Ancient DOS Games Episode 331 - Star Hammer is online!

I was fully expecting this game to be super-simple and barely result in much of an episode. Turns out... it was indeed super-simple but I ended up with a surprising amount to say about it despite that, as the notion that this feels like a "2D Wing Commander" isn't wrong... although it doesn't help it was competing with THREE actual Wing Commander titles which were all out on store shelves at the same time... :P

Ancient DOS Games Pro 30 - Minimum Winning Scores - Commander Keen is online!

I wasn't 100% certain how easy or difficult this process was going to be before I started, but I had a hunch it was at the very least possible to do in a reasonable amount of time. Turns out, because most things in the game don't actually score any points, it was significantly easier than expected to figure all of this out, though not without some bumps along the way, the last level of Episode 2 being the biggest bump chewing up a half hour of my time just on its own due to how janky the middle section of the level is. :P

Ancient DOS Games Filler #101 - Planet Crafter is online!

I've been getting a lot of play time out of this modern indie title as it's filling a niche which I feel has begun to form... I was born in the early 80s and as such I represent the first generation of gamers who have spent their ENTIRE LIFE playing videos games who are just now entering middle-age. To that end, my tastes in games have shifted considerably in recent years, as I find myself wanting experiences which have a more casual and less hostile feel to them, but are by no means "casual" in the traditional sense of the word when used to describe a game.

In fact, I recently announced a game project I'm developing myself to fill this niche which is still EXTREMELY early in its development, but I take a moment near the end of the video to show the beginnings of its built-in first-person level-editing capabilities! :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 332 - Pinball Gold Pack is online!

This was kind of an ordeal; Going through TWENTY pinball tables across five pieces of software bundled into the same package to give a brief overview of everything. I'm actually kinda glad I decided to do it this way instead of reviewing the games individually because it helped to identify common themes between them all and gave me a chance to show what was done well and what wasn't across the entire range of them. :)

Ancient DOS Games Episode 333 - Quarantine is online!
(Please note that this is a mature-rated video.)

Won't say too much ahead of time as I'm really tired and need to get to bed, but I will say I never thought I'd get a chance to cover this game on the show given that, back when I first looked into what it would take to buy the game back in 2012, the price for a copy was well over $200. Nowadays the prices are... still high but not AS high. :P

Gemini000 wrote on 2024-10-05, 03:43:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 333 - Quarantine is online!

DeatSaw tried to play this on real hardware and even that would either move too fast or too slow; I really hated this era of "non-fixed timesteps" in PC games... Makes me really appreciate Doom's constant 35 hz logic in everything, despite that not being 60 FPS.

DracoNihil wrote on 2024-10-11, 12:09:

Makes me really appreciate Doom's constant 35 hz logic in everything, despite that not being 60 FPS.

The classic 320x200 256-colour VGA video mode runs 70 Hz by default, thus 35 FPS made perfect sense: Two vertical blanks! :)

The irony is that it would take many, many, MANY years for game developers to mostly stop doing that thing where they time their games to arbitrary things which are not consistent between machines. Heck, when I did my filler video showing Oblivion's lowest detail settings even that game, freaking OBLIVION, has timing issues on modern systems! Not nearly as egregious as System Shock 2 (too fast) and MechWarrior 3 (too slow) but I kinda expected better. >_<

Nowadays, timing is usually more appropriately defined in game engines as the actual framerate and a separate "physics" framerate, though depending on the engine you may or may not have the tools readily available to interpolate between the two and thus have to do it manually. :P

Ancient DOS Games Episode 334 - Happyland Adventures is online!

I kinda had to come up with this one at the last minute since I had completely forgotten to select a game for this Saturday all the way up to the point where I was in the middle of voicing the script for the previous episode, got to the end and was like, "Wait... where did the rest of my script go...? Oh, right, I never wrote it... uh oh..." :P

Though this is one of a handful of Allegro-made titles I wanted to bring up sooner or later, as it was partly responsible for me selecting Allegro as the SDK I would focus on learning to use, plus the game even directly inspired a very specific feature in one of my own games later on! :B

Ancient DOS Games Pro 31 - Mechanics Investigation - Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is online!

This started out as a deep dive into the travel mechanics of the game, since I had a sneaking suspicion there might be some patterns to it which could lead to uncovering more about how the game is setting up the various cases it presents you with... but it turned out to be mostly random, though not without some interesting quirks.

As such, I expanded my investigation into the rest of the mechanics and ultimately concluded that... you can theoretically play through this game without reference materials of any kind! :o

Ancient DOS Games Episode 335 - Tom & Jerry: Yankee Doodle's CAT-astrophe is online!

And yeah, it's a week late because I was sick for a week. :P

THIS was the game I actually had on my 5 1/4" disk though, not the one I covered a year ago, despite the disk not giving the subtitle at all. Heck, not even the GAME has the full subtitle in it as it's only shown on the box and nowhere else.

As for the game itself, there wasn't too much to say as it's very short and simple, but the nature of the controls did give me an opportunity to explain how keyboards work: how the BIOS handles the keyboard, how you write a multi-keypress keyboard handler, and thus with all of that knowledge imparted I'm able to explain exactly how it is the keyboard routines in this game are sort of in this weird in-between state of detecting held keys just fine, but only one at a time, and why this made things weird. :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 336 - Battle Chess is online!

Had to switch gears at the last minute because the game I intended to cover for this last video of the year ended up having major game speed issues in every flavour of DOSBox I threw at it. As in, no matter what I set the cycles count to, there would be moments where it would go far too slow, but also moments with the SAME cycles count where it would go far too fast, and I'm about 95% certain the problem was emulation related as I had played a demo version of the game in the past on real hardware without these issues. :/

SO, a quick look through my collection and I realized Battle Chess was one I could cover nice and quick, thus here we are. This game turned out pretty much exactly as I expected, though I did have to dig into it a little to figure out some of the specifics such as what exactly was up with the computer skill levels or how the modem-based gameplay worked without any actual modem-connectivity features. :P

Ancient DOS Games Episode 337 - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is online!

Yeah, starting the year with a Lucasarts (technically Lucasfilm Games) title again, though at least in this event it's one which I found mostly agreeable... well... until you actually GET to Atlantis and then it's kind of a mess; Everything leading up to Atlantis makes way more sense. :P

Still, this one was highly requested so I figured it was a good one to kick off 2025 with! :)

Ancient DOS Games Episode 338 - Ford Simulator is online!

I kinda knew going into this one that it might be a little more disappointing than expected, but I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt and did my best to determine just how much it was doing to provide at least SOME level of simulation realism, and apart from the different power bands for the different gears on every car... that's about where the realism ends. :P

Nevertheless, the program isn't really "offensive" and doesn't do anything seriously wrong, it's just very lacking... though clearly did well enough for Ford to continue developing and releasing newer and newer versions every couple years for awhile. :o

Ancient DOS Games Pro 32 - Weapon DPS - Descent is online!

This was a trip and a half... I thought figuring out the DPS in the original Descent was going to be fairly straightforward but it turns out there's a bit more complexity to it than you might expect and plenty of "gotchas" where you might think you're figuring it out, when in fact, you're totally wrong, as evidenced by just how many Descent fan websites out there DON'T have the correct information presented! :O

That said, I wasn't able to come to definitive conclusions for some of the data due to the complexities I ran into. I figured out the Lasers, Spreadfire Cannon, and Plasma Cannon exactly, but everything else is "close enough" at best and "rough estimate" at worst, not helped by there being no true decompiled data to compare to anywhere online, as the ONLY source of the raw Descent weapon data is buried in the compiled data files for the game, as the only non-compiled weapon data available, even when looking through the original source code, is for Descent II, and they made a LOT of tweaks to the weapons going from the first to the second game. :P

Ancient DOS Games Episode 339 - Stonekeep is online!

I've actually been holding onto this one for awhile now... multiple years in fact... For some reason I just hadn't felt like getting around to it until now, as I kept covering other dungeon crawls and then would go do other games, and then oh hey, it's dungeon crawl time again but with something else, repeat until now. :P

That said, the game's not bad, but definitely has some massive quirks you need to be aware of to get the most out of it, but given that the entire experience has been streamlined and simplified as much as is possible given the amount of content present here, and given that virtually no enemies respawn, it's actually pretty easy to get into this game compared to most other such titles!

Gemini000 wrote on 2025-02-22, 02:26:

Ancient DOS Games Episode 339 - Stonekeep is online!

I've actually been holding onto this one for awhile now... multiple years in fact... For some reason I just hadn't felt like getting around to it until now, as I kept covering other dungeon crawls and then would go do other games, and then oh hey, it's dungeon crawl time again but with something else, repeat until now. 😜

That said, the game's not bad, but definitely has some massive quirks you need to be aware of to get the most out of it, but given that the entire experience has been streamlined and simplified as much as is possible given the amount of content present here, and given that virtually no enemies respawn, it's actually pretty easy to get into this game compared to most other such titles!

I'm glad you finally covered this one. It's one of my favorite DOS RPGs. I've played most of them, and this one makes my top-5. I played on original hardware and the General MIDI music was incredible, using a DreamBlaster X2. I keep track of my playtimes and you were pretty close in your playtime estimate. It took me 44 hours to complete.

clueless1 wrote on 2025-02-22, 12:09:

I keep track of my playtimes and you were pretty close in your playtime estimate. It took me 44 hours to complete.

I based my estimate on the total number of maps, so when I saw I was only about a quarter-way through the maps I figured I was probably about a quarter way through the game.

True, that logic doesn't exactly work for everything, but Stonekeep's progression felt VERY linear, even though you can indeed backtrack as far as you'd like from the looks of things, so I assumed that logic would hold true going forwards. :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 340 - Savage is online!

I thought this was going to be a hack-and-slash of some kind when I first saw screenshots of it... boy was I VERY wrong... :o

Actually, it's a good thing the game is as short as it is, given the extreme level of difficulty on display here, otherwise I don't think I would've pushed myself to beat it. This game is frantic and intense and once you know what you're doing (if you ever can really) it's over fast.

Also, I have no idea why they charge an extra dollar for this on GOG and Steam...?

I was a ZX Spectrum user when 'Savage' was released. I was absolutely blown away by the static screenshots in the magazines at the time... but on eventually playing it.... yeaaahhh, not so great.

In some respects it's very similar to Trantor the Last Stormtrooper, in that it has very large sprites, is (mostly) a sideways scrolling run and gun / run and axe, and looks great in static screenshots, but is jerky and bordering on unplayable in practice.

The Amiga release has the best music but that's just Paula for you I guess.

I guess the MS-DOS port didn't ship many copies given its rarity.