[Sinclair]

I found 5 Days A Stranger through Abandonia. Can't remember how I found Abandonia, though, which is odd. I think I might have been looking for the first UFO game.

EDIT: It's interesting that 5DAS and 7DAS are available both on Abandonia and Abandonia Reloaded, but Trilby's Notes is only available at the latter. I guess they didn't remove "new" games from Abandonia when Reloaded went up.

This post has been edited by Sinclair: 12 November 2006 - 04:51 PM

[David-kyo]

Perhaps because Reloaded is the site pertaining to mostly AGS games, and they needed to upload everything they could get their hands on in 2003 to Abandonia. Just look at the utter shite they're putting up there nowadays, just for the sake of being able to do an update. Considering that, I'm guessing they didn't mind what they were uploading back then (whether it be abandonware or new freeware games?) as long as it was good.

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 13 November 2006 - 04:27 AM

[Blueskirt]

Reloaded, now that is a nice little website. Because freeware games nowaday are different than abandonware from the old days. Back in the days, simplicity was not really required to make great games. In fact, the more deviously complex they were, the bigger hit they'd be. I just have to think to Civ, X-Com, Jagged Alliance, Laser Squad, Populous etc.

Games were shipped with a manual, so you wouldn't have to learn the entire game's mechanics on the spot. So when you download abandonware, most of the time the manual will not be included, you'll probably have to waste an additionnal hour to find and download the manual on a really slow website like Replacementdocs.com, and then you'll have to read the whole thing, which can be really time consuming just to try a game you have no idea if you'll like it or not. Hence why I usually privilege words from friends over reviews to try new abandonware games I never played when I was young.

Nowadays freeware games on the other side are usually designed to be simplier, and have little readme.txt files that usually describe you in a minute or 2 the controls and everything you need to know about the game. So, most of the time, after 5 minutes you'll know if you'll love the game or if you need to delete it from your hard drive pronto.

So personally, I'm more inclined to test freeware games than abandonware, because it's faster and easier to determine if a freeware is worth playing or not, than it is for abandonware, and in my book, Reloaded has more reasons to exist than Abandonia since it made me discover a lot of little gems in the freeware universe, which I wouldn't have discovered by myself because with the thousands of games released using game factory, mediafusion, RPG maker or an adventure game engine which isn't AGS, it's pretty hard to find the gems among all the crap.

[Centurion]

I forgot add to my link to oldgames site, you need extra some dos emulation program, i use this one - http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/ easy to use and everything runs perfect)

[David-kyo]

Using DosBox for running old Dos games? That goes without saying, mate!

[Sinclair]

Reloaded, now that is a nice little website. Because freeware games nowaday are different than abandonware from the old days. Back in the days, simplicity was not really required to make great games. In fact, the more deviously complex they were, the bigger hit they'd be. I just have to think to Civ, X-Com, Jagged Alliance, Laser Squad, Populous etc.

Games were shipped with a manual, so you wouldn't have to learn the entire game's mechanics on the spot. So when you download abandonware, most of the time the manual will not be included, you'll probably have to waste an additionnal hour to find and download the manual on a really slow website like Replacementdocs.com, and then you'll have to read the whole thing, which can be really time consuming just to try a game you have no idea if you'll like it or not. Hence why I usually privilege words from friends over reviews to try new abandonware games I never played when I was young.

Come to think of it, even more complicated games nowadays have less paper manuals, because of box size limits, I guess. Simcity 4 is more complex than Simcity 2000, far as I can tell, but the manual is much smaller. The Simcity 2000 manual (or it could have been the "special edition" manual, I got that version of the game) was quite wonderful, it had all sorts of stuff that didn't directly have to do with the game, but was just plain interesting. The Civ II manual was much bigger than III or IV. Of course, games ship with .pdf manuals, but a real manual is much nicer if you're going to print it out, and flipping between the game and a .pdf reader window is annoying. A more recent game with a fantastic manual: Arcanum. Large bits of the manual are written "in character", as a sort of scientific treatise.

Of course, box size might not be the big issue, as at least two of the Combat Mission games (Not sure about the size of the third's manual, even though I have all three) are pretty hefty (though not as large as the Civ II or Simcity 2000 manuals, but they still cover everything in the games), and the CM games come in new-size boxes.

[Blueskirt]

Add to that equation the fact that more games have their own tutorials included in them, may that be a training level or several hints thrown at the player during the first hours gameplay.

And the world is also generally getting cheaper with stuff included with games. Back in the days, IF games' box were full of junks included for no other reasons that make you laugh, and nowaday, with budjet releases and european releases, you can consider yourself lucky if there is something more included in the box than a CD and a manual offered in .pdf format. It wouldn't surprise me if that also affect the size of games' manual.

[Nostaw]

Nowadays, if a game has a large manual, it's because it's a hard game to play, or has a very long storyline that has to be told in the manual.

It's bad in both cases. If the game is hard to play, it won't sell that much. One can state some exceptions, but I can't remember anyone right now.

On the other side, if the game has a very complex storyline and the game producers were stupid/lazy and didn't dissolve it in the game itself, it will probably be a crappy game.

Example? Outpost 2. The game had an huge (and very cool) storyline, but most of it came with the game as a novel ("Divided Destiny, by Steven York").
Result: Sometimes you play the game without understanding exactly what's going on. The Gamespot reviewer said: "Try reading a novel while playing Command & Conquer to see where that takes you to."

But maybe this last one isn't a good example, because the novel came in Word format. Anyway, reading is for campers.

[David-kyo]

I liked how they pulled this off in Deus Ex, where you see newspapers scattered around, you can use news terminals, read into books, etc. to get an idea what's happening while you're doing your job.
I also like how they did it in Morrowind or, better yet, Oblivion, where, for instance, the lockpicking training book tells you that if you hold a torch to the lock, the tumblers will behave more predictably thanks to the heat. This should compel the player to actually read the books that are lying around him, making it seem more like a real RPG.

/OFF: For the record, World of Warcraft, Diablo and other woodcutting games made by Blizzard are not to be considered RPGs, okay?/

This post has been edited by David-kyo: 24 November 2006 - 05:07 AM

[Nostaw]

I liked how they pulled this off in Deus Ex, where you see newspapers scattered around, you can use news terminals, read into books, etc. to get an idea what's happening while you're doing your job.
I also like how they did it in Morrowind or, better yet, Oblivion, where, for instance, the lockpicking training book tells you that if you hold a torch to the lock, the tumblers will behave more predictably thanks to the heat. This should compel the player to actually read the books that are lying around him, making it seem more like a real RPG.

That's what I'm talking about. Great games must be great stories, not only have them.

When you play a game like Half Life or Gunman Chronicles, you not only understand the story, you also see that you actually are the center of the plot. You feel guilty when you push a bottom and an elevator falls to destruction with some people inside. You feel terrorized when you see your heavily armed friends being crushed by an enemy tank, leaving you with a pistol almost out of ammo. That's what we want when we give 10 to 50 bucks for a game.

But, when you, like me, buy a game like Heavy Gear, you feel cheated. The game is an inferior clone of Mech Warrior 2, with poor graphics and gameplay. The game had only one good thing: the story. It is a very very large plot, and it was almost entirely written in the manual. I mean, there were the detailed biographies of every character that appears in the game, with pictures. I found out that after I had done with the game. And it is not even a sequel. Man, if I wanted a novel, I'd buy one.

One can say: "What do you want? If the story is that large, they couldn't show it in the game". That's their problem, not ours. They tried to explain us what was going on by showing us some short movies in the beginning of half of the levels. Again: If I wanted to watch a movie, I wouldn't buy a game.

And I'm pretty sure every single one of you guys has been in a similar situation some time.

[Blueskirt]

In my case it's the total opposite. I like when a long chunk of the manual is used to tell part of the storyline or cool story you couldn't have seen in the game. Blizzard did that for every of their game since Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and it worked well for them. Mind, there are some limits that must not be crossed. For one, they shouldn't push it to the limit, like Warcraft 3 did with its 100 of pages of storyline and backstories and character bios, that was maybe just a little bit too much. And for two, it shouldn't be an excuse to have absolutly no storyline development in the game, or an excuse to not get something like Deus Ex.

I actually find it sad that everyone are uber quick at labeling this game an RPG instead of a FPS, making this game an exception, a game that should in no instance become the rule of that genre, waves good bye to hopes to see non-linear gameplay spreading to genres other than RPG, sneakers or GTA-like and defaultly making HL2 the summum of story storytelling and complexity in FPS. Oh well, maybe Alan Wake will change that.

On another note, it's now legal to break copy protection in abandonware games:
http://blog.wired.co...pyright_to.html
Now I didn't need a law to do that before, but I just hope that will get more abandonware websites, including those watched by the ESA, to also offer copy protection and crack even if they can't offer the game for download.

This post has been edited by Blueskirt: 24 November 2006 - 11:00 AM

[Nostaw]

On another note, it's now legal to break copy protection in abandonware games:
http://blog.wired.co...pyright_to.html
Now I didn't need a law to do that before, but I just hope that will get more abandonware websites, including those watched by the ESA, to also offer copy protection and crack even if they can't offer the game for download.

Very intersting. What do they consider abandoned titles? And what is an archival purpose?

[Blueskirt]

http://www.copyright.gov/1201/

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

This post has been edited by Blueskirt: 25 November 2006 - 03:46 PM