how to play Side Meier's Alpha Centauri for free
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I stopped in for a Starbucks coffee on the way back to the apt. today. There was only one girl working behind the counter, so I thumbed through one of their fliers (one that listed their locations). There are no fewer than 15 Starbucks on Yonge St. in Toronto!
I've made the damndest discovery. I'd downloaded the patch to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which I've been playing at a snail's pace on my laptop (e.g. instead of working on my novel). I bought the game when it first came out two years ago, happy to do so after playing a hacked copy of Civ (the previous version of the same thing) for years.
Anyway, so I transfered the patch to the laptop, but the patch remained on my mum's PC. This morning I downloaded the demo of the game to see how well it runs with the video card she's got. It's a limited-functionality version of the real thing that lets you play 100 rounds (rather than the 400 I seem to play every time I sit down). It works very well with the card on the PC, here; it's really not a resource-intensive game.
On a whim, I tried applying the patch to the demo, and guess what: the demo plus the patch is a fully playable version of the game!
To duplicate this trick, follow these steps:
- Download and install the demo
- Rename the directory for the demo so that the word ' Demo' is removed (note the space in front of the word).
- Download and install the patch
- Play to your heart's content