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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?)
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All the shareware on my disks was full games; most of them had an address (yes! An actual address!) where you could mail a check to tip the makers, or at least the people to whom the original code had been left by a UFO in a crop circle, in the same sort of wistful way that people these days will link to a ko.fi, but I had no ability to write checks so it never ever crossed my mind. At one point we did decide we would do whatever it took to pay money in exchange for the rest of the Commander Keen games, but IIRC we could not figure out a way to do so.
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I'm just planning to download the games that interest me when I intend to play them; it seems like it'd be easier to keep track of what I've already played that way (and also means I don't have to go through hours of downloading in one session).
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I can't do anything about the filesizes, though.
(I have downloaded all the single-player TTRPGs and am looking forward to playing them. They're weird.)
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Hee! I feel like that's a fair enough whine.
mood: nostalgic
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But I honestly don't know enough about the post-shareware CD indy games universe to even have a good concept of what I might and might not find worth trying.
I am noticing that a fair amount of it is tabletop, visual novels, and game-making resources, so it might not be quite the overload of video games it looked like at first glance (which is good!)
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Re: mood: nostalgic
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But seriously we probably spent most of a summer on Keen 4 and got massive amounts of joy out of it; there is absolutely no reason your indy game needs to be 2 gb+, even if it does have a non-midi soundtrack.
Re: mood: nostalgic
File sizes aside, I think the comparison between shareware games and modern indie games is often an apt one. A lot of shareware was created and distributed by the proverbial guy in mom's basement, and now with so many open-source programming tools and opportunities for independent distribution, games made by one person actually have a chance to be seen and played again. And those indie bundles sure can have a similar feel to those old shovelware CDs... Who knows what's in there, but sometimes you find real gems.
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The filesizes aren't quite as bad as they looked at first - I have the first 150 in Windows versions now, and it's only averaging about 200 mb per game --- wait no, that's still too big.
(I suspect many things in this bundle are weird.)
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