May 2006

There were 54 new game pages this month, and I added/updated 253 pages in the Game Gallery.

Updated Roguelike Games.

Now this is embarassing. I noticed that all my RSS feeds since early April had broken links. The reason was that early in April, I updated a page in the computer section. Now usually all the updates are in the Game Gallery, so I'm used to just editing the file name in the RSS feed and leaving the rest of the URL as it is. So all the links since then pointed to the computer section…

I re-activated the Genres page, it was there all the time, but just as a sketch of something I never finished. It is now a list of all the genre pages that I have, and I have given it a navigation entry. I have updated some of the various genre pages, too, most important that for the role playing games; I have removed the list right on this page, and have split the list for the 90s in 1990–96 and since 1997.

I'm currently having trouble with my computer, it tends to simply shut down at the most unconvenient moments. This severely slows down things, so there is nothing new for today, only the most popular games and most popular downloads have been updated as usual.

Ah, yes: Bobbin has updated her web comic.

Added a page for Dragon Wars, so finally all three games that were an inspiration for Newcomer are here.

I played Uncover It in DOSBox, where it played better than anywhere else I tried it before. It just wouldn't accept the built-in mouse driver at first, after I started up Logical and exited it again, it did. I was then able to actually play it for a while, not enough to finish a level (not because of technical problems, but because I still haven't quite a grip of the controls), but enough for a more meaningful screenshot.

It's been more than a year that I've put a Macintosh game up. But now I booted a Mac up once again and found, guess what, lots of games to add, some with screenshots already taken. So for today, Reversi: The Eclipse, a beautiful but weird Othello clone.

Seems that the game I added yesterday, Howitzer, was game #700, and at the same time download #200. So I've met my two goals for this month on one day. I think I'll slow down with new games a bit now, clean things up a bit. There will still be a new screenshot every day on the homepage and on the Game Gallery, mostly games I think deserve more attention than they get.

When I reached 500 games at the end of January, I took a look where they came from. Now, I did it again:

• Germany: 77
• UK: 63
• Japan: 54
• France: 32
• Russia: 32
• The Netherlands: 19
• Canada: 14
• Finland: 12
• Poland: 11
• Austria: 9
• Italy: 9
• Australia: 8
• Belgium: 7
• Sweden: 7
• Czech Republic: 5
• Norway: 5
• Spain: 5
• Other (except US): 34

That's 403 in total, and since there are a couple of games where I don't know where they come from, about 290 will be from the US, a bit more than 40%. Of course this shouldn't be seen as representative for anything. I have, for example, far better access to games from countries where I speak the language (like Germany) or where, as a rule, games are in English (as in most Scandinavian countries).

A small and late update. The new game for today is Howitzer, a cannon game that back in 1993 already supported resolutions up to 1024×768, and I added a table about how much video memory the different screen resolutions require to the SVGA Games page.

Four new games for today, all of them from the first half of the 90s:

• SeXoniX is an erotic Qix clone from Russia.
• Sixx is a German Shisen-Sho variant that maybe was released at the wrong time, anyway it is forgotten and there is hardly any info around.
• Stone Age is an interesting and original puzzle game only flawed by the time limits.
• The Solar Hockey League is the third game by Galifir Developments, that is, Harm Hanemaayer and John Remyn.

There's an update for Gridiron!—I replaced the C64 screenshot with one from the Atari ST. The C64 version was actually two years later and is less relevant, since it watered down the original puristic concept of representing players by dots only.

Ben Hanke sent me a new version of TinyTris. It's now less than 2.4kB. It's also back to its original green tint, after a yellow interlude. I updated the text on the page a bit, and fixed the spelling on the whole site: It's TinyTris, not Tinytris.—There are four new games for today, all of them from around 1990:

• The Way of the Little Dragon is an early Amiga fighting game that gets less attention than it deserves.
• Treasure Trap, originally on the Atari ST, was the game that revived the half-forgotton isometric action-adventure genre for the 90s.
• Targhan is a side-view (not side-scrolling) beat 'em up that holds a certain fascination for me, though I'm not generally interested in this genre.
• Turrican was the last big game on the Commodore 64, and is one of the half-finished pages I have been dragging along for weeks. There is still less text than the game deserves.

No new downloads for today, sorry. But I still have a few Othello and Gomoku games up my sleeve I will add in the next time.

I tend to have more visitors on weekends, so I try to keep my weekend updates bigger, too. For today, there are five new games:

• Astrotit is a whacky Space Invaders clone with surprisingly good CGA graphics.
• Fairy Nights is a hentai adventure, but not really a game, more like a PowerPoint presentation or slideshow. You can even fast forward to the juicy bits!
• Jelly Bean Factory is a not very convincing Canadian shareware Columns.
• Logical is a German puzzle game from 1991, available on most platforms of the day. It has spawned two fan remakes.
• Logo is another German puzzle game of about the same time, unfortunately hampered by severe interface problems.

Vesa Piittinen brought his site to my attention; he offers a map generator, a string editor, and some other downloads for The Settlers II. I grabbed the occasion for a general update of the page; there is now a new, full screenshot, review quotes, some links have been added, including one to the 3D remake BlueByte is working on. Seens that they, too, regard this game the best in the series.

There are two new games for today, SmileTris Panic! and SmileTris 2. Both are Dr. Mario clones by Christian Gruais. The first one is highly configurable, the second instead fully skinnable. I like the second one best. It really has the stuff to replace YATC, which for 13 years was the best Dr. Mario clone for Windows. Let's see if my visitors share this opinion; up to now, YATC has been one of the most often downloaded games on this site.

Another one of those pages quite probably no one's gonna read: Zero Critical, an interesting but unconventional adventure game.

Just one new game today, Spitball, in spite of the strange name a very well done arcade game by some Bored College Students, as they called themselves. The way they handled the 16 colors of high resolution VGA was quite impressive, as is the musical score.

Turbo-Gomoku was originally a programming sample for Borland's Turbo Pascal. I have now found a more complete archive that includes the TP 4.0 sources, and have put up that for download.

I forgot to mention, but I changed the navigation a bit. The by Alphabet entry will now take you to a random letter, usually the one that was modified last.

Yesterday I added two links to the Othello page, both in essence long lists of Othello games. Today, I tried to find some of these games, both sites have not been updated since about 1999 and nearly all download links were broken. I must admit that I was slightly shocked to find that in most cases I couldn't. These games are not very old, most of the 70 DOS and Windows Othellos on the pressibus page are from the 90s, yet the majority of them has vanished without trace. Here are three I could still find:

• Otho is in little danger of being forgotten, since the authors' homepage is still up. It is a high-end DOS SVGA Othello and was developed 1997–2001.
• Morphello is already a bit difficult to find, since more and more FTP archives are going down. It is a Canadian shareware game in for board games uncommon lo-res VGA mode (13h). I even found an older version that does not have GUS support, but does not lock up DOSBox either.
• Reverse 'Em was a final project in an AI class. Pressibus lists it as a Finnish game, but Erich P. Gatejen is from California, the game just used to be on a Finnish server. I found it in an archive for programmers, since it is distributed with source code.

There is a fourth new game for today, Blow Up, not an Othello but a Minesweeper clone, and probably mainly a programming sample. And I put the original version of CyLog Othello up for download, the one that still has the beautiful green background.

There are two new games for today. Both have an ampersand in their names, both are from the US, and both somehow stick out of a group they belong to.

When you look at the list of games with ASCII graphics, you find that most belong to a specific set of types and genres. There are the roguelike games; there are conversions of simple board games like Othello or Gomoku; and there are a number of maze-based adventure/puzzle games. Castles & Kings, being a fairly complex, turn-based strategy game, really sticks out among this crowd.

Nearly all Othello clones have, in one way or other, preserved the appearance of a board game, most even the green board and black & white stones. A few have been completely abstract, because the programmer didn't want to mess around with graphics or because the platform had low graphics capabilities. Charles A. Hardy instead gives Apples & Oranges a humoristic graphic theme that does not emulate anything.

There are three new games for today. They have nothing in common, except that they are all from Europe:

• Hannibal is a German strategy game from 1992. It caught my interest because it runs in high resolution mode, both the original PC version and, even more uncommon, the Amiga port.
• Hi-Q is a Dutch peg solitaire, also from 1992. As one of the first PC games at all it supported SVGA.
• Sexy Breakout is an Italian C64 game from 1986 that is sufficiently explained by its name.

Shadowrun for the SNES was, I found out, created by Australian developers, I had incorrectly listed it as a US game. And I put Uncover It up for download.

I have been dragging along a few unfinished pages for a month or so, some even longer. Time to finish them, for better or worse. One of them is Boulder Dash, which, I think, needs no further introduction.

Yet another Minesweeper clone today: Mynes, a German game with interesting graphics that unfortunately has a severe flaw.

There are three new games for today, all of them somehow related to Minesweeper, all of them for DOS and with rather simple or no graphics, all of them from the US:

• DOSMine is a very simple Minesweeper clone using ASCII graphics, created, according to a later statement of the author, just as an exercise in object design and inter-object coordination.
• Minefind is more refined, it surrounds the ASCII playfield with a graphic border, has mouse support, configuration options, and additional features like armor: game is not over as soon as you step on a mine.
• Landmine predates Minesweeper by a year, it is a graphic remake of Conway, Hong, and Smith's RLogic (Relentless Logic), a game dating back to 1985 and nowadays practically forgotten.

I stumbled across this game yesterday, and I can't even remember how. Anyway it's fun, it's free, and hard to describe in one sentence: Lord Monarch Online.

There is a sudden surge of interest in Spaceship Warlock, it has jumped up to position 20 on the Most Popular Games overnight. I'm not sure what caused this, as far as I could find out, there is no re-release or sequel.

There is only one new game today, and there's a good reason for this, for if I have counted correctly (something I can never be positive about), it is game #666. This, of course, has to be celebrated. It would have been nice to add something like Diabolika as this conspicuous number, but I didn't have anything in kind handy. So I ended up a game that is not diabolical in the least, but not just any old game either.

Chetris is a rather strange mixture of Chinese Chess (so I am told) and Tetris, or rather Columns, or maybe Puyo Puyo. It is nearly unknown, stemming from Taiwan and never having been translated. Only the Russian sites, as usual, know about it. And having been released in 1994, it is a relatively early SVGA game, which at the time were usually map-based strategies.

Today's update is rather similar to yesterday's: four Tetris clones, one of them a Columns, all of them for DOS:

• Ultris: The Ultimate Tetris is, like most of these ultimate Tetris, not all that remarkable. But keep in mind that the author was 14 years old when he wrote it!
• Sextris is basically a lamer, tamer version of the ever-popular Porntris.
• Hangtetris is a somewhat crude, relatively early Tetris clone from Belgium.
• Chain Reaction is simply a remake of Xixit, nothing more, nothing less.

And again there are two new downloads: Valgus² and Zentris, which is not available from the author's page any more.

Four new games for today, all of them Tetris clones of one kind or the other, all of them from 1997 or 1998, all of them from Europe, and all of them DOS games, all but one even running in classic VGA mode 13h that was already becoming quaint. Here you go:

• Hextris, not to be confused with the classic game of the same name, is a rather weird Tetris clone from Sweden with simple yet elegant graphics.
• Tetripz is a drug-themed Tetris from the Belgian demo scene, but with classic gameplay.
• Three is a Columns from Italy with several graphic themes.
• Detris Gold is a German Tetris clone with elaborate yet somewhat dull graphics.

Furthermore, I have added downloads for the classic Hextris and Drak (this page got a general facelift). There are now more than 170 games up for download, that is more than 25% of all the games.

I had planned a bigger update for today, but then I had too many other things to do. Still, there are two new games, one of them quite rare:

• GJID is a Soko-Ban clone with not only original puzzles, but slightly altered gameplay too. There is a later Linux port (or clone) that is still easy to get, but the DOS original, as far as I could find out, has not been available for a while, and the only place you can find it is here.
• Velena is a scholarly yet beautiful Connect 4. It is not rare in any way (it is still available from the author's homepage) but it sure looks good.

Well, so much for today. Keep checking back. There'll be lots more games for download, many of them you won't easily find elsewhere.

Ah, good old Usenet. Someone posted two largish archives of freeware and shareware board games (one DOS, one Windows) to one of my favorite newsgroups. Many of these have become rare, since most of the old FTP archives are meanwhile down. Now, here are the first six, all of them DOS games:

• Go Moku by Blazej Stompel, 1996. I'm pretty sure that this is currently the only place where you can get it.
• Mine Field by Charles A. Hardy, 1991. Quite a decent Minesweeper clone in hi-res VGA. Doesn't seem to be around much either.
• Morph by Ian York is an Othello clone with a non-standard (10×10) playing field.
• Pryma by Ian York is an Ataxx clone. For this one I even found another download link. Ian York's games have unconventional and intriguing graphics.
• Quinta is a graphic Pente by Lester Penner, who is better known for his Jewish calender software.
• Taktix is an ASCII Ataxx by Alan Meiss, who also wrote Shogatsu.

So after two British, three Dutch and two Finnish games, half a dozen from the United States. Tomorrow we'll go international again. There are still lots of goodies in those two archives.

So much for the new games. There are a few other updates as well. You can now download Alphaman directly from this site. And on the Samantha Fox Strip Poker page, I added a short bio of Sam herself.

It's funny how these things go. Two days ago I added a page for Age of Wonders, mentioning it was the first commercial Dutch game I came across. Well, today I'm adding two more:

• Clockwiser is an interesting puzzle game by Team Hoi, a group of young Amiga enthusiasts who went from creating demos to writing commercial games in the early 90s, but usually got screwed over by their publishers.
• Hawkeye is a side-scrolling shooter with some puzzle elements for the Commodore 64. Such games were common on that platform, but Hawkeye is usually considered one of the best.

I noticed that I now have more Dutch games than from any other smaller European country, including, for example, Finland. But still I couldn't point and say, hey, that's a typical Dutch game.—Talking of Finland, there are two new Finnish games too:

• Coloris is an early Columns clone, and has become the standard Columns on the Amiga. Amiga people don't talk about Columns clones, they talk about Coloris clones.
• Cameleon98, so I first thought, is the first Filler clone from outside the former USSR. But that's not true, for Jari Komppa was not even aware of the existence of Filler or 7 Colors, he quasi re-invented the game.

That's it for today. There are a few minor updates on some other pages, but nothing really worth mentioning.

Occasionally I add pages about games I really don't know anything about, because I came across them and something about them fascinated me. Such a game is Age of Wonders. My main point of interest was that it is the first commercial Dutch game I came across, but besides that, just look at the screenshot, isn't it fascinating?

Probably due to playing Beach Life, my interest in UK games was renewed, and I looked into the history of Team17 a bit. I have added two games, both of them fighter games: The fairly well-known Body Blows, and the far less known Full Contact, their first game.