Has anyone noticed the latest AGD Interactive splash screen? Seems like they’re building a new website but are working on a new project as well… I can’t really think of a game where the graphic is based upon but the way the text is designed makes me think a new Space Quest remake is coming up. Does anyone have an idea where the image could be taken from?

GOG has some new additions and about all of them adventure games. Already available to buy is Simon the Sorcerer (talkie version!). Coming soon is Simon the Sorcerer 2, Feeble Files and a game I’ve never heard of but seems cool: Waxworks.

Damn it, I accidentally deleted a couple of real comments while deleting all the spam. So if you lost something you’ve written don’t think I did it because I hate you or something

Anyway, holidays are coming up but it seems I’ll be working until the last day of 2008. I have a lot of work that needs to be done and that’s the main reason I haven’t updated for a while, sorry about that.

At least there still are the presents to make December a bit fun. I had to make a couple of lists of stuff I’d like to have and there are a some I put on there: Spore, Legendary, Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2. The one’s I don’t get I’ll probably buy next month :).

GOG has some new classics in their collection: Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament GOTY. Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 are coming soon. Because I’ve recently started playing Unreal I know that the patched version GOG is selling (2.26) plays like crap on newer PC’s. If you want to play Unreal without cpu rendering and with beautifull, high-resolution graphics you should use this non-official patch: 2.27. It took me an extremely long time to find this patch and I guarantee you it’s going to be worth it. If you want to know what the patch does just play Unreal for a couple of minutes before installing it. You’ll see…

I don’t know if Unreal Tournament has the same problems, should check that out too somewhere this month…

As a kid, the only games I could play were shareware games. There were hundreds of different compilation CDs that had millions of different shareware games on then. There is one “company” I’ll never forget from back then and that’s Soleau Software. Oil Cap, Bolo Ball, Numlo, Ant Run… All simple but extremely addicting games I used to play for days, weeks, even months. It’s fun to see that the company still exists and even sells all their games. Be sure to check out their collection of Dos games, every one of them will probably give you hours of fun.

I wish I could write some scene-related stuff, but besides HOTU still having no downloads available not much is happening is there?

Anyway, I found this nice little site dedicated to a great classic adventure: The Neverhood. It contains some interesting news about what happened to the team members and there’s also a backup of the old official Neverhood and Boombots websites. I’m not sure, but I think the site is created by an old member of the team since he’s talking about “the rest of us” on the Where Are They Now page.

As a teenager, Trespasser was a game I was looking forward to from the first minute I heard it was being developed. The screenshots and trailers that were shown before the game’s release looked stunning and I just couldn’t wait to play it. Sadly, the game was a huge dissapointment and I always wondered where it all went wrong. Today I started searching for some info and found this interesting article: Postmortem: DreamWorks Interactive’s Trespasser. It talks about the whole production process of Trespasser and gives you a lot of insights about why the game flopped.

More interesting Trespasser links:

• Just Games Retro review
• TresCon: Fan site
• Trespasser on Wikipedia
• Trespasser on Mobygames

AGD interactive isn’t the only team creating Sierra remakes, about two years “Infamous Adventures” released a King’s Quest III remake, also available with a voice pack. Right now they’re working on a Space Quest 2 remake and I must say, the screenshots look pretty good. To be continued…

I stumbled upon a cool project today called Ultimate Stunts today, a remake of the world-famous racing game Stunts. Especially the great track editor made this racing game extremely addicting. The screenshots look really promising but sadle I couldn’t get this game to work on my Vista notebook. I guess I’ll have try it out on my XP PC later today.

Looking for some great, old-skool game music? Then this LucasArts Soundtracks website might help you out. It has hunderds of MP3 files of classic LucasArts games ready for download.

Starting from today Good Old Games opens it’s doors to the public. Everyone can now register and buy classics for great prices. There are also two new games added to the “upcoming” list: Gothic and Disciplines.

As some might know, Duke Nukem 3D will probably never completely die. New total conversions and maps are still released regulary and people seem to keep pushing the boundaries of the good old Build engine. Because I really want to get into Duke3D again and try out some of that new stuff I started looking for a way to get it running smoothly again. DosBox doesn’t really do the job, so I needed something better. That’s when I found EDuke. This piece of software makes it possible to play Duke Nukem 3D on Windows and Linux as if you’re playing it on your old Dos PC. EDuke has a lot of technical and gameplay improvements too. High resolutions are supported, you can use your mouse the same way as it’s used in modern 3D shooters (free-look) and there even is an improved Build program that makes creating maps a lot easier and much more fun.

When looking are some more, I’m pretty sure EDuke is the best program to be found. Surely there’s the High Resolution Pack but I personally hate it. Playing Duke Nukem 3D with High Resolution graphics and 3D weapons and enemies might be fun for the newer generation of gamers, the ones that started somewhere around Unreal or Half Life, but I don’t like playing it this way.

I stumbled upon a great fansite some time ago: Dos Classics. Even though there are probably a douzen sites that use this name, this one is rather unique, it’s dedicated to three classic platform games: Cosmo, Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, for each game there are nice downloads, docs and info pages. Even though the site has not been updated for about 3 years, it’s always fun browsing trough a site like this. If you want an even better site that’s just dedicated to Commander Keen you should check out this one.

Wow, has been about a month since my last update. I’ve written a lot lately but it’s a secret what it’s for. Yeah, it’s for Abandonstuff, but it won’t quiet be what you probably think, you’ll see

Anyway, some time ago a webmaster contacted me presenting his newest website: Old Computer Mags. Navigating through the site is kind of irritating but it’ll be worth it. There are douzens of scans of old Italian and English magazines which is always fun to read. Check it out!

I love reading reviews and even more of game I’ve already played instead of games I don’t know yet. Why? Because I find it interesting to see how other people interpret games. It surely gets interesting when people play older games for the first time while I played them when they were released. That’s why I’m starting this new “column” where I’ll present to you an interesting review, and talk about the stuff I agree and disagree on. Of course it’s a lot more fun if you guys give your own opinions too, that’s what a blog is about :).

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Home of the Underdogs has been down for quiet some time now and I was wondering if anyone knows what’s going on there?

At first I though the webmaster would again have lost her/his (I think it’s a she) domain name the same way it happened with the-underdogs.org. After doing WHOIS lookup I see it’s still registered to someone in Bangkok and has the-underdogs nameservers so that means something else must be wrong. The worst scenario would be that the server bill was not paid and the servers (and all the content) has just been removed.

Even though the site hasn’t seen an update since 2006, if HOTU would be gone that would be a huge kick in the nuts for every single abandonware visitor/webmaster. It’s one of the oldest abandonware sites around with the biggest collection of abandoned games ever and a lot of them were also extremely rare. Many people who start searching for an old game land up there and lots of abandonware webmasters probably search there too to find some game they didn’t know yet and want to add to their own website.

What do you guys think of this? Surely HOTU has been important for all of you? Or hasn’t it?

A couple of minutes ago a finally received my login code for the Gog.com beta and sadly my bank still hasn’t sent me my credit card. Doesn’t really matter though since GOG promised a community with all kinds of stuff so even the non-buyers should have fun here. Well, here’s a small report with my first impressions…

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I just read a news post on Abandonia, let me quote this:

Some time ago we found out Blood was still sold and as such had to remove the download - much to the disappointment of our users, I might add.

Well, cheer up! Because that source ran out of copies and so the game can be downloaded once more!

This tells one thing about the person: he does not know what abandonware is about. The only thing he wants is games being free. Instead of promoting the company that sells Blood again, he’s telling his visitors that publishers should not sell games again so we can still put them online illegaly (don’t forget, abandonware is still illegal).

Another example:

As of yesterday, the entire X-Com series is available for purchase through Steam, including the pin-offs X-COM: Interceptor and X-COM: Enforcer. The price is $5 per game or $15 for all five together.

As a result, we have to remove the downloads of UFO: enemy Unknown and X-Com: Apocalypse.

Come on man, you’re totally not doing what an abandonware site should do. It’s about putting games online that are not being sold, if a company sells it again, we should be happy instead of posting things like that.

Latis from XTC Abandonware is a great example of how it should be done. He had a couple of oldwarez on his site and after I told him about it he removed the downloads and didn’t say anything about how sad it was that the games aren’t free anymore. He just posted a happy message saying he was wrong.

Of course I could be totally wrong, please correct me if I am…

Last year Command & Conquer turned freeware, this time it’s Red Alert’s turn. A great way to promote the upcoming Red Alert 3!