/shareware/

[Anonymous No.3260313]

Let's share some fond shareware memories; I used to play pic related all the time back then, but never actually got the full version

[Anonymous No.3260328]

Pictuerd is Skunny: Save Our Pizzas.
First ever "game" I bought, turns out it was nothing more than a shareware sold at a computer store.
Game ended couple of levels into the game, which left everyone puzzles to the point my father called the customer service asking how t o advance the game

[Anonymous No.3260338]

>>3260313
I thought shareware went away because everyone and their mother figured out how to crack them really quickly. I don't think I played shareware other than to see if it was worth going on the warez channels on AIM to find a crack. Usually we didn't even need that. One member of our little nerd crew was so dedicated to cracking games that he never actually played. Just distributed them to the rest of us. Of course, we're all working mediocre jobs and playing games, and he's a VP in a company that writes installation software now...

[Anonymous No.3260440]

>>3260338
Naw brug, shareware went away because the internet made it easier for companies to distribute demos and take orders from a centralized location.

[Anonymous No.3260564]

One of my first and favourite games I've ever played

[Anonymous No.3260671]

Only shareware game I EVER actually mailed money in for. Unfortunately by then they had already shut down and it took me several years before I ever found a full version download. Wasn't quite as satisfying as I had hoped.

[Anonymous No.3261186]

Had a 486 with a CD-ROM drive. For the longest time I used to get shareware floppies, stuff like Commander Keen and whatnot. One day I saw some CD that said it had 51 or 151 games on it, I can't remember which. It had a damn good selection of just about everything on it.

Secret Agent, Mystic Towers, Solar Winds, Ken3D, Scorched Earth, and a bunch of lesser known or one-man-dev games like Army/Campaign and Boloball. I've been looking for years, but I've never been able to find a copy of that exact CD. Not that I'm surprised, fly-by-night companies crawled out of the woodwork and pumped out tons of these shareware collections, and the only info I have to go off of is that it had anywhere from 50-150 games on it and some cartoon of a guy on a roller coaster as the disc art.

[Anonymous No.3261251]

If you haven't already you might wanna check out, http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html, it has a pretty large selection of shareware/game CDs.

[Anonymous No.3261352]

I played Castle of the Winds quite a bit back around the Windows 95 days (Jesus, was it 3.11?), great little roguelike

[Anonymous No.3261365]

>>3260564
fuck yes my negro

Exile 2: Crystal Souls was the best though

Also, the remakes are overly streamlined and not as fun.

[Anonymous No.3261645]

>>3260671
God I remember sinking in a lot of time as a kid in this
What was I thinking

[Anonymous No.3261659]

>>3261186
Scorched Earth. Man. Now you've triggered my nostalgia button. I used to sit around in a keyboarding room during my study hall and play that.

[Anonymous No.3261824]

>>3260328
The Skunny game are polished turfs. They're so fucking shit. I'll give the developer credit for implementing some impressive shit in DOS that had been done on consoles for years, which was surprising because DOS was not optimised for games (in OPs example he managed parallax scrolling, and regular scrolling was hard enough for DOS) but then the actual games where just fucking awful. In OPs pic, Skunny moves way too fast and is too slippery AND floating, making it almost impossible to control properly.

[Anonymous No.3261845]

>>3261352
my nigga

[Anonymous No.3261895]

>>3260564
Came here to gonna post this. Played Exile from a Galaxy of Games disc. My first taste of CRPGs. Got lost in all 3 Exile games for days.

[Anonymous No.3261925]

>>3261251
archive.org also has a bunch of 90's shareware CDs, but good luck finding anything on that site.

[Anonymous No.3261997]

>>3261824
Yes, yes they were! Back to the forest was more playable than the others like it, I think. Except of course Skunny Kart, which was just a different game.

And skunny kong country didn't even seem to have that physics screwyness at all! Still lousy, but playable, and it did supposedly have some sort of level editor.

[Anonymous No.3262094]

>>3261824
>>3261997
That Skunny Pizza game isn't very good, but there's a whole lot worse.

[Anonymous No.3262235]

>>3260313
Me too! I was also just remembering this game the other day. Is this what it sounds like when doves cry? BTW I did find a platform er of mystic towers on a BBS ,but I think it was the preceding game because it looked like crap

[Anonymous No.3262348]

>>3262094
Save our Pizzas, Back to the Forest, somethingoranother-Wild West, and I think Lost in Space all seemed to use the same engine. There was also some horizontal shooter. But the two appealing ones were the SNES title equivalents, with the Wacky Kart ripoff...

[Anonymous No.3262618]

>>3262235
That would be Baron Baldric: A Grave Adventure (staring the same dude); it does look like Death, specially for a 1992 game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn0rg3wScy0

[Anonymous No.3263549]

>>3262618
For that matter, Mystic Tower was released in freaking 1994

[Anonymous No.3263550]

>>3260338
Weren't most shareware games back in the day just demos that you had to have the full version physically mailed to you?

[Anonymous No.3263557]

>>3263550
Or I mean, not "demos" exactly, but gimped half full versions of the real game.

[Anonymous No.3264680]

>>3263550
>>3263557
Depends on what you mean by back in the day, before widespread CD drives, yeah.

I did however find a copy of duke nukem 2 at an office depot, IIRC. But that was when duke3d was already out. And by then at least the shareware versions could be obtained packed onto CDs.

[Anonymous No.3265057]

>>3261352
fuck yes

[Anonymous No.3265227]

>>3260564
Exile 3 is one of my top 5 games of all time. The remakes are unplayable shit, and I say that having been given free copies of all of them by SpiderWeb software for being one of those old school asshats who bought and registered his 3.5" floppies direct from the company through the mail.

[Anonymous No.3265229]

>>3261352
Hell yea! Wait.. win95? I had this in the 3.1 era. Loved it but never got very far. Kept restarting.

[Anonymous No.3267971]

>>3261352

Oh shit nigga I thought I was the only one who played this game

[Anonymous No.3268514]

>>3265229
I think it was 95, since I'm from thirdworldia and I barely even used 3.11
Still, the full game's been available for a while, part II is amazing, definitely recommend if you haven't already played it through

[Anonymous No.3268518]

>>3268514
>I think it was 95, since I'm from thirdworldia and I barely even used 3.11
3.11 programs ran just fine on 95. So you having played it on 95 does not say it can't be a 3.11 game

[Anonymous No.3268834]

The shareware version of Monster Bash is pretty good quality. There were many big levels with great secrets and the platforming wasn't too bad.

The next two episodes dropped the ball though. Many of them felt rushed and straightforward. There was a weaker sense of progression and exploration.

[Anonymous No.3268854]

I'm glad Exile and Castle of the Winds got name-dropped.

Anyone here recall Mordor: Depths of Dejenol? It was a rather fast-paced dungeon crawl, real unforgiving if you play a solo character. Had a pretty kickass MIDI soundtrack.