Odd Abandonware

[09philj]

Not every game can be on sale forever. Some are for consoles or OS's that become obsolete and nobody sees a point in porting them forward. Some are fucking broken. Some use code stolen from Unreal Engine and bankrupt Silicon Knights. This is not a thread for them. Those make sense. This is for the games that, for reasons that are entirely unclear, are unavailable for purchase, games that there's no clear technical reason for being off storefronts but somehow fell through the cracks.

So let's talk about Fate/Stay Night. You know what Fate/Stay Night is. It's a 2004 dark fantasy visual novel that spawned an enormously popular franchise that has consistently received new entries in various forms of media since it was released in 2004. Ufotable will be releasing the third in a trilogy of films adapting the VN's Heaven's Feel route next year. Even if you've never consumed any Fate media, if you're even vaguely aware of it you'll probably be able to pick Saber out of a lineup. With that in mind, it's very strange indeed that it's not actually possible to buy the original VN, even on it's original platform of Windows, and it never received an official English translation either. Even the cleaned up Realta Nua which improved some visuals and added voices while removing the hentai scenes isn't available. If you want Fate, you're going to have to get piratical, and patch it into English yourself. This is a very strange situation for the starting point of such a beloved property to be in.

 

[Marik2]

I think the reason for that was that people were exposed to FSN by the anime and some lets plays, but most of those people don't want to bother playing it since it has numerous bad endings, and you somewhat need a guide for it. The company doesn't seem to care about bringing the original game to the west, since the public now has the phone game and anime to entertain themselves with.

Companies are all about low effort, but high profits.

 

[I can't enter my old name]

You can still buy it on Ebay at a ridiculous price.

STALKER is strange, because when its developer GSC Game World went under, the source code was leaked. This lead to people creating mods that contained the entire game.

Then GSC Game World came back, and now you can buy STALKER on GoG, except you don't have to, because you can play the entire game through one of those standalone mods. You don't need to own the original game, and the developers don't really seem to care.

 

[Dalisclock]

Black Mesa is pretty much a full on remake of the original Half Life, minus the Xen levels which are coming...someday. However, nobody really liked the Xen levels so I think most people don't care. I'm guessing nobody liked Xen anyway, since I've yet to see any kind of underground appreciation fanbase for Xen popping up in gaming forums.

It's up on Steam, which is run by the Dev of the original half life. They don't seem to give a shit. Then again, they apparently also let "Hunt down the Freeman" be sold on Steam.

Mother 3 is a well regarded cult follow up to Earthbound, and I'd guess it is actually more popular. This is despite never offically being released in the west and a group of dedicated fans spent years translating it into English and then released onto the internet to be used with a ROM. Nintendo doesn't seem to care much and neither does HAL labs either, though since they can't be bothered to localize it for a Western release in any way, shape or form, at least they've had the decency to not impede the fans from doing so on their own.

And, of course, there's the bizarre case of the Shooter/Stealth game from a decade or so ago called No One Lives Forever. It's out of print at this point and nobody knows who owns the damn thing because the original studio went under years ago and the rights may belong to Warner Brothers, Activision, and/or 20th century FOX. The problem is that apparently the actual paperwork is locked in a file cabinet somewhere and hasn't been digitized, so none of the companies want to go look for it without a "processing fee". This has been immensely frustrating for GOG and others who want to remaster/release it. Though it is considered abandonware, ironically, because someone would have to actually go and prove they own the IP in order to issue a Cease and Desist, which again, nobody seems to care enough to go check the damn file cabinets to do.

 

[Squilookle]

Thought this was going to be an interesting talk about abandonware and what place it has in the world and then Visual Novels popped up and my eyes just glazed over.

Do you want to talk about Odd Abandonware in general? Or do you just want to talk about your night book? pick a subject and run with it, and give it the right thread title for best results.

 

[SupahEwok]

Well, the Battle for Middle Earth games are old favorites of mine that you'd have difficulty getting nowadays. No technical reason for it, as the discs run fine on Windows 7. That technically fits your criteria, although the reason is pretty simple rather than unclear: the rights used to publish them expired long ago, and there has not been publisher interest in attempting to bring them to digital distribution. That's the reason for plenty of abandonware, even if they aren't attached to one of the world's most known IP's.

 

[09philj]

Thought this was going to be an interesting talk about abandonware and what place it has in the world and then Visual Novels popped up and my eyes just glazed over.

Do you want to talk about Odd Abandonware in general? Or do you just want to talk about your night book? pick a subject and run with it, and give it the right thread title for best results.

It's the example that made me want to make the thread, since PC compatible abandonware is so unusual in these days of digital distribution, GoG, and open source or freeware releases of old games. (SimCity 1989 was renamed Micropolis and given an open source release, for example) Mortal Kombat 4 is another game that had a PC release (And was the last MK game to get one until Mortal Kombat 9), but hasn't been made available digitally, unlike Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

 

[CaitSeith]

It's the example that made me want to make the thread, since PC compatible abandonware is so unusual in these days of digital distribution, GoG, and open source or freeware releases of old games. (SimCity 1989 was renamed Micropolis and given an open source release, for example) Mortal Kombat 4 is another game that had a PC release (And was the last MK game to get one until Mortal Kombat 9), but hasn't been made available digitally, unlike Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Oh, I remember playing that one. The arenas where 3D instead of 2D if I remember.

Thought this was going to be an interesting talk about abandonware and what place it has in the world and then Visual Novels popped up and my eyes just glazed over.

That's purely on you. I wonder what other genres would had made you glaze over. Text games? Point & click Adventure games? Sport games? Flight simulators? Not cool, bro.

 

[09philj]

It's the example that made me want to make the thread, since PC compatible abandonware is so unusual in these days of digital distribution, GoG, and open source or freeware releases of old games. (SimCity 1989 was renamed Micropolis and given an open source release, for example) Mortal Kombat 4 is another game that had a PC release (And was the last MK game to get one until Mortal Kombat 9), but hasn't been made available digitally, unlike Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Oh, I remember playing that one. The arenas where 3D instead of 2D if I remember.

3D graphics, but action still locked to a 2D plane.

 

[CaitSeith]

It's the example that made me want to make the thread, since PC compatible abandonware is so unusual in these days of digital distribution, GoG, and open source or freeware releases of old games. (SimCity 1989 was renamed Micropolis and given an open source release, for example) Mortal Kombat 4 is another game that had a PC release (And was the last MK game to get one until Mortal Kombat 9), but hasn't been made available digitally, unlike Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Oh, I remember playing that one. The arenas where 3D instead of 2D if I remember.

3D graphics, but action still locked to a 2D plane

But you could strafe to the foreground or background, which slightly rotated the action plane in its Z-axis, didn't it?

 

[09philj]

It's the example that made me want to make the thread, since PC compatible abandonware is so unusual in these days of digital distribution, GoG, and open source or freeware releases of old games. (SimCity 1989 was renamed Micropolis and given an open source release, for example) Mortal Kombat 4 is another game that had a PC release (And was the last MK game to get one until Mortal Kombat 9), but hasn't been made available digitally, unlike Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

Oh, I remember playing that one. The arenas where 3D instead of 2D if I remember.

3D graphics, but action still locked to a 2D plane

But you could strafe to the foreground or background, which slightly rotated the action plane in its Z-axis, didn't it?

I assumed based on some gameplay videos that there wasn't any strafing, but I hunted down the IGN review from the time and apparently there was strafing but it wasn't intuitive to control and there was no point in doing it. Very much a "the game's 3D now so there has to be 3D movement" thing.

 

[Squilookle]

Thought this was going to be an interesting talk about abandonware and what place it has in the world and then Visual Novels popped up and my eyes just glazed over.

That's purely on you. I wonder what other genres would had made you glaze over. Text games? Point & click Adventure games? Sport games? Flight simulators? Not cool, bro.

It could have been any genre under the sun to be honest. The point was the thread advertised a talk about abandonware. What we got instead was a poor excuse to wax lyrical about one game in particular. Nothing wrong with a chat about a particular game- just don't pretend you're covering a wider topic when you're not.

 

[09philj]

[/quote]

Thought this was going to be an interesting talk about abandonware and what place it has in the world and then Visual Novels popped up and my eyes just glazed over.

That's purely on you. I wonder what other genres would had made you glaze over. Text games? Point & click Adventure games? Sport games? Flight simulators? Not cool, bro.

It could have been any genre under the sun to be honest. The point was the thread advertised a talk about abandonware. What we got instead was a poor excuse to wax lyrical about one game in particular. Nothing wrong with a chat about a particular game- just don't pretend you're covering a wider topic when you're not.

I've not actually played it yet, and it's quality is neither here nor there, really. The absence is the thing. Fate's big money. It's F2P mobile spin off RPG, Grand Order, has a lifetime gross of something like $3202000000, and both of the Heavens Feel movies topped the Japanese box office. It's gotten manga, light novels, anime, video games, sequels, prequels, sidequels, the whole lot, but the original thing itself is missing in action. Thats weird and fascinating to me. It made me wonder about other stuff that's just... not there. Nintendo's treatment of Mother is similarly strange, since theyre happy to remind everyone about Mother and Earthbound every time a new Smash comes out but show little inclination to actually do anything with them. (Although this is a pattern with Nintendo. Poor Captain Falcon.) Properly popular games ending up as proper abandonware isn't as common as it was back before digital distribution became a thing, and despite worries the all digital future will be a detriment to archiving, if anything it's made spreading work across many storage devices easier than ever. Pretty much everything that had a PC version and isn't lost in some kind of rights purgatory is available in some form. Not Fate though.

 

[09philj]

Interestingly the first Metal Gear Solid got a PC port in 2000 which is now Abandonware. Admittedly, it was an inferior port that was missing a lot of content from the Playstation version and had some graphical glitches, which is probably why it's not been rereleased since then.

 

[Meximagician]

Not quite abandonware, more like freeware that went extinct.

There's a 2001 freeware game called Drive. Created by three Masters of Arts Music Technology students from the Utrecht School of the Arts with assistance from the Bartimeus Institute for the Blind, and at least in part produced by The Accessibility Foundation. The game claims to be a 'racing game for the blind'.

The goal is to hit your vehicle's top speed by hitting boosters, guided by only sound effects and voice cues from your navigator, Bob. Drive also boasted an online leader board to see who could accelerate the fastest. There's a Mobygames entry, articles on PC world, Gamespot, IGN, and Worthplaying.com. A Slashdot post even mentions it while discussing another game Bartimeus Institute helped with, a VR shooter called Demor[footnote]at least Demor required a special VR hardware setup, so it makes sense that there's no download link[/footnote].

That's a lot of details for a game where the official hosting site went down years ago and nobody seems to have thought to rehost the game anywhere. Now the only hope for the game is if someone finds an old ATA hard drive that happened to have the installer on it. Probably would be encased in amber and buried under some Now That's What I Call Music! CDs.

 

[Inazuma1]

And, of course, there's the bizarre case of the Shooter/Stealth game from a decade or so ago called No One Lives Forever. It's out of print at this point and nobody knows who owns the damn thing because the original studio went under years ago and the rights may belong to Warner Brothers, Activision, and/or 20th century FOX. The problem is that apparently the actual paperwork is locked in a file cabinet somewhere and hasn't been digitized, so none of the companies want to go look for it without a "processing fee". This has been immensely frustrating for GOG and others who want to remaster/release it. Though it is considered abandonware, ironically, because someone would have to actually go and prove they own the IP in order to issue a Cease and Desist, which again, nobody seems to care enough to go check the damn file cabinets to do.

Go watch GManLives's review of NOLF1 over on youtube. Trust me.

 

[Dalisclock]

Interestingly the first Metal Gear Solid got a PC port in 2000 which is now Abandonware. Admittedly, it was an inferior port that was missing a lot of content from the Playstation version and had some graphical glitches, which is probably why it's not been rereleased since then.

I played it way back in the day. I remember a lot of the cutscenes not working corrrectly. I assumed it was something wrong with my copy or my system.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

One game that I encourage any adventure gamer or cyberpunk fan to try, Circuit's Edge.

It had a lot of features we take for granted now; namely an open world, relative freedom to explore and take in details in just about every location right from the get-go, and a wonderful cyber-noir tale in a very distinct setting. The puzzles are actually pretty free of moon logic, if you're worried about that, and the combat system is strange, but relatively easy (I handled almost every fight including the more difficult ones with a cheap knife and the knife fighter chip). It's still abandonware as far as I know, but been a while since I DL'd it.

 

[09philj]

One game that I encourage any adventure gamer or cyberpunk fan to try, Circuit's Edge.

It had a lot of features we take for granted now; namely an open world, relative freedom to explore and take in details in just about every location right from the get-go, and a wonderful cyber-noir tale in a very distinct setting. The puzzles are actually pretty free of moon logic, if you're worried about that, and the combat system is strange, but relatively easy (I handled almost every fight including the more difficult ones with a cheap knife and the knife fighter chip). It's still abandonware as far as I know, but been a while since I DL'd it.

It was developed by a company that got merged into EA and it was published by a company that got merged into Activision so I don't think there's much chance of it going on sale ever again.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

One game that I encourage any adventure gamer or cyberpunk fan to try, Circuit's Edge.

It had a lot of features we take for granted now; namely an open world, relative freedom to explore and take in details in just about every location right from the get-go, and a wonderful cyber-noir tale in a very distinct setting. The puzzles are actually pretty free of moon logic, if you're worried about that, and the combat system is strange, but relatively easy (I handled almost every fight including the more difficult ones with a cheap knife and the knife fighter chip). It's still abandonware as far as I know, but been a while since I DL'd it.

It was developed by a company that got merged into EA and it was published by a company that got merged into Activision so I don't think there's much chance of it going on sale ever again.

Yup, early glimmers of Westwood's game chops before C&C was birthed. One little touch I miss is having to find info in the game's documentation to help you out (you need it for phone numbers and your ATM pass code)