Trackmania Nations ESWC, a free version of the Trackmania brand, has been released:

Trackmania Nations ESWC designed for eSport "Nadeo, developers of the massively played online racing series, Trackmania, have come up trumps with their free Trackmania Nations ESWC game!"

and

For the first time in the history of eSport, a video game has been specially developed for the Electronic Sports World Cup and is being offered free of charge to the players of the entire planet so they may commence training for the qualifiers due to take place in 53 countries on Friday 27th of January. The Grand Final of ESWC will be held in Paris from June 28th to July the 2nd , in front of 40,000 people, where the best players from each country will battle it out for a prize of 400,000 dollars

Free Trackmania, get it and stuff.

Edit: AusGamers mirror. Includes StarForce copy protection. promoted/edited forum item

sweet, would love a GA mirror

So i can list my occupation as professional game player now????


Its trackmania.. So its gotta be good!!!

awsome news scuzzy, DLing now

Gave it a whirl and as expected it's a whole lot of fun. The graphics are gorgeous and the screenshots might not suggest it but the tracks are just are just as whacky as the previous installments.

great fun online.

ga / ausgamers server would make it even better!

ga / ausgamers server would make it even better!

Trackmania uses peer servers, it's not latency dependen as there is no collision.

That looks fantastic, downloading now.

I was playing this most of the afternoon yesterday, great fun :-)

Then later in the night I couldnt connect to the trackmania.com master server, something about bad proxy configuration :<

sweet, would love a GA mirror

http://www.gamearena.com.au/files/details/html/trackmania-nations-eswc#

Cheers scuzzy.

Jesus christ, that looks f***ing awesome. Will definately be checking it out.

Well, I haven't had this much fun playing any online game since the early days of CS... Just finished playing a 6 hour straight stint. I thoroughly recommend this game! :D

i try to connect o the internet and it says invalid key. wtf? there was no key to enter

Just keep trying, also try clearing your username and password.

Thats pretty hot for free!

played through a lot of the practice tracks, very sexy game, lots of fun.
Trying to connect to an internet game was a nightmare, although it's possible because of some form of downtime atm at 1:15am?

Either way, before I even got a server list, I got every sort of error imaginable, remedied simply by retrying over and over again, not by changing anything. Eventually I got a list of servers to join to, tried joining one which required a password, so I tried another one, but then I got the old invalid key message and returned to the main menu :S

If this wasn't so damned free, I'd be very upset! Can't wait for some updates and some easier online play!

thanks to scuzzy for being nadeo fanboy #1 :)

w00t!

I think the biggest problem with the server currently is the Load and Nadeo fixing stuff as things happen, the demo's just exploded with the same kind of things for the last games, the sunrise demo was massive.

Took out screenshots from the main post but here they are again, courtesy of scuzzy:

http://images.ausimages.com/upload/2006-01-29/TN_Tmn01.jpg http://images.ausimages.com/upload/2006-01-29/TN_Tmn06.jpg http://images.ausimages.com/upload/2006-01-29/TN_Tmn08.jpg http://images.ausimages.com/upload/2006-01-29/TN_Tmn09.jpg

this game is great fun to play, but is there meant to be sound effects?

Like I don't get any engine sound or tires squeeling etc. I get the photo effects and the start lights but thats about it...
I've played with my settings a ton and it hasn't changed anything.

yeah there should be music and engine noises and tyre noises. Go to the advanced configuration and choose software sound rendering and make sure you disable EAX.

I just noticed this has Starforce with it. I dunno whether to install the game or have they made Starforce machine-safe now?

I won't be installing it because of how badly starforce trashed my OS last time I installed something (thx splinter cell) - I was getting consistent hard lockups every few hours on a brand new machine which had run flawlessly for around 3 weeks without missing a beat. Less than an hour after installing that SPYWARE (installed itself without my permission or knowledge, so its f***ing spyware), my machine locked up for the first time. I tried their so-called removal tool, didn't work. I tried a billion things over a period of approximately 12 hours of pure dicking around, nothing. Format, reinstall, then it was fine.

There's a GameArena server up now btw.

yer but its all intermeddiate tracks. need more pro stuff

I hate starforce cause you gotta have the CD in to play the game, very frustrating. I have a legit splinter cell 3 and every time I wanna play gotta insert the god damn cd.

Computers are not ps2's

but theres no cd, WHAT WILL YOU DO!

Why is there StarForce copy protection on a free game?

so whats the deal? is this game worth the risk of downloading?

Why is there StarForce copy protection on a free game?

Stop people from putting hax into the game exe.

so whats the deal? is this game worth the risk of downloading?

you mean in a "I don't want to be addicted" sense?

just as awesome as the original 'Stunts' was :)


'very impressed with how well it runs with old SIS 650 chipsets. I wasn't expecting something like this to run so smoothly on Mrs Koopz' crappy old laptop. It's awesome to come across a lan game that she'll actually play these days!

Downloading now, looks promising, damn i'm behind times...

Damn you scuzzy, I now have a new addiction.

Aaaah i'm addicted to it, it's so damn fun but challenging. So much swearing when your destined for a podium and flip on the easiest corner of the track..... DAMN.