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But the real find would be the European version, called Another World.

My favorite rare game was written by a now dead transsexual for the Apple ][. And I am not trolling, Cytron Masters rocked and transsexuals wrote a lot of games during the 80s! Weird but true...

What I'd like to see in a space game is exploration like in Nomad, one of the most underrated space sims I've ever played. It was a little game released by GameTek back around when SC2 came out, and it was extremely good. Came on 4 floppies, ran on a 286, and had some quite high quality sampled voice in various spots (no music though). The most stunning feature overall, however, was the 3d - the entire game was realtime rendered, polygonal 3d. The planets were texturemapped spheres which you could orbit, and spacecraft flew around in 3d space. The combat engine was rather pathetic, but was still fun. You could purchase different types of worker 'bots' and send them down to the surfaces of planets to harvest materials. You also could get jobs from various planets to go rescue stranded captiains, help ships in battles, steal information from enemy planets using spybots, and tons of other stuff. It was gigantic. Something in the range of 1000 unique planets, ~16 races, and a gigantic nonlinear plot that I never managed to completely unravel. And best of all, it was fun. I still play it from time to time. One of the producers went on to make games like Subspace & Infantry and is now one of the executive producers for Sony's Everquest games.

Get Wasteland here for your PC. Enjoy.

The Sierra chick came in and was showing me some stuff they were working on - a little rendered (Actual Game Screens!) movie about a game called Outpost. It was supposed to be the end-all of simulation/strategy/resource management games. It looked really cool, and the Sierra chick told me about all the things you were going to be able to do in it.

A couple of years passed, and Outpost finally came out. PC Gamer reamed it a new one, and so did this guy. All the features I heard and looked forward to were gone. In their place, a sterile, unfun, buggy pile.

Outpost 2 came out to much better reviews, and there was talk of Outpost 3, but as all the links to it are dead, I believe that this may go in the 'Unfinished Adventures' catagory.

There are a variety of factors which determine why a game fails to come to market, or why it comes to market in a fashion that makes people shake their heads and go "why did they even bother to make this piece of crap?". But the main reason is the the development cycle and how well the team making the game adheres to it.

A lot of teams suffer from a lack of ability to scope their project appropriately. They try to make "ubergames"; games with every possible feature imaginable or desirable, and the feature lists for these games often have their fanbase drooling for it's release. These teams tend to take the attitude "we will ship when it's done", and in doing so they lose the focus necessary to actually ship the game, because at no point do they stop making changes, because they can always see ways to "improve" the game. At that point, many things can happen that result in a failed game. The publisher may get sick of hearing their requests for more time, look at how much money they've spent on this unfinished game, and either cancel the project because they can never hope to recoup their investment, or force the team to wrap it and ship nearly as is, which means that the game will be buggy, unpolished, and missing a lot of the features that were promised. A good example of this was Sierra's Outpost; a planetary colonization sim that had a HUGE list of innovative features, which shipped buggy and with a README on the disk explaining that 2/3 of the features in the advertising were not in the game.

Alternately, the publisher may continue to have faith, or they may have a lot of money on their own, and they just keep working on the game ad infinitum (Duke Nukem, anyone?)

It's fine to make a game that is ambitious and takes longer than the 18-24 month standard development cycle; but it's critical to success that you set milestones and some form of schedule; but most importantly that you know when you need to stop adding stuff and bring the game to a finish.

-marsh

You can get it here. I shall try it now and then you'll have found 1 other person that has played it.

Speaking of OOTW, you do know they made a real sequel, right? Not Flashback, but an actual game that picks up where the other one left off. It's called "Heart of the Alien", and it was unfortunately only released for the SegaCD.

But now it's it's available for free at The Underdogs. Just download, burn to a CD, and run on an emulator (I recommend Gens.)

Enjoy.

But since they have already been proved, you would be better off 'testing' BlockOut, arguably the best 3D tetris game ever.

i'm not surprised.
it's happened before with some decent results.
though i haven't checked it on wine...

i think we need to encourage this sort of thing, get back to the roots, you know?

i'm not surprised.
it's happened before with some decent results.
though i haven't checked it on wine...

i think we need to encourage this sort of thing, get back to the roots, you know?

The IF-Archive is an excellent source of these games. Their collection is *massive*.

However, if you're into uncommon and under-rated games in general - check out Home of the Underdogs if you haven't already. Not only does it review and describe many excellent games, but it has tons of full downloads of old games too.

One particular IF game that really caught my eye was Ad Verbum. It's premise is mostly to do with words. For example, there's a room who's entire description starts with the letter N. You quickly realise that only words starting with N work in the room (note, the exit to the room is south):


Neat Nursery
Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings nestle noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns.

Nearby: ... nifty nappy.

>take nappy
No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation.

>asdfg
No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now.

>south
No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation.

>exit
No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now.

>north
Northward? No, necessarily not. Not north. No noticeable notch, no navigable nook.


There's all sorts of other language-based puzzles in the game, and it's an excellent test of your vocabulary. Despite being a little short, i highly recommend it.
(Note, it's not part of this competition).

The IF-Archive is an excellent source of these games. Their collection is *massive*.

However, if you're into uncommon and under-rated games in general - check out Home of the Underdogs if you haven't already. Not only does it review and describe many excellent games, but it has tons of full downloads of old games too.

One particular IF game that really caught my eye was Ad Verbum. It's premise is mostly to do with words. For example, there's a room who's entire description starts with the letter N. You quickly realise that only words starting with N work in the room (note, the exit to the room is south):


Neat Nursery
Nice, nondescript nursery, noticeably neat. Normally, nurslings nestle noisily. Now, none. No needful, naive newborns.

Nearby: ... nifty nappy.

>take nappy
No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation.

>asdfg
No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now.

>south
No! No! Negative, novice. Nasty notation.

>exit
No! No! Nefarious nomenclature. Narrate nicely, now.

>north
Northward? No, necessarily not. Not north. No noticeable notch, no navigable nook.


There's all sorts of other language-based puzzles in the game, and it's an excellent test of your vocabulary. Despite being a little short, i highly recommend it.
(Note, it's not part of this competition).

I am too young to really know what Commodore 64 games looked like

Then head on over to an Abandonware site like The Under Dogs and try a few for your self.

On the otherhand, old games are not really about what they look like, cos they pretty much all look dreadful by todays standards, rather, its about what the games PLAY like. And thats why people still enjoy them today.

You can relive the adventure on your PC with this remake called Indenture that includes a whole mess of NEW levels and secrets. All you need is a PC with a DOS box and you're set.

There was a Space Shuttle simulator for DOS that came out back in 1992... As I remember, it replicated the functionality of most switches in the cockpit well. Perhaps it might be possible to combine the two?

As an aside, I remember switching the "jettison external fuel tank" switch on only a few seconds after takeoff... Not recommended if you want to survive!

all in one handy Finder shot: the macintosh garden

Back in the day (early ninties) there were to ASCII game creation systems.

The first, ZZT, was the first game ever created by Epic Megagames, and was created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney. It was FINALLY released as freeware in 1997. A compendium of its games is available at Z2.

The later Megazeux was created by Greg Janson (considered to be the greatest ZZT game creator ever, creating such legends as Code Red) in 1994, and allowed sampled music [MODs], sound effects [SAMs], and customizable colour and character palettes. A SourceForge project to port the system, which was released in 1997 under the GPL license, is available at megazeux.sourceforge.net. (It has been cancelled.)

Both game systems had huge communities during their primes, featuring several hundred "companies" producing games for the systems. A look into the more humourous side, including satirical looks at its more prominent members, is available here.

Hopefully SOMEONE will mod this up so that at least the legacy of ZZT and MZX can be remembered.

My favorite repository of classic abandonware is The Underdogs. Most of their games are classics from the mid- to late 80s and each features a review by the submitter or the site's creator, who has his own idiosyncratic & slightly old-fashioned ideas about how games should be made. Just as important, games can be searched by company or creator. Almost all are available as free downloads.

You went to all that trouble and didn't install Master of Magic?

Enjoy Freenet & Frost while you can.

> For that matter, if you're willing to deviate from
> the "free" thing, many of Infocom's originals
> (remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> computer game?) are also still available.

for that matter, *all* of them are availabe at home of the underdogs. you can run them in os 9, but also -- thanks to fink and frotz (% fink install frotz) -- in os x, in a transparent terminal window, so you can still watch some divX in the background

it's now www.the-underdogs.org, actually.. apparently, their previous domain got stolen by one of those domain name preying search engine things.

these sites have archives (or links to) many (thousands) of old/classic games. even lots of IF (interactive fiction).

i don't know if they're all classics, but they all run under Classic.

http://mac.the-underdogs.org/ has everything you want. I recommend Armor Alley in particular.

There is a lot of abandonware these days, including many older games. I would suggest looking for something at an abandonware site.

The best site I've found in my travels has been Home of the Underdogs. This site has many levels of classification, and attempts to stay legal by asking develoeprs if it is OK for them to put these files up for download - something rare in the 'free-for-all', file-sharing and copyright-infringing attitude of the Internet these days.

I'd give them (or another site like them) a shot.

-Matt

All you need and tons more:

http://www.the-underdogs.org/

Omega is one of my all time favorites - about 14 years ago I found it at a computer show being liquidated for $10. I should have bought more than one copy :-(

All is not lost - you can still get the game from
here:
(http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=783)

And they have the manual also - which is required to really understand the game.

I have always prefered its specialized programming language over games like C-Robots or such.

I'd love it if someone would re-write it - leaving out the foolishness like the random bulletins that
popup...

And dont forget Mindrover...

Here you go although I haven't tried it:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=1923

I remember toiling away for hours on this game with my old Amiga. That example game with the Tigres and the Euphreties was super dope, I forget the name...

My favorite, although probably not up there with Legos or Lincoln Logs, would be the good old "Incredible Machines" series of PC games by Jeff Tunnell. A great mix of wacky puzzle games and classic construction-style building. It's got something in it for everyone, from the tediously easy beginner levels to the mind wobbling insanely complex expert levels, not to mention a built in editor to come up with your own puzzles. Maybe not a true "classic", but sure something to pass the hours away with (I still play it on a weekly basis ;).

...check out The Underdogs. It's a game site dedicated mostly to those games of yesteryear that went largely unnoticed (sometimes for good reason.) They have hundreds (if not thousands) of games available for download (if the game is abandonware), as well as maps, manuals, etc... Some of them are fairly recent (but the archive goes back to the early 80s.)

On topic: if you use the select menu on the left-hand side of the page that says "Search by Theme" you can choose "Design Tool". This takes you to a list of construction set games.

it's still around... and apparently still being worked with... http://zzt.the-underdogs.org/

If you're really old school Apple ][ you'll remember Robot War designed by Silas Warner.

All of which is very cool of them. But not sueing people for writing virtual machines isn't coolness, it's just basic law. Infocom never claimed the exclusive right to implement the Z-machine specification, and probably couldn't have made that claim even if they tried.

Now, what I'd really like is to play is the original Zork. The one that the founders wrote for ITS while students at MIT. No, not "Dungeon," that's an unauthorized port, with an incomplete game and flawed parser.

This is what Open Source should be about. Granted, there will never be a day where all software is free and source code is available. The simple idea of that is balderdash. Most of the software industry would grind to a halt. But I digress.

This is definitely a step in the right direction and should be viewed as a giant step in the right direction for the open source movement. Granted, the code isn't free to use commercially, and only the engine is included in the source; the point is that several free projects have this engine to work off of, and programmers-in-training can examine the code and learn from it.

This should be seen as 'doing a good deed' and 'helping the community'. It's there so everyone can learn from it and boost the overall gaming industry.

It is also a giant leap in the right direction for free software in that companies are acknowledging the free software movement and releasing the sources to the products which no longer are sold or generate a substantial revenue. If the BeOS source were to be released, the community as a whole would benefit greatly. Not to serve as flamebait, but BeOS is superior to almost all othe Operating systems today, and if the source were released, it would have a good chance of becoming #1 if the vollunteer developers put enough effort into it. Other projects benefit from seeing the source, as well. They may choose to intergrate certain elements (the BeOS UI on linux.. *wipes drool off keyboard*), or they may choose to simply examine the technique of how an operating system SHOULD be written. Heck, the thing boots in less then 5 seconds on my slightly dated pc.

This is certainly a nice change from the game publishers requesting that sites such as The Underdogs take down full versions of titles produced by independent developers whose assets were purchased by the publisher after they went bankrupt.... and the games are no longer sold in any stores, and the publisher refuses to sell them or provide a copy if contacted. and many of these games were made over 10 years ago. Sometimes lobbying them to make the games free works, but there is a little-known organization which is the software world's equivilant to the RIAA which urges companies not to release their dated products free with the thinking that other companies may follow and unintentionally destroy the software industry.

Isn't that pathetic.

But why would the publisher want people to learn from their code? They could be worried the person may found his own gaming company, release a product which puts them out of business (highly unlikely :) ). Chances are they won't. Chances are, if they become familiar with the code enough and learn enough about game programming, there is a good chance the person may seek employment from that company. So it does have potential to benefit the company.

Download it from here

The true users of this software will be:

A) Self-appointed vigilantes with nothing better to do.

B) Immature little warez kiddies turning in sites that belong to "opposing" warez groups.

As a side note, how many times do you think The Underdogs will be turned in per day?