Submitted 1 year ago by ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/06725de6-2be7-44f8-abf2-8f7c64f864e5.jpeg
For those that didn’t use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger and a server browser for games back in the day.
As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.
It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.
I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...
It also made it really easy to join your friends games before everything was on steam.
Remember Mplayer?
I remember playing Jedi Knight on the Internet Gaming Zone
My back hurts
It got forked into MPV and is still under active development.
Yee olde gamer
Xfire had such a good system for overlay. and just so many good features. It was better 10 years ago than Discord is today.
It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.
Why do you think it was better than Discord today? Didn’t get to experience Xfire so genuinely curious about it’s user experience.
It wasn’t. Nostalgia is hell of a drug
It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.
VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.
It had a built in screen recorder.
Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.
It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.
Hope it makes a comeback.
Hell yeah. Xfire, Counter Strike Source, and Toonami made up the bulk of my childhood. I hardly hear it talked about anymore
The only reason it came up again for me was I noticed it in some old computer files, ha! Used to be my most used application by far.
jesus christ. xfire. that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
Did you pronounce it X-fire or Crossfire?
I never even considered it might be pronounced crossfire…I am stupid.
I dont even need to watch this video, I can hear the thumbnail. Don’t get caught in the CROSSFIREEEE!
I actually convinced my parents to buy this for me, played it once.
I think I remember an official statement saying “X-Fire” was correct, and “crossfire” was wrong.
“Ex-fire”. “Crossfire” was an AMD thing.
Do you call the button on a controller X or cross?
I could be wrong but I call it the D pad
Man I’d forgotten about this.
This and vent were the first things I loaded when gaming (along with frapps).
Unregistered Hypercam 2
Xfire to Discord: I am your Father
I used it every day. RIP my gametime statistics for BF2.
If flying a fighter jet in real life was just like flying one in BF2, I’d have a very valuable life skill.
Same, but with helicopters.
Man I used to stat pad with the boys on BF2 and camp. We were a troll squad. Such good memories.
This brought back memories I didn’t know I had. Gosh I miss those days, I wish I had downloaded all the clips I recorded before it died. I’m sad now.
There are some archives of the service here -
wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire
Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots?
Holy shit. Just found my profile that had stuff there from when I was 14… I’m nearly 32 now. Wild …
GameSpy man. Ftw.
The gametime stats in Xfire were my first clue that I maybe needed to get off the PC once in a while and, as the kids say these days, touch grass.
Was still kinda proud of myself though. Albeit a sort of shameful pride.
I had forgotten it until this post.
Oh yea xfire was the software to have. I streamed myself doing full playthrough of bioshock and remember even getting quite a few viewers. Good times.
God that brings back memories. I mainly used it for Halo CE back on Windows XP still in like 09-10. Joined a clan through Xfire that I played with a bunch. Used it a little for Minecraft too! Those days on CE were the best.
This brought back so many memories. Late night DarkOrbit, CS…
Oh god. I must have had 2000 hours logged on jedi academy with xfire. Brings back memories.
Me too, but it was Civ 4 instead of Jedi Academy
Reminds me of the all seeying eye
I remember disliking it. I don’t remember why
Yeah I think I ended up trying it an Ventrillo, and I preferred the latter.
This was the best way to game with and chat with friends. I miss those days.
Also, GameSpy arcade. My parents had McAfee blocking the internet, because the literal first thing I did was save porn to “My Pictures” directory. But it only blocked the browsers. So I used the built in web browser in GameSpy to download Star Wars BF2 mods, amongst other things
My childhood!
How about even older: HEAT (HEAT.net)? https://web.archive.org/web/19970601031026/http://www.heat.net/
Used to play Duke Nukem 3D there, and I think one of the Quake games. Later games all came with bundled Gamespy and forced the installation on me, hated it so much I gave up playing online back then, and still never got back into it.
Didn’t they have custom skins because I remember messing around with that and rocking some cool skins…?
Oh, I remember. Some of the games I played a lot would just crash if I had Xfire running in the background.
Xfire was my bastion with my totally legit copy of Call of Duty 4.
CoD4 was fireee. Dude, CoDJump, Zombie mod, and on top of it all promod to make the game competitive.
Bring it back :(
A blast from the past. Totally forgot about it existing until this post.
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I used this and Hamachi for years
ArmoredCavalry@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I used hamachi because no one aside from me in my group of friends knew how to port forward, but it didn’t work on my network and it took me 4 years to figure out it was because at&t has it’s own network on it’s dialup modems by default.
They still do that to this day with their fiber modem/routers! I hate it! And even if you do passthrough to have your own up for only your router, your ping is still never below 23ms because there’s two stop points in the chain, that and at&t’s dns resolution is ass.
Damn internet oligopolies.
Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Terraria before proper multiplayer support was our prime Hamachi game. We had like 7-8 people from an internet forum playing on and off through our hamachi virtual network.