Updating Download Central again

After a break of six or seven months, I’ve started updating Download Central again. There are thirteen new Windows 3.1 Games:

• Ambush, the implementation of an ancient board game also known as Rithmomachia.
• Battle SAT, Battleship in space with interesting graphics and a slightly uncommon interface.
• Blocks, a simple Concentration that’s interesting because it is fairly old (1991).
• BrainWave, a 256-color shoot ‘em up that takes place in your brain.
• Dare to Dream, one of the relatively few graphic adventure games for Windows 3.1.
• Life 3000, a Game of Life with many additional features.
• Mario Blaster, a strange little game I added mainly because the VB4 source code is available.
• MLC GuessIt! is a hangman written as a fundraising effort for the Minnesota Literacy Council. You can download two versions.
• Parsec, Black Box with slightly different rules. There are two types of objects to locate, planets and stars.
• Space Mines: Your task is to transport the supply modules in the bottom left corner of the screen to the space station in the top right corner of the screen, avoiding the black hole in the center and the mines moving across the screen.
• Trio is a solitaire card game where you must find groups of three cards that form a trio. Cards have three attributes, color, shape, and quantity. To form a trio, these attributes must be all the same or all different.
• Triple YatZee is, well, Triple-Yahtzee with color scorepad and 3D dice.

What’s popular on Astoria

About a week ago I finally implemented a stat method on Astoria that actually works (I don’t have access to the logs there). It’s a bit early to say much, but the top three are quite clear:

1. Strip poker games
2. Post-apocalyptic games
3. Games for 16-bit Windows

Caro on top!

Well, yes. I just did the stats for the first two days of October, and Thu Nguyen’s Caro has been the most downloaded game so far. That’s the first time another game has dethroned Same Game for Windows since it rose to the top in June 2007.

The further rise of Thu Nguyen’s Caro

Today, Thu Nguyen’s Caro made it into the top twelve downloads. So late in the month, this is quite remarkable.

Blackberries and the sudden popularity of Caro

I’ve written before how the popularity of games always surprises me, how I never know in advance if a game I upload will be downloaded a lot, little or not at all. After a certain time the number of downloads usually stays fairly constant. If a game that has been up for years suddenly gets a boost in popularity, there is usually a specific reason, just as now with Thu Nguyen’s Caro.

A new surprise: Comet Busters!

The unpredictable popularity of games hits again. The latest surprise is Comet Busters!, an Asteroids clone with ray-traced graphics, digitized sound, and multiplayer over modem or Internet. I added it on July 27, and it is currently #10 of the 16-bit Windows games, though it hasn’t made any of the other lists yet.

Four more games running in small windows

Some time ago I listed five games running in small windows, something that has always fascinated me. Then I had found some more, and made a new list, again with a maximum size of 40,000 pixels. That was exactly one month ago. I noticed that I had only four this time, so I left it as a draft hoping a fifth would turn up. It didn’t, so here’s the list anyway.

Usually I look only at how the game starts by default. I’ll make an exception for Ecstasy, since it’s such a cute game, and has only three size settings. By default it starts with 5×5 smileys, with 4×4 the window is small enough to fit here: Pixel count 31,920.

This is how Lights! starts by default under Windows 9x or XP. Under Win32s, you have to resize it to make it display nicely , and the window would be larger. Pixel count: 25,920.

Gem Mania is the third and last Lights Out in this list. It was written by Steven Marshall and has a custom window in the same style as Slider. A special feat the author has achieved here is that the icon is a complete representation of the game, just smaller in size, but the number of “gems” is the same! The window is already smaller than anything in the previous list, but it is not the smallest yet. Pixel count: 20,736.

This one is. Global Mines is a Minesweeper with Internet support, and in its default setting it has the smallest window I have ever seen on a Windows game. Pixel count: 20,064.

Games from Scotland

I noted before that the vast majority of UK card games is from England, more specifically from rural England (An English love for patience). Now I wanted to see how this is with UK games in general, and went through all the readmes in search for contact addresses. I found half a dozen in Scotland, and two in Wales. Here are, for now, the games with addresses in Scotland.

The Clackmannanshire address is not for the author (Roderick A. Begbie) of HDS Hi-Lo, but for the distributor (Hillfoots Data Services). I’ll put it here anyway. It would be the oldest game from Scotland in my collection, and the only card game.

Peter Balch (Edinburgh) wrote several interesting Windows games from at least 1994 on. So far, I uploaded two of them, more will certainly follow.

Another game from Edinburgh: Code Breaker by R.D. McDermid, 1995. It even has a picture of Edinburgh Castle in the about screen.

Steven Porter gives an Aberdeen address in Jump (1995).

Neil Fraser wrote Chain Reaction in Inverness in 2003.

Now, this whole thing should not be taken too serious. But a few details are interesting. In England, freeware and shareware development seems to take place in the country mostly. I think I came across only one London address, and I can’t remember any from the big industrial cities at all. But from these six Scottish games, three are from Edinburgh and one from Aberdeen.

That all these games are for Windows 3.1, is probably to a certain amount a coincidence, Peter Balch for example has written a couple of 32-bit games as well. Still, the absolute lack of DOS games is interesting. This is very different in England, but it is similar in Ireland. So far, I’ve come across only two DOS games from Ireland, and these were later than most Windows games.

Early Windows 3 games at Microsoft

Just trying to gain an overview of the Windows 3 games written in 1990 by Microsoft employees. I’m ignoring those I know only within the Windows Entertainment Pack. Months are according to the time stamp of the versions I have.

Curt Johnson’s Windows games

Moved to new blog.