It is time for my perennial replay of MW4:Mercs, which is my favorite big shooty robots game of all time. The last couple times I used the MekTek free download through their crappy app MTX. Despite the crappiness of MTX, it used to work OK. This time it would no longer run, saying my checksums didn't match. I tried re-downloading and it stopped midway through the patching again with the checksum problem. I have not had this problem with any of the many many other games I have downloaded. Plus, MTX forces me to be stupid torrent seed which I don't like. Theoretically you can download it from MekTek without MTX but my efforts in that regard failed miserably. Despite their fanboy worship of MW4:Mercs, I'm not all that hot on MekTek. I used to own a couple of copies of the game on CD but sadly all I could find now was Disk 1 (the play disk). Without disk 2, it won't install. I tried surfing for it, but the only source for the free download is MTX (boooo! hissss!) and although I can find it for sale from individual vendors on Ebay and Amazon they want $50 to $120 for it plus none of the sellers is a site that I am familiar with. Most of them seem to be inviduals with a few small local stores thrown in. Normally, I would just go to Interact! in Pasadena but sadly, they played Taps last week and closed down permanently before I got the Mechwarrior bug. (As an aside, that was a sad day for local game stores everywhere as for many years Interact! was a stalwart of the LA area gaming scene and the best place to buy old games before gog.com. Sadly, Steam, Amazon, gog, et. al. killed them. Sigh.) So any particular tips for finding a playable copy of this thing? It is traditional for me to play it once a year or so. Also, MW4:Vengeance and MW4:Black Knight don't count: they are feeble pre-cursors to the majesty of Mercenaries (b/c in addition to all else, Mercs has the Arena with Duncan Fisher). If there is a non-MTX and non-MekTek way to get the free download that's fine but I'd be willing to pay $20 or so for a CD copy from a reputable source. Come on, help a brother out; once I get the jones nothing else will satisfy.
I'm 95% certain I have a copy squirreled away in a box somewhere I can send you, gimme a couple days to locate it.
I was going to offer to send you mine (picked it up for a couple euros from a toy store bargain bin some years back, never got around to playing it), but then I realised it was Vengeance, not Mercenaries.
if I remember correctly, Mektek is just a shit awful front end pasted over a regular torrent client. So if you can get the torrent links, you can just download MW4:Mercs legally with a regular torrent client. Their forum is down currently so I cant look them up
I did look into that option but the patching is apparently borked from what I read if you do it that way. You need a self extracting patch app and again as with MTX there are these mysterious checksum errors. This is the weird circumstance where the consumers would have been better off *without* the free release. If there were no free release I could buy this game in a fresh clean download off gog or steam for $10. Since the free release has nixed that option, my option choices are to use the crap-tastic MekTek site or buy an overpriced old copy. The problem with this free release was that it was channelled only through mektek, and they are not up to the job IMO.
