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Anyone else think of the RPG game The Aethra Chronicles when they read the title of this article?

Nor does unpopular. Here's a link to prove it.

I also recommend Sierra's Manhunter. A solid cyberpunk adventure game from the glory days.

Abuse was released to the public domain when crack.com went bankrupt. You can download it and play the full version from underdogs and not even worry about stealing :)
It works on 98/XP just fine. Of course if you hate Microsoft then the source code can also be dug up with a little googling allowing someone to make a linux version.

Long live The Underdogs: Crystal Quest and its follow-up, Crystal Crazy

Long live The Underdogs: Crystal Quest and its follow-up, Crystal Crazy

is called daggerfall.

Be warned about two things though:
1) The graphics suck
2) it can ruin your (real) life.

This freeware program from Jeffrey Ventrella is an open-ended version of this. Small wormlike creatures evolve to find the most efficient, fastest method of locomotion through liquid. You can change various parameters to make it easier or harder for the little swimmers.

DarwinBots makes use of true genetic algorithms for propulsion, attack, feeding, social behavior, and evolution of multicellularity. I like Darwin Pond better, personally, because it's more stable and DarwinBots doesn't have the "cuteness" factor.

Because these figures are engaging in human-type motion in a reasonably believable 3D environment, I can understand how it's important- however, it isn't truly revolutionary in nature. It's just another step in the evolution (appropriate, ne?) of genetic algorithms.

And if you really really want to play it it's available here. Seeing as how it's an offline rip of an online game, you can't save or anything. But from a historical perspective it's interesting.

This is the best one I have found, rating system, everything you asked for. :)

The Underdogs

The Underdogs has manuals of many old (but better than most of the newer ones) PC games available for downloading. You can also have the games for some of the manuals, but don't tell anyone.

I found most of the "Incredible Machine" series available for download at The Underdogs (a great site for info/downloads of old games).

I haven't tried to install any of them yet, but I grabbed v3.0 and the original. Getting old DOS games to run under XP can be tricky, but there is always DOSEMU, which usually works. There are some tips on the site if you have trouble.

Even less well known is the MULE remake Traders by Merit Software 1991. It was clearly a remake of the original game, but unfortunately they added an unnecessary fighting aspect to the game if things wern't going your way.

Another MULE clone (this one I haven't played) is Subtrade: Return to Irata by Century Interactive 1993.

Even less well known is the MULE remake Traders by Merit Software 1991. It was clearly a remake of the original game, but unfortunately they added an unnecessary fighting aspect to the game if things wern't going your way.

Another MULE clone (this one I haven't played) is Subtrade: Return to Irata by Century Interactive 1993.

I point you to:
Home of the Underdogs

A very good Abandonware/Older Game site, not only for the variety of stuff it hosts, but for the fact that he does actually take stuff down if he's requested, and for stuff that is still being sold, even has links to places you can purchase it.

You might want to look at The Games Factory. If that doesn't suit you, check out this site which has various abandonware games for free download, including the Pinball Construction set.

"Conquests of Camelot", a Sierra game, did this years before Die by the Sword did. There was a section where you had to joust the black knight, and you chose the quadrant for your lance to strike as he was riding towards you (using the 1-9 keypad.)

It's still one of my favorite games, I just wish I could get it working fully under XP. VDMSound works to a point (I get music working) but sound is a no-go. Isn't there a Sierra "emulator" of sorts for these classic adventure games?

Or better yet, they should remake it.. leave it 2d/adventure based, but update the sound/music/graphics for newer PC's. That'd rock.

To get back on-topic I also consult Megagames regularly for all my patches needs and related add-on software.

• Sid Meier's Pirates!
• Sid Meier's Colonization
• Covert Action
• Gunship
• Silent Service
• F-19 Stealth Fighter
• F-15 Strike Eagle
• CPU Bach

Like Theme Hospital? Try Life and Death 2: The Brain They let us play that in high school, and get credit for it!

dreamweb : simply best cyberpunk adventure game ever.

incredible details (you could click on a small pea on the dirty floor of your bedroom and still have a few lines longs description about it), great scenario, spooky atmosphere and an absolutely awesome music.

never played anything like that again...

For me, it was the sheer enormity of the game universe...the fact that you could command a ship (of celebrity look-alikes) around a small three planet galaxy, land anywhere on the planet, and be greeted by distinct terrain and life. Granted, most portions of were probably generated off of an integer-seed algorithm, but being younger back then, I was happily fooled by the illusion. Note, if you never played this game, you may have gotten the same vibe from StarFlight

As far as life-changing, I think this is what motivated me to purse game programming.. the fact that one could be god-like in creating a universe, driven strictly from numbers.
On a side note, this same game has affected me in another way. The theme music (albeit beeps) of Norjaen's saloon is still in my head to this day!

For more info, check out this link

Ah, Return to Zork. The first adventure into the Great Underground Empire of Zork--that used graphics. Sure, the acting was awful, but it did have a lot of Full Motion Video (on the CD-ROM version), and the soundtrack was pretty good (again, only on the CD-ROM version)
And even if you thought the game sucked, you'd always rememeber Booz's famous quote:

"Want some rye? 'Course you do!"

And the drinking game that followed. Admit it, you ended up damn drunk several times before you found out you had to dump it in the plant.

You can download Stunts at:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=2162

The IDSA has done this to quite a number of sites before this. They are more annoying than the RIAA/MPAA, but much less visible.

Mostly, they go around to sites which specialize in old or obscure games, and request them to take down full versions of the games (even when the games have been out of print for many years or when the developer has been out-of-business for many years). The Underdogs comes to mind as one such site - they're definitely not a warez site, but rather, are advocates of independent game publishers and obscure games (as you can guess, the members of the IDSA don't like this one bit, and chose to attack the site by abusing the copywright laws)

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (along with the rest of the series).

Need anything else?

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (along with the rest of the series).

Need anything else?

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (along with the rest of the series).

Need anything else?

Am I not merciful??? :)

Am I not merciful??? :)

I have a bunch of old laptops so I have had the same problem as you. There is Small Linux but that didn't really suit me at the time. You can forget installing any other Linux distro on anything with less than 4Mb of RAM, although I would say Slackware is the best of the bunch when it comes to hardware requirements.

In the end I opted for Freedos for a 386 with 2Mb that my 5 year old son plays with. It's not UNIX, but it's much more UNIX-like than any other DOS I have used. There are also many educational programs and games that are available for free download.

Hope this helps.

• develop the game using free or lower cost tools
  
• publish the game themselves (either via online distribution or burning CDs themselves and mailing them out
  

• develop the game using free or lower cost tools
  
• publish the game themselves (either via online distribution or burning CDs themselves and mailing them out
  

The Scratchware Manifesto

Someone should have pointed out the first dozen times this exact same idea was done in a game. Maybe they would have gotten over it a decade ago.

Hey, EA used to make good games too back in the day. I remember on my Atari 1200 there was this game called "Worms?" that was really great. You can read a short discription of it at http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v9n7/260_Ou tpost_atari.php but lets face it, that was a long time ago. They also produced really great games for the Commodore 64, like "M.U.L.E." and "Seven Cities of Gold" (which was actually decent on the first release, though the updated VGA version for PC totally sucked). In fact, if you check out HotU and show EA titles by year you'll see that their early stuff was actually pretty good. You'll also notice there are only 16 games listed (ie good games) for 1995-2002, compared to 11 listed for 1986 alone. Granted, its a site for old games, but I don't think they've left much out in this case.

Hey, don't be talking smack about Westwood! (SSI just published EoB, Westwood developed it.) SURE it was a Dungeon Master-style game, but DM created a genre, you can't expect people to sit on their laurels and not be inspired by it to create their own. I'm surprised it's as small a genre as it is, there's only a handful games that I would say belong in this specific category. Err.. I guess the category would be: "party first-person real-time grid-based RPG"

Westwood later came out with a game called Lands of Lore (not based on AD&D at all, yay!) that, if you like these kinds of games, is well worth your time to try and find a copy to play. The sequels are decidedly less worth your time to try and find.

-If

The IDSA wants all emulators to be banned. More on this here.

More bullying by IDSA and Cox.

I'm guessing the IDSA is a games-only version of the BSA.

It's at Underdogs, merry Christmas!

The DOS version is still available at the-underdogs. Amazing how a 200KB game could keep one engrossed for hours on end. Heck, the Infocom IF games were a lot smaller than that.

Yeah, Shadow of Yserbius was on TSN. That was way before The Realm, and it was actually cool. Death Darts, baby!

Later they came out with an offline version of it.

-If

Rematch seems to be a better working of the same concept. The game puts you in a deadly scenario, and you only have time for one text command to get you and your friends out of it safely. It's an exercise in trial and error, but it's fun as hell. It's short too, so everyone should take the time to try it at least once.

If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one...

It already exists.
And it's actually called The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. And it's one of my favorite games ever. One order of magnitude above Morrowind in terms of freedom. If you've already covered 75% of Morrowind's map, well, just imagine that after playing Daggerfall for a year I hadn't even been in all the available subregions. To visit every place would take years and years. There are tens of thousands of them.

The plot is great, very complex and political, and very non-linear. There are hundreds of factions, some you can join and some you can't, and all of them will have opinions about you depending on who you serve and who you betray.

Heck, after finishing it, I still kept playing my character again and again because there were things I wanted to investigate after reading about them in books in some of the many libraries you'll find around. Turned out the things in question had indeed been implemented in the game. Wabbajack, Wabbajack, Wabbajack...

Note that most of the game is randomly-generated, so the landscape and day-to-day missions may feel repetitive after a while, but they still somehow manage to feel very engrossing. Possibly because some of them can't be completed. It's a very interesting phase of character development when you're driven to expatriate yourself because you fucked up a mission and started hearing rumors about how much you suck. :)

Also note that the game is possibly one of the buggiest ever made. But its qualities are otherwise so great that you'll keep coming back to it.

...there's a very interesting game out there called AISLE. It's interactive fiction, and, while you only get one move per game, you can do pretty much anything that you want in that one move. While it certainly isn't infinitely playable, there's feedback for many inputs that you'd never expect.

-R

Let Sierra rest in peace.

I guess I should expect to see DEFUNCT under Sierra's status on Home of the Underdogs.

Try to imagine Kings Quest for X-Box...

Hmm, as long as they're stopping, how about adding support for x86? As much as I'd like to see AMD kick Intel's arse with their x86-64, I always worry that they are going to go out of business and then I'll never be able to buy new computers (though with TCPA and Palladium, I might not anyway) because I'll still need backward-compatibility. Imagine not being able to use ANY of your old programs from long-defunct companies -- games, especially. It's already hard enough to get developers to release source for their 10-year-old games.

These lists would be a lot more useful if the editors made some effort to link to the games' official pages and especially to playable demos.

"Downloadable playable demos" applies only to PC platforms such as Windows (vast majority), Mac (very few), and Linux (fewer still). It does not apply to console platforms such as GBA, GCN, PS2, and Hbox. It may apply to the GP32 handheld system from Gamepark because Gamepark encourages homebrewing (and thus redistributable games) on the GP32 system.

I did find the Syberia demo, but I think its being slashdotted.

Cyberia (which may not be Syberia) was published by Interplay several years ago. Check the bargain bin or an online auction venue if you want to play Cyberia (which may not be Syberia).

Could it have been Demon Stalkers?? I was mostly using PC's by the time this game came out, but I vaguely remember it.

Yup, it did, and it wasn't a bad little game, either.

I think I actually got it in a bundle with Privateer/Privateer: Righteous Fire.

Home of the Underdogs has it here: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Strike+ Commander

This site here has a lot of links to old games that aren't published anymore. Not the same as owning the orginal but if your dying to play an old game of Jumpman this is a place you can find it and a lot of other old games.