Windows Shareware Disk Showcase: Ultimate House of Games for Windows, Part 1

It's been a while since my last vidya game post, hasn't it? Well, that's what happens when you write a blog where anything goes. You know, I think I should make that my blog's subtitle: The Blog of Anything Goes.

By now, I’m sure any 21st century Earthlings reading these posts have a few questions. Like, why do I have such a nostalgia for all this crap that became obsolete centuries before I was born? Let me explain.

See, in the aftermath of the Fusion, one of the ways the two worlds started getting to know each other was by trade. The most vital commodity we traded was knowledge.

As we grew to learn each other’s languages and cultures, we taught each other what we knew. It started, of course, with things like what was safe to eat, how to prepare it, and how to make antivenom for that nasty yophakhi sting.

Once we got that part down, we got technological. Earth taught us about things like electronics and rocket science, and we taught them what we know about medicine, biology, and how to use the Art of Change.

One convenient stepping-stone in our wrangling of Earth tech was to buy older, simpler examples of it and the documentation thereof in order to dissect and reconstruct it with our own methods.

Thus, over the next few decades, we began our climb when it came to melding the arts of electronics and transmutation. Our climb was much faster, for we had the shoulders of giants as footholds.

And that’s why my first computer was one of these fucking things.

Even the art of transmutation can’t make this thing less shitty. Photo belongs to one Clicsouris (CC BY-SA 3.0). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Musee_de_l'Informatique_-_Exposition_25_ans_du_Mac_16.jpg

Back in the days when they were still replacing the old infrastructure for the internet, shareware disks got a new lease on life. Only ones I remember personally having as a ‘net were the eGames Galaxy ones, though.

Thankfully, since Archive.org’s servers weathered those decades like a champ, I can dig around and find some more of that good ol’ late 20th century crustiness. With a VM in tow, let’s take a trip back in time.

You’ve seen the Silver Surfer, now witness the might of the Silicon… uh, Sucker.

The one we’ll be looking at today is called Ultimate House of Games for Windows.

Ahhh, yes, good ol’ Earth, Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, and Moldy Cheese World.

After I installed the WIRL plug-in, I was both disappointed to find it didn’t work on the emulator and glad it didn't microwave the virtual machine. This done, I rolled on over to the House of Games.

As we go on, you’ll find that these categories mean fuck all. You’ll see what I mean.

I’m going to be rating these games by five disks.


: Utter waste of bytes. Fuhgeddaboudit.

: Not the worst, but not good.

: Not fantastic, but functional.

: Really good, for a shareware game.

: REGISTER THIS.


Let’s do these in order, shall we? First up, the Arcade section:

Alien 3-D 2, Rebel’s Revenge:

Alien 3-D 2, huh? Not sure if I should be jumping into the Alien 3-D franchise midway through. Alien 3-D 3 is the one most people start with, but I feel like I wouldn’t really have the same context going in there as I would if I’d started with the first game.

Let’s look into the game’s lore before we dive in, shall we?

Whose 10-year-old wrote this?

As we can see, Alien 3-D 2 was a real rebel in the franchise, upturning series conventions much in the vein of Zelda II and Castlevania II. Steering, for one, was a real game-changer. The face of the video game industry would never be the same.

Also, please quit twisting my tail.

In this version, you have to kill the aliens, but in the Extended Director’s Cut, you had diplomatic options. The option for erotic tentacle liaisons caused quite the stir in the press.

Let’s give the epic storyline a moment of scrutiny, shall we?

You’re continuing your mission to explore the farthest reaches of the universe, just as you touch down you hear a message through your Video Radio.
That’s called a television.

It’s from one of the planets.
You know, as opposed to Azathoth’s asscrack.

Turns out there’s been a Rebellion on the planet Mascotron, the enslaved locals have fought back and are out for revenge, you are the top of the hit list and it’s your job to protect the human race.
Wait, wait.

So, if our protagonist is being targeted for revenge by a people who have recently overthrown their enslavement, does that mean this character was involved in their being enslaved in the first place?
Is… is this game pro-slavery? That’s it, I hereby disavow this game and its author, and will make a catchy social media campaign about it.

Seriously, though, fuck slavers.

Up next, we have the Weapons:



Eh, magma’s no big deal. I made magma cakes when I was a ‘net. Hell, even today, I like to roll around on some. Real therapeutic.

(Disclaimer: Those last four sentences were sarcasm. Dragons aren’t that hardy. Don’t try this at home. Or anywhere.)



Nothing too out of the ordinary, here. Just your garden-variety laser cannons. Ho-hum. No, we don’t use laser cannons in the future; ballistic missiles are still way more practical.

One, a hydrogen bomb is enough to nuke an entire city. Remember the nuke that hit Hiroshima? A hydrogen bomb dwarfs that. “Overkill” would be an understatement about using these against a spaceship. Two, even that is nothing against a fucking sun.

For context: Every second, the sun's putting out the same energy as a trillion 1 megaton bombs.


It would fry not only the spaceship you're aiming it at, but also you, and anything within the same distance that Mercury is from the Earth's sun.



Of course, it's actually referring to the fact that the sun is a thermonuclear fusion reaction, much like the end result of a hydrogen bomb, but c'mon. You know I couldn't not rag on this.

I don’t have the patience to talk about the rest of this thing’s readme (yes, I saw the cheats section at the end), let’s get on with the game!

A starscape intro... Basically, these guys made a bad version of that one Windows screensaver.

If a title screen full of nothing but bad MS. Paint robots against a chalk white background isn't enough to instill confidence in you, I don't know what is.

After a screen full of static jabbers in a robot voice I can’t understand a word of, we get this.

Yeah. First-person perspective on a 2d plane. Maybe it’s the emulator, but this shit’s just about impossible for me to click on in time. Between how fast everything is coming at you, and how awkward aiming with the same mouse you’re using to move the camera with is, you can forget actually hitting anything. Oh, and everything’s coming from behind you.

All this is accompanied by more mumbly voice acting, only here it’s coming from an actual person. A young-sounding one, at that. And here’s where I realize that this game was literally made by a child. Now I feel like a dick.

These MS Paint drawings SUCK, Jimmy! Go to your room!

I swear, this shit feels like it came right outta Kilk & Pl-

No selling as shareware, HUHHHHHH? UHoG's got some 'splainin' to do!

Oh. Okay, it really was made in Klik & Play. Color me surprised.

Bad Toys:

This just reeks of “early DeviantArt”.

Bad toys, bad toys, what'cha gonna do, what'cha gonna do...

Not much to say here, just a shitty Wolfenstein 3D clone drawn in crayon. Controls relatively competently.

Criminy jim-jam! You people didn’t tell me this would be a horror game!

Only real noteworthy thing here is this cheesy splash screen.

Hot diggity, that’s one lovably trashy t-shirt. You think they make those in XLD size?

Bedtris:

It’s Tetris. No, really, that’s it. Not even with a mattress theme. I’d say that’s wasted potential, but no. It really isn’t. (I may or may not have spent way longer than I should have playing this one; it’s Tetris, after all.)

Blast Doors:

You can’t say it’s not apropos.

You could call this a strategy game, and you wouldn’t be wrong. You aim a cannon, load it, and fire at the enemy. That’s about it. Not typically my genre, but in the interest of fairness, I buckled down and tried to meet the game on its own terms.

It promptly whooped my ass. But damn, if it wasn’t an ass-whooping I enjoyed.

One neat mechanic the game has is the variety of artillery you have to work with. Straight missiles, cluster bombs, napalm… It’s an NRA member’s wet dream. You can also move by using rockets aimed at where you want to go.

This game doesn’t take itself seriously. As the enemy fires, they’ll spout pithy one-liners, or else just straight nonsense. A current of black comedy runs through this game, right down to the tongue-in-cheek readme.

Thankfully, none of the pop-culture references were recent as of the game’s release, so none of it feels dated.

I love how, in the middle of this horrible “the toll of war” scene, you’ve got American Gothic right there.

A lot of this turned out to be prophetic. A testament to the powerlessness of rational minds in the greater scheme of social machinery.

Pfff. Yeah, that’s about the right attitude to that kind of pedantry.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really get all that good at the game, partly because the cursor disappeared whenever I went into the game window. Even if I couldn’t really dig too deep into it, this game just oozes charm. This game is easily worth tracking down.

Botz:

You just knew we had to follow the one unironically great game with another turd.

Botz is a top-down shooter wherein you have only one hit point, everything around you moves lightning-fast, and the walls are all flowers and so are the power-ups and traps.

Graphically, this is just Geocities: The Game. I kind of like that aesthetic, actually. Call it kitsch. Obviously, the main character is a gold-plated R2-D2, and the titular Botz are some generic action figure.

These screencaps show you all there really is to see about this game.

 BrainWave:

A fixed shooter set against trippy fractal backgrounds with extra levels you unlock by registering. That’s about as “late 90’s shareware” as you can get, right there.

I was ready to write this off as entirely uninspired, but it does have a modicum of thought put into its design. Every so often, enemies will drop power-ups, and all these do is make your shot better. Thing is, when you die, these power-ups scatter and fall off the screen, and you have to pick as many of them up as you can when you respawn.

Challenge Pool:

Hot damn. This game’s the definition of “basic”. Right off the bat, it lets you know that it has no ambition beyond being a bare-bones interpretation of Pool. Literally, it’s the game distilled to nothing but its bare components; point stick at ball, push ball at other balls to knock them into holes, repeat.

Irritatingly, it takes a few seconds to calculate the trajectory of the balls in question after you shoot, and you don’t even get to see the cue actually ram into the ball.

With all that said, it’s a functional game, but that’s all it is. It works. I’m sure this game made some salaryman’s day more bearable, and that’s what counts, right?

DX-Ball:

This game claims inspiration from an Amiga game, and from the title screen alone, this is very apparent.

Very, VERY apparent.

This game is a clone of Megaball, which is a clone of Arkanoid, which is a clone of Breakout. Such is games’ history. And hot damn, does it have style!  And a real banger of a theme tune, too. You could’ve told me this was an Amiga game, and I would’ve believed you.

Mechanically, it’s pretty solid. You’ve got a wide variety of power-ups; some do simple utilitarian things like making your paddle bigger, and others do things like adding more balls to the screen, and even letting you shoot the blocks like a fixed shooter.

The arrangements of the blocks are very cleverly done, utilizing the wide variety of gimmicks available. The place where ball lands on your paddle decides where it shoots off, making it like a pinball game, in a sense.

I guess if I had to find something to complain about, it’s the lack of keyboard controls. Though, given the kind of game it is, even that’s kind of understandable.

Suffice to say, I this game made a good impression on me, and evidently a lot of people agreed; this game spawned a whole series! DX-Ball 2 even got a remake in 2018.

In fact, you can play it online, here! https://dx-ball.ru/

Number 6 on the list of “Things Mr. Welch is No Longer Allowed to Do in Video Games”… Kidding aside, this is really endearing. Things like this give free/shareware games that little “homegrown” touch I love.

Gravity Well:

This one honestly took me a few attempts, and I considered just writing a paragraph or two about it based on what little I’d grasped, and moving on. Then, I realized that was the same mentality that screwed over NieR.

Is this what the mindset of a games journalist is like? Playing a game just long enough that you can pretend to have an informed opinion on it, then moving on to the next in a joyless procession? It feels like a fundamental violation of what games are meant for.

Between this and game development, it seems like the dream of working in the games industry is one better left unfulfilled.

Shit, am I glad my job has zero to do with games. I’ll take giving dragons tits over this crap any day.

Oh, right, Gravity Wall.

So, it plays a lot like Asteroids-cum-Lunar Lander, but also there’s a territory war going on. You land on new planets you want to take for your own, and defend the ones you already have.

There’s actually a lot of complicated shit going on in the background, but thankfully the part you actually play is pretty simple. Freighters and other friendly units help expand your empire, and your goal is to defend them with your fighter (the only unit you actually control).

The frenetic pacing of this game combined with the constant tug of each planet’s gravity makes actually accomplishing anything very difficult, but it’s so satisfying when you finally do. And that’s how a game should be.

Once I engaged with the game on its own terms, I found it pretty fun. I feel like games journalists fail to do this. And, to be fair, it’s not always an option when you have so many games to write about, and deadlines breathing down your neck.

Games journalism, then, is a fundamentally faulty system. A game whose only winning move is not to play.

Shit, I just turned this review into an editorial. Uh, lesbians!

Gubble:

Really, you went with a t-pose for this? Also, “Melcosia” sounds like a disease.

Be honest, you’ve seen the Game Grumps episode of this. The minute you saw this, “WE’RE PLAYING GUBBLE!” came to mind. There’s no joke I can make here.

For you heathens who haven’t, Gubble is basically Pac-Man, except you collect a screwdriver and unscrew bolts in the floor instead of eating dots. Also, the screwdriver acts a hit point that you can easily pick back up.

Playing this game, you get the sense that whoever made it was really invested in this Gubble guy as the next big mascot. It’s a little embarrassing to watch.

You can just hear the creator lovingly crafting these assets and thinking “Yeah, this game’s gonna be nuclear.”

Looking at the clear that more care was put into the presentation than the actual game. In short, it’s like Pac-Man, but slightly worse.

Hotwheels 3:

Remember when I called Challenge Pool “basic”? Well, this game is straight-up unfinished. Even Challenge Pool had an A.I. opponent for you to compete against; here, you’re either hot-seating it with a friend, or racing against nothing.
This is a top-down racer much like Off-Road or Micro Machines.

Your racecar accelerates like a jackrabbit on crack, and turning is more awkward than a teenage My Little Pony fan. You’ll spend most of the race ramming into the walls, which I swear are made of fucking magnets.
You remember those godawful R.C. segments in the Toy Story Genesis game? This controls like that.

This is what loneliness looks like.

If there’s one nice thing I can say about it, it’s that it has a surfeit of tracks, and some amount of creativity was put into them.

Yes, a racing game where the second course literally involves following traffic directions. Riveting.

In fact, as you go further on, you see more and more effort being put into the presentation of these tracks.

This looks like something I might’ve used as my wallpaper, once upon a time.

Someone got cute with Photoshop.

I’m just glad they didn’t go with 420.

In all honesty, you can tell this is just some guy’s pet project that he put out there to get feedback on. As an alpha, it’s not too shabby. Hopefully the author went on to do better.

Inside World:

Being told to switch to 256 color mode fills me with trepidation. Finding out that it’s an RPG in the middle of the “arcade” section (which, to be fair, also included a strategy game) is even more frightening.

Worst of all, it’s average.

So, the idea is that you’re a bunch of co-eds wandering into some kooky scientist’s basement to fight mutated bugs. That’s our plot. To be fair, it’s about as deep as the games it imitates (Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder).

Aboveground, it’s an Ultima VI clone, but the minute you step inside, it’s Dungeon Master without the spooky atmosphere or clever puzzles.

Combat feels like you’re just blindly mashing the “attack” button, given how few offensive options you’re initially given. Strangely, characters don’t seem to actually die, instead just “falling asleep” for a little while before springing back up to take their lumps all over again.
Even when the entire party got K.O.’d, no game over screen came to greet me. Here’s the thing; unless it’s a Lucasarts point-and-click, games have stakes. When you play a game, you stand to lose something, even if it’s just the game itself.

Hell, even in Lucasarts games, you could count getting stumped and giving up as “losing”, since you don’t win. Maybe that’s this game’s idea of losing? I’m not even sure if I lost in that sense, since I definitely could’ve solved it if the game didn’t bore me.

The puzzles, meanwhile… Well, they’re competent.

I think “it’s competent” about sums up the game as a whole. It’s no Eye of the Beholder, but as a shareware game, you’re not really expecting that level of polish, are you?

I guess that’s my problem with it. It’s not particularly polished, or intriguingly awful. It has no real concept it wants to assert, beyond being a Dungeon Master clone. It fails to make a compelling argument for its own existence.

Again, though, this was probably some kid or salaryman’s first RPG, and if it got them into the genre, then it did its job.

Invaders 95:

It’s an implementation of Space Invaders. That’s it. If you like that game, you could do worse. It has some cute flourishes, like the aliens getting little MS.Paint googly eyes when you hit them. Sound effects are present and functional.

In a way, this takes you back to the idea of a simpler time, when finding a competent port of Pac-Man or Space Invaders meant you were in hog heaven as far as Windows games went.

I’m conflicted as to the rating I should give it.

I’d give it a 3, but… Come on, it’s Space Invaders. Even today, the game remains a tense test of skill in spite of its basic nature. On the other hand, though, I gave Bedtris a 3, and yet it’s still undeniably Tetris in all its compelling glory.

This looks like it came right outta some 10-year-old’s sprite comic.

But, Tetris clones absolutely swamped the shareware scene. It didn’t take much to make a competent Tetris implementation. When a game is so widely copied, can you really give high marks to something that does a competent job of copying it without adding anything interesting?

Even Pac-Man clones tend to at least change up the maze layout. This, meanwhile, ports over something less common, and that alone helps justify its existence.

Maybe you think I’m full of shit. You might be right. Regardless, I’m giving it a 3-and-a-half, just because.

Jumpstar:

This one got me thinking, how much of a game’s quality comes merely from presentation? Was it merely the lack of polished graphics and sound, was it something more substantial that turned me off this game?

I’m not terribly experienced in the SHMUP genre, after all, so what kind of judge would I be? So, I picked up the best SHMUP I know, Summer Carnival ‘92 Recca, and played it with the sound off.

At least the enemy designs are somewhat kooky.

Instantly, I noticed how much more frantic that game’s pacing is, and how much faster on your feet you have to be: Enemies also tend to line up in such a way that you can fire on them and decimate a whole row of ‘em. There’s also a lot more happening on screen all at once, but not so much that it’s impossible to keep track of.

In contrast, this game’s enemies move in very simplistic patterns, and the game moves at a ploddingly slow pace. I thought for a second, maybe I don’t like this because it’s a Gradius clone? I don’t care for Gradius, after all.

But then I remembered, Gradius has obstacles in the terrain, while this game relies entirely on enemy patterns. Mind you, so did Recca, but that game had very fast, dynamic enemy and bullet patterns. These guys all move in a Castlevania Medusa Head pattern (i.e. serpentine— shit, I just realized, of course Medusa’s head would fly in a serpentine pattern!), or home in on you.

So… Yeah. I’m sorry, but this game’s painfully average.




Sheeeit, we’re close to the 4000 word mark. I get the feeling we’ll hit 6000 or so if I do the whole list in one post.

Rather than dump a loooong one on you, I’ll split this up into two parts. See you next time! Same dragon time, same dragon blog!