| I Am Joe's Website Home News & Views Bike Week Places Books Rogue-Like Games Your PC Links Good-Bye Abandonware |
| Abandonware Abandonware is software that has been abandoned to the public by its creators and/or original copyright owners and is no longer sold or supported. Most of this time it is because the platforms the games were developed for are no longer commonly used or even available, the companies themselves may be out of business and the games themselves fell out of favor with a public brainwashed by marketing into pursuing the newest fads and using the latest technology. Despite being "abandoned" a lot of these games are still lots of fun to play and are often more entertaining and addictive than most of the newer games. The big difference in computer games now and in the early days of computer gaming appears to be almost entirely a difference in graphics capabilities. While this makes for pretty pictures what it mostly attempts to do is distract you from the poor quality of gameplay. Most games seem to have the actual playing of the game put in as an afterthought as the authors seek to impress with their ability to code lots of flash and glitter. They use more system resources and memory in their intros than the old games used in their entirety. When they do try to improve the gameplay their ideas usually result in increasing the dexterity required so much that the games are no longer fun to play (fun is the idea, I always thought). While searching for an old PC football game called XOR NFL Challenge [see note at bottom of page] I stumbled across a great site called Home of the Underdogs. Wow! Not only did I find the XOR game I found tons of others! My brother soon located an entire webring concerned with these old games called, fittingly enough, The Abandonware Webring. I have found loads of old favorites including XOR NFL Challenge, Empire, the same Daytona racing game you can still play in the Daytona U.S.A. arcade, Neuromancer and loads of others. I even found the DOS version of Rogue (see my Rogue-Like Games page) which I had been looking for since I bought my PC. A lot of the old Atari games like Joust, Defender, etc are available although you may also have to download one of the programs that slow down your PC's clock speed. These games were written for very slow (by today's standards) processors.. Try playing Joust when the attacking birds are moving like lazer bolts. Home of the Underdogs also has a lot of the old manuals for these games in .pdf format. A great thing about these games is their small size. The XOR NFL Challenge game, for instance, downloads as a 147 kb zip file and unzips to take up less than 1/2 MB. It originally came on two 5 1/4" floppies (one with the game data and one with the teams data) which had to be switched when prompted unless you had a state of the art PC with dual floppy drives! With today's comparatively huge hard drives you can load hundreds of these games without sacrificing much disk space. Not only do they take up little space on your hard drive they usually use little in the way of memory and system resources. The games rarely need to be installed. They can usually be unzipped in any directory and run from the command line or by creating a shortcut to the .exe file. Most of them will run in a Windows DOS shell. If you have difficulty getting them to work this way they should work from the DOS prompt. Some of the games need some game setup or system tweaking to get working. A few I could never get to work. Some games require keywords from the original manuals to run so if you threw them or gave them away years ago when the game console finally died instead of storing them in a box in the garage or attic or closet like you should have you're out of luck. There seems to be an unfortunate trend with many of the older abandonware sites. A lot of them, either because their domain names expired and were grabbed by those types who like to let others build up traffic to a site and then hijack it for themselves, or because of rising bandwidth costs or because they infringed on someone's copyright are either becoming pay sites (you have to register and pay a membership fee) or disappearing entirely. SOME GAME LINKS: Home of the Underdogs - This site has a huge selection of games and manuals. Many of the games are not truly abandoned but require that you have the original manual (in other words you should have a legally owned copy of the game in its original format) to get the passwords to play them. Home of the Underdogs disappeared for a while but they've recently reappeared, loaded with popup ads. It's a shame they had to do this but I realize that bandwidth is expensive. It would be better if internet advertisers looked for better ways to grab your attention (check the Soulbath link on my Links page) than by annoying you but... The Abandonware Webring - The webring has links to numerous sites with loads of games. Poke around, I'm sure you'll find something that interests you. There are some other great free games available on the internet that are free but are not abandonware by any means. Free Games & Demo Links: ## GeneRally... One of my current favorite games is a racing simulation called Gene Rally. While it has simple graphics and is easy to play in it's basic form it quickly becomes addictive as you get more involved in the game. There are little details in the action like skidmarks building up where the cars drift around the turns, bumping slower cars to knock them loose and out of your way (and vice versa - I've been knocked over the wall more than a few times), doorhandle to doorhandle racing, big smears of blood in the crowd when a car goes into the stands (yeah, I know that's sick) and lots of other things. The biggest feature, however, is the ability to design your own additions to the game. A track editor comes with the game and you can design tracks with all sorts of features. It is also possible to create new types of cars to race. There is a rapidly growing community of Gene Rally racers that share their tracks and cars and utilities of all sorts and the site's forums are a great place to find out anything about the game you could want to know.. ## Grand Theft Auto 2...Apparently the creators of this great game have pulled the demo. Too bad. It was possibly the most exciting 6 minutes of gaming fun out there. It may be possible to still find it on alternate download sites and if I find it I'll put up a link. ## Strategic Baseball Simulator...If you love baseball you'll love this game. ## TNM Wrestling…After a long absence Oliver Copp is back with a new version of his TNM7 wrestling simulator. His site has been completely updated. The latest version of the game is not free although you can download a 28 day trial version for free. The reason that I put the link here on my free games page is that Copp has also released an earlier version of the game (TNM6.2) along with its source code for free under the GNU Public License. Earlier versions of the wrestling simulator and several plugins are also available for free download. I definitely recommend the FCA Cubed plugin which allows you to create your own matches. I have created several FCA Cubed matches and a set of "celebrity" women wrestlers, both of which you can get here. The matches include a Hardcore Match which travels from the ring through the building to a back alley or out into the parking lot, a Pumpkin Bash which was created specifically for Halloween matches, a Hell In A Cell match, a Catfight which was inspired by ECW's Francine-Beulah-Dawn Marie-Sunny brawls and WCW's and WWE's diva wrestlers and includes a mudpit alongside the ring and finally my Medieval Arena Death Match which is a real "loser-leaves-town" match (usually, there is only 1 survivor!). The celebrities (I run a women's circuit and created the celebrity wrestlers for a once a year PPV called Celebrity Bash-A-Thon) are designed to be fairly weak wrestlers. They include Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, Shannon Doherty, Shakira, Reese Witherspoon, Shania Twain, Mariah Carey, Jenna Jameson and many others. There are also several "fantasy" wrestlers who are designed to be dangerous wrestlers such as Xena (Lucy Lawless), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both Sarah Michelle Gellar and Kristy Swanson), Sheena (Gena Lee Nolin) and Rommie (Lexa Doig). I've tried to be accurate with height, weight (sometimes estimated) and hometowns. Several of the "Finishers" for them are quite clever if I do say so myself. Others are still somewhat a work in progress. Hopefully you'll find them somewhat humorous and fun. A small circle of the once huge community of TNM fan sites still survive (see the links section on the TNM page) and now that the game is back I'm sure that the number of fan sites will quickly grow again. |
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| A special invitation for XOR NFL Challenge fans! We have created an XOR NFL Challenge football league! In it you create a team within certain parameters and manage and maintain the team over several seasons through drafts and free agent signings. While you are too late now to get in on the inaugural season we will accept additional participants for the next season. Send an e-mail to the address above for a template, instructions and a the league rules if you are interested. There is no obligation or money involved and participation can be as minimal as you wish once you create your team. It's just a way for old and new fans of the game to once again have fun with it. |
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