Nostalgia....Old niche-type games...
 

Well today I was feeling rather nostalgic about old games. I of course now have a vast collection of older generation console games (through emulation). One of these games include the little known 'interactive movies' of the 1990s. I thought it was really cool at the time, and just recently I was playing one of the games for the PS1 called Braindead 13. Rather amusing..

Anyways, I did some digging around about more of these types of games, there is of course Space Ace, and Dragon's Lair, but these games were released way back in the early 80s. Imagine that. Anyways, I am wondering if anyone else here remember these types of games as well?

I also have in my collection 'Who Shot Johnny Rock' for the 3DO platform, but these games were also released for other consoles, and I would imagine for the pc at the time as well.


I did stumble upon a really interesting link while searching more information about these old relics, and found out a site where there are updates being sold for more modern consoles, and even dvd/blu-ray players.

For those who remember these games, or are curious these are the trailors to some of them...

Dragon's Lair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bkSTophvCI

Space Pirates
http://www.digitalleisure2.com/Trailers/SPintro.mpg

Who Shot Johnny Rock
http://www.digitalleisure2.com/Trailers/WSJR.mpg

P.S

Perhaps most would consider these types of games rather cheesy, but looking back now, it was rather interesting for it's time, and I can't help but wish if they would make some games likes this again; but thats just me.

Hack. Takes us back to the '70s on mainframes. The original Star Trek game, same timeframe.

I have a version of the old hack running here, called slashem. There is a very similar version known as gtkhack. Adequate graphics using gtk widgets.

I also have a very old copy of Larn here, with VAX source. I've been fiddling with it a bit, and have it running, but it is strictly text and I find it rather tedious to play.

I dunno, but I really liked the old Mechwarrior series as well as most FASA games. I think most of these came out in the late 80s and early 90s. My favorite was Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries (3D enhanced edition), I still have the CD somewhere in my other house. I also played lots of Sega Genesis/Megadrive games and I still do actually, I bought a gp2x and I have them on there so when I go on a trip I can play them all again (I know I should have probably waited for the pandora, but as it's still not out ...).

Do a search for a'abandonware' torrent if you are into older games but be careful:

'I noticed a small amount of these games contain viruses'

I also don't know how legal that torrent is.

Yeah, there are many dos games too that you can run through dosbox or dosemu. I know there's also:
http://www.openttd.org/
which is a native linux port of Open Transport Tycoon, which is now abandonware. Just know that abandonware means just that, that the companies that made the games either no longer exist (so they can't pursue you legally) or no longer care about the game because it is so old and no longer in stores and don't plan on any expansion or re-release.

Several Genesis/Megadrive games and many SNES games are ESA protected, because they were actually re-released along with newer games. Like for example there is a Sonic the Hedgehog compilation for the XBox, if you could just download the roms of these games and play them, what would be the point of buying this ? Well that's why they started to legally enforce you not downloading them. SNES games even more so, I know they make lots of Zelda, Metroid, Mario remakes (I don't really like Mario) for the DS and probably now for the Wii. They don't want you downloading the roms so they can include them on the game CDs as bonus stuff.

I know on the Wii it's virtual console feature you can download a lot of nes/snes and genesis games for the console, but no sega cd games as far as I know. I admit I already have most of the roms anyways, but I was talking more of these 'interactive' type games I mentioned earlier. There were ports to the SegaCD like Space Ace, etc, but because of the single speed of the Sega CD, the videos were quite blocky in quality. The 3DO sys was a little better, because of the 2x cdrom speed, but the PS1 had better video codecs, but not a lot of the interactive games were released for it. Then I found that site, digitalleisure.com which seems to be remaking these games, which is also interesting because they must have had access to the original footage in order to do so, because I don't see them taking videos from either the laserdiscs or segacd/3do games because of the quality of the trailers is much better.

Anyways, as for the other games, I really got into the ecco the dolphin games for the segacd (emulated of course), and some others, but it was when I played these interactive movies is what really got me about this subject. I do have Wing Commander III and IV for the PS1 (legitimate copy), which does have actual FMV, but it isn't quite really an 'interactive' movie so to speak, where you have to make quick decisions during gameplay/scenes.

Man, what about Zork? I played that game for years (all of them except II and III) and never beat a single one of them. Damn zork.

Never heard of 'Zork' but I will look that up as well. While I was going around torrent sites I actually found emulators for the laserdisc system, I saw actually copies of Space Ace...I did not know there was a laserdisc emulator out there...hmm.. I still want to buy these games though, but don't know when I will be able to.

Interestingly though these games like Space Ace, Dragon's Lair, and Mad Dog Mcree were on originally laserdiscs in arcades, then ported to consoles later on, when consoles began using cdroms. I wonder how it works with dvd/blu ray players though since they seem to have most of these games ported to those as well.

I know I've played Mad Dog McRee in the arcade as well, must have wasted many coins on it.

Mad Dog Mcree:
http://www.digitalleisure2.com/Trailers/mdintro.mpg

Mad Dog McreeII
http://www.digitalleisure2.com/Trailers/MD2Trailer.mpg


I am wondering if the company that is remaking these games are forced to reverse engineer most of the code, since ALG (American Laser Games) is most likely defunct, so I doubt they would have any access to original source code, plus they would have had to use the laserdisc version since that is the highest video quality available. I would imagine that even finding copies of it on laserdisc must be very difficult indeed. But actually the quality of laserdisc is comparable to SVCD mpeg-2, which is not far off from dvd quality.

I have never played any of these games on arcade, and only heard about them a few years in gaming magazines, but then forgot about them again until recently.


Anyways, this is the Braindead 13 game I mentioned earlier, which I have for PS1 but as a copy, not original. I recently sent an email to digitalleisure in hopes that they might consider a remake of this, but I have not heard back from them yet, plus getting the game might be difficult since the original publisher ReadySoft has been defunct since the release of Braindead 13. This is more of an amusing game, especially the homicidal character with the hooks for hands, Fritz. :D

Braindead 13 intro..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKn4ahuvbG0

Brainded 13 Main character vs. Fritz.. :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcVo6N0ZXtU


I really wish they would make games like this again.

Nostalgia abounds here.

From the beginning I maintained an archive of pretty much all the shareware stuff I downloaded from the BBS's of my day, which includes animated GIFs and other images (not the naughty stuff, just the stuff that looked neat on a 16 color EGA screen), applications, communications terminals (Telix, Procomm), utilities, games, etc. I kept everything on 3.5" floppies, and maintained 2 copies of each, as I learned early on the loss potential of floppy disks. You can imagine the stacks I had?

I've got enough classic 80's games to fill a DVD, all cataloged and set up so they can be easily copied into any DOS emulator. I've set up config.sys and autoexec.bat files, and a nice DOS based menu system. I've bought all the King's, Space, and Police Quest series, along with Lary, too!

Other than the Atari 2600, until the PS1, I was never into consoles, so I don't have much nostalgia for them. I do have a copy of the Atari games I liked to play as a kid. I have a PS2, and plan to purchase another for when it dies, so I can continue to play my PS1 games. Standard PS3s don't play PS1 games. :(

Oh, you can play ps1 games on a ps3, I have many here and they all seem to work. But, there is a problem in that $ony didn't bother to add any kind of high quality filters to their emulators and the graphics of ps1 games look like absolute s*** on the ps3. It doesn't even look as good as it does on say epsxe, which I've tried. Too bad most games freeze when running them through epsxe. I still have my ps1 (not here with me), but I hate playing it as is. The memory cards are possessed, I swear it. I once lost all my saves when I added a new car to my GT2 garage, wonderful ! I wanted to smash both the memory card and the ps1 with a hammer. Luckily I did not :)

The regular PS3 does not. Some of the older models (20G and 60G) did have a chip, or software) that emulated the PS2, but I don't have that model. You have to pay an extra $100 for a PS3 that will emulate PS2, but I understand the newer ones are software-based emulation, which is not nearly as good. And you have to special-order them.

The later models still emulate PS2 games, but it is only done through software. The older generation PS3s actually had the emotion chip hardwired into the PS3, but later models left out the chip, and is done only through the software of the PS3.

As far as I know any model of the PS3 is supposed to play any PS2 or PS1 game, however with PS1, there are some companies when they made the game did not follow certain standards for the original console and some games may not work correctly or at all.

I didn't know that. Well, I dunno which version I have, but it seems to play both PS1 and PS2 games just fine. I guess I got lucky :)