How to Install and Run Enemy Nations on Windows 7

Enemy Nations is a real-time strategy game, created by Windward Studios.
The game is officially free, and available to download from here.
But in order to install it and run it properly on Windows 7, there are several things you need to do first.


Step 1: Extract the .RAR file
After you downloaded Enemy Nations, extract the .RAR's content into a folder


Step 2: Make a Disc Image
The game requires you to enter a CD in order to play it, but the download is a .RAR file.
There are two options: burn the .RAR's content into a CD, or make a disc image from it.

To make a disc image from the folder that contains the .RAR's content, we'll use a program called "Folder2Iso". You can download Folder2Iso from here.
Folder2Iso is very simple. Select a folder which you want to make an .iso file out of, and select where to save the .iso file.

After you've created an disc image of the game, mount it using a virtual drive.
Daemon Tools Lite is a free virtual drive software which you can download from here.


Step 3: Copy The DLL Files
Inside the game's folder there's a folder named "DLLs".
I'll assume your game folder uses the same name as the .RAR, "EnemyNations2".
We need to copy all the DLLs from the DLLs folder to the main game folder, except the one in "EnemyNations2\DLLs\Win32\winnt".
To be more specific:
Copy all the DLLs from "EnemyNations2\DLLs" to "EnemyNations2".
Copy all the DLLS from "EnemyNations2\DLLs\Win32" to "EnemyNations2".
Copy the DLL from "EnemyNations2\DLLs\Win32\win95" to "EnemyNations2".


Step 4: Run in Windows XP Compatibility Mode
Go to the game's folder.
Right click "ENations.exe"
Select "Properties".
Select the "Compatibility" tab.
Enable "Run this program in compatibility mode for:".
Select "Windows XP (Service Pack 3)".


That's it!
To play the game run "ENations.exe".
You must mount the CD in order to play the game.

Note: you DON'T need to run the game's setup.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Review

The first and third X-COM games, UFO: Enemy Unknown and X-COM: Apocalypse, are my favorite strategy games.
When XCOM: Enemy Unknown came out I wasn't hyped about it, because I knew these are different developers and that they will "dumb down" the game in order to reach bigger audience (Couldn't be more right about that one)

This weekend I gave XCOM: Enemy Unknown a shot, and it lived up to my expectations. It sucked.
My first impression was good, there were cutscenes that helped to build up the story, and units had visual customization, cartoonish aesthetics to avoid the uncanny valley, and the combat was nice - only at the beginning.

I noticed that when you start a game you can choose to play in ironman mode, which means you can't go back to previous saves of the game.
Reloading a save in a battle could let the player retry to hit enemies, and avoid casualties.
From a game design perspective, if a player find finds himself constantly saving and reloading every time a soldier dies or misses a shot, he might as well use cheats to get 100% accuracy and infinite HP.
This means that I'm going to play with ironman mode on, and on classic difficulty.

At first it was all nice, I had my soldiers, I won some missions flawlessly, they ranked up, everything was nice so far. Eventually my veteran soldiers died, and they had to be replaced with rookies.
And this is where the game critically fails.
While the difficulty raised up to the point where every encounter have at least 10 aliens, and they include tough aliens, like the Muton, it became impossible to win missions.
Every single time I had to fight with 5 (got an upgrade to the squad size) soldiers that can't hit a target from 6 feet away, and have low HP which means they died from 1-2 hits.
Every time I faced at least 10 aliens which hit my soldiers 90% of the time from any range, have stronger weapons, and some of them had more HP.
I tried to use grenades because they always hit, but I'm limited to one per soldier and they for some reason weaker then a rifle. so it didn't help much.
I got to a point which the enemy have more firepower, more units, more health, and more accuracy then me, so it became practically impossible to win a mission, and I couldn't do anything about it.

Let me repeat myself, "I couldn't do anything about it". That's why this game sucks. And I can't do anything about it because of the dumbing down. The whole point of the dumbing down is to minimize the number of options you have for each decision in order to make it easy. This game was so dumbed down so you basically don't have a decision to make anymore.
In UFO: Enemy Unknown, if my soldier has low accuracy, I could take an aimed shot to make up for it. A feature that was removed in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
In UFO: Enemy Unknown, I could give any soldier any weapon. In XCOM: Enemy Unknown weapons are class restricted.
In UFO: Enemy Unknown, I could arrange my soldier's inventory, So for example I could take as many grenades or rockets as a soldier can carry. A feature that was removed in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
In UFO: Enemy Unknown, If I lost my best soldiers, I could make up for it by bringing up to 16 soldiers to every mission. A feature that was removed in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and apparently you need to need to research how to make more than 4 soldiers sit down in a aircraft.
In UFO: Enemy Unknown, I could sell stuff I manufacture, and generate additional, important, income. A feature that was removed in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
Also, in X-COM: Apocalypse you have training facilities, which let you improve your "spare soldiers" while you don't use them for missions.

As you can see, a lot of features were dumbed down and removed in order to keep the game simple. Simple and broken.
But hey, at least you can make your soldiers look cool, right? After all the soldier customization is the most complex system in the game.

How to Find Missing Webcam Driver

Here's a tutorial that will teach you how to find the driver you need to install for your webcam in case it's missing it:

1. Make sure your webcam is connected to the computer.
2. Open the "Start" menu.
3. Search for "Device Manager".
4. Under "Imaging devices" look for your webcam, right click it and choose "Properties".
5. Open the "Details" tab.
6. Under "Property" select "Hardware Ids".
7. Copy one of the IDs and try to search it online.
8. You should find in the search results websites that will let you download the driver you need for your webcam.

In case your search doesn't come up with results and you have more then one ID, try to search for the other(s) too.

Zandronum Name/Text Coloring

To color your name in Zandronum you need to add:
\c

...followed by a letter that represents the color you want to use, before the part of the name you want to color.
You can do it by going to options, player setup, and editing the name.

For Example, if I want to color my whole name red, I would write it like this:




And it will look like this:

If I wanted to color the "YONI" part red, and the "0505" part gold, I would write it like this:

And it will look like this:

Using colors in the chat works the same way.

Here's an image I made that show each letter and it's color:

Notice:
"L" uses the original color of the font.
"-" uses the default color.
"+" uses the default screen message color.
"*" uses the default chat color.
"!" uses the default team chat color.


Important:
-Make sure you write lower-case C even though that Zandronum doesn't display lower-case letters.
-Make sure you don't confuse between backslash and slash, you need to use backslash ("\").
-If you want to color text using the console you need to use two blackslashes before the C ("\\c").

How To Skip Titan Quest's Intro Movies

First of all, this solution works for both "Titan Quest" and "Titan Quest: Immoral Thrones".

In order to skip these movies and go straight to the main menu, here are the steps you have to follow:

1. Enter the folder "...\Titan Quest\Videos".

2. In this folders there are 4 files:
"TQCinematic.bik", "TQGameIntro.bik", "TQLegal.bik", and "TQLogos.bik".
Rename them to something else, adding just a single underscore or a number will do the trick.
(example: TQLogos_.bik)

3. Now create 4 text files, and name them like the original file names from step 2. (not including ".bik")

That's it.
The next time you'll launch the game there will be no intro!