Game wishlist

[leilei]

Melee, highly Star Control 2 inspired freeware game from 97-98. lots of stolen sounds, though (a Cyberdogsish case here)

i'm surprised the original site is still functional after all these 13 years, considering 1996-1999 is a freeware BLACK HOLE missing in the pages of iHistory. I had to sniff out an ancient floppy with a BOOKMARK.HTM on there for this!

[MrFlibble]

Inner Worlds (DOS) [Added to the site]
I think this game is definitely worthy of adding to the site. It has amazingly good-looking graphics and an unusual premise of the protagonist being a young werewolf girl.

The developers, Sleepless Software, have released this game into public domain, but they don't host the download on their site (see download links below).
Inner Worlds Official Home Page
Inner Worlds at MobyGames
Inner Worlds Wikipedia article
Download Inner Worlds Shareware from cd.textfiles.com
Download Inner Worlds Full Version from dosgames.com

[MrFlibble]

I've mentioned Alien Rampage here before, but I'd like to bring this subject up again 'cause the shareware version seems to be pretty hard to find on the net. Googling produces a decent amount of download links for the full game, but the only download of the shareware episode I could find is at Demu (a.k.a. DOS Museum), and it's been repackaged in a RAR file.

There are also webpages (like this one) that have dead links to various shareware and demo games, from which it follows that the filename of the Alien Rampage shareware distribution is, supposedly, SDRAMP.EXE.

There's also that annoying Finnish website of a video gaming magazine called MBnet that appears to have a huge collection of downloads of old demo versions, shareware games and so on, but only allows access to the archive for their subscribers.

Other than that, here are a few more games I think are interesting:

Black Crypt (Win9x)
This is the first game by Raven Software, a Golden Age 3D real-time RPG originally developed for Amiga and released in 1992. It had pretty decent graphics and interesting gameplay, and due to its popularity, a project was started in 1998 to port the game to the PC platform. This was never completed, but a two level demo of the PC version is freely available.
Black Crypt Official Page
Black Crypt at MobyGames
Download Black Crypt PC Demo

ShadowCaster (DOS)
A first-person RPG featuring a shape-shifting protagonist, which uses a modified version of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine.
ShadowCaster Official Page
ShadowCaster at MobyGames
Download ShadowCaster Demo

Quarantine (DOS)
A 2.5D vehicle driving FPS set in a dystopian future, where the player takes on a role of a taxi cab driver who strives to escape the city. An interesting aspect of the game is that to earn money for upgrades, the player must function as a real cab, taking fares and driving random customers around the city.
Quarantine Wikipedia article
Quarantine at MobyGames
Quarantine review from GameBytes
Download Quarantine Demo from Lightning BBS
Download Quarantine Demo from cd.textfiles.com
Download Quarantine Demo from chatnfiles.com

Quarantine II: Road Warrior (DOS)
A sequel to Quarantine.
Quarantine II: Road Warrior at MobyGames
Download Road Warrior Demo at C|NET Downloads

[MrFlibble]

BTW, if you consider adding Heroes of Might and Magic II demo to the site, here's the version with the original installer (a more widespread one is just a zip):
ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Windows95dotco ... h2demo.exe

[MrFlibble]

In the continuation of the 2.5D FPS theme, here's another (rather obscure) title you might take a look at: Rex Blade (a.k.a. Domination). The game was criticized for dated graphics and non-intuitive gameplay (as well as other drawbacks), but here's what the author has to say on the issue:

I had to write that game in 45 days from concept to shrink wrap. That schedule was the problem. The engine is an advanced ray caster that I wrote, but simon and schuster wouldn't give me time to finish the 2nd version, so the engine we had to use wasn't in high rez, and had to go with 320x200. But, the graphics are similar to doom, it had advanced lighting, shading, glass, and other effects. The 640x480 engine had to be shelved. But, the game had 10-12 different planets, each with its own graphics and theme, the shear amount of art, graphics, etc. made it nearly impossible. But, bottom line, finished a FPS from scratch in 45 days, sold about 100K copies. I needed a good 9-12 months to do something really clean. However, the game has ideas in it that were way ahead of its time. For example, there are computers that you access to do things like exit, etc. But, these computers are REAL, you can program them, so they work -- and you can write games on them, or hack the level and turn things on/off, open doors, so it was a thinking hacking aspect to the game never fully explored.

Finally, the game had REAL AI, the actors have memory and communicate to each other about weapons location, ammo, food, and plan accordingly. If you put the game into god mode and look down you can see that the creatures are all doing things. Unlike doom and other games, the characters just sit and wait for you to flip a virtual switch then attack. But, I was trying to create something that had an ecosystem that was alive and worked.

But, 45 days -- shit, most people can't write "hello world" in 45 days let alone a million lines of computer code and publish a game, so I am very happy with it nevertheless. It was just bad timing, bad publisher, bad schedule, with a good concept, GREAT character and idea "Rex Blade" rocks as a concept and if you read about it, its interesting since I invented it 5 years before HALO, but Rex Blade is very similar to the Master Chief, he was used in a time of war, hyper advanced, genetically modified, and the game starts off by re-starting him in his orbiting capsule since he was in hypersleep.

Anyway, after Rex blade, we did 2 more follow up packs to the game and I decided without real funding, $1-5M a game, and 1-2 years a project there is no way to do what I want, so I started doing the casual games and that worked really really, 1-6 months a project, they cost $5-50K and all made at least 10x their cost, some 100x, so amazing ROI.

But, you never know... I might bring Rex Blade back some day and give him justice.

Andre'

(quoted from here)

He also goes into some detail about the game itself:

Thanks -- But, what's really impressive is that in a video game, there is a virtual processor, environment, OS, language, interface, then you could walk up to the console in the FPS itself, login, code, and WRITE a game within the game Kinda like Inception So, we had asteroids, breakout, and a few others we wrote that you could find on the "mainframes" memory system.

Anyway, bottom line, my interest was in making objects real, not just look real. I want liquid to act like liquid, but also be used as fuel. Imagine a game like HL, but instead of just physics working, simple electrical systems could be constructed, you could build things in a "lab" then use them -- or whatever a simple radio, or timer to blow up some C4, etc. Right now, games have destruction and its pretty damn amazing, but it would be cool, if things BURNED -- for real, melted, gave off vapor, even some simple models would be really interesting.

Or when you mix chemicals they react in the way they should (within reason), so you could make acids, explosives, and so forth with chemicals found in a game. That stuff is just cool since you have to figure out ways to do it in real time, plus make the models fairly realistic.

Not to mention you might learn something about electronics or chemistry playing a game! Not a bad trade off for the USA since we have the worst public schools on the planet and we are behind everyone in education now.

Andre'

(source)
Rex Blade Review at Super Adventures in Gaming
Download Rex Blade Demo from FilePlanet
Download Domination Shareware from tiscali.it
Download Domination Shareware from 4shared.com

On another note, here are some assorted strategy games:
Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance - Demo, Demo 2 (mirror)
Blood & Magic - Demo
Castles - Demo
Castles 2: Siege and Conquest - Demo
Lords of the Realm - Demo (with music), Demo (w/o music, smaller)
Lords of the Realm 2 - Demo, Demo 2 (mirror)
Lords of the Realm 2: Siege Pack - Demo
Lords of Magic - Demo
Lords of Magic: Legends of Urak - Demo

[Edit] The same FTP that I found the Domination shareware episode yielded the original installed of the Zombie Wars demo

[DOSGuy]

Okay, here's the deal on that Zombie Wars demo.

Gee Whiz! Entertainment released a demo based on a beta version of Zombie Wars, called the "Zombie Wars Internet Demo" (zwdemo1.zip). It was a Win16 game that required WinG, but was clearly a DOS game (probably based on the Alien Carnage engine) that had been ported to Win16. From Gee Whiz! Entertainment's website:

Requirements: 486-dx66, Win 3.1, 8 Meg ram, 8 Meg HD space, Colour monitor.
Recommended: Pentium, soundcard, 16 Meg ram, 8 Megs HD space, Win95, Colour monitor, Joystick or Gravis gamepad.
NOTE- Windows 3.1 version requires the WinG library.

According to the readme file, the demo is from 29 July 1996, but someone packed it into a Win9x installer on 10 July 1998 (the file you linked to). Since the original demo was based on a beta version of the game that Gee Whiz! probably had no interest in distributing any more, and the copyright notice wasn't updated to "1996-1998", and the installer calls the game "Halloween Harry 2 - Zombie Wars", it looks like this installer was created by an anonymous third party! But since I can't find the original zwdemo1.zip, I'll put it on the site anyway while I contact John Passfield about it.


Once the game was done, it looks like it required Windows 95. Gee Whiz! created downloads of the complete game (split into two zip files, plus two optional movie packs), that would only let you play a (different) special demo level until you unlock the rest by registering the game.

Files:

zwgame1.zip (4,297,152 bytes) [Have]
zwgame2.zip (4,707,765 bytes)
zwavi1.zip (6,261,359 bytes)
zwavi2.zip (4,350,169 bytes)

The registration price was $24.95. By November 1998, Gee Whiz! reduced the registration price to $9.95 and linked to a company called RegNow that handled registration for shareware authors. According to Gee Whiz's website, the download that accompanied registration was 8,106,539 bytes. (Perhaps zwgame1.zip and zwgame2.zip were combined into a single file, but you still had to download the movie packs separately?)

From the Gee Whiz! website:

Requirements: 486-dx66, Win95, 8 Meg ram, 52 Megs HD space, Colour monitor.
Recommended: Pentium, soundcard, 16 Meg ram, 52 Megs HD space, Win95, Colour monitor, Joystick or Gravis gamepad.

[MrFlibble]

Out of the multitude of packages of The Catacomb Abyss shareware version, here are the ones that have all the original files (as defined in the packing list inside VENDOR.DOC) and no extra additions:
The Catacomb Abyss Shareware v1.13
The Catacomb Abyss Shareware v1.13 (different ZIP filename)
The Catacomb Abyss Shareware v1.13 (different ZIP filename and size)

The unaltered package of v1.12 is harder to find, at least, on cd.textfiles.com there only seem to be this one (already mentioned somewhere above) and another one split in two parts, but both distributions do not match the packing lists: the first one has omitted a file (CONFIG.ABS), and the second has extra files added.

Also, here's another ZIP file of the old Chasm demo (v1.02) I just stumbled upon:
http://cd.textfiles.com/cream/cream23/games/chasm.zip

[leilei]

Another entry in the "obscure late 90s DOS hotseat combat freeware games department" is Wings. This has tracker music too

[MrFlibble]

When looking for a ShadowCaster demo at cd.textfiles.com, I accidentally downloaded a shareware sci-fi adventure game called ShadowForce, which seems pretty obscure, but appears to be rather nice. So far, I've only found scarce information about it in a wiki dedicated to the game's developers, Midnight Synergy:
http://midnightsynergy.wikia.com/wiki/ShadowForce

Here's a link to the "clean" ZIP at cd.textfiles.com (ironically, the one that got mistaken on that CD for a ShadowCaster demo):
http://cd.textfiles.com/sv/svgames9501/CDR06/SHADOW.ZIP

Other archives I found on cd.textfiles.com so far have additional files or comments, but the filename is usually SHADFORC.ZIP and not SHADOW.ZIP.

[Edit] The archive also can be found under the name of 1SHADOW.ZIP, which might be the original name:
ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/JCS-Distributi ... SHADOW.ZIP
ftp://ftp.chatnfiles.com/Public-Sharewa ... SHADOW.ZIP
Both archives seem to be "clean", but there are minor differences in documentation files and a game resource file on one occasion.

[MrFlibble]

I've found yet another a rather obscure game that has been officially liberated, called Legend of the Silver Talisman. An action-adventure game with a two-player option, it features gameplay similar to Gauntlet.

Download Legend of the Silver Talisman Shareware v1.1
Download Legend of the Silver Talisman Registered v1.2
Legend of the Silver Talisman gameplay video on YouTube

[ThreeHeadedMonkey]

If it's anything like Gauntlet, I must try it!

[MrFlibble]

One game I've been looking for for a long time, and is hard to get your hands on (much less get it to work properly) is: Little Big Adventure (aka Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure) As released by Adeline Software and distributed by Electronic Arts & Activision back in 1994. You can find screenshots of the game with ease, and even some websites that claim to let you download it, but I haven't gotten one to work properly.

(Note: I did find a new website with a download I haven't tried Here when digging up URLs to link in this post, and I'll report back when I try it...)

I have no problem getting a screenshot of the game and writing a review for the site, if the game can be found and legally posted here. Thank you for you time and effort!

I've found a playable demo of that game at cd.textfiles.com:
http://cd.textfiles.com/sv/svgames9501/CDR06/RELENT.ZIP

[MrFlibble]

I've found two demos of Battle Isle 2200 (a.k.a. Battle Isle 2 in Europe). Both feature the same demo mission, but the one called Battle Isle 2 doesn't have the intro animation and sound effects are disabled for whatever reason.

Download Battle Isle 2200 Demo from FilePlanet*
Download Battle Isle 2 Demo from BlueByte FTP

*NOTE: There are several different packages with this demo on the net, most of which have the same problem with INSTALL.EXE not working due to missing files (and thus sound and music are not configurable). The archive at FilePlanet does not have this problem and is likely the original version. Its original file name is supposedly BATLISLE.ZIP.

[MrFlibble]

I've found a demo of Hammer of the Gods (somewhat of a predecessor to Heroes of Might and Magic) demo among the newest additions to cd.textfiles.com:

http://cd.textfiles.com/ie/ie07/DEMOS/HAMMER/

For some reason it's a plain folder with game files, not a zip archive or anything. Hopefully an archived distribution can be also found somewhere.

[MrFlibble]

BTW, I've been complaining about the Alien Rampage shareware virtually not available on the net and on shareware CDs, but in fact there's one at cd.textfiles.com:
http://cd.textfiles.com/cdaction/cdaction07a/RAMTEMP/

I did not mention it previously because of the doubts that the package is not the original one, but this is still better than nothing.

Perhaps my attention to this particular game is more than due, but it's a pretty good game to be sure, so I think it would make a worthy addition to the site anyway