> FilePlanet is a huge archive of gaming files (maps, patches, mods, movies) that may well be the biggest on the internet. Then GameSpy bought it and started forcing you to get GameSpy accounts, and use fiddly download methods rather than good old fashioned linking straight to a file.

Yeah, FilePlanet sucks now, but sadly it's still probably the best place to get gaming files, and certainly one of the fastest.

> > I don't know what on-line gaming
> > was like with MPlayer, and now I'll never get
> > the chance to find out. GameSpy seems to do
> > a really poor job based on my experience. I
> > say this having never successfully played
> > anything through them. That's one bit of
> > software that won't be wasting space on my
> > hard drive any longer.
>
> MPlayer used to be fun. A friend of mine achieved almost world-status playing Aliens vs Predator on there, with low lag and a good ranking system. Now he's lucky if he can get into games at all

Unless you're talking about some MPlayer I've never heard of, my experience was the exact opposite. MPlayer SUCKED. I got AvP when it first came out and couldn't stand MPlayer. It was buggy, laggy as hell and was always forcing me to download updates. I quickly began playing multiplayer games only via the direct TCP/IP connect option.

Gamespy isn't a particularly decent piece of software either, but it's vastly superior to the hell that was MPlayer. It's sort of moot now, as most decent games have their own in-game browser, meaning I don't have to use any of them. w00t!

>
>There's really no reason for GameSpy to have survived, let alone flourished. Does anyone out there know why?

I think, as you mentioned, largely because of the fact that they own a lot of Web sites. Of course, I have my doubts as to how long GameSpy will continue to exist, given the difficulties in making money running Web sites these days.

Stephen