Jason: Hmm, I could be wrong but I'd expect it to be pretty expensive. You could write a proxy to convert brainking games into a text based format. Would reduce the bandwidth usage *a lot*. Might be a bit hard to write, but I'd expect it would be fun to code.

If your interested in doing that, I'd recommend a high level language that has a good HTTP interface. This allows you to skip over messing directly with the protocol and save you a lot of time. Regexp is proboably useful for gathering data, unless theres some other way to access brainking I'm missing (an RSS feed of games, for instance..)