So I felt the urge…to play some MechWarrior last Saturday night.

With MechWarrior Online coming out soon, (the only game that could possibly retire me from SF at this point), I’ve been catching up on my Battletech lore. Grabbing them old Warrior trilogies and Blood of Kerensky stuff of my shelves.

So I downloaded MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries on Saturday.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/244041/how_to_play_mechwarrior_4_mercenaries_on_your_windows_7_pc.html

Installation was a piece of cake. Download MTX, download the game (took an hour or so), and patch it. Fired it up, worked just fine.

To my pleasant surprise, the fine folks at MekTek have been updating the hell out of the game since I last played it years and years ago.

I think I remember there were like 30 or so Mechs in the original Mech 4: Mercs, but my jaw dropped open when I clicked on the Mech list in Instant Action. There were like 80 or 90 mechs!!! I had to scroll down for ages to reach the bottom of the list.

As it scrolled down, my jaw dropped further and further.

Warhammer!
Marauder
Behemoth aka Stone Rhino I assume
Centurion!!!
Battlemaster and IIC variant
Warlord
Supernova
Rifleman
Trebuchet
Urbanmech (The trashcan returns! Aka AC20 on a light mech.)
Blackheart
Black hawk (Love the slots, hate the torso twist.)
Kodiak
Grizzly
Commando
Highlander
Cyclops
Zeus
Hunchback and IIC variant (aka double AC20s on a medium mech! You can even dump the guns in the torso and strip off all the armour off the arms like the lameass I am :P.)

And many more mechs than I can even remember right now. I was almost salivating at this point. One of my peeves with Mech 4 was the lack of classic Mechs, I couldn’t stomp around with the old Zeuses and the Centurions that I loved in Mech 2.

Not only the Mechs, I think they balanced the weapons and added a ton of new weapons!

Assault laser (Basically a short range laser that does 20 damage. Only 5 tons. I instantly tried it out.)
Inferno rockets
Plasma cannon
Rail gun (The dropship weapon, think it’s 5 slots ballistic weapon with 50 plus damage!!)
Linked capacitor PPC
That’s all I can remember, but they had a ton of new missiles as well.

Utterly amazing. I downloaded it at 11PM, and I played it straight till 730AM the next morning. And then I woke up at 11 AM to go to SNL! Actually went 2-2 in AE and Marvel, which was not bad considering…

Damn, I had so much fun. The first thing I did was to make a Yen Lo Wang Centurion build to smash some mechs in Solaris. (LBX-20 with 4 mediums/ER Large Laser)

Felt so broken instakilling other mediums with my double AC20 armourless arms Hunchback 11C. And still tinkering with all the heavies to try to improve on my favourite Loki build- double LBX-20 with a ER Large laser and pushing 100kmps top speed.

Damn! I can’t wait for MechWarrior Online. I know Pyro is excited about it too, this might finally be the game that pushes me to get a good computer after all these years.