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This has been a productive month. I find I have added or updated
235 pages, 221 of them in the games section, that is about every other
page there. There are 35 new game pages, about as many new navigational
pages, and three for game designers.
I almost wasn't able to upload yesterday's update, I had reached my disk quota once again and had to to delete the VGA file for Zork Zero. I'll put it up again later somewhere else. Meanwhile I've made some more room by putting the Terranigma Screenshots on a different server.
I'd have liked to finish the month with some fanfare, but there just isn't anything special I completed today. There are two new game pages, Color Lines and Pipe Dream. There is no screenshot for Color Lines yet, since it wouldn't run on my main PC and Neograb screws up the EGA palette. I have introduced a new feature on these pages: a country icon in the top right of the about box, linked to the relevant page of course. I'll be slowly adding it to all the pages that have about boxes.
I tidied up the table of Macintosh Games a bit, and there are some related updates for the following games:
I changed the Macintosh stylesheet a bit, I think the Verdana is better to read than Arial. The list of games I played on the Performa 630 is now in chronological instead of alphabetical order, and the similar list for the IBM PS/2 50 has become a bit longer.
Well, that's it for today. There will probably be no update tomorrow, and if, it will be purely technical. I am departing from my previous principle of having 8:3 filenames only, and might rename some of the pages.
Two new games, Kalakh and Trubis. Update for Alternate Reality: The City. More tomorrow.
Will I ever see the end of that Tetris clone stuff? I don't know. Today I added Valgus², where tetrominoes come from
all sides and float towards the center, besides, it's the first game
in this category that was ported from a different platform to the
PC.
I've been working on the navigation again, and redid the RPGs, Arcade Games, and UK Games. Like in the alphabetic list, most platforms are now listed, games without pages are removed, and the year given is always the year of the first version.
There are a couple more added games:
Smaller updates for Sword of the Samurai, where I added review quotes and similar games, and Fallout 3, where there's a new interview with Leonard Boyarsky.
After last night's marathon, I wasn't really prepared to repeat the
experience immediately (even more so since not a single one of the
new pages has been accessed yet, and today's update is considerably
smaller. I've just added a page for Vlak, a game that has been in the lists for ages,
but didn't have a page yet.
Then I experimented a bit with font settings for ASCII games running in a window and took better screenshots for Pentix, Small Tetris, and Tetrafix.
And then there's a small update for Times of Lore, which was released on more platforms than I knew. I've experimented with a new way to display platforms in the about box, don't know if I'll keep it.
Staying up all night—it seems to become a habit. But working on the Tetris clones I noticed that the Alphabetical Gamelist just wouldn't do any more. Divided into only two files, it had become far too huge, the information was often inaccurate and outdated, and that at a certain point I had been undecided whether it should be a list of games on this website or games I had played didn't help either.
There is now a seperate page for each letter. Entries for which there was no page have been removed (I may have overlooked some). I try to give at least the most important platforms for every game. The year is always the year the first version came out, not the PC version. I removed the video modes completely, they make little sense in a cross-platform list.
I hope this improves navigation a little. The only other update is a link added to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, a FAQ for running it on Linux.
I'm still working on the Tetris
Clones. I've added a screenshot for Pentix and pages for the following games, which added the first
game from the Netherlands:
The last one has been in the lists for quite a while. I noticed that Tetris clones are the most international of categories that I have (though mainly centered in Europe), and I brought the Country List up to date. All the flag icons of countries for which there is no seperate list are now linked to it.
There are two things that I hate. One thing is uploading
something that isn't really finished. The other is letting a day
pass by without an update. Sometimes (said the farmer in the voting
booth) you have to choose the lesser of two evils. In this case,
I decided it was the first.
I'm in the process of reorganizing the Tetris Clones, they are all going to get their own pages, with screenshots. So far I have done this for the following games:
Everything is still a bit incomplete, and most of these games don't have entries in the general lists yet. I hope to fix it all by tomorrow. But the pages are up and working, among them the first Korean and the first Norwegian game on this site!
I came across a site that has newly-made games for the NES, to be played on Emulators mostly, I guess. And there I read that Nesticle is rather inaccurate and should be handled with caution. I do remember that there were some difficulties when I tried to play Soko-Ban, and replaying it on LoopyNES I found that it was indeed an emulation problem.
Last there is, once again, a new link for Morrowind. Not a mod this time, but a review--sort of. Whatever it is, it's rather funny, and you'll find it at the bottom of the page.
I found an exactly six months old unfinished page for Black Viper on my harddrive. This is a rather
mediocre motorcycle shooter I got interested in because it claims to
be post-apocalyptic, and stayed interested
in because it's an example of late Amiga game development.
I bought an IBM Convertible 5140 on eBay yesterday. While it isn't part of the PS/2 series, it came out nearly exactly one year earlier, it can be considered a fore-runner, thus warranting an entry in the PS/2 Diary. I decided not to make a page about it until the package actually arrives.
The rest is maintenance. Whale's Voyage II isn't SVGA, as I had a blurb let me mislead into believing. I added better navigation to all the Ultima games, and added those that have been ported to the Amiga to the ECS list, but some of the pages are rather outdated, and I still haven't got one for V. I will at least be adding links to Khad-Keren reviews to the later games, but I haven't done so yet; I spent most of the time set aside for working on this site reading them instead. Finally I realized how few original EGA Games there are when I added icons of the original platforms. Arkanoid for example (besides being a coin-op) was on the Atari first.
There are three new pages today…
…and four pages have been updated or significantly edited.
Bombastyr Wittinghouse and his staff proudly announce the
opening of The Daggerfall Museum on the premsises of the Embassy. The
Museum is dedicated to researching and displaying the ancient,
pre-release, history of Daggerfall. Read about left-out features,
admire unused graphics, and contemplate what Daggerfall might have
been.
Part of the info has already been on display in the Embassy, under the title "dropped stuff". But where applicable, it is illustrated with the interface graphics or textures now, and there are a couple of beta screenshots that are completely new.
I fixed a few blunders once again, finally uploading the VGA page and re-uploading the illustration for the EGA page, which had been lost when moving the Wasteland Solution. There is a new Morrowind mod, a fix for the calendar, which was originally short one month, and there are some updates about The Story of Llylgamyn on the Wizardry on Consoles page. I'll still have to work on that a bit.
Added a page about Radical
Dreamers, a relatively unknown sequel to Chronotrigger that is not an RPG, but an interactive novel.
It was never officially released outside Japan, but has been
translated as a labor of love.
I gave Myst a bigger update, with a screenshot and quotes from the various reviews, and I linked it to Zork Nemesis as a similar game. The latter got a similar treatment, including a longer description. Not that anyone ever looks at either page anyway.
There is a single new link each for Isometric Games and General Game Links. There are a few small updates (including two screenshots) for the Zork series. And I browsed the older changelogs a bit (and fixed some links). It's quite funny. 18 months ago I reinstalled the counter and noticed that this site was actually read…two months earlier I had 36 game pages. There are more than two hundred now.
Seems I'm not done with correcting errors. For some reason, I had always assumed that SimCity ran on the monochrome monitor on the Atari ST. It didn't. From all the info I could get, it was color only. I have now exact release dates for the Amiga and Atari versions, and added a few more like Sinclair ZX or Amstrad CPC. I guess there wasn't a platform that SimCity wasn't ported to.
I found that not only there were Atari versions of all the three Ishar games, but these were among the few that supported the enhanced Falcon video modes.
I added a paragraph about the Apple IIGS to the Apple ][ page, with a table of all the games on this site that had an Apple IIGS version. There aren't many.
I added a walkthrough for Geisha, which I illustrated with screenshots I found on Mobygames. It's not a very good walkthrough, but it's the only one that was ever written, so I guess it will have to do.
The Wasteland Solution has been moved to another server (this will free up a lot of space, those maps are big), and there are some minor updates for Wizardry and The Bard's Tale.
Contrary to what I had previously stated, there is an
Amiga version of Hanse. When I edited
this page, I found some notes I had taken about an obscure game called
The Fourth Protocol. I'm not sure how
these notes got there, but anywhere there's now a page about the
game, which was the first icon-driven adventure (or, as some prefer
it, investigation) game ever.
I added a table with the different versions of The Bard's Tale, added a paragraph about a Commodore 64 version of Cover Girls Strip Poker which had previously escaped my attention, added a link to SimCity, and fixed an error on the OCS/ECS page, where two Atari icons were linked to the Atari 800 instead of the Atari ST.
Dungeons & Dragons is 30 years old! Guess that would be a good occasion to finally revamp the page, but I didn't, I just added a link to a retrospect.
Yesterday it was French Games (a little update here: I had omitted the fact that the Ishar series was available for the Atari ST, too), today it is German Games. I noticed that a good many links here still point to outside pages, so for starters, I made a page for Pizza Tycoon and its sequels. And I added a new game in this category, Ballerburg.
Then there are a few smaller updates. First, what I always hate most, I noticed an error: The Atari ST version of Ultima II, while it was fully integrated in GEM, did not run in hi-res mode.
I added a screenshot for Ricochet and I found a site with lots of screenshots and added links to Lemmings and Rick Dangerous.
Well, originally I thought I'd be busy today updating the
description for the Build Engine and the
related games. But then I suddenly felt this strong urge: There aren't
enough French Games on this website! So
I made rather short work of the Build Engine and added pages for 20000 Leagues Under the Sea and Geisha instead. And then I added a page about
Muriel Tramis with a list of all her
games, as far as I could find them.
Added a new Screenshot Gallery, one for Sexy Droids (click on the image to see it). It's on the other server of course, so space won't be a problem. And I took the list of Fallout Mods out of the Fallout page and put it on my new Fallout website.
And then there are, as usual, a few pages with small updates or routine maintenance:
There are pages for two more Build
Engine games: Shadow Warrior and
William Shatner's TekWar, the later
being more of a curiosity, since, along with Witchaven, it was the first commercial game
using the Build Engine (not Duke Nukem 3D,
as I had erroneously claimed). It's strange that this engine, which I
consider an excellent engine even though it wasn't truly 3D, was used
in so many sub-par games.
I have linked to one more Shadowrun review, which is interesting because it is found on a site dedicated to the PnP game and therefore seen from this perspective. The reviewer attested the SNES game more atmosphere than the SEGA game, even though the latter stays closer to the rules.
Small updates or routine maintenance on the following pages:
Who would have thought that there are actually people who have
never heard of Pac-Man? Well, for
those there is now a better description, a screenshot of the original
coin-op, and a table about the monsters, their names and movements.
PC-Man by the ingenious Greg Kuperberg
has a seperate page now.
I guess I've been hanging out on the Elder Scrolls boards too much. I noticed I used UBB code instead of HTML on the Arena page—it's fixed now. I also removed a stale link and put the links above the reviews. There is a new mod link for Morrowind again—one of the benefits of hanging out on the Elder Scrolls boards.
There is now more info about Return to Danger and The Ultimate Challenge, the two add-on missions for Spear of Destiny. Some small updates for Wolfenstein 3D (SNES) and the SNES itself. I moved the DOOM Pre-Alpha Slideshow and the HEXEN Pre-Release Screenshots to another server to make more room here and updated Hexen in the course.
There's a small update on the Wizardry page, since this series gave me a good opportunity to lash out against those self-appointed crusaders for "true" RPGs, something I'm quite fond of doing lately. But there is also one more link to a Planescape: Torment review, a praising one, so that there is now an equal numpber of positive and negative reviews for this game.
Updated IF Development Tools, a page that had been slumbering for nearly sixteen months. I did not have to remove a single link, but then again not a single site I link to had been updated either. I added Inform and ADRIFT, and while I did not remove the links to the obviously dead projects (you never know…), I moved them to the bottom. Talking of IF, I added the Amiga versions to the Zork table and updated Zork Zero a bit.
Added a Van Buren section to my new Fallout site. Structured the links to the Fallout 3-related interviews and forums a bit.
Added screenshots and about boxes for Dungeon Keeper and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Added a page about Peter Molyneux. Added a mod link for Morrowind.
Updates today circle mainly around The Elder Scrolls: Yet another upcoming game, Shadowkey for the N-Gage. List of the main differences between Arena and Daggerfall. A new link for Morrowind.
Then there's a new interview about Fallout 3, and I did routine maintenance for Dungeons & Dragons, a page that's pretty old (previous update in November) and could really need a makeover. Oh well.
I bought a fully working Amiga 1000 today for only EUR 9.90, along with monitor keyboard, mouse, joystick, and about two dozen disks. And it seems that most of the disks are in working condition too. So by now I have played my first games on an Amiga: two Othello versions I found on one of the disks.
Nothing else is new today, except that I corrected a few typos and errors on the Gridiron! page I uploaded yesterday.
Up to now, there was not a single sports game on this site. Since
I detest sports in real life, I had no inclination to be bothered
with their virtual representations. But then I came across this game
called Gridiron! on the Elder Scrolls
forum. It was Bethesda's first game, and it was revolutionary because
it concentrated on physics instead of graphics and atmosphere, both
interesting aspects for me, and so I added a page about it.
Hanging around the The Elder Scrolls forums (I do that a lot lately) I noticed there are two Elder Scrolls games for cellphones, Stormhold and Dawnstar. The screenshots look a lot like the old Wizardry games. On platforms like these, classic gaming is coming back.
Redid the Isometric Games page, splitting up the table and adding platforms and video modes for the games before 1995. Mentioned that there was a PSX version of Transport Tycoon.
I've been working on the Arena Manual again, and added a paragraph about the rather rigid character class system on the Arena page.
Added a page for The Immortal, fixed some errors for Ishar and finally added the series to the Amiga page.
Nothing big today. Added a render of TNO and fixed a link on Planescape: Torment, added a link to Bookmarks and removed a couple of others. Noticed that Earl's TV and Appliance Repair Web Site Extravaganza Supreme Deluxe is gone (a real shame), so I had to remove it from the DVD page too.
While looking for reviews of Bubble Bath Babes I came across a scurillous but fun game
that inexplicably was torn apart by all the reviewers:
Wall Street Kid. I've written it a
longer review than I usually do.
Usually when I updated the Abandonware page lately, it was because some site or other had vanished from the web. Today, it's because a site has returned: XTC Abandonware. Unfortunately, you need JavaScript now for anything to work.
I had known that Arena was originally supposed to be gladiator game, but not that there was a period when it was supposed to be party-based. So I added a short paragraph about this fact, a link to some related screenshots, and a few more details about its features. I noticed that Marc Stinson, author of the Beginner's Guide to Daggerfall, has written a similar guide to Morrowind. I think it's already two years old, but I didn't come across it before.
And then there are again a couple of pages that have undergone routine maintenance or small updates:
Bunny Abandonware is obviously gone for good. The typical phenomenon of a site moving to a new address and never arriving there. I've removed the link from the Abandonware page.
That's the only news item for today (if you want to call it that), otherwise I've just given routine maintenance to a couple of pages listed here for record purposes only:
The first few days of a month are always interesting, for then
I can tell best which pages are currently popular and which not.
Just like exactly a month ago, here are the current top five pages
for single games:
Morrowind, surprisingly, has become the page with the single most hits in this category. Since I've hardly played Morrowind, this is a bit embarassing, for it can only be a hopefully helpful linklist. I added a link to a mod yesterday, a link to a review today, and I finally uploaded that face by B. E. Griffith that should have been there for I don't know how long.
Fallout and Fallout 2 can nevertheless still be seen as the number one, for combined they get a lot more visits. There is an interesting piece of news today: Work on Fallout Yurop has resumed. And I added a list of similar games to the Fallout 2 page.
Knights of Xentar may seem to have dropped, since it was second place a month ago, but actually it has gained visitors. These first four pages are all quite close and might soon change places. I rearranged the page a bit and added quotes from the reviews.
Doom, of all things, has become the fifth now, another game I hardly played, and one about which there are lots and lots of other websites. I added a link to DOOM 2D in the humor section.
Apart from this, there is only a link to an unremarkable FPS on the Post-Apocalyptic Games page, and, in lieu of a screenshot, a render of the Mistress from Dungeon Keeper 2 (which, by the way, comes close after Doom in popularity).
Since I run this page I have seen the demise of some games,
and occasionally I have announced a new one. But this is the first
time that I can announce the comeback of a game that had more or
less vanished from sight. Yesterday I got a mail from the
developer of Poker Party, Mahlon
Brice, saying he had decided to resurrect his game. You can buy it
from his website for a moderate price. It has been tweaked a little
to ensure smooth running on fast Macs.
CorrodedCoder, known to the Daggerfall community as the creator of DagVid, has written a vidfile extractor for Might and Magic 6, 7, and VIII, a fine occasion to finally add a page for this series, something that was overdue anyway. Of course you can download the program from there. Due to this new page Marble Madness has a new URL now.
Added a page for Rick Dangerous, for no particular reason, I never played either game, it was just mentioned at a board I frequent and I felt like it.
I made that rather mind-boggling Wolfenstein 3D stylesheet voluntary again. Finally there are some small updates on the following pages:
It seems that Boudewijn Waijers' Roguelike Games Home Page
that had been restored as a mirror is gone once again. I have
removed the links from the Roguelike
Games and Ragnarok pages.
I noticed that the Dungeon Keeper 2 page has risen considerably in popularity, so I've given it a makeover mostly cosmetic in nature, since there were no broken links and I didn't have a screenshot handy.
Talking of screenshots, there are now two for Daggerfall. There is a new post-apocalyptic mod for Half-Life 2 in the making. And that's it for today.
Ben Hanke has removed the download for Tinytris from his homepage, so I now link to the Tinytris page on dosgamesonline instead.
Added another Fallout 2 review, or rather a comparison between Fallout 2 and Diablo II, approximately from the time the latter came out.
I found something I had been looking for for a very long time, the Diablo pre-release demo. I found it on a Polish site which I have added to the Diablo Fan Pages. It is a single executeble of about 55 MB from August 1996, and lets you play only a warrior on only one dungeon level with the Butcher's lair. It is quite difficult, since you start with no gold and no healing potions, there is no healer in town, and you can't identify items until you get a Book of Identify. Unfortunately it has no save screenshot functions and taking screenshots the Windows way doesn't work either.
Last not least there are a few smaller updates on the following pages:
Just a small update to start the month. I found I had more pages about Console-Style RPGs than I had thought, and a few updates for Knights of Xentar. Screenshots for Chronotrigger and Zork Zero.
