How to play City of Villains or City of Heroes doing 60mph on a Train

I'm sure my huge fanbase (thats right, both of you know who you are) already knows that I commute to NYC on the train every morning. I do it early enough that there's usually not that much competition for good seats. Most people want the window seat, but they're not seeing the big picture. The seat right next to the front door of the car is typically the one with an electrical outlet beneath it. I can spread my laptop out on the seat in front of me and plug in the laptop for the duration of my 50 minute commute.

Here's where the fun starts. My equipment (also note that this same experiment works on Windows Vista RC1 with only a few minor video glitches in the MMO)

• Alienware Area-51m 17" widescreen laptop, 3Ghz 2GB ram 7400 RPM drive. Believe it or not, this beast is 2 years old.
• Running Windows XP Professional SP 2
• Sprint PPC 6700 Windows Mobile 5.0 phone w/Bluetooth and USB modem support
  
• Installation of City of Villains / City of Heroes
• iPod loaded with Heavy Metal music

First time setup:

1. Pull out the PPC 6700 and turn on the Wireless modem in Bluetooth host mode
2. Have the laptop search for bluetooth devices (in my case I had to use it in USB mode on the Alienware because it doesn't have bluetooth)
3. Set up the passphrase (I chose "trainsrule")
4. Once the new  wireless modem has been detected, create a new Dial-Up Networking connection using the  newly detected Bluetooth modem (will probably show up on COM3 or COM4) . Phone number is #777, connects to the internet, leave the user name and password blank.

With the first time set up out of the way, I basically do the following when I get onto the train:

1. Pull out the PPC 6700 and turn on the Wireless Modem in Bluetooth host mode
2. Make sure the Bluetooth radio is on on the laptop
3. Click "Connect to ..." and then the DUN entry for the wireless modem
4. For sprint, the phone number is #777, leave the user name and password blank

At this point, I have a 240kbps link over USB (or slightly less via Bluetooth) with the modem. Now I fire up City of Villains and go kill things for the next 25-30 minutes. In my test I started after coming out from under the Hudson River by creating a new character. I was done with the tutorial and had a level 2 character on his way to his first real mission by the time I got to the Metropark station in New Jersey. I ran into a few rubberbanding issues in Newark, but that was probably due to going down to only 1 bar of signal. With 3+ bars of signal (what I get for the majority of the train ride), the game plays almost the same as it does over my Wi-Fi connection at home.

So the basic idea here is that I now have the ability to play my favorite MMO during my commute to and from work. Obviously I can't go on any high-level raids, but I can work on the guild's base or do a quick mission. I'm quite certain that when Motorola first came out with those big-ass 10lb mobile phones with foot-long antennas, that nobody expected that one day people would be using cell phone PDAs to enable Massively Multiplayer Online Games on a train :)

One other bonus. If you do the above networking connection between phone and laptop using the USB cable instead of bluetooth, you can charge your phone while you are playing City of Villains (or whatever other MMO you like to play). I hope this blog post encourages you folks to stop using your PDAs for productivity and start using them to enable mobile gaming! 

tags: cityofvillains  cityofheroes  mmorpg  mmo  gaming  video  games  vista  sprint  mobility  cellular  fun  

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