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May 2007
Well I did it. One of the two new games for today is #1000. Which one? Your choice. These are the contenders: Spych, a Robbo clone for DOS, and Drilling Billy, a Lode Runner clone and the currently only DOS game in my collection that runs at 800×600 only.
Now that this goal is reached, I'll probably go slower with updates, or at least adding games, for a while. There are lots of other things that need to be done, which I had been postponing till I reached the 1000 game mark. There will probably be weekly, not daily updates, in June.
Just for the record, as usual: There were 15 new game pages in this month.
Two new games again for today: Damage, a strange action game for the Amiga, and Mindgame, a Mastermind that is remarkable because it is one of the few DOS games that supported resolutions higher than 640×480.
Two new games for today: TT95, a Tetris originally for the HP95LX, but it runs under standard VGA as well, and Chip's Advance, a faithful remake of Chip's Challenge for the Game Boy Advance, for which I have now added a seperate page as well. It is really an interesting platform, and I'm gonna write more about it.
Um, sorry, forgot to actually upload Tetris Tactics yesterday. That's fixed now.
After more than a week there's a new game again: Tetris Tactics, another one of these Fallout-themed mini-games, by the makers of XO Tactics.
I learned through a forum posting by Todd Howard that Istvan Pely, the maker of Zero Critical, is on the Fallout 3 design team. I guess that's good news, I always thought there was something Falloutish about that game.
Sorry, nothing new the last three days, and not much new today either. I've been reading the Van Buren design docs, which were posted on No Mutants Allowed in fall 2005, but which I discovered only recently. It's interesting, but also rather confusing. At the time development was cancelled, Van Buren was still very much a work in progress, and the docs are sometimes contradictory. Besides, some places were rather complex—very complex.
On to something completely different. Gona from Hungary sent me an email about the Macintosh CD-ROM driver problem with Afterlife: The new driver with the reset number was introduced only with OS 8.5, under 8.1 the game will run without any problem.
I expanded the existing page for the Altor engine with info about the game it was created for, Nightfall. All the pages of four 3D engine pages are now fairly up-to-date.
After the five game makers yesterday, today I updated the pages of four 3D engines. Some will still need some further work, but at least they've all got screenshots now, and the links are working:
Besides that, there is only a small update for Wasteland. Most of the file formats used in this game have been decyphered, and I added a link to the wiki dedicated to this task.
Ah well, sometimes things run better than expected. I updated not just one, but five pages in the Write Your Own Games! section:
Another thing I've started updating regularily again is the Fallout site. Now the text files have been extracted from the Van Buren demo, we know a lot more about some of the locations, the people you would have met there and the quests you would have got. I've started to write up these locations, one a day, yesterday's was Jericho, today's is Mesa Verde. Besides, I added what Jess Heinig said about Tycho and some illustrative screenshots to the curiosities page.
Adding DarkForge Columns yesterday I noticed what sorry state the whole Write Your Own Games! section really is in. Most of the pages were last updated in July 2004. That really has to change. I'll try to do one page each day. For today, it's DCGames. Simce the official website is meanwhile gone, you can now download one of the later versions right here. Not the latest, unfortunately, I couldn't find a 100% intact archive of that.
Another new game for you to download today: DarkForge Columns, a faithful remake of Sega Columns, written in DarkBASIC. Source code is included in the archive.
On to something completely different. I still have more than a dozen unfinished pages lying around. One of them I finished and uploaded today: A Tribute to Tetris, the winning entry to the Tetris category of the X2 Support Group 1995 Programming Contest.
Well, here they are: pages for Battle Chess and the Enhanced CD-ROM version of same. Somewhat cryptically, I have named Fallout as a similar game for both. I didn't find good words to explain this yet, but hope to add it soon.
There is a big update for Morrowind (added several new mods, and two screenshots showing what the ATI Truform support of the Morrowind FPS Optimizer does) and a small one for Oblivion (link to Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, and a new screenshot). I'm working on pages for Battle Chess, but they are not finished yet, it's getting late, and I want to upload.
Another Fallout-themed mini game for today, but one of an unusually high quality: Tactical Lines, a Color Lines variation by the Digital Geckos. There are also a few small updates for Fallout.
Only two small updates today: First, a new, full-sized screenshot for Fallout 2, showing a magnificent but entirely useless map, the entrance to the Enclave. There's really nothing to do here but enjoy the view and go in, you won't be able to come back here ever again.
Second, new icons for the first two Fallout games. While the winking vault boy was always the icon enclosed in the executable, Fallout Tactics was the first game that used it for the shortcuts. The previous games had a rad symbol, so I thought it more appropriate to put this into the about box.
So I won't be playing Fallout Tactics a lot, I guess. But I might start playing Fallout again, the original. I looked around a bit and found that the fan community has not been inactive in the past years. There are some interesting mods and inofficial patches around, not the usual cheat mods or over-ambitious projects that never get finished, instead patches that try to make things work as the designers intended them to, or put back some of the missing persons that were fully scripted but then removed.
And I realized what a mess the Fallout page currently really is. There's some cleaning to do. I put a sort of disclaimer on the page that states as much, added a list of all the Fallout-related pages I have, a few more links to reviews and a full-sized screenshot instead of that little one. It's still the vats, I think that's the most gorgeous view you get in the game.
Funny, I had never actually tried to play Fallout Tactics. I did so now. I can't say I was disappointed. I didn't expect anything, and that's exactly what I got. I didn't write a new description yet, just put up a new screenshot, added a few tidbits like the multiple icons that hide away in the executable (one of the things I liked), and a new link. There's one on the Fallout page too.
Maybe I was wrong about people coming to the Fallout 3 page looking to download the Van Buren tech demo. It wasn't downloaded all that often in the two days it has been up. Maybe they were looking for a demo of the upcoming Bethesda game. In this case, you'll have to be patient. Bethesda has announced a teaser trailer for early June, there is no talk of a demo yet (if they'll make one at all).
Back to Tactics: Is it telling that I couldn't find a single fan page for the game? What I did find were a couple of fan games, small, unrelated, but Fallout-themed games, some of them explicitely referring to Tactics. I added one of them today, XO Tactics, a Gomoku, and will add some more as far as they are fun as games too, regardless of the Fallout references.
Downloading the Van Buren tech demo wasn't quite the chore downloading Ground Control was; I did that recently, and it took me about a week. Downloading the demo took me only half a day, still it was annoying, since the server is not only slow, but does not support resuming either.
Never mind: I've got it, it's up, and you can download it here with less hassle. I created a seperate Van Buren page, you will find it there. The old Fallout 3 page will be about the Bethesda sequel, and the, um, controversy surrounding it, exclusively. Right now it's still what I wrote back then, in the wrath of the moment.
The Fallout 3 page got a lot of hits in the last days from people looking to download the Van Buren tech demo. Check back tomorrow; I'm currently downloading it myself (it will still take a couple of hours), I'll have it up by then, along with a thorough update of this page. For now, the article is mostly as I wrote it in July 2004, and some of the external links are broken.
The mystery of the missing HAL.DLL is solved. Yes, I installed Linux again, and had the same problem. Actually, there was nothing wrong with the HAL.DLL; it was a matter of partitions.
Before I installed Linux, I had two partitions on the drive, with XP installed in the secondary partition. A good part of the drive was simply empty, that space was reserved for Linux.
Now when I installed Linux, it created the necessary partitions in that free space, and thus a second primary partitions. You may remember from the DOS/9x era that adding a hard drive tended to change the drive letters of the existing partitions, if some of them ahred a disk, since DOS first assigns letters to all the primary partitions, and only then to the secondary partitions.
XP handles these things differently, but not the PC BIOS. So when that Linux partition was created, it changed the internal order of the existing partitions. XP tried to boot from the wrong one, didn't find the HAL.DLL, and threw that somewhat misleading error. All I had to do was change partition(2) in the boot.ini to partition(3), and everything was as it should be.
Nothing else is new for today. I bought a collection of three strategy games, including Railroad Tycoon II and Tropico. The latter is a very interesting and rather complex game, I hope to have a page about it up soon.
Well, I didn't expect that. Yesterday, Same Game for Windows was the second most downloaded game, directly after XTET, even surpassing Pipe Dream, which had held the top position from July 2006 till some time late last month.
Otherwise there's nothing new today, just an icon for Adventures of Lolo remake.
For the start of this month, a large structural update that is mostly behind the scenes. A few pages however got visible changes:
