Legal Crime is a rather unique real-time strategy
game, developed in by a group of students at the University of
Helsinki, Finland. They called themselves
Byte Enchanters. The first version was released early in
1997.
I discovered this game in August 1999, shortly after I got Internet connectivity and my first state of the art Computer. I registered it in September, the first shareware I ever registered (unfortunately I lost my key later in one of my numerous harddrive accidents, so I'll never be able to play it online). I have been playing it since, sometimes more, sometimes less, and haven't grown tired of it. In fact, there are lots of things I haven't done yet.
Legal Crime is a strategy game, you build up a crime empire in the
prohibition area, fighting not so much against the police as against
the competition.
Depending on the map and your style of playing, a
game can last anything between a few minutes and two hours. You can
create your own maps and scenarios (which might, for example, let you
fight against multiple enemies).
Unfortunately, this great game was orphaned about two years after it was first released.
It had already been orphaned when I discovered it. But at that time, the web site was still up, and the latest version was only a few months old. Only in the forums strange things were going on.
Posted By Operator on May 03, 1999 at 23:24:53:
This is the Operator,
I am the only Op left in LC. I am the one who broke into BE and edited the Op list. I have banned everyone that has tried to stop me. And today i killed the servers. I am tired of the people that figured out who i am for real. For all you who wonder who I am, let's just say i'm gonna keep you wondering. So stop giving those morons Seltzer and Thunder credit for my triumph. This game will die and i will kill it if i have to hack into every single one of your computers. Goodbye LC.
Operator
Shortly before Christmas 2000, the Byte Enchanters website went down. The game itself can still be downloaded from various shareware sites, but you won't find a place any more where you can upgrade to the full version.
The two Byte Enchanters domains, after serving as redirectors for porn sites a while in late 2001, were for sale in 2002. Only serious offers over $400 would be considered. Whoever bought them never did anything with them.
Every now and then I do find out something new.
Put Legal Crime 1.1.5 on Download Central, and updated this page the first time in seven years.
Occasionally I get asked if there are still ways to play this game online, if Kali still carries it, and so on. I got two such mails shortly before my harddrive crashed in June 2004, now they are lost and I cannot answer them anymore. I'm sorry for that.
Anyway there is not very much I know. As of 2004-06-22, Kali does carry Legal Crime, but there seem to be too few players to ever get a game going. I have added the Kali Legal Crime Forum to the links. It's probably the best way to meet other players.
How many people are still interested in playing Legal Crime at all? Again, I cannot say. In the first three weeks of June, 60 people visited my downloads page. Not many, but it should be enough to get a game going now and then.
Finally created an index page for my Legal Crime downloads. As for now, it's still only Douglas and Martin A. Bliss' map and scenario editor and Borbarad's maps.
I think I found a remedy for the game crashes: disable your sound card. At least it worked for me.
I browsed through the archive of the Byte Enchanters website at the Wayback Machine. I found some interesting things, among them the forum post I quoted above. I was also able to salvage a lot of maps.
It would be interesting to know what exactly went on in spring 1999. Why did the Byte Enchanters break up? Why did they suddenly lose interest in the game? And why did the community break apart that fast?
Seems you still can play Legal Crime over Kali.net after all. And signup is free now.
There does not seem to be a server left where you can play Legal Crime
online. Case's Ladder still has its
Legal Crime pages, but there are no records any more. Kali does not carry the game any more at all,
and GameStorm does not exist any more.
Unfortunately, the developers did not include a LAN or direct cable connection multiplayer option. It was their philosophy that Legal Crime should be played over the Internet and over the Internet only. Now that Byte Enchanters are no more and the few servers that carried it dropped it, you cannot play it multiplayer at all.
Your only chance would be to get hold of the original server software, which was freely available to ISPs but noone else. You might try requesting it in appropriate newsgroups, maybe a.b.o.g. The chance, I should guess, is not very high.
I was able to recover Borbarad's maps via the Wayback Machine! Technically, a Legal Crime map is just a text file with a .map extension. And since he had not zipped his maps up they were archived just like text files would be. There are eight maps, one of them (appropriately titled test.map) is just for testing purposes, not for playing (the two players are completely separated from each other). For now, you can download them in one zip archive, Borbarads own comments will follow soon.
The most serious bug is probabely that when your income/savings get really high, they suddenly jump into the negative for short but increasing time spans. Once or twice I actually lost a game because of this. Simple remedy: keep your money in reasonable amounts.
When you have a collection center on the same block as other businesses,
then the money from these businesses sometimes will not be collected
at all. An arrangement as in the screenshot to the right is thus
definitely not recommended.
I had sometimes read reviews complaining the game crashed often, but did not encounter this myself until, ironically, I upgraded to a faster computer. On my old Aptiva/Pentium II 333MHz, even back when it had but 32MB RAM, only one rather large map had managed to crash the game, on my new 1.1GHz Duron, bought in early 2002, every fourth game or so crashed, sometimes before it even loaded.
Then I found out that this crashing was obviously related to sound. Simply disabling the sound card (this can be done in the Windows control panel) let me play as stable as ever, and I couldn't say I missed the sound very much, though it took some getting used to. But then, suddenly, I could play it again, with sound, and it would never crash. I never found out what was behind all this.
Apart from this, the only annoying thing is the bad (or rather non-existing) Gangster AI. The game does not seem to have a router, making the guys on the screen move rather weird, the all-important money carriers sometimes cannot reach a business at all, and gangsters always attack the nearest enemy man, not the most dangerous one!
Downloading the game is not as easy as it was, as many sites didn't host
it themselves, but just linked to the official site. Note that while the download is
frequently listed as demo,
this is not true; there never was a separate full
version, the locked features are unlocked by typing in your registration code.
The following download links were last checked 2011-08-20:
So now you have downloaded the shareware version and would like to upgrade to full? Unfortunately, I cannot help you here. From the resellers listed in the documentation, none carries it any more. You're on your own.
For that reason I recommend downloading version 1.1.5. As far as gameplay is concerned, this version can do everything. 1.2.3 (for which I don't have a download link anyway at the moment) only added two animations (explosion for the terrorist and destroyed Cadillac) but also a checksum to prevent playing all the maps and scenarios with the unregistered version. With 1.1.5, you can do this simply by renaming them.
There are hardly any fan pages left. Of the dozen or so pages I once linked to, two are still up, the rest vanished during 2001. And those two were last updated 1998 and never will be again. It is just a matter of time that they, too, will vanish. I did find another one, but it is not active either.
The reviews stayed up longer, but they, too, vanish one by one. Gamespot
listed it among ten great online multiplayer games
in 1999,
but the article is gone.
Some of the game's designers can still be traced on the web.
Apprentice godfathers and assistants
Once I played Legal Crime, I got interested in gangster games and tried several. I was usually disappointed.
As an interesting sidenote, though most of these gangster games are situated in the USA, none were developed there. Legal Crime is a Finnish game, Gangsters and Street Wars are British, and Crime Fighter, as already mentioned, is German.
Some aspects (unlimited resources) are completely unique to Legal Crime. Otherwise, Age of Empires can offer a somewhat similar game experience, and The Legend as well.
