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Alright, this is a sorta-effortpost OP for classic MechWarrior games. As I'm only familiar with Mechcommander and MW4:Mercs I'll only be doing those two but I'll be glad to add in other games if people want to do writeups for those. What IS MechWarrior/MechCommander? MechWarrior and MechCommander are a pair of game series based on the Battletech tabletop game, an excellent and long-running LP of which can be found here. There are many varying mechanics and styles across the different titles in each series, but they all share the core concept of controlling and commanding giant stompy death robots. In short, MechCommander is a real-time tactical game in which you control the actions, outfitting, and logistics of up to a company of twelve mechs. MechWarrior titles vary in the autonomy you have, but generally allow for the same level of control while placing you directly in the cockpit as a Mech pilot. This OP will concentrate on MechWarrior 4:Mercenaries, the most recent game in the MechWarrior series. An expansion to MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, it adds a new campaign, new mechs, and a series of side missions that allows you to fight other Mechs in a free-for-all arena setting. I'll be using the MekTek free release which adds a host of new mechs and weapon systems as well as Battlearmors and Elementals.   Some backstory: In the Battletech universe, pretty much all of known space is called the Inner Sphere, and is mostly divided between five Great Houses. Decades prior to MW4, the heads of two of the most powerful Houses, the Federated Suns and Lyran Alliance, allied in marriage to create the superpower Federated Commonwealth. More recently, the Inner Sphere was invaded by the Clans, a race of humans genetically and culturally engineered for martial supremacy over the course of centuries. A combination of years of war, inter-family assassinations and politics has led to the Lyran half of the Commonwealth seceding, beginning a civil war that will eventually require the player to choose a side. On to the actual gameplay:  This is the command center screen you see once you've created a pilot and named your Mercenary unit. It gives you direct links to the Star Systems view, Orbital View, Free Market, and MechLab. We'll go over all of these one at a time.  This is our Star System overview. It shows you available planets to jump to and relevant contract information.  Next we have our Free Market, where you can buy and sell chassis, weapons, and pilots. Pretty self-explanatory.  This is the Orbital View on the arena world Solaris VII. On a campaign mission you'll often have multiple available missions at the same time; sometimes they are mutually exclusive, and other times you can simply choose which to do first. On to the MechLab, the heart and soul of every Mech game worth mentioning. This is where we outfit and modify Mechs to achieve the perfect Mech build, whether serious or gimmicky. FWIW a 85KPH Gladiator with 12 ER Medium Lasers is a bad idea.  This is the basic chassis screen. Please take a moment to notice the clean and easily navigable UI. Here we can select a chassis and it's *FREE* paint scheme, as well as equipping electronic components and up/downgrading engine rating. Each engine upgrade costs more tonnage than the previous, and while the bonus to Mech speed is useful, be aware that higher ratings have no effect on torso twist rate. Let's look at our electronic components: ECM: Increases enemy missile lock-on time, decreases the distance at which you show up on enemy radar, prevents BAP-equipped Mechs from seeing you through buildings. BAP: Decreases your own missile lock-on time, allows you to detect enemy Mechs at longer ranges and through non-terrain objects such as buildings. Jump Jets: Jumpy stompy fun, you can get quite a bit of vertical distance on these. Weight cost is proportionate to chassis weight. LAMS: Well worth 1.5 tons if you're facing any notable amount of guided-missile fire regardless of range. It ignores unguided missiles but shoots down one or two missile clusters from a salvo, potentially turning that nasty Clan LRM20 into a LRM10. IFF Jammer: Makes you appear as a neutral (green) entity outside of 200 meters. The AI seems to ignore it, but it's incredibly useful for backstabbing in multiplayer games. Enchanced Optics: Quadruples the size of the zoom overlay while leaving magnification the same. Useful for sniping. Advanced gyro: Decreases rocking and shaking from enemy weapons fire and decreases the chances of being knocked down. While lights and mediums are prone to being knocked flat by a heavy barrage, there are very very few builds that can actually knock down anything over 50 tons. Mainly useful for keeping on target while being pounded as even assaults can be spun halfway around by a good hit. Next up is the weapon loadout screen:  Here we have an empty Gladiator with a variety of slot types. Weapons are constrained by critical slot size (simply the visual size of the weapon model) and slot type. Red = Energy, Green = Missile, Yellow = Ballistic Grey slots are Omni and can accept any weapon type. Mektek has also added three new slot types to balance the Mechs they've added to their release: Blue slots allow direct-fire-only weapons. No missiles. Purple slots are "Heat-Generating" and reject ballistic systems. Light blue slots only accept Ammo-consuming weapons; no energy. Also shown is the Mech's overall performance in four areas: Firepower is somewhat complex. I don't know the exact math, but it looks at your alpha strike capability as well as sustained fire. Speed, jump jets, and heat management are also calculated but factors such as ammo amount are ignored. Armor is calculated by simply how much you have in total, without regard to relative chassis capability. An Awesome and a Hunchback with 250 points of armor will each show the same rating. Speed is calculated relevant to the max speed of the chassis. A 70 KPH Atlas will have a full green speed bar, whereas as Mad Cat with the same speed would be yellow. Heat Management tells you how heat efficient your Mech is. This much is fairly self-explanatory, but the method of calculation isn't because the game assumes that you will be constantly firing every weapon on your Mech. For example, let's say you want a short-range brawler with some sort of longer reach. After all, no one wants to be defenseless outside of 400 meters. You can load a LBX20 and 4 ER Medium Lasers with a single ER Large for long-range poke. The game will show you a very weak efficiency in heat management, but if you take off the ER Large you suddenly have a heat efficiency that allows you to fire all of your short-range weapons to your heart's content. Relative Heat Management I don't really understand, honestly. The tooltip doesn't really explain well, or maybe I'm just dumb. There's an additional tab for armor, which shows the tonnage and points of armor in each location. You can also select between Ferro-Fibrous, Reactive, and Reflective. Reactive and reflective has strong bonuses to defense versus ballistic and energy fire respectively, at the cost of less points of armor per ton. You'll also be able to see what type of internal structure your currently selected mech has. The MechLab is also where you'll repair or restore Mechs after each mission. If your head or CT is fully destroyed you will go critical and the mission will be failed, with the possibility of your mech being destroyed beyond recovery. Arm and side torso damage don't seem to count towards the Mech needing repairs unless a section is fully destroyed. On top of that you'll also have friendly and salvaged enemy mechs to choose whether or not to repair. On a side note, I read an FAQ which theorizes that the crippled vs. completely destroyed works like this: If the shot that kills a mech delivers more points of damage than the maximum "health" value of the internal structure, the reactor is considered destroyed and the mech a loss. Otherwise, the Mech *should* be salvageable. Severe center torso damage will take between one and two weeks to repair, depending on just how severe the damage is. Costs will range from a few hundred thousand C-Bills to just shy of three million for a crippled Daishi. You can "skip" the waiting period by following a prompt to advance in-game time (without losing access to any missions), or simply playing a mission in a different mech. Be warned that each time you advance cycles or do a mission there is a chance the Free Market will update, so if there's anything you want in limited quantity grab it first. This is especially important if you don't already have replacement weapons for a mech that lost a section containing weaponry. Now we'll jump into an instant action fight:  Here I'm facing off against a Grizzly. At the bottom left it shows the target's facing relevant to you as well as their weapon loadout. While you don't need LoS to target a Mech, you will not see it's weapon config until you or a lancemate has LoS and has put crosshairs over it. One of the most useful aspects of this readout is stripping important enemy weapons. As an example, if you damage an enemy section to yellow, all weapons located in that section will show yellow on the readout. This makes it a lot easier to pick off an important weapon or be a jerk and strip them all before ambling off to shoot other Things. Bottom right is the same deal as left, just for your own mech. Note that while severe damage to a section can destroy weapons mounted within, destroying a side torso does not have any effect on the attached arm. Furthermore, damage to an already-destroyed section is automatically sucked into a black hole. The rest is fairly self explanatory, weapon groupings (which you will be able to set in the Mechlab every time you save a Mech) and radar. The next SS is just here to illustrate the alternate targeting readout in the bottom left. By tapping <, you no longer see the enemy orientation or weapons loadout, but you can see exactly how much armor is remaining on each section. That's about all the effortposting I'm up to for now. Hopefully this isn't a loving God-awful OP and other goons with relevant experience can add some stuff for the other MW/MC games.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:02
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Mechwarrior 2tuluk posted:
Mechwarrior: Living Legends Neo Helbeast posted:I just got MW: Living Legends working so I figured I'd drop some links while I was at it. Also of use: Center reticle for less erratic aiming (this is very helpful): Tilde key to open console. Type "cl_free", hit the tab key, type "=1", ENTER. Add to an autoexec or enter every time you launch. This simply let's you actually hit what you want to hit instead of hitting everything else. Full install links/instructions. Also has links to userconfigs that boost graphic performance for low and high-end PCs respectively, as well as remove the sound bug. Apparently. I personally tried installing both at different times and neither did anything but cut my FPS to MWO levels. These are all the maps used for Chaos March. You can download and install one at a time (there are 200+) or you can simply use the following link and get most of these maps in one simple but large (2+GB) compressed file. MW:LL Map Pack Be warned I googled this one and I'm not 100% certain it's the same one I have because I can't find the post anymore. TeamSpeak3 Server for MW:LL Vorenus fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 23:03
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Reserved for more stuff
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Sep 15, 2014 23:04
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Reserved for even more stuff that will probably be HORRIBLE.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:04
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Man, once you fill on all those reserved posts, this thread is gonna be epic.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:51
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I haven't played Mechwarrior 2 in years, but man, that soundtrack 
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Sep 15, 2014 23:58
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I want Mechwarrior Tactics to be a good game, and I want it to be out so I can play it. Is there good news for me? 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:07
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Mechwarrior Tactics is most likely dead. Its webpage has been like this since the end of August. Especially likely given the IGP / PGI publisher dev split and the fact PGI walked away with the Mechwarrior license while IGP had someone else working on MW:T. 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:10
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Awesome Welles posted:I haven't played Mechwarrior 2 in years, but man, that soundtrack I still have the music from MW2 in my music library. 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:15
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I wish the older games would show up on GOG, at least MW2 with support for Glide. I know 3's a bitch to get working right due to all the bugs so I'd be fine with just 2, Mercs and GBL but that depends on how much red tape has to be cut through 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:16
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Yeah, any of the Mechwarrior games of the Earth/Starsiege series showing up on GoG.com would be instant-buys for me. I know it isn't proper Mechwarrior, but I feel Earth/Starsiege deserves a place in this thread. 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:18
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Can anyone find the series of screenshots of Mechwarrior 3 before Zipper took over development? This is the only one I've found so far:
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Sep 16, 2014 00:19
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Apparently this game thinks I'm trying to run it on a Celeron 300 with a Voodoo 1 graphics card (not really, but it runs like crap). How do I make this thing not run like crap?
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Sep 16, 2014 00:19
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Yeah, any of the Mechwarrior games of the Earth/Starsiege series showing up on GoG.com would be instant-buys for me.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:24
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gently caress yes these games Also supplying some LPs on the archive Berryjons Mech Commander VLP - http://lparchive.org/Mech-Commander/ My own MW4:Mercs VLP - http://lparchive.org/Mechwarrior-4-Mercenaries/ Still gonna LP MW3 once I get it running consistently, I've found a few tricks to make it run but it hates trying to load the After Action screen 
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Sep 16, 2014 02:10
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Zeether posted:I wish the older games would show up on GOG, at least MW2 with support for Glide. I know 3's a bitch to get working right due to all the bugs so I'd be fine with just 2, Mercs and GBL but that depends on how much red tape has to be cut through You want the MW2 Titanium edition actually since those came with enough DirectX support that you could get them working on Windows 7 without any difficulty. MW2: Mercs is the greatest of all Mechwarrior games by the way.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:14
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I've heard bad things about Titanium. Looks good but according to mech2.org:quote:It is missing some music tracks. There's even old Usenet posts I've seen bashing Activision over it because they had budget issues. My issue with MW3 is the fact that on my laptop the HUD flickers a lot. And the bouncing glitch happens to my own mech when I walk it off a ledge. Zeether fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 02:16
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Grew up playing playing 31st century combat and MW2: Mercs. Great games Was going to try and get Mercs working on my computer (windows 8.1 64bit) and I'm aware of stuff like VMmech, but 
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Sep 16, 2014 02:18
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I have a copy of vanilla MW2 (in a Mercs jewel case  ) but some loving kid scratched the disc to where it won't work in MechVM because the data layer is FUBAR. I might go hunting for the best version (the one with "INCLUDES NETMECH" stamped on the disc in red) at some point.
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Sep 16, 2014 02:20
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Man, Ghost Bear Legacy was my poo poo when I was a kid. Mercenaries was better of course but I always got hosed up on some mission because I was literally a child. I also remember being really disappointed that the "free" market was anything but. To this day I walk around at all times as if I were a mechwarrior, twisting at the abdomen to continue walking the course at all times.
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Sep 16, 2014 04:46
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Party Plane Jones posted:MW2: Mercs is the greatest of all Mechwarrior games by the way. I think it's really hard to argue which game is the best because they all pretty awesome, but it's really hard for me to ignore Mw:4 Mercs free release just on sheer quantity of content alone. Also Pirate's Moon and its ridiculous difficulty curve.
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Sep 16, 2014 04:50
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Zeether posted:My issue with MW3 is the fact that on my laptop the HUD flickers a lot. And the bouncing glitch happens to my own mech when I walk it off a ledge. This is a zBuffer problem, the game's physics are locked to the games framerate which is supposed to be 30 fps. I'm too sick right now to type up the whole reason but really just blame PowerPC development.
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Sep 16, 2014 04:55
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crabcakes66 posted:I still have the music from MW2 in my music library. I had to look it up again. I don't think people who weren't able to play it back when it first came out really get it, but loading up that first mission with the Wolf Clan (I think?) where it drops you on the desert planet, the mech's systems starts up, that computer voice talking back at you, and this loving track starts up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX4G1RJYTi8  In 1995 that poo poo was loving amazing.
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Sep 16, 2014 04:58
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Awesome Welles posted:I had to look it up again. I don't think people who weren't able to play it back when it first came out really get it, but loading up that first mission with the Wolf Clan (I think?) where it drops you on the desert planet, the mech's systems starts up, that computer voice talking back at you, and this loving track starts up: Arkham Bridge is my jam.
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Sep 16, 2014 05:03
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This is a good thread. Especially if it helps make Mechwarrior games playable on modern systems because MWO is kind of rear end as F2P and online only multiplayer games are wont to be. I mean I own pretty much every Battletech electronic game: http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2012/11/game-collection-hobby-games-gone.html (Not shown is Heavy Gear 1 which I now have, plus the console titles Mech Assault 1,2, the DS one, SNES Mechwarrior, and SNES Mechwarrior 3050/Genesis Battletech.) The old games might have had flaws but they were very fun to play with lots of cool scenarios and things to do in them besides team deathmatch. Sadly only one game tried remotely to follow anything tabletop (Crescent Hawk's Inception) but was maybe two hours of actual fun gameplay then pointless random combat for a couple pages of text to lead you into one of the worst end games of any RPG ever made. If not games period. Also no post tutorial area character advancement and a super limited amount of mechs. The sequel was a 286 era RTS game. You can imagine how well that turned out. (I know I am not RTS games' biggest fan but if one has issues with Dune 2 this is pre Dune 2 RTS. With even worse AI for your dudes.)
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Sep 16, 2014 05:15
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I have a copy of MW2: Mercs that came bundled with my first windows pc. Were bundled games altered in any way, or can I just grab that MechVM thing and it'll work? If it helps, the pc it came with was a sony vaio pcv-130.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:54
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEVb_HQuxQA Timothy Seals does good remakes of the classic music. pixelbaron fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 07:07
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Yeah, any of the Mechwarrior games of the Earth/Starsiege series showing up on GoG.com would be instant-buys for me. Well, it's A: A similar sort of walking tank sim and B: loving Awesome. I never got a shot at Earthsiege 1, only Earthsiege 2, and I still have fond memories of flying the Razor and running around loving up dudes' feet to salvage them in the HERCs.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:10
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Does anyone know what needs to be done to get MW4: Mercs running on a Windows 7 PC? The 32 to 64 bit gap means I can't play one of my favorite games ever now I'm running my CD copy with both Mech Paks because getting the Mektek version working is a nightmare in and of itself.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:58
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Karl Rove posted:Does anyone know what needs to be done to get MW4: Mercs running on a Windows 7 PC? The 32 to 64 bit gap means I can't play one of my favorite games ever now I've never been able to make Mektek work EVER no matter when. I did however install Mechwarrior 4 Vengeance retail with Black Knight expansion retail and it works lovely. (On Windows 7 64) Running as Admin to be safe, and have it in the C: drive. Maximum detail and everything. Have most of the controls modded to be as close to MWO as I can since I have basically played MWO for so long controlling my robit with a stick would probably be weird.  Looks pretty legit and I played totally through the tutorial mission. Which I recommend just to see what controls to move where. You need CD in the drive but that's ok honestly.  And in my fly hooptie until I can get a proper Assault like a Madcat 2, aka "The Shaggin Wagon". So far my only issue has been it not allowing me to assign mouse buttons 4 and 5 to what I want, a crash due to multiple ALT Tabbing, and me not having more guns for my Shadow Cat. (Currently running 4 CER MPulses, 2 IS Ultra AC2s with minimum ammo, LAMS.)  Check this out PGI! Repair bays! Little sprites of people and animal life moving about! Jiminy Crickets MW4 is still overall a deeper and more interesting game than MWO and they didn't even have to sell 500 dollar gold mechs to do it! (I am now thinking of doing a little tribute to MW4 Vengeance. I've taken a good dozen odd screenshots for it.) Captain Rufus fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 09:02
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Karl Rove posted:Does anyone know what needs to be done to get MW4: Mercs running on a Windows 7 PC? The 32 to 64 bit gap means I can't play one of my favorite games ever now MekTek isn't terrible, and Mektek is the only way I know of to make it work on 64-bit. Not sure how much I can really post on that without crossing the :files: line though.
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Sep 16, 2014 13:52
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people having problems running/installing the classic mechwarrior/mechcommander games on modern windows should be using pcgamingwiki.com or maybe posting what kind of HW/OS they have so we can help them troubleshoot their problems. http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/MechWarrior_4 -very detailed. fixes might be applicable to mw4 mercs mektek release. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 14:11
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Karl Rove posted:Does anyone know what needs to be done to get MW4: Mercs running on a Windows 7 PC? The 32 to 64 bit gap means I can't play one of my favorite games ever now Mektek runs fine on my pc, and I have Windows 7 Pro 64bit. I had a "mechwarrior4mercenaries.all.to.51.03.01.0021.mtx" file sitting around from 4 years ago, extracted it to a directory and ran "MW4Mercs.exe". Try going here. Or here.  Ah, good old Mercs instant action fun. Ambaire fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 21:13
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The original MW4 of course makes no sense. Mercs is better, but I still don't like how long you have to hammer on things for them to die. When I drop a UAC20 and two ER PPCs into your centerline, I should at least see weapons going up in smoke.
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Sep 16, 2014 22:21
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Defiance Industries posted:The original MW4 of course makes no sense. Mercs is better, but I still don't like how long you have to hammer on things for them to die. When I drop a UAC20 and two ER PPCs into your centerline, I should at least see weapons going up in smoke. Certain mechs have durability all out of whack with their supposed armor rating. You can hammer on a Bushwhacker in Mercs for ages and the drat thing won't die.
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Sep 16, 2014 22:23
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Somebody on moddb's actually put together the MW4:Mercs+Pak thing in one easy to use .rar now that MekTek's weird client-torrent thing shut down, but I'm not sure whether it's kosher to post it here. The whole rights issue is just  as far as I can tell.And is there any way to make Heavy Gear 2 run on modern PCs? I've wanted to try it throughout several years, but it always fucks up when I try to launch campaign.
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Sep 16, 2014 22:27
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Mordja posted:And is there any way to make Heavy Gear 2 run on modern PCs? I've wanted to try it throughout several years, but it always fucks up when I try to launch campaign. http://www.gog.com/forum/general/heavy_gear_2_culling_fix/page1
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Sep 16, 2014 22:36
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Why do people think that MW2: Mercs is the best? That and Pirate's Moon are the only Mechwarriors I haven't played, but I played the everloving gently caress out of Ghost Bear Legacy when I was a kid.Night10194 posted:Well, it's A: A similar sort of walking tank sim and B: loving Awesome. I never got a shot at Earthsiege 1, only Earthsiege 2, and I still have fond memories of flying the Razor and running around loving up dudes' feet to salvage them in the HERCs. I never played Earthsiege, but I played a lot of Starsiege because my dad got me that while waiting for Mechwarrior 4 to come out and I thought it was loving awesome. It had this crazy huge manual that described everything in the setting, and was full color high quality pages. Part of that might be nostalgia, I lost that manual and the game when I moved up to Vermont but man, would I kill for a GoG release of Starsiege.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:48
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Pattonesque posted:Certain mechs have durability all out of whack with their supposed armor rating. You can hammer on a Bushwhacker in Mercs for ages and the drat thing won't die. Also a fun tidbit that I noticed: in the original manual for Vengeance, the Thanatos had a different loadout than what you see in the game. It was something like an AC20, an SRM 6, and four flamers.
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Sep 17, 2014 02:53
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Don Gato posted:Why do people think that MW2: Mercs is the best? That and Pirate's Moon are the only Mechwarriors I haven't played, but I played the everloving gently caress out of Ghost Bear Legacy when I was a kid. In MW2: Mercenaries, you can take a mission to steal a Kodiak from the Clans for the Draconis Combine's ISF. At the end of the mission, you can chose to blow up their DropShip (killing hundreds of ISF Ninjas) and run to your own hidden DropShip and steal the Kodiak for yourself. And the Draconis Combine can't say a thing about it since it was a mission they gave you "off the books," and retaliating would put them in huge trouble with the Mercenary Review & Bonding Commission.
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Sep 17, 2014 03:00
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