I’ve never been a big online player except perhaps for World of Warcraft. So leaving that meant no simple excuse for an online chat with my brother.

Attempting to multiplay using Rome Total War didn’t work because my CD key seemed to be invalid. It is valid, it’s on the game booklet!!!

Hamachi logmein is a VPN* meaning it effectively makes machine that are over the internet look like they are in the same room connected by a local network (LAN). Any multiplayer game that’s happy on a LAN should work and without CD keys. The software installs easily allowing you can create a virtual network with a security password to restrict who can join. The installation creates a new network adapter interface, effectively a separate pretend network card. Network traffic sent using that interface stays on the VPN. The first attempt to play didn’t work. Both ends could connect to the network and ping each other but were not appearing to be on the same LAN.

The solution was in my strict deny-everything firewall. The Hamachi VPN setup and handshaking is done through TCP but the actual communication between the peers is done with UDP. Telling my firewall to allow two-way UDP traffic on the Hamchi network did the trick. The Hamachi network is easy to recognize since it has IP’s starting 5. and your own machine is given a fixed 5. IP address. Once done, time to kick up RTW, start a LAN game and get those armies moving.

Playing against a human is very different from fighting the AI - everything happens much quicker (no pause) and much more unexpectedly. So I think we will have some fun and perhaps see what other games will work on the LAN. * virtual private network