Lemmings 2: The Tribes for DOS
Source: Game Players PC Entertainment 5.6 (November/December 1992)
Scan Source: RetroMags
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Happy 35th anniversary to Loom! 
(May 1990)
Have you ever seen the 5-minute demo presented at CES in Las Vegas in January 1990? 
Full video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6PxHvPNZl-o
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The Adventures of Lance (Michael P. Miller and Margaret J. Ganzberger, 1990) #DOSGaming
NEW PODCAST! We've done lots of combat sims over the years, but never before under water, which is what 1993's Subwar 2050 by Particle Systems and Microprose is all about!
Some say it's merely "aquatic Wing Commander", but when you dive into it (pun intended) there's quite a unique experience to be had at the bottom of the sea!
DOS GAME CLUBSubwar 2050 – DOS GAME CLUB PodcastMonthly online discussion and roundtable podcast featuring one DOS game per episode.
Picture Perfect Golf (Lyriq International/Priority Records, 1995) #DOSGaming
NEW COMMUNITY PROJECT! In March we revisited DOOM, the game with which we started the club all the way back in 2017.
During this month the club took it upon themselves to put together a complete custom episode WAD for vanilla Doom 1.
Nine people contributed work on putting together 8 maps, 1 secret map and a custom MIDI intermission track.
We're very proud of our awesome community and we hope you'll check out what we put together for you all!
DOS GAME CLUBDGC Doom Map Pack Collaboration – DOS GAME CLUB PodcastMonthly online discussion and roundtable podcast featuring one DOS game per episode.
i can't really believe this research was never done or published over the years. it's funny how basic knowledge like this disappears: the original typeface that graced the cover of every Ultima game.
"Victorian" was created by english typeface designers Freda Sack and Colin Brignall in 1976, and was included in the ITC typeface library.
top: Victorian Standard Regular typeface.
bottom: Worlds of Ultima - Martian Dreams box cover, with a slightly modified version of the Victorian font. You'll notice that the M has a very pretty descender added by an artist at Origin Systems. i *suspect* this was painted or airbrushed by Denis Loubet (does anyone know denis here?), but there are no credits given in any of the manuals.
both use an exactly 64 point font.
MS. PAC-MAN for IBM-PC. From 1983. Okay, I am really bad at this game... but at least the emulation is working! 
Sometimes, I just love to dig into really old games. Here's 1983s "Ms. Pac-Man" from Atarisoft. The game came on a double-density, single-sided 5.25inch disk of 160K. But when you tried to look into it from DOS, it just seem completely empty, because it's a "Booter" without a file system. Interestingly, this one doesn't seem to be copy-protected at all.
P.S. Here's the link:
https://archive.org/details/pc_mspacman_kfraw
back in the mid-90s just prior to sierra's downfall into fmv and poorly funded titles (their sale to CUC international), the company started looking for low-risk low-profit income avenues.
in the post-doom FPS feeding frenzy, the bloom was off adventure games. they were expensive to produce, and their audience was shrinking fast.
one solution was recycling old software, and honestly, it was great for a 13 year old kid like me, because it meant that i could buy a "sierra game" for $10 instead of the $60-$80 i would normally have to pay for a flagship title
Crazy Nick's Software Picks were collections of mini-games taken from sierra adventures. there were several of them - LSL, King's Quest - I happened to find this Conquest of the Longbow pack at a pharmacy.
the games were *great* - Archery and Nine Men's Morris kept me absolutely occupied for weeks. I had no idea at the time that they were culled from a full sierra adventure, until I discovered it by accident in my twenties.
today i found my copy of the game, buried in another game box. it still has the greasy kid fingerprint from me eating a bag of Old Dutch (regular) chips while i played
how did i only learn now that Uncharted Waters 2 had a DOS port? 
the dithering style is unusual and beautiful - almost like woodcuts with the very intentional horizontal spacing between vertical lines
Bio Menace has been remastered by Apogee and is coming to Steam later this year 
(video via dosgamert, a nice dude and an excellent YouTube follow, as he does lots of playthroughs of DOS games and often posts exclusives like this that you'll see first on his channel.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldaf8z2ik3o
Wishlist it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3459100/BioMenace_Remastered
haha so
back in 2013, blizzard re-released Blackthorne as freeware using dosbox on battle.net
it.... was strange. if you hadn't played the game before then, you might not have noticed a bunch of glaring bugs, like missing sound effects and missing music in several places, including the intro. over the years, no one was able to figure out the cause, and the standard reply became "just download the original from a dos gaming site and play that instead"
it always kind of pissed me off that blizzard released a truly *great* game in this state, so tonight i decided to figure out what was causing the missing audio.
the first step was ruling out some audio configuration problems - except, blizzard stripped out the dos installer program from their release. no prob - I'll just grab a copy from an abandonware site. and so, I downloaded a fresh preinstalled copy of blackthorne from myabandonware.com and made sure the audio was configured properly.
... and surprisingly, the game still played with missing music in the intro and on the first level, just like the blizzard version.
on a hunch, i grabbed two original diskette images, and installed the game from scratch. i ran the audio configuration, ran the game, and - lo and behold - the music all worked fine.
.. which made me realize: blizzard's team so was fucking lazy that they copied the buggy pre-installed version of the game from an abandonware site, and rebadged it with a blizzard logo. apparently no one on the team was familiar enough with the game to realize that the audio didn't work at all. 
a multi-billion dollar company.
so folks, if you want to play Blackthorne and enjoy the gorgeous music - grab the *disk images* here instead: https://archive.org/details/003030-Blackthorne
Moses: Old Testament Adventure #1 (Three Rivers Software/First Row Software Publishing, 1987) #DOSGaming
The first computer I used regularly was an i286 running DOS. It had a black and white display and a large 5.25" floppy drive. I had 12-20 games like Alley Cat, Battle Chess, DigDug and Pac-Man clones on single disk. My favourite was Space Commanders II. I was 4 or 5.
pro move: add yourself as an npc in your own game
dick move: make yourself the hardest npc in your own game
warren schwader: why choose
(a classic interview with schwader from halcyon days: https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/SCHWADER.HTM)
Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen
Source: Game Players PC Entertainment 5.5 (September/October 1992)
Scan Source: RetroMags
interplay's very unique and memorable Neuromancer rpg-adventure largely was overshadowed by their more popular titles like the bard's tale series and wasteland
perhaps because of this, there is very little primary historical research on the development of the game. i'm overjoyed to see that the Stay Forever Podcast took the time to interview lead programmer troy miles and writer-programmer bruce balfour in 2023.
both developers go into a ton of detail into life at interplay in the 1980s, the pain of writing ASM for the c64, and the twisted tale of how neuromancer was licensed to interplay via timothy leary
(fwiw, english begins after the german intro)
interview with troy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0AoJB3DZ_4
interview with bruce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKU62TfDU0
Continued thread
i do appreciate this caveat/note from the colonel's bequest 'about' dialog, which is normally reserved for developer credits. you can tell they're speaking to 90% of sierra fans who kept calling the 1-800# asking why their graham is broken
today i was looking for a method to crack The Colonel's Bequest, so i don't have to do the ridiculous fingerprint copy protection every time i load the game
i stumbled upon chris's amazing analysis of an (in)famous one-byte crack for the game, that first appeared on BBSes in 1989. the one-byte hexedit tricks the game into forcing the first fingerprint option to be the correct one every time.
unfortunately... it has a brutal side effect: using this particular skip instruction on the engine, it destroys the randomized generation that makes Colonel's Bequest very special compared to most other adventure games. just imagine how many people's playthroughs of the game were ruined by a bad crack.
just look at all the shit it broke:
"Dead bodies are always in the first place you look
Items only appear in the west secret passages
The elevator always starts out downstairs
You're always killed when opening the closet when the killer is active
You're always killed at the end of secret passages when the killer is active
The botched Red Barron easter egg never occurs
The Southern Belle easter egg always occurs
You never get carried off by a gator at the front gates
You always see the ghost in the cemetery
The killer always walks by windows when possible
The chandelier never stops shaking, explaining this false ScummVM bug report
Everyone blinks, fidgets, and moves with lifeless constancy"
(and hundreds of more events)
it's a fab read if you're into emergent gameplay, byte code and design
www.benshoof.orgThe Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked