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2009-04-03

HotU Redux

It was not long after I announced the final death of Home of the Underdogs in my last post That it turned out that things weren't quite as it seemed. What remains is that Sarinee Achavanuntakul has no intention to continue the site herself, after all, she hadn't updated it for more than three years. But the content is not lost, has been made available, and so far there are two revival projects:

• Hotud.org is the older one, launched on 2009-03-08. It uses the Joomla! CMS, registered users can comment on the games and even add games to the database. It seems that the site is more or less complete as far as the reviews and screenshots go, but only part of the games can be downloaded.
• HomeOfTheUnderdogs.net went online (or at least posted its first update notice) 24-03-2009. It does not use a CMS and completely retains the design of the old site. This site, too, seems to be complete, but so far has no downloads at all, or at least I didn't find any.

Neither site has been officially endorsed by Sarinee, and neither can claim to be the true successor. HomeOfTheUnderdogs.net of course offers the more authentic experience. It is a real enjoyment to be able to surf it without having to wait ages for the pages to load. This is also the site I have redirected all my HotU links to (still more than 150), mainly since hotud.org does not retain the original URL structure so I could not have done it with a global search and replace.

As for the Macintosh Garden links, I have removed them completely, since the Garden does not seem to exist any more.

Poselství Trůnu

Regular visitors may be aware that I'm quite fond of the Czech real-time strategy The Legend. Its original name is Legenda: Poselství Trůnu 2, so obviously there had to be a Poselství Trůnu 1 somewhere. After some search I found it. It seems it was never distributed outside the Czech Republic, but it is bilingual and does have an English name, Message of Throne. It is quite a different game, a turn-based strategy in the style of the KOEI games.

What else is new

There is a small update on the General MIDI page, the DB50XG had 676 voices, not 737, and I fixed a link on the Rise of the Dragon page.

May I remind you of my eBay auctions again? I'm currently selling Matchbox models.

Previous entry: 2009-02-21