Games That Weren't^®

A little game which is a sequel to another game which never got finished. You may know the 3rd entry, which was actually finished and released in the Crap Game Compo in recent years called "Ake Goes Medievil".

Ake goes on another adventure, this time in a small sideway scrolling platformer.

Currently, nothing much goes on apart from a hard to control Ake floating around the platforms and a dead end at the end of the preview.

Featuring some reasonable graphics and some good music by Zyron, this game doesn’t really promise too much. Talking to the programmer should hopefully reveil the reasons behind this game.

Ake has another hard time, will he ever see the light of day?

The first in a series of three remarkable games, but most remarkable for the fact that only the 3rd game in the series has been finished and released at a crap game competition in recent years.

Ake starts his adventure in a game dominated by C64 Basic character set graphics, but neat little hi-res overlayed sprites, which animate fairly well.

The main character does not respond too well, and jumping is buggy, and no progress can be made past this first screen, so its assumed that this is it.

Some Christmas music plays as you try to make sense of what the game has to offer, which seems to be in the right direction in terms of sprites, but not anywhere else.

Johan will hopefully enlighten us on this game very soon, and maybe introduce us to more of the game. Watch this space.

A great character idea, but game design is missing…

Aftermath recently surfaced to GTW thanks to Jason Whitener who kindly brought it to our attention.

The game is a US based game that was programmed by Mark A. Dickenson, who was active on Qlink back in the day (and programmed the Stereo Sid Player as well as several other utilities). Mark was an active supporter of Qlink when it was up and was active in the sid forums.

He went to a couple of Sid conventions they had as an offshoot of the forums they had active at the time, and later went on to develop the Stereo Sid player, with Stereo sid support, supporting both the internal as well as either the second sid mod or the Dr. Evil Labs Stereo Sid Cart. Later he programmed several other programs, one of the more memorable ones being digiplayer, that would play ripped samples, and even supported the reu, allowing for longer ripped samples to be played. Mark even was a software developer on the Commodore 65, designing the music, digital autio and text to speech software.

Aftermath was something that Mark was working on which would allow for stereo sid utilization, REU support and uploadable content support. It was a kind of Ultima/Questron style game with some dated/unrefined graphics compared to some releases you might know. In the demo version we are hosting (thanks to Jason who grabbed it from a BBS many years back), you can see some various bits and pieces from the game, including a world editor.

As far as it is known, the game was never going to be marketed commercially, as the c64/128 market had started to dry up (though this is to be confirmed with Mark).

Mark these days works on a hobby browser based game called Alien Assault Traders … I wonder how much of Aftermath may have sneaked into this game? We hope to find out more soon and learn what fully happened with this game.

For now, check out the demo and enjoy :-)

Dungeons and Dragons was a gaming phenomena that started in the 1970s when historical gaming enthusiasts, Gary Gygax created his own rules to tabletop battlefield gaming and focused it on a small group of heroes sneaking into a castle.

The game proved popular and to this day remains a huge influence on popular culture, though few people realise it. All modern computer games owe something to Dungeons & Dragons. Any game with even a casual structure that involves hit points, experience or levelling, in fact owes it’s existence to the original RPG game that introduced these concepts.

It is no surprise then, with the explosion of home gaming in the 1980s that Dungeons and Dragons tried to get in on the act.

This game, preserved in ‘preview’ form on www.gb64.com, sees you create a hero, choosing between a Warrior, Wizard, Cleric, Paladin or Thief and venture out into your surroundings. As such, despite it being ‘Advanced’ Dungeons & Dragons, the character creation is more similar to style to the original Dungeons & Dragons of the 1970s. Race-wise too you can only choose from several basic races and not the mixed race characters that typified Advance Dungeons & Dragons and many other games under the banner, such as the Gold Series games including The Savage Frontier and Pools of Radiance.

The unfinished state of the game shows itself through basic spelling errors on words such as Armour and Halfling and poor formatting, with too many words starting on one line and finishing on the next. In fact, some elements are downright bizarre, ‘experience points’ spelt ‘xperience points’, for instance. And starting as a level one Mage with 22 hit points, when every D&D gamer worth his geeky dice collection knows Wizards get 1D4’s worth of hit points per level, therefore starting between one and four hit points.

The game proper is a typical text adventure, with a menu displaying your options when you enter a town or ‘area’. In the town you can buy weapons and armour, or visit the temple, inn or casino. Your choice of dangerous ‘area’s consists of a forest, a dungeon and so on.

Playing the game it becomes clear this is in no way an official D&D product. Around this time TSR/SSI were producing quality RPG games, immersing the player fully into the D&D universes, such as Forgotten Realms. This game, on the other hand, plays like the results of a first-time bedroom coder. Misspellings, poor formatting, basic setups, poorly written and with an incredibly tedious combat system that bizarrely features no spells despite my character being a wizard, I was glad when my wizard was killed by a Giant Cockroache because I was bored of waiting for the fight to finish, when my options were either running away or attacking again.

I can only assume that the game was perhaps created as a showpiece for the programmer, perhaps to take to TSR for it to be commissioned or to a software house to commission a different work. Sadly the preview isn’t up to much, which is probably why it remained a preview.

Sadly the game does actually have potential, simply because text adventures were relatively well suited to a pen and paper RPG game like Dungeons and Dragons, if done well. This isn’t, sadly, although if it is tentative results of a first-time bedroom coder, it’s a valiant effort (although there is no excuse for such terrible spelling). But on a commercial level, it’s a stinker and probably better off left as a Game That Wasn’t, rather than a Game That Was.

A little puzzle game which was planned for the popular German games magazine, Magic Disk.

This preview features 5 levels of puzzle shuffling to represent the pictures supplied with the puzzle. This is by no means a new idea. A little buggy in places, but reasonably promising in its own right, although the graphics could be better and have a bit more colour.

The full version never surfaced on Magic Disk, and now its up to GTW to track down Bas and find out exactly how much further this game got.

Fair, not original, not completed…

Brought to my attention by Jason Kelk, AD Infinitum is a early version of W.A.R which was released by Martech in 1986.

You may wonder what a game like this is doing in the GTW archives, but you will notice that the final game compared to this, is a lot different from this preview.

For instance, in this preview your ship can turn both directions like Uridium, but in the released W.A.R game, you can only travel one direction.

You’ll also notice that the title screen has a font very similiar to Andrew Braybook’s own in Uridium. It seemed that AD Infinitum was dubbed too similiar to Uridium, so they cut the double scrolling and added extra bits to try and cover up the fact that it was a Uridium clone.

Essentially the original W.A.R game was scrapped to make way for a new version to keep legal eagles out of the way. Sadly it ruined the game, and eventually only the Hubbard music was any good.

Just how far the first version got before it made the scrapheap, we don’t quite know. Stoat and Tim are present on the internet, so hopefully we can throw some questions their way about the game. This could be all that exists of W.A.R version 1.

More soon we hope…