It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III. It’s kind of an old game - it was re­leased in 1999, but the graph­ics cer­tain­ly don’t show it. If you look close­ly (and use the map ed­i­tor a lot), you’ll no­tice that an in­cred­i­ble amount of time was put in­to mak­ing the art­work for the game. Even at the measly 800x600 or what­ev­er res­o­lu­tion the game us­es, the forests and moun­tains and ev­ery­thing are in­cred­i­bly de­tailed.

What is most in­ter­est­ing about the game, how­ev­er, is its po­ten­tial for so­cial gam­ing to­day. It has two in­her­ent ad­van­tages. Old games tend to use disk space much more ef­fi­cient­ly (as a ne­ces­si­ty), and this one is no ex­cep­tion. The en­tire in­stalled foot­print of HoMM 3 Com­plete (the orig­i­nal and two ex­pan­sion packs) is on­ly about 300 MB. I can com­press this in­to an archive and put it on other com­put­ers, and get this - HoMM 3 al­lows you to join mul­ti­play­er games with­out hav­ing a CD in­sert­ed! You can copy this game to all your friends’ com­put­ers and have them join your game with ex­cep­tion­al ease. It’s sec­ond ad­van­tage is its turn-based na­ture: since you can­not do any­thing when it’s not your turn (be­sides look­ing around and in­spect­ing your al­lies’ heroes), there is a lot of room in-be­tween turns for con­ver­sa­tion and so­cial­iz­ing. It’s not nec­es­sary to be in a fren­zied, in­tense state the en­tire time one is play­ing this game.

HoMM 3 games do take a long time to com­plete (on the order of many, many re­al-life hours), but mul­ti­play­er games can be saved and restart­ed at any time. Sav­ing is al­most in­stan­ta­neous and ba­si­cal­ly ef­fort­less. I have been try­ing it out with my friends, and HoMM 3 does in­deed make an ex­cel­lent so­cial game!

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, HoMM 3 is no longer pub­lished, but you can still buy HoMM 3 Com­plete (which works, very well, on Vis­ta!) very cheap­ly at some sites. It might be worth­while to pick one up soon, espe­cial­ly if you’re in­ter­est­ing in so­cial gam­ing, as I’m not sure you will even still be able to buy this game in a cou­ple of years.

Sys­tem en­vi­ron­ment:

• nVidia graph­ics card
• Win­dows Vis­ta Home Premi­um 32-bit
• 2 GB RAM
• In­te­grat­ed “HD” au­dio

The so­lu­tion for me:

1. Re­mem­ber to set CoD2 to com­pat­i­bil­i­ty mode with Win­dows XP SP2! You can do this by right-click­ing the short­cut and se­lect­ing “Prop­er­ties”, then open­ing the “Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty” tab at the top.
2. First tried up­dat­ing Di­rec­tX 9. Vis­ta users should note that Di­rec­tX 9 and Di­rec­tX 10, while both com­ing pre-in­stalled on Vis­ta, are sep­a­rate com­po­nents. You should still up­date to the lat­est Di­rec­tX 9 even if you have Di­rec­tX 10. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, while a good first step, this didn’t work for me.
3. Then, added “+set com_in­tro­played 1” to the end of the short­cuts. You can do this by open­ing the short­cut prop­er­ties (see step 0) and adding those char­ac­ters, with­out quotes, to the end of the “Tar­get:” box, so that the full line looks like: “C:\Pro­gram Files\Ac­tivi­sion\Call of Du­ty 2\cod2sp_s.exe” +set com_in­tro­played 1 This fixed the sin­gle-play­er for me, but I still could not open mul­ti­play­er.
4. I found on NT­com­pat­i­ble.com a seem­ing­ly-ridicu­lous lit­tle propo­si­tion. The poster sug­gest­ed that, to run CoD2 mul­ti­play­er, one should plug some­thing in to the mi­cro­phone jack. So, I did, and lo and be­hold, it worked! Rather a strange so­lu­tion, I do say. It like­ly has some­thing to do with the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween my in­te­grat­ed au­dio and the voice chat fea­tures of CoD2, so turn­ing off voice chat might al­low it to run with­out a mi­cro­phone plugged in.

Any­ways, that’s how I got this game to work on Vis­ta; hope it helps some­body else too!