Windows Shareware Disk Showcase: Ultimate House of Games for Windows, Part 2

Here we go again, back with more shareware games to tear into!

Klotz:

Ooh, “Klotz”, huh? Sounds like a puzzle game. I wonder what new and exciting concept this will bring!

It’s another motherfucking Tetris clone.

It’s literally Tetris, but arranged in perhaps one of the most asinine ways possible. Oh, all the basic components are there, and in a recognizable configuration, but they’re all every so slightly off.
Look at the default controls, for instance: you’d think that you’d use the arrow keys, right? Nahhh, that would make too much sense. Can’t have that, can we? Instead, it uses the numpad, and not even the parts you’d expect.

For what it’s worth, you CAN change these to a more sensible WASD combination, so it’s not the end of the world, but I still have to wonder what the hell they were smoking.

If you're wondering, "faster" increases the game’s level. Yeah, that’s right, the Level is something you can control mid-gameplay.

Oh, and the game actually starts before you have the chance to click inside the window to take control. And guess what? There’s no pause button. Instead, to stop the game, you have to set the level window to 0.

So, what’s the point of a game that’s all about keeping your head under escalating speed and tension, if you can just slow the game down when it gets too much for you?

That’s like a spelling bee where you can skip a word if it’s too hard. No wonder games that don’t mollycoddle you stick out nowadays, when they’ve been pulling shit like this since the 90’s.

All that hyperbole out of the way, though, if you elect to set the controls to something sane, and choose not to be a wuss and leave the speed controls alone, you still have a competent iteration of regular Tetris, albeit one that doesn’t innovate in the slightest.

It kind of makes me wonder why the developer bothered.



…

You mad genius.




Mordor:

I have no idea why this RPG is in the Arcade section, but that’s how it be.

Mordor is a Wizardry clone. I could just end the review here, but I sunk like two hours into this thing so I could pretend to have an informed opinion on it, and by Gosh I will.

You have your usual “menu town” in this game, complete with Not Boltac’s Trading Post, a place to resurrect your dead, Guilds that dictate what your class is (because Gosh forbid we be as straightforward as just picking it at the start, right?), a Seer who tells you where shit is, a bank, and a place where you can buy enslaved monsters.

Wait, what?

Daaaamn. Gotta love that they gloss over it with the term “companion”, but let’s be real here. These guys are “companions” the same way that guy working in your garden is “part of a foreign exchange program”.

Combat plays out in real time, for no particular reason. In a game like Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder, it makes sense, because you can see where the enemy is and maneuver accordingly, or even attack from a distance.

Here, however, there’s no reason not to just blindly go full Kenshiro on the Fight button and massacre the enemy. Even Might & Magic III let you do this, in a turn-based context. Not to mention, the fights all play out automatically unless you specifically input commands other than your pre-determined defaults.

Party creation is tedious, in that creating a character involves making the character, logging out of said character, then making the next one. Thankfully, you can only have a max of 4 party members.

The game has this weird insistence that you log in as a particular character. Possibly to avert the initial confusion of starting with an empty party like with Wizardry.

Speaking of party creation, let’s look at our options, shall we?

  You assume a lot about me.

Not mor(dor)e fucking elves.

People who know me know just how much I fucking despise these genteel tree-hugging pricks. Whose teenage sister insisted that they be crammed into every generic fantasy setting?

Chuckles laughs at the idea of these prissy fuckers whenever they or pixies come up in any conversation about the fae. If these leaf-eared asshats met an actual fae, they’d probably piss their pants.

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right. Elves can suck my fat scaly dong.

These guys are “RIP AND TEAR!” personified. Got it.

They’re also usually found on Karen’s lawn.

Ahhh, dwarves. The way they’re described here, they sound like your kid cousin or sibling who’s always starting shit, yet you’re the one who gets bitched out by Mom the minute you stop kow-towing to their every whim.

*Shrek joke*

Thus, Mordor reveals itself to be elitist propaganda, the working class being portrayed as ugly, yet romanticized as being magical people full of secret, humble wisdom.

Fuck off.

Osiri are like elves, but with a nebulous “twist”, which totally makes them a distinct, original concept. DO NOT STEAL!

So, what you’re saying is that this setting features heavy discrimination towards biracial people, to the point where they’re invariably characterized as athletic but needlessly aggressive and not allowed in polite society, thus forcing them into criminal roles.

So, no different than a stock D&D setting and/or your average Republican gathering.

The dungeon design pulls out every cliche in the book. Hallways with nothing but doors on both sides that lead to rooms with nothing but monsters? Check.

Damage tiles filling a room on the way to something else, with no other alternative but to eat the damage? Check.

Pit traps placed with no rhyme or reason, and no telegraphing of their presence or way to avoid them? Check-a-roonie!

As for the presentation, it’s largely a mishmash of clip art that only matches stylistically if you squint your eyes. It has some sound effects, so there’s that 1% of atmosphere going for it.

Gaining gold happens at a fast enough rate that it’s hard to mind the grind, at first. Except half the time, some assbag would steal it all, so that progress is ultimately rendered moot.

You know what I never understood? Thief enemies that steal your gold in battle, but they don’t drop it after you kill them. How the fuck does that make any sense? What, did they eat the gold? Did they shove it up their ass?

Ultimately, I’m just typing up paragraphs to describe what’s really just a glorified Skinner Box, the shareware version of one, at that. Wonder how much the full game cost…



40 dollars?! How far up their own asses were these people’s heads, that they had the chutzpah to charge $40 for a half-assed dungeon crawler in the same year as Quest For Glory IV, Albion, and Ultima VIII, with World of Xeen being out just the previous year?

What a piece of shit.



Moretris:

Tetris is a game you have to really make an effort to fuck up. When Alexey Pajitnov typed up the very first version’s code on an Elektronika 60, he pretty much conjured up the perfect game.

Tweaking Tetris requires great care. Mostly, it involves altering overarchingrules, rather than the basic gameplay loop. The pieces must be same set of pentomino-inspired shapes, they must always rotate strictly in four directions.

Generally, though, it fits the same principles of falling pieces, hastily fitting them together, and trying not to get overwhelmed by the ever-increasing speed.

To be clear, tweaking Tetris CAN work; between Tetris DS, Tetris 99, Tetris Effect, Tetrisphere, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and the like all do new and interesting things with the game.

Moretris does none of this.

Look at this piece; and tell me how the fuck you expect it to play as part of a normal Tetris game. What’s that? You don’t? Exactly.

Or how about this?

Yes, that huge orange square is a solid block I randomly got dropped on me. Up yours, too.

Another thing is that every time you clear a row, a garbage row appears at the bottom that you can’t get rid of. I’m sorry, but wasn’t the whole point of Tetris about seeing how long you can manage to keep from being overwhelmed by the structures you yourself built up that you have to clear with increasing speed?

In other words, losing in Tetris is supposed to be entirely your fault.

Here, you’ve just got an arbitrary, artificial height limit increase that can be compunded by the game randomly dropping a “fuck you” block that you can’t do anything with. It’s bullshit. The only helpful addition are the bomb pieces (pictured in the first screenshot), which will clear away individual blocks on contact.

And the worst part is the patronizing lose screens.

That’s what I’d say to the people who made this, but they’ve made other games on this disc that are even worse.

Oh, fuck right off.

It’s the puzzle game equivalent of Eragon; some kid slapping together something that rips off every component of the things he likes, with no original thought or care for how they coalesce. I put more thought into this review than the author did this game.

The only difference is that this person thankfully didn’t have rich parents backing his hack work.

Fuck this, I quit.

WHAT

NO, I DON’T WANT TO BE PROSELYTIZED TO BY MAHJONG JESUS

FUCK OFF

I had to three-finger-salute this thing away. That’s one last thing I neglected to mention, actually. I’ve never ended a session of this game without it crashing.

Surely, a retail game by a big studio would never do this, right?

*insert Bethesda joke here*



Penny’s Arcade:

Say what you will, I actually like the fugly aesthetics of this game. There’s something so instantly nostalgic about all that JPEG crust mixed with the simple-but-not-horrible Ms. Paint graphics on display, here.

Now if only the game itself weren’t total dogshit.

You know those stupid “rage games” with deliberately terrible controls and unfair difficulty, all in the name of being “ironic” and deliberately pissing off the player so that they’ll have fuel to scream and throw a tantrum on a public platform for money, thus attracting even more people to play it for themselves like the consumer whores they are?

This is like one of those, except the scary part is that someone made it in earnest.

It’s a shooting gallery, and you aim your little gun with the mouse. You’re given a variety of objectives, such as shooting X number of balloons in a certain number of shots, or shooting a particular vehicle enough times in quick succession so it’ll win a race.

All of this makes for an inoffensive premise for a game, but there’s just one problem; your cursor isn’t visible. The only way you can possibly aim is via the position of the gun itself.

I believe the word ‘crapshoot’ is appropriate.

There’s also the lack of all that much content, too; once you’ve done two or three boards, you’ve seen all there is to see in the game.

It’s hard to call the game a trainwreck when there’s barely enough game to go around; it’s more like a golf cart crashing into a ditch because you got drunk and floored it at 15 miles an hour. It’s a disaster, but one on such a small scale that you hardly register it as more than a mild embarrassment.



Perfect Weapon:

Which is a shame, because the game's soundtrack is unironically a real banger.

Remember Tomb Raider? Hell, remember every 3D game from that era that wasn’t Super Mario 64? Yeah, I bet a lot of you do. Hell, for those of you who were alive in the 20th century, I bet the mere mention of games like Croc and Castlevania 64 brings back cherished memories of your youth, sitting in front of that N64 you got for Christmas that your dad would later sell for booze and end up getting it replaced with a Playstation.

This game is like someone taking those memories, and bashing them in with a sledgehammer until nothing remains but a vague, mushy red and brown paste.

Protagonist Johnson here is doing the "I really have to take a shit, but I'm also trying to act like Simon Belmont" pose.

Oh, this game has it all. Godawful prerendered backdrops with camera perspectives that shift almost entirely at random, with no sense of where the character is in physical space.

Dear Gosh, the controls. Now, I don’t hate tank controls on principle; Resident Evil used them to great effect in enabling the spoopy camera angles the game loved to pull on a regular basis.

The face of constipation, I tell ya.

Thing is, ResE was a horror game, while this game is meant to be action-centric. This means that you’ll be swarmed with enemies while wrestling with the glacial turning controls, and mashing buttons like a caffeinated 5-year-old in the hopes of something you do landing a hit.

Gosh help me, I could not tell you which button does what, because this seemed to change whenever the game felt like it, and the game includes no instructions on the matter, either.

The only way this game could be called a Perfect Weapon is if you made someone play it to completion as a means of psychological torture.

As an aside, I was streaming the games on this disc for my brother and a friend of mine, and the friend in question was out running errands as we chatted on-stream.

It makes you think about just how amazing telecommunication has become, that I can livestream shitty shareware games from a literal century ago to friends across the country whilst they’re out doing other shit.

And before you ask, no, we don’t have flying cars in the future. But who needs those, when you’ve got dragons?



Pinball95:

Imagine the most flaccid, Baby’s First Unity project-ass physics possible, give it shitty prerendered graphics, and put a price tag on the full “game”.

I’m either talking about your average Steam game, or Pinball95.



This picture tells you all you need to know about the game. It has no sound, no scoring system, none of th fancy gimmicks that make a pinball table fun in the first place. It’s the most banal, half-assed implementation of the concept of pinball I’ve seen yet.

Also to note, it had no real user interface, either. It took me forever the figure out how the hell to escape this pinball purgatory.

NOT AGAIN

BEGONE, YOU ABRAHAMIC ASSHOLE



Pirate’s Plunder:

Pirates Plunder is a game wherein you navigate a grid full of randomly-generated events. Maybe you find some treasure, maybe it’s Mr. Kill.

The only things you know for certain are the islands, which are one-time weapon reload and ship repair stops. Making a clear path for these places is a key strategy.

The goal is to find all the treasures listed on the bottom of the screen.

If you encounter an enemy, you get into a bout of turn-based combat, selecting which weapon you want to use, though you only have a limited amount of each one.

In other words, this game is like a condensation of the roguelike genre down to nothing but its most basic components,

In a way, I think it works. It’s easy to grasp, any playthrough of the game will be short and sweet, and it requires a modicum of strategic thought, putting it in the same league as Freecell and Minesweeper.

I like it.





Rally Racers:

Who sold their underage daughter to a politician so they’d pass that law?

If you can’t tell, this is a Rally-X clone. There’s no music, no bright colors, nothing that would typically say “this is an arcade game, it’s gonna be FUN!”.

Which is fitting, because fun left the building quite a while ago.

Rally-X had controls akin to Pac-Man, wherein you moved on a very strict grid. Here, you’re given a lot more freedom, but at the price of the game’s controls feeling very “cheap”, like the programmer couldn’t be assed to do it properly.

The central gimmick of Rally-X was that you could expend some of your precious fuel to leave behind clouds of gas to thwart the cars trying to get you.

Here, pressing space expends fuel, but automatically makes all enemies on screen go nuts, thus eliminating any real care and strategy the original game had in this regard.

As seen in the screenshot above, the AI does a hilarious thing where, at random, it spazzes the fuck out and goes full Geddan all on its own. Literally the only AI in this game amounts to “follow player”, and nothing else. No clever patterns to thwart you with.

So, it’s Rally-X, except with none of the frantic pacing and fluidity that made that game work in the first place. In a game that expects you to pay money for more of it, this lack of polish up front is inexcusable.




Rats!:

The real pièce de résistance of this showcase is Rats!, a game where you have to stop rats from fucking and multiplying to the point where they overrun your garden.

No, seriously. They even make moaning noises when they bang.

On the right of the screen, you have a surplus of weapons to drag onto the main part, be it bombs, smoke emitters, poison, sex switchers (?!), nukes(!!!), et cetera.

The real entertainment comes from seeing all this shit described in the manual. Here, have a look.



“If you kill all of one sex of rat, you will be given the maximum number of each object so you can quickly finish off the unfortunate and frustrated remaining sex.”

This game is literally about stopping the evils of heterosexuality from destroying everything.

The stages available in the full version are Grass, Desert, Ice, and Hell.



I shit you not. This is a game about stopping rats from fucking in Hell.

All my performative disbelief aside, I can reasonably see someone getting entertained for a few minutes by this, though there’s not really much substance to it other than the comedic value.


SimFero:
Pretty much just a little desktop toy where you press go, and have to click on Mr. Kill before he shoots you. I’ve never succeeded in this. There’s really nothing else to say, here, aside from me kinda missing the days when this sort of desktop doodad was commonplace.

The end of your average session of this game.

Computing back then had a sense of humor that I think is absent in this largely utilitarian computing environment we have constructed for ourselves. The same thing happened back in the 21st century, so I guess history really does repeat itself.



Smash ‘em:

Who is Galtware?

It’s Whack-A-Mole, with shitty mismatched JPEG stock art for graphics.

Do these gophers represent the poor? Am I hitting them with the hammer of Righteous Selfishness? Or perhaps the shitty JPEG quality represents the enshrinement of mediocrity, and the slow agonizing death of art that can only be staved off with the hammer of art deco.

Occasionally, you’ll get an interlude wherein you hit rats running across the screen (what is with this disk and rodent infestations?).

I swear by my life and my love of it that I shall ask nothing of any rat, except to die under my hammer.

That’s really all there is to it. This is something you’d see as a flash game, back when that existed.



Super Ice Qube Hopper:

You know, there’s something endearing about indie arcade clones that genuinely try to gussy themselves up and truly believe in their (derivative) concept.

This, if you can’t tell, is Q-Bert with a mix of shitty prerendered graphics and vomit-inducing LSD backgrounds. Oh, and the fucking thing wants you to play it with the mouse, because every game on the planet seemed to have a weird fixation on mouse controls.

Need I say more?



UltraBlast:

I think sending this to an enemy would be a war crime.

Remember what I said about Pinball95? You can say all the same things for this. It’s a lame Breakout clone, on the same disk that already has DX Ball.

One weird quirk about this is that you can move the paddle along the y axis as well, meaning you can just pin the ball and have it move wherever you want, rather than requiring you to react quickly to the unpredictable ball physics like the entire point of Breakout would have you do.

*sniff*

I smell a very familiar stench in the air…

AAAAARGH

BEGONE! THE POWER OF GOSH COMPELS YOU! THE POWER OF GOSH COMPELS YOU!



Tetriszen:

NO. NO MORE FUCKING TETRIS.



Virus:

Hmmmmmm...

HMMMMMMMMMMMM...

Sure, let’s install the game called Virus on this computer. I’m sure nothing bad could possibly come of that.

Thankfully, Virus doesn’t destroy your computer, just your will to live. Virus is a tile-based game that runs on Windows Chip’s Challenge controls, meaning that there’s no scrolling, no animation, just images flashing against squares. Yee-haw.

There are four kinds of tile: blue, yellow, red, black. Each of these colored tiles turns into the next when you run over them, and black tiles are solid and can't be crossed.

Coming after you is an antivirus, who’s always homing in on you, and can phase through black tiles no problem.

You run over blue tiles, and sometimes these reveal little icons that you collect. You’re looking for the little fang icons. When you get all of them, you need to find the exit icon and move on to the next stage.

If my description sounds dry as hell, that’s because the game itself is drier than a TERF’s pussy.


Apart from the funky artwork in the menus, there’s really nothing all that interesting to say about this game.

Nothing more insufferable than a shitty game that’s full of itself.

The actual rating is two,
but I couldn't be assed to edit the gif.

Voyager: Deep Space Rescue:

So, imagine Asteroids, but instead of random asteroids and the occasional enemy spaceship, you had a truckload of enemies all out to kill you, and a legion of spacemen to rescue once you destroy the ships.

The enemies here all graduated from the Default Unity School of AI Design; they home in on you all at once, and the glacial turning controls mean that you either have to keep fleeing and hope you find one that’s in front of you, or turn around, and hope you can fire off enough bullets before they gangbang you to death.

Oh, but I can’t leave you hanging on what the LORE behind this game is, now can I? Here you go, my lovelies:

This story reads like Toejam & Earl fanfiction.

Meh game, meh plot. Figures.



Warheads:

It’s Missile Command. That’s it. Missile Command is a good game, and this is a decent implementation of it. Aside from crappy MS. Paint graphics (which aren't far removed from the original game anyway), there’s really nothing to say.

Zoi VR Blocks:

Crashed. Yeah, you heard me. It wouldn’t run. What a relief.



Wow, the second half of the arcade section was pretty much a shitshow, and not even the fun kind, this time. And keep in mind, this is ONE directory on this disc, so who knows what kind of “goods” we’ll find in the other sections.

I’m both hopeful and terrified.

Either way, that’s about all I can take from this disc for this post. I need to end here before the last of my soul leaves my body.