Fantastic review of CK1-3! Completely agreed on episode 3 being annoyingly brutal. I never played it but once and kept going back to episode one.

One tiny little nitpick: at one point I understood you to say the pogo stick was used in the Keen games from the point you get it in episode one onward. This isn't quite true, as Keen Dreams has no pogo stick at all. Of course, that's an odd episode anyway, so no biggie 😀

lazygamereviews wrote:

One tiny little nitpick: at one point I understood you to say the pogo stick was used in the Keen games from the point you get it in episode one onward. This isn't quite true, as Keen Dreams has no pogo stick at all. Of course, that's an odd episode anyway, so no biggie :)

*goes back and watches your old LGR of Keen Dreams*

...is it just my imagination or does Keen Dreams feel like Id Software making a joke on Softdisk much the same way Super 3D Noah's Ark was making a joke on Nintendo?

As an aside, I have the GBC version of Commander Keen and wow does it suck. The small screen space combined with the size of the graphics makes virtually every jump in the game a leap of faith, plus the pogo controls are really difficult without a keyboard. x_x;

Gemini000 wrote:

As an aside, I have the GBC version of Commander Keen and wow does it suck. The small screen space combined with the size of the graphics makes virtually every jump in the game a leap of faith, plus the pogo controls are really difficult without a keyboard. x_x;

Not surprising, given it wasn't even developed by id, but by David A. Hall productions, with permission from id. Lame. I frickin' love Commander Keen, but there is no place in my heart for that "game"...

Nice review! However it should be called commander keen Invasion of the Vorticons trilogy .
you also said that one could get the entire commander keen series this is obviously not true the steam pack lacks keen dreams and keen 6 .

One thing that strikes me as odd is that you did mention commander genius but not the commander keen community and it's mods (PCKF KEEN WIKI).

And if you think keen 3 is hard you need to play the Episode smile mod for keen 2 🤣 (also here is a LINK of the maker playing it himself (his skill level is insane!))

I found the review a bit shallow to your other review to be honest and i know you had your reasons , it still makes my inner keen fan sad .
I hope you do not take all of this in a bad way .

Also HERE is a piece of fan art i made a while ago .

It can be difficult coming up with good reviews and it's incredibly easy to miss stuff, either because the information provided is incomplete or inaccurate in some way, or costs money to find out for certain. For instance: I had already bought the Apogee release before I realized the Steam release was a better deal, but it was hard to tell exactly which games were in the Steam release, as is a common problem with game packs sold on Steam that aren't collections of individual Steam games.

Also, the weather during the week was incredibly unpredictable, limiting the amount of time I could spend using my computer. (My neighbours lost a computer from a lightning strike just a few years ago. I was in my kitchen at the time... freakin' LOUD! x_x; )

As a result, I focussed on the games themselves and wasn't able to explore much beyond them. I only knew about the Commander Genius thing because someone had mentioned it when requesting I take a look at the games.

And yeah, I avoid talking about mods out of personal preference and also because modding games that aren't designed to be modded isn't always a straightforward thing and if I did talk about it I would almost certainly get questions from people trying to mod the game but can't figure out how to do it, thus asking me to figure it out for them. As it stands, I already get questions every so often about how to get specific games working in DOSBox, some of which I've never even played. I usually just refer such people over here. :P

Gemini000: no worries about being busy. Saturday I was to busy to watch your episode (which was a good one), since I had been to a demonstration (Saturday For Equality) in Denmark, and I took a lot of pictures. Which I then uploaded, so being busy is something I know about.

Gemini000 wrote:

Other than that, lots of guesses for Jazz Jackrabbit this week, though most of them came in after almost all the guesses for Commander Keen were made, which was kinda weird. 😮

Where there any guesses for Jill of the Jungle?

Gemini000 wrote:

lots of stuff

Ah i see , thank you for the explanation Gemini .

Calvero wrote:

Where there any guesses for Jill of the Jungle?

I think there was only one if I'm remembering correctly. *shrugs*

Ancient DOS Games Filler #19 - Modern DOS Games is online slightly early due to needing sleep. Goodnighzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... -_-

May be worth a mention that Paku Paku is also public domain, and the source is freely available - should be of some interest to people into vintage programming.

at some point the author was working on yet another DOS game with similar graphics / system requirements, some kind of scrolling space shooter... not sure if that's still going on though.

VileRancour wrote:

May be worth a mention that Paku Paku is also public domain, and the source is freely available - should be of some interest to people into vintage programming.

Wait... according to the readme, it's Cardware, where you send the author a postcard if you enjoy it. AFAIK, only the source code is public domain, not the game itself. :o

Then again, I should point out that the game has several name variations including "Paku Paku", "Paku-paku" and "pakuPaku", so considering the lack of consistency it's possible the information about the game is different depending on exactly which webpage (or even where on that webpage) you're looking. :P

Gemini000: Great little filler you did 😀 And I am looking forward to your next episode 😀 Your show has begun to make me enjoy a Saturday 😀

I wouldn't necessarily insist that "cardware" and "public domain" are mutually exclusive, though your mileage may vary. ;)

for what it's worth, I agree that it's the least difficult Pac-Man clone I've ever played - I got about as far as you have, and according to MAME info, the "powerups don't do a thing" behavior in later levels seems to be consistent with the arcade original.

For a minute I thought #96 could be of World of Xeen but that predates Daggerfall. Can't wait to see what you review up next.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 96 - Amulets & Armor is online! (Please note that this is a mature rated episode.)

No, I don't own the full game... I ALMOST did. I first played this game back when it was brand new and I wanted to get the full game, but I was only 15 at the time and didn't really have any money to my name. Then, much later on in life when I finally remembered about the game it was too late to get a copy. :/

So yeah, I had to resort to looking at the shareware version. I REALLY wanna see a legitimate digital download of this pop up somewhere at some point down the road. This game is definitely deserving of a lot more attention than it ever got.

I also find it crazy that Leileilol's pretty much the only one who has a working v1.2 shareware download available. Most of the websites I visited either had dubious "abandonware" downloads of the game or semi-broken copies of shareware v1.0. :P

I should've sent in a guess! I would've known that. I discover unused stuffs in it!

I should mention Janus Anderson's site has a CD quality mp3 of that one flute song used in the demo. That thing used to be a bit of an earworm.

There's also a nasty item duplication exploit done in network play. A&A is designed for lan parties pretty much and can be enjoyed cooperatively. You can dig in the game's files for remnants of its early MUD-like days.

leileilol wrote:

I should've sent in a guess! I would've known that.

You could've, but considering your little shrine is the best place I could find to get the shareware versions from you ended up named (and linked) in the video anyways. ;)

leileilol wrote:

There's also a nasty item duplication exploit done in network play. A&A is designed for lan parties pretty much and can be enjoyed cooperatively. You can dig in the game's files for remnants of its early MUD-like days.

One of the broken v1.0 downloads I tried out neglected to place the map description file for multiplayer into its required directory, so when you tried to run a multiplayer game the only map choice was called "P" and attempting to play it sent you back to the character select screen. :P

I did confirm the multiplayer does indeed work in DOSBox though. :)

I'm going to fix up my A&A Shrine a bit, it was last updated in December 2008. It'll still have the same content though and i'll even link to that video review.

Ingame gamma correction in A&A is Alt-F10.

leileilol wrote:

I'm going to fix up my A&A Shrine a bit, it was last updated in December 2008. It'll still have the same content though and i'll even link to that video review.

Awesomeness. :)

leileilol wrote:

Ingame gamma correction in A&A is Alt-F10.

I knew there was a way to alter it! Very muchly adding that info to the additional information section in the next few minutes! ;D