ceargaest

[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]

linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.

since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!


username etymology
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Lizstar
@Lizstar

Y'all remember Galaxy of Games?

It was a series of cheap shareware CDs that RomTech, later called eGames, that you could buy at retailers like Best Buy, Target, K-Mart, etc. Basically, they're a collection of people's Shareware games, often games made by single a single dev, many times several of one person's games.

I owned one of these. It's called Nothing But Action, and I realized that there's like, nothing about this game online. Even Mobygames doesn't have this listed in the Galaxy of Games series!!! I grew up on this, and played the fuck out of these games. Most of them are terrible. But they're SUPER interesting.

So I uploaded it to archive.org lol

It's made for like, Windows 95, so you'd need a way to play it today. But tbh it's worth looking into, this is a weird piece of history no one talks about anymore. The only shareware games people talk about today are like... Doom? Maybe a few others??? But there were THOUSANDS of these things, spun out in one person's basement, hoping to be the next Doom.

They were not the next Doom. But they're cool! Maybe I'll do a full obscure games talk about this, with some of the weirder stuff contained within.

Here's what the actual program looks like BTW, maybe this will jog some lost memories in some of you!

title screen

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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

I had a bunch of the "Galaxy of Games" ones they put out as eGames; Red, Yellow, Blue, Green. I think Blue doesn't work anymore, but it seems like these have been archived already lol

Shoutouts to Speedy Eggbert and Crazy Drake. This takes me back.

Oh, we had our slew of shareware CDs as well, mostly from Rondomedia (Germany). However, we did get some eGames shareware CDs, although they were more recent, as there was like a 3D Pinball thing, which ran extremely poorly on our old Win98 PC (probably like...less than 1 FPS?) and ran WAY too fast on our XP PC. Off-hand, I recall something about Peggy in the name of one of the eGames games? It was some puzzle platformer thing with presents and stuff.

The Rondomedia CDs were more standard shareware fare, though, mostly breakout, shoot-em-up or card games.

I think I might still have the one that was all card games. Also a number of other shareware cd's from other companies where half of the "games" are just like, files for other games and not actually games

Aw man, I grew up on Galaxy of Games Red Edition! I still have the CD, I should try to get it working again. So many standouts. Speedy Eggbert, Crazy Drake, Demonstar, Raptor (I think the only game from the collection now available on Steam), a surprisingly good looking shmup that I don't remember the name of, and a very good mini golf game that was like, space themed? I think? Damn. Memory lane. I don't remember ever seeing Blue though!

I already see plenty of stuff I recognize; Bad Toys is fascinating (especially if it's the original black and white version), Microman is historically important as it was the pre-pre-pre-prototype for what eventually laid the groundwork for DirectX for Windows, and I will never not love Bricklayer's music.

I'm not familiar with this, but I do see a game there called Jewel Thief. I had what might have been the same game as part of a different collection. I know I've had some good success playing 90s games on Linux so I might check and see if it runs and if it's the same game.

I had one of these CDs, but one thing that stood out was in a little tucked away folder was a Trailer for Maabus, and that trailer made it look very amazing. Plus using MS Dos to browse the folders was like a maze like joy in itself.