Netbash 3 & 4! Retro Gaming Multiplayer LAN Party Videos

Hey everyone 🙂

I don’t know about you guys but when I was a young man in the late 90s and early 2000s I loved meeting up with 3 or 4 mates, getting some booze & bad take away food, bringing our computers over and playing multiplayer games like Command & Conquer, Unreal Tournament, Counterstrike, and Civilization just to name a few. We nicknamed them ‘netbashes’ (although most of the world call them LAN parties) and had many over those years but sadly for whatever reason (grew up, got jobs, got girlfriends etc) we stopped doing them after 2001ish.

Well in 2017 we decided to bring back the netbash (possibly due to an early midlife crisis haha) and relive our youth playing some of these great old games. Thanks to the fan gaming and modding community its easier than ever to play some of these classic games on modern machines. OpenRA in particular is just an utterly brilliant and addictive way to relive C&C and Dune gaming. Since I already had a website and youtube channel devoted to retro gaming and mods I decided to start filming some of our netbash games to improve the content. Below are some of the videos of these great fan remakes and mods of great classic games!

If you haven’t seen my original post on Netbash 1 & 2 you can find it: HERE

Netbash 3 – August 2017
It took us a few months to find another weekend to get the group together but we finally got there. James also invited his old mate Mick around to join him, Dave & I allowing us to play our first 4 player match! We seemed to be having an off day as we lost the first few matches of OpenRa C&C1 and kept having to drop the AI count lol. Finally we prevailed lol. Then after Mick had to leave I asked the guys to have a go at playing a Dune 2 HD Legacy match. These games went even worse haha. We lost so many games that by the time we did win a match I wasn’t recording anymore lol! Doh! James’s partner Jane cooked us a nice roast which I then promptly vomited all over her floor due to accidentally eating it to quickly. I’m not proud lol.
We also played an OpenRA Red Alert 1 naval battle map (as I realised I hadn’t done a RA1 video yet) and then a fun OpenRA C&C2 map that has you battling over snow covered bridges. We’d had a crazy match on the map at bash 2 so I was determined to get a video of it this time!
Bash 3 naughty meal of choice: Jane’s Roast Beef!

Star Trek Birth of the Federation 2 Sequel Projects in 2017

I still consider Star Trek The Next Generation – Birth of the Federation to be one of the greatest Star Trek games ever made, which is why I gave it a big tribute on my Star Trek Games website. I was a big Master of Orion 1&2 player back in the day so to a play a Star Trek version of that was a dream that had become a reality. I still remember that friday night in 1999 when BOTF was released and I first brought it home. My mate James and I were calling every video game shop in my city but all copies were sold out as trekies were all racing to get this game. Finally just before 9pm at night (closing time) we found a place with 1 copy left, jumped in the car and sped over there to get it! I stayed up all night playing BOTF and played it nonstop for days, weeks, months, and still came back to it repeatedly after years! So did James as he discovered that if you started the game with the cd you could take it out and still play, so for days he kept showing up at my house to borrow the disc for 20mins haha!

UPDATE 24/07/2023: New official Star Trek 4X game in development (not BOTF2 though).

Like many trekies I was devastated when Micropose lost the licence and fell apart ensuring there’d probably never be a sequel to BOTF. However fortunately in the early 2000s several fan groups decided to take on the mantle of making a BOTF2 sequel. The 2 biggest were the Star Trek Supremacy and Birth of The Empires projects. I religiously followed them though all the 2000s however as the project updates got rather quiet I sadly lost track in the 2010s and just figured the projects had died like so many other great fan projects out there. However recently I decided to investigate to see if these great old BOTF2 projects were still alive after 15 years and much to my surprise and joy, they were! In fact due to a breakup in the Supremacy group now there were now 3 BOTF2 projects out there – the ST BOTF2 Supremacy Project, the ST BOTF2 Rise Of The UFP Project (split from Supremacy) and the Birth of the Empires Project. All 3 projects were way more complete then I expected and you can literally play long games as the original races or cool new ones such as the Borg or Dominion in them right now!

Sadly because these projects have sort of disappeared from the limelight over this decade they don’t seem to have quite the huge followings they had back in the 2000s likely because of website moves, forum closures and fans like me just thinking they were dead. To help fix this I decided to make some long detailed tour videos of each 3 projects showing you just how cool and complete they are. If you loved playing BOTF back in the day then I strongly suggest you check out these 3 projects and visit their forums to show your support! There’s not many people left working on these projects so they could use all the help they can get! Feel free to do what I’m doing and offer help to all of them. I’ve been working with both the BOTF2 Supremacy & Rise Of UFP project guys to add more Remen content to the Romulans (Scimitar & Shock Troop centres etc) and it’s been a great experience. They’re all really nice guys and open to suggestions and very open to offers of help. 🙂

Here are the 3 projects:

Star Trek BOTF2 Supremacy Project

The first big BOTF2 project that started it all has come a long way over the years and is very fun and stable to play. Play as the Dominion? Yes please! This video was filmed earlier in the year so the project has had MANY updates since (incl playable Borg!).
Link to Project Forum (tell them Blake sent ya!)
Download latest WIP Demo
Link to their new project site
Link to my tribute page with more pics and info
(Shortcut links to each race/faction tour in video description on youtube page)