Steam version incompatible with UK retail?

[MasterGH]

For a long time a friend of mine has been telling me how great this game is, and that if I bought it we could do multiplayer. So, I eventually saw the Gold version cheap online (the shop had it for £9.99 {~AUD$16.50} including delivery) and bought it. After playing for around 4 hours in Continuous mode I found time to attempt a game with my friend, but that's where things went wrong.

He has the Steam (and seemingly US) version, while I have the UK one. This is somewhat amusing considering we both live in Australia, but anyway when we tried to connect one of us would get a "wrong version" error. Mine was properly patched to the UK version 1.04. His version seems to be the US 1.04, so we're not sure what is up.

Things we've tried: forwarding port 21701, both connecting through connecting through the lobby and directly. Another friend has the Steam version, which works perfectly online with the first friend. I can't connect to either of them. We also tried using The Sunken Dragon addon, but it just said exactly the same message.

What we aren't able to do is try the LAN mode, because I live in Queensland while they're in Western Australia.

So, will we ever be able to play together or is this just some shoddy region coding?

[NeatNit]

Looks like a pretty bad mistake on the developers' part. There isn't much you can do...

What I'd try is to find what file has the version string (I assume it's going to be something like 1.04_uk or something like that) and either hex-edit it to say us instead or copy the file from your friends (the first option is more legal :P)

But I have absolutely no idea how to find where the version string is stored, and it might (but not necessarily) cause even more problems...


Ok, one other thing you could try is something that worked for a kind of similar issue with Multiwinia (you don't have to know about the game).

What happened is that if trying to play LAN from different versions of the game (Steam, retail, mac), it would say incompatible. For some reason, if one person launched Multiwinia twice, then closed the first one, it wouldn't do that. So I'd just try that. There's a very low chance that that would work but if you want to try, it's worth a shot. Make sure to try both as host and as a joining player.

And if all else fails, contact the publishers/devs. Although that isn't really an option because the devs are gone (bought by ubisoft I think)...
Your only 100% bet would be to re-purchase the game from Steam.



Good luck! Hope I'm not too late, and that what I said it not in vain (I have absolutely no idea if that would work or not. I'm just throwing random things out there :P)