My girlfriend and I love playing computer games over LAN. We only see each other on the weekends, so being able to play our favorite games over the internet would be awesome. Alas a lot of especially older games lack a proper play-via-internet mode or use services like GameSpy which are usually more hassle than its worth.
For a long time we used Hamachi if we needed a VPN to play some game over the ‘net. But for some reason it doesn’t work that great under Windows 7 and has caused quite a few problems on my PC lately. For example it totally messes with the network connection of my virtual machine. So we looked for an alternative.
Among the products we tried were Tunngle and Lanbridger. The first one was very easy to use but felt a bit like overkill for what we intended to do. While it worked great, its user interface felt a bit too complicated for our taste and we didn’t really want to use all the features.
So I had a look at Lanbridger. Feature-wise its close to Hamachi but its interface is much clearer. Setup took only a few minutes and it worked like a charm. We tried it with several games and had no problems at all. Luckily it doesn’t seem to cause any issues with my virtual machine like Hamachi did. So Lanbridger looks like a great way to setup a VPN without any hassle and its free to boot.
