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A Story About Gaming
The closest I have ever been to being "a serious gamer" was the summer as a young teenager when I acquired a dollar-store CD with Over 1000! shareware games on it, and played through ALL of them. All of them. (Okay, there were some like Tetris that you couldn't really "play through", I learned to hate 3D FPS, and I got impatient pretty early on with some of the more persnickety text-based adventures, but basically: I gave at least a fair shake to ALL of them.)
I found the CD recently while cleaning and was getting kind of nostalgic about that particular time and corner of gaming and how it had passed forever. I still think fondly of a lot of those old games, and I still think fondly of the experience of fighting through some of those games I don't think fondly of, and alas! the days of shareware CDs are gone forever.
...and then people started linking to the itch.io indy games Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and I realized, self, this is as close as you will ever get to a modern version of that old shareware CD.
So, dear readers, I bought it.
And then I got really frustrated that there was no way to download my purchase except by paging through 1500+ games and doing it one-by-one?? It will take me hours just to do that! How am I going to make my new shareware CD!
And then I started doing it and realized why they do not have it available as a single downloadable package. OMG. Devs these days need to learn how to AVOID BLOAT. I think I have only downloaded one game so far that would even have fit on that shareware CD BY ITSELF. Yes, graphics are better these days, but not that much better! And I seriously doubt many of these games have long fully-produced VR movie-quality cutscenes. They do not need to be multiple gigabytes in size. That CD had four Commander Keen games, Doom *and* Wolfenstein 3D on it.
...this has been your "kids get off my lawn" whine for the day.
(I still have all the Commander Keen .exes, though I haven't tried to run them on Windows 10 yet. The largest one is just over three quarters of a megabyte.)
(...does anyone know how to batch-download from an itch.io package?)
I found the CD recently while cleaning and was getting kind of nostalgic about that particular time and corner of gaming and how it had passed forever. I still think fondly of a lot of those old games, and I still think fondly of the experience of fighting through some of those games I don't think fondly of, and alas! the days of shareware CDs are gone forever.
...and then people started linking to the itch.io indy games Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and I realized, self, this is as close as you will ever get to a modern version of that old shareware CD.
So, dear readers, I bought it.
And then I got really frustrated that there was no way to download my purchase except by paging through 1500+ games and doing it one-by-one?? It will take me hours just to do that! How am I going to make my new shareware CD!
And then I started doing it and realized why they do not have it available as a single downloadable package. OMG. Devs these days need to learn how to AVOID BLOAT. I think I have only downloaded one game so far that would even have fit on that shareware CD BY ITSELF. Yes, graphics are better these days, but not that much better! And I seriously doubt many of these games have long fully-produced VR movie-quality cutscenes. They do not need to be multiple gigabytes in size. That CD had four Commander Keen games, Doom *and* Wolfenstein 3D on it.
...this has been your "kids get off my lawn" whine for the day.
(I still have all the Commander Keen .exes, though I haven't tried to run them on Windows 10 yet. The largest one is just over three quarters of a megabyte.)
(...does anyone know how to batch-download from an itch.io package?)