.

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    4. Re:Too bad it's on file planet. by mutewinter · · Score: 3, Informative

      Read this.
      I just did it with 0 problems, it took me 5 minutes to get the Tribes 2 CD key.

  2. Ground Control Is Very Fun! by Benedick · · Score: 4, Informative
    I played through Ground Control a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. If you are thinking that a game you get for free must be pretty marginal, think again. This is a tactical game, not really an RTS. You don't do harvesting of resources or anything - it's straight combat all the way!

    I particularly enjoyed the fully 3D camera in this game and the graphics were very sweet for the time. At that time, I was running a P3 600 with 128 MB of RAM and a 64 MB Kyro 2 Graphics card. I had to turn down detail a bit for that rig to keep up so if you've a good modern system, it should look quite sweet. I fired it up on my new machine a couple of weeks ago to revisit the game when I heard the sequal was coming out and it still looks very nice today.

    Anyway, if you've the time and bandwidth, this free game is WELL worth getting.