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videogames + (4)

Why History Needs Software Piracy: How copy protection and app stores could deny future generations their cultural legacy.
posted by homunculus on Jan 27, 2012 - 53 comments

Retro video games have come back into the public consciousness. (See previously) [more inside]
posted by reenum on Sep 10, 2010 - 18 comments

Home of the Underdogs (previously, previouslier) has been resurrected -- and enhanced with community-driven features (user comments, user added reviews, user ratings, etc.) -- by Lord_Pall. That is all. [via mefi projects]
posted by cog_nate on Mar 26, 2009 - 55 comments

Home of the Underdogs is no more. Although in decline since 2006 or so, it was once *the* place for abandonware. HotU hosted 5000+ game reviews (by contrast, the "next-best-thing-still-around", abandonia has around 1000), the majority of them with the games available for download, including some titles that are now incredibly difficult to find. [more inside]
posted by juv3nal on Feb 18, 2009 - 77 comments

Save King's Quest IX. Ever since personal computers became powerful enough to run graphics-intensive action games, adventure games like the ones once produced by Sierra On-Line (King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and countless other titles) and LucasArts (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit The Road) have been in decline--most of the series have been abandoned, King's Quest was awkwardly morphed into an unsuccessful first-person fighting game, and Sam & Max 2 was famously cancelled (and, less famously, uncancelled). In the last couple of years, the genre's gotten a shot in the arm from an active emulation community, the ready availability of "abandonware," but mostly from unauthorized sequels and remakes created by fans and distributed for free. The flagship of these new games was to have been King's Quest IX, a three-part finale to the series that wrapped up all outstanding loose ends and properly said goodbye to the characters. The project team included forty people, some of whom worked on the game for more than four years. And, at the end of October, Vivendi Universal (which bought, then disbanded Sierra On-Line) pulled the plug.
posted by Epenthesis on Nov 15, 2005 - 40 comments

In 1995, Microprose released Master of Magic, a game best described as Magic: the Gathering meets Civilization. Despite a daunting list of bugs, the game developed a strong following. It's one of the top 150 games of all time (nevermind the date!), and easily one of the best turn based strategy games ever. Lots of people would love to see this franchise revived, and the good people at Stardock [makers of Galactic Civilizations] are trying to do just that. Godspeed!
posted by absalom on Jan 14, 2005 - 29 comments

Sometimes beautiful games just get screwed in the sequels... But thanks to obsessive fans, it doesn't have to be that way anymore!
D1X and D2X are OpenGL/SDL updates of (in my opinion) the best first-person-shooters of all time.
Xenocide, still in progress, and UFO2000 are overhauls of the classic X-COM, UFO Defense.
And finally, Anacreon Reconstructed is a graphical update of Anacreon: Reconstruction, an amazing old ASCII game about inter-galactic empire building.
Know any other good Indie overhauls of classic games?
posted by kaibutsu on Aug 28, 2004 - 19 comments

Fighting feeping creaturism. Following in the wake of "abandonware" sites, here's a chance to perform that much-needed downgrade in order to escape bloat/adware/etc. What's your favourite software relic?
posted by holgate on Aug 31, 2001 - 34 comments