Also, GameSpy arcade. My parents had McAfee blocking the internet, because the literal first thing I did was save porn to “My Pictures” directory. But it only blocked the browsers. So I used the built in web browser in GameSpy to download Star Wars BF2 mods, amongst other things
The gametime stats in Xfire were my first clue that I maybe needed to get off the PC once in a while and, as the kids say these days, touch grass.
Was still kinda proud of myself though. Albeit a sort of shameful pride.
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This brought back so many memories. Late night DarkOrbit, CS…
Reminds me of the all seeying eye
This was the best way to game with and chat with friends. I miss those days.
Did you pronounce it X-fire or Crossfire?
“Ex-fire”. “Crossfire” was an AMD thing.
X fire, but in my defense I was eleven
Sorry, why would it be called crossfire?
English is my 2nd language, so I always read it as “X” Fire. That;s funny, I never though about it.
X usually stands for cross. Some road sign will say train xing or deer xing
More recently X also represents a heap of shit.
Sometimes X is also used to abbreviate Crossmas.
Christfire would’ve gone hard.
A lot of, generally Japanese, media uses “x” as shorthand for “cross”
A friend always called it “christfire” because it pissed EVERYONE off
Let them know I’m taking that for my new band name.
Hence the cross button on PS controllers.
I remember in Paper Mario: TTYD one of the late game tattle entries on a X-naut enemy clarifies that its pronounced “cross”-nauts. This game had me mispronouncing the villain team’s name the entire time until the end.
I never even considered it might be pronounced crossfire…I am stupid.
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I think I remember an official statement saying “X-Fire” was correct, and “crossfire” was wrong.
I dont even need to watch this video, I can hear the thumbnail. Don’t get caught in the CROSSFIREEEE!
I actually convinced my parents to buy this for me, played it once.
I cannot read the word crossfire without that song latching onto my brain.
The commercial is a masterpiece of 90’s child-centric advertising
Do you call the button on a controller X or cross?
I could be wrong but I call it the D pad
I mean this button.
A blast from the past. Totally forgot about it existing until this post.
My childhood!
Never knew anyone to use this
Xfire to Discord: I am your Father
Grandfather? Wasnt Mumble the in-between?
ventrilo: am I a joke to you
TeamSpeak ftw
This brought back memories I didn’t know I had. Gosh I miss those days, I wish I had downloaded all the clips I recorded before it died. I’m sad now.
There are some archives of the service here -
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire
Supposedly most of the videos, and 20% of the screenshots? I’m not sure if there’s a way to easily search the archive contents, rather than download.
There’s quite a few profiles on Web Archive too -
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xfire.com/profile/*
Holy shit. Just found my profile that had stuff there like bio, pc specs and games/hours from when I was 14… I’m nearly 32 now. Wild …
I was an mplayer user. They had plenty of quake team fortress servers.
Xfire had such a good system for overlay. and just so many good features. It was better 10 years ago than Discord is today.
Why do you think it was better than Discord today? Didn’t get to experience Xfire so genuinely curious about it’s user experience.
It wasn’t. Nostalgia is hell of a drug
It was very feature-rich. Literally everything discord offeres, but better implemented, and every feature was customizable - the in-game overlay being the one I remember most fondly. In addition to a VOIP indicator like discord has, it had a text-chat overlay too that my guild used a lot. We were spread out over multiple games, but we all had one unified in-game guild chat thanks to Xfire. You could resize and reposition everything in the overlay, and could set a keybind to toggle whether your mouse and such could interact with the chat windows or just click through it to interact with the game. It was clean as fuck.
VOIP quality was outstanding. UI in general was customizable and also clean as fuck.
It had a built in screen recorder.
Everything was intuitive to use and easy to use.
It was just really, REALLY high quality all around.
Hope it makes a comeback.
What wasn’t feature-rich was the chat, just plain text, no emoticons or rich text or anything. Absolutely loved it.
Agreed. Cutesy emotes are great when you aren’t trying to concentrate on multiple other things at the same time. When I’m mid-game the only chat I read needs to be static and non-moving.
It did a really good job of putting the stuff you actually want on screen, while staying the hell out of the game’s way!
This came up in convo with a co-worker recently. I had completely forgotten about it until he mentioned it and then, suddenly, a flood of memories came rushing back.
