First Contact Without a doubt, First Contact by AlienWareTech sports the wildest user interface of the gaming-oriented voice-over-IP programs. If that's not enough, you can make your own new "themes" for it. A more important unique feature is First Contact's Game Integration Mode, which currently supports Half-Life, Quake II, Tribes, and Unreal Tournament. Simply launch First Contact and, say, Half-Life, and join a game on the Internet. First Contact will automatically check to see if any of the other players are also running First Contact and, if so, link you up for voice communication. No IP addresses to mess with. A third unique feature is that First Contact costs money; you're supposed to buy it (at an as-yet unspecified price when we downloaded it) if you like it after a 30-day evaluation. First Contact is another newcomer to voice-over-IP gaming, but the name behind it is well established, for AlienWareTech is a division of AlienWare, builders of high-performance gaming PCs. (Go to www.alienware.com to drool over them, or head to www.alienwaretech.com to get the program.) This gave us high hopes for the software, and we impatiently awaited the completion of its 2.4MB download. But things started to go wrong as soon as we tried to run it. Both our computers refused to run First Contact, producing the error message "A required .DLL file, WS2_32.DLL, was not found." This file is part of Winsock 2.0, a feature of Windows 98. No problem, we downloaded a free upgrade from Microsoft, but we were dismayed by how poorly this problem was documented in First Contact's built-in help. After all, if you can't run First Contact, how can you use its help facility? And even if you can, the help information errorneously states that Windows 95 OSR2 already includes Winsock 2.0. After this false start, things looked better. The program is truly peer-to-peer, so no one has to launch a "server". To talk to someone who is running First Contact, just hit "connect" and type his IP address or that of anyone else connected to him--or let the aforementioned Game Integration Mode do its thing. Our testing went smoothly until Bryan connected to my Quake 2 game and First Contact quit with an error message about not being able to contact the "registration server". Turned out the Game Integration Mode was trying to check with a central server over the Internet to determine if any other First Contact users were part of the game we were playing. Since we were playing modem-to-modem, it failed. The solution was to turn off the Quake 2 Game Integration Mode plugin. Our situation had not improved. In the game, voice breakup was terrible, with gaps often lasting several seconds. Though First Contact's CPU utilization was only about 30%, it lacked Roger Wilco's "high priority" mode. Worse, both of us heard First Contact frequently repeating itself. These repetitions would eventually stop of their own accord, only to begin again a minute or two later. After struggling vainly with various configuration settings, we gave up. Like TeamSound, First Contact must work on some computers or AlienWareTech wouldn't be distributing it. But it consistently failed us. Well, at least one good thing had come out of all this testing: We were starting to really appreciate good old Roger Wilco! Onward to BattleCom.