In 1982 Greg Kuperberg and Orion Software put out Paratrooper, an EGA action shooter game on the brand new IBM-PC that put you in a gunner’s turret as helicopters and parachuting soldiers invaded. Before that, in 1981, Mark Allen released Sabotage for the Apple II. They were early examples if a twist on a convention concept: shoot everything to get points, but shooting costs points.

Ten years later, Night Raid was released with a shareware version by Argo Games and Software Creations in 1992 to little fanfare.

In Night Raid, commonly confused as Nite Raid for its DOS 8-character folder abbreviation, which I acquired in the 90s on a plain white 3.5″ floppy put out by Software for Everyone, a company that made their living by repackaging shareware, charging the legally allowed “copying and disk fee.”

The game has good graphics and sound for its time. It’s an addictive style too — you can shoot as many shells as you want, but the real object of the game is to rack up a high score. You get you get two points for shooting paratroopers, five for large, slow airplanes, 10 for smaller, faster planes, and 10 points for shooting down deadly smart bombs. It costs one point for each shell costs you a point, and you will get down to zero quite fast if you’re not quiet.

Of course, if you just want to blow off some steam, go ahead and blast the bejesus out of everything and keep firing those shells … boom, boom, boom, boom.

If one criticism is to be levied against Night Raid, it’s that the shareware is so short, only a handful of levels that takes up about 10 minutes of your gaming day to finish.

The registered version gets progressively harder, with more troopers, planes, and bombs engaging your hapless little bunker.

There is something to be said for the graphics, too. If you shoot the troopers parachute, he waves his arms as he plummets to the ground. During level intermissions, you get entertained by asides like pizza deliveries. For a game that three guys put together, it’s pretty detailed.

This game boasted over a megabyte of 256 color graphics, music, AND two-channel audio.

Ye Olde System Requirements:

• VGA Graphics Card
• 286 or better
• AdLib/SB/SS support
• 386 recommended

Download the readme file

Way back in the mid 1990s, the computer game magazines were full of whole page advertisements in the back of the book for a 3D Dos game called Cylindrix. It wasn’t necessarily a visual marvel, but it was an intuitive game and one of the first real 3D experiences in Dos.

Cylindrix was coded to run in Dos DJGPP Protected Mode so that it could address more than 640 KB of memory, something that the Dos programmers felt was impossible at one point in history.

I had an original copy on 3.5″ diskettes that I sold on eBay for over $100 about eight years ago. I actually wish I held onto it, because it’s a museum piece. But I still have my two-disk demo.

So what is Cylindrix?

Cylindrix is a fast-paced battle game set in a round cylinder. To play the game, you use teamwork and fast reflexes to tap the enemy pylons scattered around the map. Tapping the pylons turns them to your team’s color. The more pylons you have on your side, the most powerful your hover tank’s (did we mention you’re in a hover tank?) weapons become. You’ll find yourself constantly struggling to maintain a favorable pylon count, or your enemies will gain the upper hand.

You play the commander and you have to assign each of your wingman tanks a task like “Get Pylons” or “Attack Enemy Ships.” Knowing which commands to issue and when to issue them is the key to winning the game.

One of the game’s developers, John R. McCawley, obtained permission to license out the game for free. He’s also working on Windows and Linux ports of the game.

Definitely try his new versions, because his team completely rebuilt the game from scratch.

You will absolutely need DOSBox for my version, or it ain’t gonna work.

From the game’s readme.txt file
The playing field

THE CYLINDRIX. This is the playing field in which the game takes place. Your vehicle can either skim along its surface or detach from the surface and fly freely within the Cylindrix. Each end of the Cylindrix is capped with a force shield preventing you from escaping combat.

All of the cylinders are the same size, but the various lighting conditions will make some feel smaller or larger than others. Each square on the surface of the cylinder is 40′ x 40′.

A cylinder’s measurements are: Height: 382 feet high, or approximately 27 stories high Length: 1200 feet, or 87 stories long

Square foot area: 1,440,000
Total cubic feet: 137,000,000

Pylon: Average height, 7 stories
Radar Base: 45 feet high

PYLONS. Towers of energy called pylons jut from the surface of the Cylindrix. When your vehicle collides with a pylon, the pylon becomes charged to the polarity of your team, turning it whatever color your vehicles are. As a result, your teams weapons will do more damage. Capturing pylons is of extreme importance.

RADAR BASES. Each team has a radar base somewhere on the surface of the Cylindrix. The radar bases will fire relentlessly at any enemy vehicles in range. The radar bases control the homing of energy missiles, and update each vehicle’s radar display. If your radar base is destroyed you lose both of these.

ENERGY SQUARE. Each Cylindrix has on its surface an energy square. If you move your vehicle over the square its shields will be recharged.

HEADS UP DISPLAYS
Each of the eight ships has a uniquely designed Heads Up Display, but they all display the same information.

ON SCREEN RADAR DISPLAY. This is an actual 3D display of the cylinder and always moves in relation to your view of the cylinder. Your ship is represented by the white square that is at the bottom of the
cylinder when you are on the ground and when you are in the air the white dot will move in relation to the cylinder. The blue squares represent the blue team, the red squares represent the red team.
Any time your radar locks onto a ship, the square representing that ship will have a yellow box around it. If your radar base is destroyed, your radar disappears.

CROSS HAIRS AND RADAR LOCKING. These cross hairs allow for the aiming of lasers by eye or missiles when your radar is inoperable. When you lock radar on an opponent, a diamond shape will appear between the radar lock box, and your ship. When the cross hairs, the radar lock box, and the diamond are all lined up, then you are facing the enemy directly.

SHIELD STRENGTH DISPLAY. The shield strength level is indicated by the bar on the screen with the ‘S’ on it. Every time your force shield is hit with a laser or a missile it is weakened. If your vehicle is
shot after your energy shield has been depleted, it will be destroyed. There is a brightly colored square on the cylinder’s surface, called the Energy Square. If you move your vehicle on top of it while on the surface, your shield’s strength will recharge.

MISSILE DISPLAY. The number of missiles you hold is displayed here. Missiles regenerate automatically.

WEAPON DAMAGE DISPLAY. The relative amount of damage you are able to do, the number energized pylons you have tagged on the Cylindrix surface (see “The Playing Field” above) is indicated on the bar on the screen with the “D” next to it.

WINGMAN 1 And WINGMAN 2 – COMMAND DISPLAY.
Every time you give a command to your wingman, it is displayed here.

WINGMAN 1 And WINGMAN 2 – SHIELD STRENGTH DISPLAY.
The shield strength of your two wingman is displayed here.

KEY CONTROLS:

NOTE: Cylindrix allows the reassigning of keys, but the default settings are as follows.

AERIAL AND SURFACE CONTROL
“s” Take Off and Land
“v” Change viewpoint, in or out of ship.
“Esc” Pauses game and brings up an options menu.

SURFACE ONLY CONTROLS
Up arrow Move forward
Down arrow Move backwards
Right arrow Rotate right
Left arrow Rotate left
“Alt” Sidestep Right or Left using arrow key (Strafe).

AERIAL ONLY CONTROLS
“a” Throttle Faster
“z” Throttle Slower
Up arrow Nose down
Down arrow Nose up
Right arrow Rotate right (Clockwise).
Left arrow Rotate left (Counterclockwise).
“Alt” + arrow key Step Up, Down, Right, or Left (Strafe).

WEAPONS CONTROLS
“Ctrl” Fire laser
Space Fire energy missile
“x” Engage Special Weapon

COMMANDS TO WINGMEN KEYS
W 1 W 2
F1 F7 Get Pylons
F2 F8 Attack
F3 F9 Attack Enemy Radar Base
F4 F10 Defend Home Radar Base
F5 F11 Group – Surround and Defend
F6 F12 Orders Canceled

Ye Olde System Requirements

• 486/66 DX (SX will not work)
• Soundblaster compatible sound card
• Double speed (2x) CD Rom Drive
• 10MB of HD Space
• 8MB of RAM

The vertical scrolling shooter is a great, classic arcade genre.

In 1992, Epic MegaGames released this almost forgettable little EGA game called Overkill. You, the pilot, are tasked with destroying all the evil alien forces that captured six otherwise peaceful planets, enslaving the populations along the way. Destroy them.

Overkill was developed by Tech-Noir Productions and Ste Cork, and it was the first vertical shooter released by Epic (oh there would be others…). It had some period features including joystick support and MIDI music but was technologically unimpressive. Other games of the time — Commander Keen, the original Duke Nukem I and II — had far superior graphics.

The game gave the player shields/life energy, a contrast to other “one hit you’re dead” scrollers of the time and earlier. You could also collect power ups and boost your fuel, shields and weapons.

This game was a bitch to extract originally. I bought the shareware in the 90s on 3.5″ floppy at one of The Christmas Tree Shops on Cape Cod — one of many bribes from my mother for one of many excursions to the stores, which are basically the perfect visage of an adolescent male hell.

Anyway, do you know how hard it is to pull something off a floppy these days? They’re gone, baby, gone.

Come to find out, Overkill was released into the freeware realm on July 23 by Ste Cork. Now the whole world can have it.

Download the registered version of Overkill free from Blast Magazine. You will need DOSBox.

Ahh, 1993. The first person shooter was bursting forth in popularity with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. We sped through command prompts and wrote our own config.sys and autoexec.bat files to make sure we had the free memory to run our new games. The biggest challenge: was it worth the memory sacrifice to enable the mouse?

One week before id Software took over the world with the shareware release of Doom, Apogee followed the monumental success of Wolf 3D with their next action shooter, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Doom squashed it; Blake Stone sold poorly despite positive reviews. id even had a stake in Blake Stone, it build the texture mapping engine for the game. But Doom was destined for icon status.

“We had decent pre-orders and the first couple of months were pretty good but sales dropped pretty quickly,” said Mike Maynard, in a 1996 interview. His company, Jam Productions, put out Blake Stone. “Had we gotten more input from Apogee earlier on in the development process I think we could’ve released the game 3-4 months earlier than we did.”

The game set in the year 2140. Robert Wills Stone III — Blake — is an agent of the British Intelligence, recruited after a highly successful career in the Royal Navy. He was sent out to investigate Dr. Phrus Goldfire, a mad geneticist whose criminal organization, STAR, is set out to conquer the world. Stone has to fight through six campaigns, representing six different STAR facilities, to destroy Goldfire’s mutant and human army before it can invade.

This was a big game, built on an engine that was based on the original Wolfenstein 3D engine. The six campaigns provided many hours of gameplay.

The game has a lot of features including food tokens to increase health, friendly “informant” scientists who give you items, and the previews of the main boss, Dr. Goldfire, appearing throughout the campaigns to fight you, only to retreat once you hit him enough times.

This was another game I found on the old, red Aztech’s Super Shareware Games CD that came with my first CD-ROM drive. It’s a permanent fixture in The Old Shoebox.

The full version is available from Apogee/3D Realms for $10. Apogee and Jam would follow with a sequel in 1994.

Download Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold shareware FREE from Blast Magazine.

It also brings 16-player multiplayer and native support to Windows XP/Vista, MacOS, and Linux/Unix.

It’s a piece of gaming history that’s been sadly losing ground with time. There has even been trouble keeping some of files hosted online.

That’s just not right.

Here’s Doomsday:

Doomsday 1.9 beta-5 for Windows

Doomsday 1.9 beta-5 for Linux/Unix

Doomsday 1.9 beta-5 for MacOS

Here are some of the addons:

To install addons, place the .pk3 into the “/doomsday/snowberry/addons” folder.

jDoom Enviroment pack (for doom and doom2)
jDoom Enviroment pack (for tnt and plutonia)

Unliminated Ammo Mod

Rain in some Doom levels
Rain and sandstorms in Hexen

Lorcan TNT music pack

jDoom high-resolution texture pack
Texture pack for other front ends

Stay tuned for more. There are full resource packs that I’ll dig up and put online.

More good stuff happening at the New Doom Forums

I still like to dive into a quick slayer match in the Blood Gulch or dive, two at a time, in a Warthog and open up on enemies with the unlimited machine gun.

Not everyone knows exactly how much development went into Halo, and nowhere is that more apparent than in watching this old, 10 minute video from E3 2000, almost a year and a half before Halo launched November 14, 2001.

The E3 2000 trailer and I first crossed paths in the August 2000 PC Gamer CD-ROM. The disc had the Motocross Madness 2 demo teased on the front and also contained demos for Gunship!, The Time Machine and Force Commander.

This video is old. It has elements like a rocket launcher on the warthog and a really weird Master Chief’s voice. It was done cinematically — movie style — to show off at E3 and give a taste of what the game could do.

Enjoy this bit of history. It should be in a museum.

At that time, the game had floundered around incompatibility issues and relative obscurity — DOSBox wasn’t a big deal yet.

The game is built on the Commander Keen 2D engine and designed as a one-man show by Jim Norwood.

This is another game I first encountered on the Aztech’s Super Shareware Games CD.

Bio Menace is just an awesome game. You play CIA operative, Snake Logan, on recon duty in Metro City, which has been taken over by the evil Dr. Mangle and a horde of vicious mutants. (The mutants look kindly cuddly in the game, but whatever.) This is a game that combines elements of action, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic and adventure in one floppy disc-sized install.

In the game, you get to maximize Snake’s killing power with machine guns, super bullets, plasma bolts, two different kinds of grenades and even land mines. Bio Menace consists of three episodes with secret levels and hidden easter egg in the second episode.

The game is non-stop and very challenging. Snake has very limited health, and medkits are in short supply.

Bio Menace has wonderful VGA graphics, Ad Lib music and Sound Blaster compatibility.

I’ll never fully understand why this game didn’t take off in modern gaming with sequels and console remakes, but you can enjoy the original, as intended, for free.

Download Bio Menace free from Blast Magazine

Ye Olde System Requirements:

• IBM PC and compatibles
• 286 Computer (386 or higher recommended)
• 575k of conventional memory
• 5 meg of Hard Drive Space (10 meg for registered)
• Supports Sound Blaster, Ad Lib and Joystick

One of the best computer golf games is still Links LS 98 and subsequent versions for Windows, released 11 years ago by Access Software.

Access made some very good games in the 80s and 90s, including the Tex Murphy series, before they lost their identity — and eventually their existence.

Links: The Challenge of Golf was released in 1990 for Amiga and DOS. When you think of computer golf, and how far we’ve come with an amazingly popular genre from Links to Tiger Woods 08, “The Challenge of Golf” is nothing less than a piece of history. Until recently, it was a lost piece of history.

“The Challenge of Golf” was the first realistic golf sim. It had amazing graphics and based itself on real professional courses. It was the kind of game that took a lot of machine to run 18 years ago.

In the DOS days, it was an art-form to increase your amount of free system memory so that you could run games like Links and later Doom and Wolfenstein and many other golden aged titles. Access actually included a letter to its players in the “readme.bat” file:

LINKS-The Challenge of Golf
echo INFORMATION ON HOW TO INCREASE FREE AVAILABLE MEMORY
echo Last update 11-10-90
echo .
echo Dear LINKS owner,
echo .
echo We believe LINKS is the most realistic and most technically advanced golf
echo simulator ever developed. In creating such a sophisticated program, however,
echo we have had to push your computer to its limits. LINKS requires a large
echo amount of memory to manipulate terrain data and to reproduce accurately
echo all of the intricate details of the game. At least 530K bytes are needed to
echo run the program. Player comments require another 8K bytes and wildlife
echo sounds require an additional 17K bytes. Thus, 555K bytes are needed to see
echo and hear all that LINKS has to offer.
echo .
echo To verify the amount of free memory on your computer, run the DOS utility
echo called CHKDSK. The last number displayed is the amount of free memory. If
echo the number is less than 555000, then some of LINKS’ digitized sounds will
echo not be heard. If the number is less than 530000, you will not be able to
echo run LINKS.
echo .
pause
cls
echo .
echo Your 640K machine actually has 655360 bytes available. When your computer
echo boots, it loads DOS (which takes about 55,000 bytes) and then uses a file
echo called CONFIG.SYS to automatically set aside memory for file buffers and
echo other things. It also uses a file called AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOmatically
echo EXECute user defined instructions. Both CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT can (and
echo usually do) contain programs known as TSR’s. TSR stands for Terminate and
echo Stay Resident. These programs install themselves and then stay in memory
echo to be used when needed. A mouse driver, print spooler, keyboard enhancer,
echo disk cacher, memory manager and DOS shell are all examples of such programs.
echo THESE PROGRAMS USE MEMORY. If there are too many of them resident at one
echo time, there won’t be room for LINKS or other large programs. TO INCREASE
echo FREE AVAILABLE MEMORY, YOU MUST REMOVE OR DISABLE SOME OF YOUR TSR’S.
echo .
echo If you have more than 640K (1Meg, 2Meg, or more) this can be used as extra
echo memory for preloading sound and graphics, but not for DOS. LINKS still
echo requires at least 530K free of your first 640K.
echo .
echo LINKS AND WINDOWS
echo You must exit completely from Windows to run LINKS. Do not exit Windows by
echo way of the DOS PROMPT icon.
echo .

Microsoft bought Access games in 1999 and kept it in sort of a protected status for a few years. Access was renamed Salt Lake Games Studio and put out golf games and expansion packs, including Links 2004 for Xbox. They also repackaged their excellent DOS Links 386 game into a Windows version.

Take-Two Interactive bought the Access/Salt Lake studio in 2004. They built a few console games including the Top Spin tennis series. They also split the Amped Xbox/Xbox 360 snowboarding series between MS Games and Take-Two. Take-Two renamed the studio to Indie Built but closed the shop in 2006.

Links resurfaced in the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer, one of the best magazine CD’s ever released. The “Classic Games Collection Volume One” contained full version of Duke Nukem II, King’s Quest, Descent, Terminal Velocity, Alone in the Dark, Wing Commander, X-COM, Links, Monkey Island, Ultima Underworld, Ultima I, and Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed. It was a stacked collection of classic games.

Download Links: The Challenge of Golf free from Blast

Heretic introduced ambient noise — evil laughter and such — that was random, as opposed to Doom’s enemy-spawned noises.

Like the Doom story, Heretic has hellish elements, demons and tons of different weapons at your disposal. There were also plenty of cheat codes.

There has always been a ton of literature and source documentation on the Doom/Heretic/Hexen/Quake games, and I was able to dig up the original FAQ for Heretic, which is a fun, long read and will tell you just about everything you’d ever want to know about this ultra-classic title.

Heretic is a supernatural blast-fest that is the most realistic, action-packed fantasy combat computer game for the PC. Created by the graphic masters at Raven Software in concert with the technical gurus of id Software, Heretic adds new levels of play and graphic wonder to the tried and true DOOM gaming environment.

In the old days, PC games came in large boxes, twice the size of the puny ones they come in now. Even my original Heretic shareware CD came in a large box and cost money at Toys”R”Us way back when.

One of the best things about these games in the present is that their source code has been released, and modern, high-resolution, Direct3D versions of the game are being made available to breathe new life into games like Heretic. This is a fine example of “they don’t make them like they used to.”

Ye Olde System Requirements:

• IBM PC and compatibles/MS DOS (works on DOSBox)
• 486-33
• 4 MB RAM
• 10 MB hard disk space

Download Heretic shareware from Blast Magazine

Around 1995, well before my High Heat days, I played hours and hours and hours of Hardball baseball. One of the first CD-ROM’s I ever owned — which came with my first 4X CD-ROM drive — was an Accolade game compilation that contained Hardball, Unnecessary Roughness football and Jack Nicklaus golf.

Hardball never had awesome graphics, but it, like many other PC sports games, especially at that time, was game you could truly make your own. You could add players, change teams, add yourself and your friends, add legendary players and change everyone’s skills accordingly.

The March 1996 edition of Computer Gaming World Extra, the free CD that came with issue 140 of the magazine, contains a demo of Hardball 5 as well as CRY.SYS, Space Bucks, 11th Hour, Age of Rifles, Fulltilt! Pinball, Heroes of Might and Magic, NCAA College Basketball and FPS Football 96 packed into a disc with patches, a comic strip and the obligatory AOL installation. It was a very typical magazine CD back then.

The Hardball series itself has been around since 1985, when Accolade put it on Commodore 64. It later ended up on Apple II, Apple IIGS, Macintosh, the Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Amiga, MSX, ZX Spectrum, PC (DOS in CGA and EGA), and eventually the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Sony PlayStation — if you believe Wikipedia.

Hardball 5 is one of the highest-rated PC baseball games ever made. Gamespot’s Hugh Foster called it “the most playable baseball sim on the shelves today,” in an early review.

It was also one of Accolade’s late titles before the Infogrames took over in 1999. Accolade is responsible for the Test Drive, Deadlock, Bubsy, Brett Hull Hockey, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam (AWESOME Genesis title) and Star Control gaming franchises among many others.

Download the Hardball 5 demo free from Blast Magazine

Oh what a magazine it was. Launch was mainly a music publication, which offered a Macromedia-powered CD-ROM magazine in the 90s. It was an early form of convergence journalism, and we pay homage to them and their efforts.

Like just about every other good thing in the tech bubble years, it got bought out and bastardized, homogenized and repackaged. Today, Launch is unrecognizable as merely an Internet radio station incorporated into Yahoo! Music. Yahoo! paid $12 million for Launch in 2001.

But Launch CD-ROM did some great things back in the day, and one of the things they did pretty well was throw in video game reviews and game demos.

In Launch 11, which I believe was the February 1997 issue, they included a review and install program for a new action game called Tomb Raider.

To give you a sense of where we were back then, Launch 11 also offered an interview with Silverchair and reviews of cd’s from Bush, Branford Marsalis, Cardigans, Cake and Merril Bainbridge. Also featured, a review of the soundtrack from Romeo and Juliet (by the way, one of the best soundtracks ever made). They also reviewed Waverace 64, Grid Runner, Temptest 2000, Tobal No. 1, Mr. Bones and Drowned God.

The Tomb Raider review (read it here) is a classic early take on Tomb Raider.

Download the Tomb Raider Demo
Download the original readme

I first encountered Seek and Destroy in the July, 1996 issue of Interactive Entertainment (IE), the CD portion of Computer Games Strategy Plus magazine (previously called Strategy Plus, then called Computer Games, now sorta out of business, but it’s coming back.).

This CD was stacked — also including playable demos and shareware of Duke Nukem 3D, Zork Nemesis, Afterlife, Normality, Decathlon and Battle Arena Toshinden as well as video reviews of several games and textual archives of all 24 previous issues of the CD magazine. (It was based, fittingly enough, a CDMag.com)

The guys at IE gave Seek and Destroy a favorable review, and I wholeheartedly agreed.

From the publisher: Seek & Destroy combines elements of Choplifter, Desert Strike, and Return Fire. Pilot a chopper or a tank against hordes of enemies. Not too deep, but lots and lots of fun! This is the SHAREWARE version of the game, not a demo!

From the start, Safari Software — which Epic bought out entirely in 1997 — admits that Seek and Destroy combines elements of other fun, pick-up-and-go games. They weren’t really trying to do much different; you fly around in a chopper or drive around in a tank and shoot the hell out of everything. Sometimes they mix it up by incorporating a demolition expert you have to drop of and pick up or some other subplots, but in the end, Search and Destroy is the kind of game you can just play, and play and play again. The controls are easy, the weapons are massive and there’s plenty to shoot at. There’s no getting lost in a 36-hour developing plot. Start the game, shoot stuff.

Seek and Destroy is still technically available from Epic Classics, but I’m not so sure about the © 2000 on the site…

Here’s IE’s original video review of Seek and Destroy.

Ye Olde System Requirements:

• IBM PC and compatibles
• Minimum: 486, Recommended: 486/66
• 4 MB RAM
• 19 MB (CD version) or 4 MB (disk version) of hard disk space
• Dos game with Windows Installer

Download Seek and Destroy shareware free from Blast Magazine

At the twilight of the Eastern-Han Dynasty of ancient China, under the reign of the frail and incompetent emperor Han-Ling, the country was in disarray when the government was run by a group of corrupted eunuchs-theso-called “Ten Attendants.” Hardship and famine finally threw the country into turmoil. The rebellion quickly spread over the country. The rebels were known as “Yellow Scarfs” because they covered their heads with yellow scarfs. To get the full support of the generals in the military regions, Emperor Han-Ling entrusted them with more military power to put down the uprising. The Yellow Scarfs were finally crushed but at the expense of the central government which saw its authority threatened by the generals turned warlords. One of these warlords, Dong Zhuo, on the pretext of dislodging the Ten Attendants, marched into the capital city Luoyang and then usurped the throne. Although Dong Zhuo was quickly defeated by other allied generals, the turmoil was far from over. As the weakened Eastern-Han Dynasty no longer had authority over the whole country, every warlord was watching for the opportunity to take over the leadership. After ten years of suffering from numerous battles between warlords, the people in northern China finally had some respite when Cao Cao, a Machiavellian strategist, eliminated all his opponents in the North.

Not content with his sucesses in the North, Cao Cao wanted to reign over the whole China by eliminating the rest of the warlords in the South. His first target was Liu Bei who, being a royal prince of the Eastern-Han Dynasty, has a legitimate claim to the throne. Though small in force, Liu Bei was well entrenched in the country of Jing, and he knew how to preserve himself by allying with a neighboring warlord Sun Quan. Together they engineered a serious b;pw to the ambition of Cao Cao when they defeated his great army in the Campaign of Chibi.

Having suffered a great loss, Cao Cao had no alternative but to retreat to the north. Taking advantages of his military success, Liu Bei went further to occupy the region of Sichuan so as to consolidate his position in the country of Jing. With the help of his five intrepid generals — Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Ma Cao and Huang Zhong, he managed to build up an army strong enough to wrestle alone with Cao Cao. With the aim of restoring the Eastern-Han Dynasty, he now sets off to the North to confront Cao Cao. But Cao Cao is by no means a chicken. He also has many experienced generals like Duab Weum Xy Xy abd Xuahou Chn holding out in various fortresses.

Will Liu Bei over come all these obstacles on his way to the North? Will he finally defeat Cao Cao to restore the Eastern-Han Dynasty?

And that’s how 1993’s Sango Fighter is laid out in its original documentation.

Back then, a small Taiwanese company called Panda Entertainment set out to design a historically accurate 2D fighter. The result was Sango Fighter — which was supposed to be marketed as “Violent Vengeance” in the US, but the distributor went with the original name.

Sango Fighter was also a Sega Master title called Sangokushi. Released exclusively in Asia, the Master port was 8MB and one of the largest in size ever released on the console.

This is, of course, a Dos title, but it has amazing graphics, a loud MIDI soundtrack and 12 playable characters based on real 2nd century Chinese warriors. The controls are a little awkward, but Sango Fighter is an enjoyable play and works perfectly in Dosbox. The shareware version is limited to fewer players and the first part of the story mode.

Sango Fighter never took off in the US. Street Fighter was already in arcades by 1987 and Midway put out it’s own 2D fighter — you may have heard of it, Mortal Combat — in 1992, and Acclaim was quick to put out a home version. Sango Fighter never saw any Super Nintendo or Genesis (Mega Drive) action, which may have helped.

Download 1993’s Sango Fighter shareware free from Blast Magazine.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows is one of the best Dos-based vertical shooters ever made. The concept was simple and quintessential to a period of gaming where you configured your sound card and never stopped shooting.

It was also fairly advanced for its April 1, 1994 release date. It had stunning graphics, background music and tons of individual sound effects from machine guns to missiles to explosions.

The plot was simple — you were a mercenary paid to eliminate “MegaCorp’s” competitors. Take it from 3D Realms: “In the future as a mercenary flying the super-tech Raptor, you’ll be sent on interplanetary missions to knock off top competitors of MegaCorp. Battle against hordes of relentless enemies. Spend the bounty you receive from their demise to expand your devastating arsenal, which can be upgraded with 14 hard core weapons!”

Raptor was mostly a keyboard-controller game but it supported mouse movement, joysticks and gamepads.

The came is divided into three sectors, giving you some new enemies and scenery in each: Bravo Sector, Tango Sector, and Outer Regions, with 9 levels in each region.

The first episode, the Bravo Sector, is largely urban/jungle, ending with a large enemy oil rig.

Tango Sector, the second campaign, includes some more variety including a chemical plant, farms, city environments and an airbase. In the final episode, Outer Regions, the player travels through moons, ice worlds and volcanic wastelands. The last two sectors also have a “night wave” where you fight at nighttime, adding to the game’s detail.

The Bravo Sector is the easiest of the three, and it allows players to save up money to weapon and shield upgrades to fight effectively in the other two campaigns later.

Raptor and many other classic titles are kept alive by 3D Realms/Apogee today. Developer Scott Host — whose company, Cygnus, worked on Raptor — now markets a windows version of the shooter.

Ye Olde System Requirements:

• 386DX/40 Computer (486DX2/66 strongly recommended)
• 2 meg of free memory (A 4 meg machine is recommended)
• 7.1 meg of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)
• 15.8 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)

Download Raptor: Call of the Shadows Shareware Edition free from Blast Magazine.

Updated: 12/7/07: Here’s a GREAT gameplay video.

So I dug deep into 15 years worth of archives and saving just about every file and found an old version of Instant Messenger from 2000 believed to be AIM 4.x.

Enjoy: [download id="3"]

Also, here’s AIM+
[download id="4"]
Happy Retro-AIMing!

Wikipedia’s list of AIM versions:

• AIM 1.5.234, with an unknown release date (for various Linux distributions)
• AIM 1.5.286, with an unknown release date (for various Linux distributions)
• AIM 4.3, with an unknown release date (for Mac OS 8.6 and earlier)
• AIM 4.3.2229, released in 2000, included with Netscape Communicator.
• AIM 4.7.1333, released on February 18, 2004 (for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9)
• AIM 4.8.2790, released on November 26, 2001 (for Windows 95)
• AIM 5.0.2829, released in September 2002 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.1.3101, released in November 2002 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.2.3292, released in July 2003 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.5.3595, released in May 2004 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3702, September 2004 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3797, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3844, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.3857, unknown release date (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 5.9.6089, released on August 31, 2006 (for Windows 98/NT4/ME/2000/XP)
• AIM 6.0.28.1, unknown release date (for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.1.32.1, released on March 27, 2007 (for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.1.41.2, released on May 3, 2007 for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)
• AIM 6.5.4.16, released on October 10, 2007 for Windows 2000/XP/XP/Vista x64)

• AIM Pro 1.3 build 260, released on November 1, 2006 (for Windows 2000/XP)
• AIM Express, unknown release date, online version.
• AIM ET / LAIM / AIM Lite 0.31 Beta, released on June 9, 2007 (for Windows 2000/XP/Vista)

And if you’re really interested in retro instant messaging, check out the World’s Slowest Instant Messenger.

The newest addition to the Blast crew, Bessie King is with us in Boston as the Entertainment Editor. That’s the reason why you’re seeing a ton more content and some quality news reporting, like our instant coverage of Marie Osmond’s fall during Dancing With the Stars. She’s an ace reporter who has also done work with the Quincy Patriot Ledger.

Dan Peleschuk is the stalwart culture editor. The Boston Globe correspondent is a top-flight writer is as comfortable putting together features as he is doing hard news reporting.

Elizabeth Raftery is second in command on the editorial side. Lexis Nexis should have a section devoted to the amount of work she’s put out in her career so far at the Globe and the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise.

So that’s the family.

Blast Magazine November is a wholly different animal for us. We’re touching some deep issues in this issue — drugs, pornography, Brittney Spears’ new album, etc. We’re running a scientific study on whether or not the government should step in and regulate the adult film business. We’re running a review of a Brady Bunch porn spoof. We’re running a long-form feature story on the Salvia herbal drug craze.

We also have two new retro technology features. I put together and edited a bunch of 10-year-old tech and game reviews. Not exactly cover stories, but there’s some serious gaming history in these articles. Shareware used to be all the rage. Freeware was a novel idea. This was, of course, before the open source revolution. You’ll also see that there used to be a little outfit called GT Interactive Software. They distributed Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and then decided to make a bunch of games from Duke’s “Build” engine, which sucked, even back then. They don’t exist anymore.

Second, I’m putting something together called “The Old Shoebox.” I think all of us tech-nerds have one. An old sneaker box with magazine CD’s, old operating systems, multiple game distributions, early CDR’s of Knoppix and a burned copy of Microsoft Office 2000 — before they started limiting how many times you could use the CD key.

I’m dusting off these half-scratched discs, taking the legal stuff and giving you a bunch of freebies. Next week you can download AIM 4.X and Aim + here. I’m not sure that you can do that anywhere else. There are also some excellent full games in the abandonware category that you can have. Duke Nukem 1 is first on the list.

So that’s November so far. If you’re a prospective advertiser, please be advised that the girl on the cover this month is not a porn star.

Everyone else — hey, check it out, porn star on the cover!