Shareware Existentialism In '95
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- Опубліковано 28 лис 2021
- For over 20 years I've been walking around thinking about these two game demos that freaked me out as a kid. Neither made sense; it turns out that's because they were incomplete. This is just some ruminations on the subject.
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Ha! This is my jam, my jelly, and several other spreadable condiments.
Loved this, there’s never enough coverage of this specific breed of DOS weirdness… and now I’ve gotta find a copy of Cyberbykes. Great Tim Rogers-esque script, too 👍
MORE LGR FOODS!
Glad I'm not the only one who felt like there was some Tim Rogers energy in this video.
Marmite? I don't like Marmite.
Is it bad that I grew up mesmerized by my dad's story's if the arguably terrible process to play games in the commodore and dos days
@@BobMonkeypimp - That would give a whole new meaning to “an LGR thing.” 😂
The best PC games of 1994/1995 used the CD-ROM capacity to do what the cartridge consoles couldn’t . . . e.g. Under A Killing Moon, Myst, Mechwarrior II. You are so good at telling the stories of this time.
An internet legend still walks among us. We are blessed.
edit: and let me say your song was ahead of its time, or we're still far behind where we should have been, back in 2007.
So phantasmagoria (which showed up on my autocomplete?!?) Is a good game???
@@benholroyd5221 No, it was a terrible game. BUT! My friend and I were riveted by it, because, in an era where it wasn't a given that I would have a CD-ROM drive, the game took ... what was it, 5..? 7..? CDs? Clearly it was after Sierra's Midas Touch had worn off, but wow it was impressive for the time... being everything Sega CD was hoping to be, and failing miserably at.
Meanwhile, the OP's list contains two of my favorite games of all time, including my #1 favorite game of all time. And that MW II soundtrack... I still play that in my head on the regular.
So yeah. I wasn't missing much, having left console-land after the NES, and not exploring it again until I bought an SNES and a PS1 right when the N64 came out.
Dude!
@@nickwallette6201 - “The OP’s list.” 😂
Another curse of Shareware discs is that you can remember the gameplay, graphics and music of some games, but can't remember the title
It doesn't help that some of them the name was changed with the final release as well ie Electro Body was released as Electro Man.
Yeah, I remember this puzzle game that had like a black marble on Mac. I wonder what the hell it was called.
Same hole here, recently i found one called Guimo, a 2d platformer where the protagonist is a little lizard with a plasma gun. My entire life i remembered it as "guino" and never found it in any searches.
Now i'm looking for a couple other titles i played in the old days, one being some sort of futuristic fps where the only feature of it i can remember clearly is that you could drink beer from fridges in the map and walk around drunk with your sight swaying all over, and another one being one where you had to touch star-textured things in a map to end the level, one of those notoriously being a table lamp.
@@Gatorade69i think you're talking about oxyd
@@JaredConnell OMG. Thank you. I have been trying to find this game for what seems like forever. Looked it up and you are right, it's Oxyd. Wish I could thumbs up your comment like 5 times.
Ok... Imagine this same experience, but you don't understand a single word of english. That was my childhood. :3
Same
i started learning english in that way.
Oh the joys of knowing that clicking ACTION on the main menu gets you the good stuff, and CARD/CASINO is some boring stuff for adults that's not worth checking.
Would have been nice to be able to read the instructions, but lucky for kiddo me the arrowkeys and space and mouse was usually all you needed for most of the games.
@@ristopoho824 about controls, you can imagine my struggle when one of them was the Space Bar but it was labeled as "SPC", it took me years to figure that one
Same here, plus no instruction manuals, and years later people were amazed at my computer skills, If they knew how I learned. Basically I would load a game & press each key on the keyboard one after the other taking note of the effects, that was how you learned computers back in the days.
Oh my god I laughed too hard in public after "my first sight of ANIME" and then again at the referenc to "Mrs raider" instead of croft.
Love ya buddy, great stuff.
Cyberbike gives me major psychedelic hacker indie game vibes in the same vein as Super hot, hotline Miami, head hunter, etc. If it came out these days with the same exact graphics it would be played by Markiplier 100%
Love the nostalgia shattering introduction 😂👍
TIMES WERE BAD
@@CathodeRayDude No way, man. I feel blessed to have lived through that era.
And I have to say, I am personally shocked... shocked and hurt!.. that Wacky Wheels was one of your prop pieces for how PC games left us in the dark. That game was BOMB, dude! :-D C'mon, it was one of like a handful of games that actually used the OPL3 to the extent of its abilities! How do you not adore it's store-brand Mario Kart awesomeness?
Edit: Had to add: For shaaaaammee.. 😞
@@nickwallette6201 the music was great but it was an egregious (and litigious) Mario kart knockoff that somehow ran at lower frame rate on a machine orders of magnitude faster!
@@CathodeRayDude To be fair to the game, it didn't have the benefit of hardware acceleration and had to do all that in software. And when I first saw footage of Mario Kart years later, my first reaction was "Huh, the console players got a Mario-themed ripoff of Wacky Wheels.", at least until I found out which game came first.
I just... fundamentally disagree with the premise.
Aside from having numerous retail games from the era(not Doom, though. For me, Doom ends with your guy dying and going to hell. But meh, I had Dark Forces and Duke Nukem 3D.), I LOVED shareware CDs. For all the garbage in them, there was an equal amount of cool experimental stuff and just treasure you would never find out about otherwise.
Was Radix: Beyond the Void worth the cost of a full copy? Probably not! But it was worth an afternoon with the shareware copy, I tell you what.
Was Tyrian worth the cost of a full copy? Yes actually, but I never actually saw it for sale until years later. Same story with Terminal Velocity, actually.
Was Baryon ACTUALLY just a thinly-veiled clone of Raiden? Well, yeah, but it was MY thinly-veiled clone of Raiden!
Was that one sidescroller with the choice of two robots really friggin' cool? Hell yes it was, and if you know what it was called then for godssake ping me!
Metal & Lace is hilariously iconic to me, though. I have only ever seen it once in an Electronics Boutique catalog, but it resonated with me and I remember it vividly. Anime robot girls was RIGHT down my alley, even though I didn't really know that alley was there yet.
It looked utterly fascinating, and I was so disappointed to look it up on the internet a decade later and find out that it was a subpar fighting game with low-res titties. I had all sorts of ideas of intrigue-filled plots, undercover espionage, and robust robot customization, and it was all dashed with a single search. I can't hate any video that reminds me of those dreams.
The quiet rage emanating from this video is enough to warm up my cold room
Midtown Madness's demo was also great. Drop you in a city with translucent impassible walls and give you a limited selection of vehicles with only a few races to complete. I wanted the full game SO BADLY when I was little!
I remember a Test Drive demo that was pretty cool.
Did anyone else try to read game discs as audio and download the soundtracks? I remember it working with Midtown Madness and, weirdly, Coolboarders 2 for the PS1
This feeling of the game's indifference towards you and the lack of direction or feeling of any safety was doubled for me, as a Serbian kid who didn't know much English then, beyond computer commands. Readme files wouldn't even help. It was just me, the game, and all the time in this world.
I had very limited access to pop culture and nobody to talk to, no magazines about games to read, etc - just countless hours alone in a room with a computer and this stuff and useless readmes, so I actually sorta get what you mean. It felt so isolating and alien.
The PS1/early 3d games gave me a sort of "liminal spaces" feeling
as a child where even if the game was bad there was something compelling about exploring them.
Tenchu 1 especially!
Me too! I had never really voiced or thought about it what it was. Twenty years later I discover that term and then see videos like this revisiting these old games!
They were compelling to explore because you were young and they were new. The same experience arises in young kids playing modern games these days.
Memory unlocked: My grandma was the first person I knew who had a computer (on which she played Doom and Duke Nukem.) She had that EXACT Over 1000 Games disc. Spent hours exploring that thing when I would visit. I'm still haunted by the memory of not being able to find the exit key while being chased by The Noid.
I take it you couldn't avoid the Noid ?
I never tire of the trope that the weird alien bastards are always wearing some neon lycra jumpsuit or whatever, and our plucky space hero is always just in street clothes or a random laborer's outfit.
Thanks for the video! I had this problem as a kid, that I never thought that a "bad game" is actually a "bad game" and not "I am bad at the game", and having the similar 1000 games on a disk experience it wasn't exactly a great experience in the slightest.
I never understood Chakan (for the Genesis) as a kid, cause I never read the 2 minutes of story at the start nor before each level, and I never actually completed a level because I couldn't figure out where I had to jump. Fast forward like 15 years later, and I find out that yeah, it's just a kinda bad game for those reasons exactly
That's actually pretty interesting, and I swear I remember feeling the same way. Its like as children we don't even have the concept of a "bad game" or a "good game" - that idea just didn't exist to us. A game was never objectively bad, rather, we didn't personally like it, or it made us bored.
I adore this presentation. More of this please. I'll beg.
WOW Cyberbykes is such a nostalgiabomb, especially the level at 30:14! I had so much fun with it as a kid and I remember being in awe with how big the map was and how many secrets there where. Thank you so much for this review!
As a kid growing up in Europe in the early 90s, my introduction to video games was a hand-me-down Amiga 500 from my older brother along with a big box of floppies, mostly pirated games and perhaps 4-5 original games. Most floppies were mislabeled or weren't even labeled. About 30-40% of the floppies had read/write errors: some failed to boot, some got as far as the main menu and then crashed, some crashed at some point in-game. Of those floppies that worked, some had buggy cracks and crashed at some point; some weren't cracked at all and thus required materials that I didn't have and didn't even know I was supposed to have. Even those games (original or pirate) that were 100% working did not have the accompanying manuals that were often essential to play the game (Police Quest was particularly egregious in this regard). My earliest memories of gaming are all something like: booting a pirate version of Zak McCracken, repeating the same steps that at that point I knew by heart, until I got to a point that required to enter the copy protection codes, then watching the game crash and kick me back to the AmigaDOS screen. It was miserable but the *idea* of playing video games was so captivating to me that I kept doing it over and over.
I remember most of that 😀 Plus being too young to understand English and oftentimes having to guess what the heck was going on while playing a pirated, English-only game without a manual…
I learned english with pirated half working Amiga games and english only cartoon network. The 90s of eastern europe were strange...
Oh man. That are times I never experienced. What I grew up with was newgrounds, a Wii (though no rental disks) and a DS lite (still working, apart from a screen ribbon cable that needs replaced), and it's so interesting to see what the "before times" were like.
Also, in the recent videos I've noticed that you've developed a very unique style, and I absolutely love that mix of snarkiness and laconical commentary.
I remember desoldering an chips in rented cartridges, ripping them, and resoldering the chips much better than they were originally. I actually fixed a BUNCH of games from blockbuster. There was an employee who knew what was happening that would let me rent defective games because they would always come back fixed. I never shared the roms. I wish I knew how much money I saved that blockbuster...
What were you using to dump the ROMs? Most people didn't have a ROM dumper back then, outside of industrial applications. How did you play them after ripping? On an emulator?
Wow. I'd rather claw my eyes out than desolder multiple DIPs every weekend. You deserve some sort of medal.
Would it not have been easier to dump via the card edge?
One of my favourite game demos has to be for The Stanley Parable. It's such an odd game to tell people to buy, but the free demo just really shows off the excellent narrator and the humour way better than a trailer can, without using any actual content or story from the full game.
8
I have the full version of The Stanley Parable and it's quite deep.
I was looking for this comment, easily one of the most memorable demos out there. I actually considered it to be better than the full game until I found the in game development "museum", that level of meta kinda redeemed the whole thing for me.
this is immediately one of my favorite videos of yours. your storytelling and pacing is brilliant and the way you engage with misery is amazingly funny. AWESOME!!!!!!!!!
I bought Fade to Black on PC, because I loved Flashback (it’s predecessor) so darn much. I remember it being cripplingly difficult, but I kept at it because of my fond memories of the previous game. About halfway through the game I finally got a hang of the controls and it didn’t seem so bad. Then I breezed through and beat it. Looking at it now, I don’t know how I put up with it, lol. I still dig the particle FX when you disintegrated an enemy. Also this nostalgically reminds me of Bioforge for its absolutely cripplingly hard gameplay. Never could finish that one though.
Slightly janky controls were the biggest flaw in Flashback, but that's kinda endemic to the "cinematic platformer". I love that Delphine decided not to fix that, but rather to make the whole thing 3D instead and magnify the problem.
@@ThetaReactor Yeah, they even reproduced the original Flashback animations in 3D, this is wild.
I loved flashback but didn't have a good enough computer when the sequel arrived, looks like I dodged a bullet.
I came to this channel for the retro PC's and A/V gear but this video on those "liminal" vibe video games was so fascinating I would not mind at all if it became a recurring series!
I want to compliment your writing style and delivery, particularly this passage:
15:27 "This is probably the point where the unforgivable camerawork comes into ironic focus, since you have no idea what just happened. Due to the bizarrely inclined angle, all you know is that three vaguely defined things in the upper 40 pixels of your viewport failed to stand still, prompting you to respond with the only agency a gun-equipped video game character has; but your motives are obscure. What did your man see that prompted him to up his body count, and whose bodies were they? You can at least approach the turret to understand its countenance, but the green bastard and the yellow thing were both evaporated by your prowess, never having shown themselves as more than a few pixels of distant VGA. Certainly at this point you've already learned that if you try to get close to something, your curiosity will be exchanged for blood, so unless you want to reload and take another death solely so you can get your eyes on whatever you just killed, you'll be remaining in the dark about your captors."
That whole section is very evocative and just fun to listen to.
You managed to fit Elon and Hyperloop bashing into a very entertaining video on mid 90s shareware. This is peak content, perfection
Hyperloop is one of the most baffling projects I’ve ever come across. The discrepancy between what was promised vs what was delivered is hilarious. Seeing Tesla’s drive through tunnels at 25-30mph and getting backed up with traffic I find so funny. Whoever approved that in Vegas must be silently furious
@@natelax1367I doubt that, because I'm sure they got a massive bribe - I mean campaign contribution out of it
I remember demo's fondly. However one of the most fun experiences was playing games at the library (full games) without a memory card which made each one a demo effectively. My mind was absolutely blown when I finally was able to get my own memory card and see past the first odd hour of Spiderman 2. In fact I recall finding someone elses card and loading up a save that was near the end of the game and I was like "wow!"
Such a great video! Thank you!
I kinda miss the days of getting used memory cards and seeing what the previous owner left on them.
I was about to say that I also miss getting used cartridge games with saves still left on them, but uh, I guess with the Switch that's still happening.
My parents were divorced but at my dad's house I had a Dreamcast.... But no VMU. I remember leaving Sonic Adventures on for days trying to beat it.
Never have I ever heard a better summary of my childhood PC and gaming history, than in the intro to this. Thanks dude. 😊
I think this might be one of my favorite videos of yours. It perfectly captures the fascination I have with games that time and the world have passed by and my belief that a game doesn't even have to be good to hold my attention, just interesting. Brings me back to the days I discovered Outpost, a space colony building management game by SierraOnline. Which was released in essentially a Beta state as a final game. It was buggy and certain endgame features such as the Mass Driver that are described in the games manual aren't even present, and given its lack of success the modding scene to fix these particular issues never really materialized. Yet, it still compels me to this day and I find myself occasionally booting it up to see how far I can get before my colony turns entirely into red light districts and everyone starves.
Great video, this reminds me of Ross Scott's Game Dungeon series. It's so tough playing old games that don't explain anything well, the kind where you can lock yourself into an unwinnable situation from a missable.
I absolutely adore this please please please make more like it
I know it must've taken so much effort to do, but god damn do you do it good
Thank you so much. I will try.
@@CathodeRayDude That's honestly fine enough for me; thanks for taking the time to reply and I look forward to whatever you create next!
Demos are making a comeback. Check out Steam during one of their sales and there are always plenty of demos to play. Granted few, if any are from AAA developers. Also some are so bad they will probably bring back memories of shareware games. But you will find some great gems in there.
Demos are great. I want to know if I will like the game. Demo discs were awesome. It got to the point that I would pirate ga as just to see if they ran on my PC, most games I ended up deleting cause they wouldn't run, ran bad or I didn't enjoy.
TPB has full length demos, just dont forget to buy the ones you enjoy 👍
I feel like Cyberbikes would be more fun if they took out the guns and just made a game about going off of ramps and doing stunts. Especially if they added the ability to roll the bike mid-air.
I'd keep the combat, but improve it in addition to having an emphasis on stunts and style. In a modern version, I'd have a sniper-style shooting mechanic, where you hold Shift to draw the gun after going off a ramp, going into a Breath of the Wild bullet-time view as you fire at your enemies from the heavens, racking up bonus points for the tricks. Heck, you could even use WASD to perform tricks in mid-air while the gun stays trained on your target for even more points.
The first video of yours I watched, and probably still my favourite. Would love to see more like this at some point, the narration and pacing of the video did a good job of replicating that sort of odd, surreal feeling that accompanied many childhood experiences.
You're content and production is always great. You're an inspiration
0:52 I'm also noticing that even with a proper period setup, many of my MSDOS gaming memories were 'a bit off.' Wacky wheels really does come right to mind. I loved that game.
probably the best video you've made, i like how you have such a large variety of content
Holy crap that presumably stock image of an old HP Pavilion desktop brings back memories. I had one of those along with a bed scanner and a somewhat similar monitor until I got an upgrade when one of my mom's office computers got a replacement monitor setup and it was no longer needed.
I love your ability to fill me with nostalgia, take me back to a “better” time and long to play sub par games with horrible controls until I have an aneurysm from my frustrations! 10/10
My God, I love Shareware. I wonder where my old Shareware discs went. They contained some awesome games. (I think there was Doom in there too)
They got replaced by the "best downloads" pages that hand out meaningless awards randomly and interfere with the actual downloading in every underhanded way imaginable.
This was a really nice video, thanks. Great points too, I remember all too well all the shareware I didn't understand and I'm actually busy ripping my old stacks of shareware CDs that I as a kid used to run on our 386.
On the thing of shareware/demo's being dead: they seem to be returning for (mostly) indie games. Often called a 'prologue'.
30:48 I actually recognize this EXACT yeehaw from the only game installed on my elementary school's Pentium III computers back in 2007 - a Lode Runner clone with art based on a German TV show, also released in 1995. Funny how that works.
No matter the topic you cover, I always find your videos fascinating! I hadn't heard of many of these games, even Fade To Black. It's really interesting seeing what games have been more or less pushed into obscurity by the annals of time. Back in the late 90s and 2000s, my family also had a couple discs of game compilations, and while I didn't have the exact same experience, it was very similar to the one you described and displayed. I had this one in the 2000s called 201 Action Adventure games, which featured mostly game demos, but also a ton of freeware/shareware. I don't remember particularly enjoying very many of the games, but I do remember falling in love with the Avernum series after being exposed to it by that compilation disc. There was also a demo for this top-down horror survival game (which Darkwood reminded me of when I first saw gameplay of it) called Fiend, which was made by Frictional Games, who would later make the Penumbra series and the Amnesia series. And there was even this game called Stephen Hawking's Pro Wheelchair which, frankly, was in pretty poor taste. It was another top-down game, but as you could probably guess, also a parody of the Tony Hawk games. If you spun the wheelchair around enough times in one spot, you would catch fire and get points for "Spontaneous Combustion!" as the game would put it. It certainly was a strange and unique era.
Cyberbykes! So, it was awesome as a kid. The problem is, you were and playing it wrong! The secret/key is the network play. My brother and I were fortunate enough to have two different systems. We could spend hours playing together doing cool stunts, fighting each other, doing the missions, and in general doing what kids do when playing together and make up stuff to do ala the sandbox mode.
Fade to Black is the way it is because it's a sequel to the 2D cinematic platformer, Flashback which itself is a sequel to Another World. The gameplay rules you have to adapt to in those games would be considered very janky by modern standards and they basically tried to apply them to a degree in a 3D space for Fade to Black in a time when developers were still coming to grips with establishing accessible standards in fully 3D games. Same reason for the graphical choices, flat shaded polygons are how characters are depicted in the 3D cutscenes in the first two games and were very impressive in 1991 & 1992 as they originated on the Amiga which was my first computer.
Yeah, can't be too harsh on this game as it came way before Mario 64, Tomb Raider, MDK...
Flashback is in no way a sequel to Another World. It's more of a "spiritual successor".
Another example: Prince of Persia 3D. It was the third game in the series, it came out in the late nineties and it was mostly a Tomb Raider-esque third person game, but when you met an enemy the view shifted to the familiar side view for the fight.
@@dosnostalgic True. However, there was a legitimate continuation of Another World titled Heart of the Alien, available only on Sega CD.
@@jacekszychowski4919 Sure. It's absolutely *terrible*. Except for the intro. The intro is awesome.
I will never forget the Macintosh shareware disc that had Escape Velocity in it. That game blew my mind.
Escape Velocity was _fantastic._ I remember how proud I was to go from the minivan to a full fleet of captured Kestrels. I'd _love_ a reboot of that.
I remember getting the full version of Fade To Black back then, not knowing anything about it other than "it's a third person shooter with a cool name"... I think I got maybe 45 minutes out of it before never touching it again. That's saying a lot, since I was pretty easy to please as a kid. I'd spend endless hours playing and replaying the random shareware garbage you mentioned, and even get hours of entertainment out of games I didn't much like, just because they were games and they were there. But FTB was just... awful.
Funny enough, of all the shareware and demo compilations I had, I don't think any of them had Fade To Black or Cyberbykes. (a shame, since Cyberbykes is exactly the sort of game I'd have gotten endless mindless fun out of)
Your videos get better and better with each release. Get this man to a million subs!
YES we definitely had this CD as kids, i'm glad you were able to remember the name of it. the cover is really memorable too. thank you so much!!!
Haha glad I found this. You had me cracking up! The right shift hahahaha.
I also wanted to say that I appreciate what you were saying about paying homage to lesser known things, like Cyber Bikes. I completely agreed and understood what you were saying about all of that.
Fantastic video!
"Some games wouldn't run and some were mahjong"
I came here for the modem video first, but this is the video that made me a subscriber and patron. This humor is amazing.
This has to be the most polished professional video that I’ve seen on your channel. I’m not sure if it’s your passion for this particular subject or fever dreams from the past! Excellent work! You should really consider doing more retro video game reviews. This makes me remember the horrors of shareware!
I've been waiting forever for Tim Rogers to drop a new video. And your video is the only thing that has scratched that is. This is really good
Great work as always, man!
While I did have a bunch of those crappy collection's, there were a few AMAZING collections in Europe, that retailed at a higher price. That's how I got to play Diablo, Fallout 1+2, and Tomb Raider in 1999 on a basically non existent budget.
sounds like badly obscured commercial piracy...
@@xeostube nah there was demos of all 4 games released, Diablo basically lets you get as far as the Butcher, Fallout IIRC was fairly accessible even being able to recover the water chip, never got hands on the Van Buren Tech demo for FO2, and never had much interest in Tomb Raider at the time.
i really adore your eloquent writing
brevity and wit, yo
Sometimes I remember that weird emptiness from those old demos too. You've quantified it well.
I really loved this video, thank you.
There's a wonderful game from 1995 called Cybermage: Darklight awakening. It flew under the radar and almost no one ever heard of it. But man was it great. You were a half human, half cyborg with guns as weapons as well as magic from alien technology with corporate conspiracies, hookers, corrupt cops, gambling mechanics, secret areas...it was great. Anyway, they had a demo that on its own was just as big if not bigger of any of the "chapters" in the full game, and the demo was completely made from scratch and not cut from the real game. I really don't know why it wasn't more main stream. Even now, you'll basically have to search for an ISO of it b/c no one seems to want to monetize it, not steam, EA, Origin. I highly recommend trying it!
Uplink was so amazing, I would play that demo on loop for hours. Honestly, it felt like the full game couldn't compare.
Great video! Random self-indulgent story: It reminded me of (and made me reflect on) a funny experience I had when getting a new PC as a kid. There was like this second hand market (in Aus) near by and I wanted a game so I went to check it out. And for (I think!) $5 a floppy disc with a 'Mario All-stars' logo on it. Even though I was a little kid at the time, I was still skeptical of this having played funny random fan games on those types of CDs you mentioned. And I was shocked, and VERY pleasantly surprised to find it actually did in fact load up Super Mario All-stars. I realised a while later it was just autoloading a ROM through z-snes. A good memory, I recall we just moved so I had to play it with my monitor on the floor and it was a cheap second hand green tinted CRT... Jesus, that's hilarious when I put it in perspective. And for the first time it does make me feel "actually" old. Crazy stuff! I also had the free version of the original Unreal from some magazine CD. That sticks around in my head for whatever reason
Cheers for the content!
Flashing lights, flickering images he warns and then he illegally keeps blinking, you get hypnotized
Well done video. Really enjoyed it.
Incredible vid, thank you!
That first compaq PC is the exact same one, and same color that my mom got. The first PC i played everquest on :')
great job, you are an awesome story teller!
Man, the mousse input control mode for this certainly looks like...something...definitely something alright :D
I love the amount of sass in this video haha '
Moments before a floating robot bastard shoots you in the face'' made me burst out laughing
i keep coming back to this video. normally i don't like it when hardware people do software reviews but i just love this.
i came back to post the same comment again. this video deserves to do numbers.
These are the types of video titles I refresh my subscription feed for.
Loved every minute, slapstick commentary and advice to developers 30 years ago, what’s not to love?
Thank you so much for talking about this
Damn I was looking for Cyberbikes for years!! Always remembered it fondly, but forgot the name and couldn't find it. Thanks mate👍😂
This videos definitely giving me memories, I remember my neighbor had this first person vehicular combat game but you got all these gadgets, I remember you could actually deploy a brick wall behind you fortnite style. I also remember this weird first person game I had everything had like photograph textures in almost like a gallery setting and there were different themed rooms I don't remember if there was any enemies or what objectives if any there were or if it was an edutainment or what, I just remember there was some toxic sludge room and another "hall of presidents" themed room, I must have been 8 playing this game it's seriously just images and sounds bouncing around my head.
The bad camera angle that points downward at an angle from behind the player is often times done that way because of draw length issues
I love the tim rogers-esque narrative you have going. Keep up the great work.
My local video store was an independent (in Thorncliffe Mall in Toronto), that sold semi-pirated shareware games on 3 1/2 and even 5 1/2 disks. They were duplicated by a local outfit called "West Hill Sales" which has literally no record online (even in paywalled databases) and was probably just a guy in a garage in Scarborough copying disks. Their only contact info was a PO box that I actually sent a letter to in the 90s (that got returned as undeliverable).
They were around 4-5 dollars a disk, cheaper than renting a console game at the same store.
I grew up on a lot of shareware CD's, but for mac. I have a lot of fond memories of Marathon as a kid (other games too, ones that I forgotten the titles to a looong time ago but Marathon is the only one I went back and played later as a teen and later an adult) and having no clue what was going on, and making guesses, filling in the blanks in my head instead of trying to read the terminals like someone who had a reading level above that of a third grader might. I think that's where my appreciation for the overall atmosphere of a game comes from those experiences and there's something really nostalgic for me about impenetrable nonsense shareware games. For those who weren't around for that, or for those that do share that ambivalent fondess for cryptic shareware trash, you should check out a game by thecatamites called "Goblet Grotto". captures that feeling perfectly.
I really liked your game reviews!
25:24
All you had to do was follow the damn train, CRD.
Also, my all-time favorite video game demo was Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol - I got it from one of those game packs, too.
PC Games in 1994 were REALLY AMAZING as long as you weren't a small kid looking for platformers and kart games. I had Wing Commander, Ultima, Civilization, Sim City, Heretic, a ton of Adventure Games, TIE-Fighter, Warcraft, Raptor...
Fade to Black was the successor of Flashback, a „Prince of Persia“ like game that I loved as a kid. Unfortunately, I could not finish this game, no matter how much I wanted to love it.
This brought back a lot of hidden memories of “Full Throttle” 🏍
“…and some were mahjong.”
So much mahjong.
I love every second of this.
The nostalgia beat-down I got when you popped that 1001 games case up on screen.
Ohh damn.
25 year ago me would have loved that cyberbikes game, and spent forever just driving about.
One of the games from the era that allowed some manner of world exploration was Car and Driver. You could drive off the roads and up the mountains to an extent, this to me of the era was almost as much fun as playing the game as intended.
I distinctly remember the second game you show with the space ship at 3:01 I haven't watched the whole video yet but I really enjoyed that game and got pretty far. I have no clue what it was called and if anyone knows please tell me. I got really excited when I played EV Nova because it felt like a better version of this top-down space exploration game.
As a kid growing up in Eastern Europe in the 90s, the PC was (and still is) my ultimate gaming platform. Games were far too expensive on the consoles, and copying them was impossible, while with PC games, you could get over to your friend with a bunch of floppy disks and exchange games by copying. Yes, it was illegal, but no one cared about it.
When you said "Terrifying visions of the Abyss" I immediately thought it would be a French game... and yup, Delphine Software FTW.
27:46
Sweet this game supports vr
I wonder what vr headset it supports if the quest or index?
I've never heard the phrase "Hideo Kojiman fever dream" before, but I love it
What a fantastic video!
The early DirectX/windows game sampler demo disc were my favorite! so many memories!
“thrust into a denimed man’s body” is such a well crafted yet equally cursed combination of words. 👏🏼
Exploring those discs that came with the computer magazine my Dad bought me, undoubtedly the fondest memories of my childhood and my window to the world before we finally got hooked up to the internet. And it wasn't just the games, but also the software and even better the MOD music !
3:24 SKUNNY! I had that demo! No idea where my brother got that from, but I remember it as one of the first computer games I played 😅
I didn't know games could be better ^^
Thanks for pronouncing Warwick correctly!
Your problem with mid 90s PC gaming seems to be that you didn't know other PC users, the great thing about being a kid with a PC in the 90s was that as long as you knew someone who knew some one who knew some one whose older brother bought the game then you could get it for free. I don't think I realized that PC games were commercial products that could be bough in stores until I was a teenager, before then they were always just things traded and copied amongst friends.
Your finally getting your deserved recognition
Oh man. That image of the computer in one of those computer hutch/bookcase things, gave me flashbacks. Now that I think of it, when was the last time anyone ever saw one of those?
Hmm, I don't know what to make of this video. My father had a shareware game CD called Action 100, it featured a lot of well known games from publishers like Apogee and Epic etc, and I loved it. You also mentioned some of my favourite PC games like Rise Of The Triad and Spectre and Wolfenstein 3D.