I played Rainbow 6 way back when it first came out. And honestly, I can't remember the story anymore.

I'm half-way through reading the book right now and when I finish, I was thinking of playing through the game if it remotely follows the book.

So, my 2 questions are:

1) Does the game work? I've heard tons of complaints that it simply does not work.

2) Does it follow the book somewhat closely?

Thanks!

Thanks for the links. I'll have to give the demo a try.

I use to play this game all of the time. I recently downloaded and installed it again. Its one of the better games that I have played. It is older of course but I love the story and multipler is the best.

First, it's "related to" the book, but not too closely. Think of them as "parallel" elements of the same story. Much of the book is about intrigue, while the game is all about the action (which is often... though it may not seem that way... glossed over in the books.

Does the game work? Well, that's a tough question. If you have Win98, yep, works perfectly. If you have WinXP, it can run with some issues. If you have Win7, well... I can run it here but I get no sound (so far). This MAY be related to my using sound-over-HDMI, however (this is on my home theater PC, hooked up to an amplifier by HDMI, and then to my speaker system and big-screen TV). Sound-over-HDMI is notoriously buggy, largely because of some questionable design choices on the part of some programmers at nVidia (and, possibly, at ATI/AMD?)

Basically, on nVidia hardware, you won't get any sound over HDMI, or at least not regularly, unless you're in at least 1024x768 resolution... and this game is designed for a lower resolution than that. So... NO SOUND.

Now, the later games were built upon an improved version of this... the first game built on the newer engine (but otherwise similar in terms of gameplay) was called Raiinbow Six 2 - Rogue Spear. And they did eventually port the first game's levels to the second game's engine. The videos in Rogue Spear continue to be 640x480 (ie, NO SOUND) but the game engine itself can be run at higher resolutions. Even better, the Rogue Spear upgrade allows for 3DFX graphics, and there are multiple "glide wrappers" out there which can upscale... so running Rogue Spear through, say, nGlide, set to output to 1280x1024 (even though the game itself is only putting out 640x480 for the videos, they get upscaled like everything else) gives you full sound and significantly improved 3D rendering.

So... if you have trouble with this game, look for Rogue Spear, and you'll get the same gameplay but without the drawbacks, and you can get the original missions (provided in one of the expansion packs to Rogue Spear) as "simulated historical missions" to play around with as well.