The Schenk & Horn Tetris games

Nowadays, Lars Schenk and Frank Horn produce a software that creats and prints barcodes ActiveBarcode. Before 2004, they ran a company called ShareDirect which published shareware. In 2002, there was a school shooting in Erfurt with 17 dead. As a reaction, the German parliament decided, two years later, on tougher laws to prevent access of minors to violent video games (don’t you love politicians’ logic?). Every computer game sold in Germany henceforth had to have an official age rating, a costly process, too costly for a small shareware company. ShareDirect closed down, the domains are for sale, currently they redirect to Classic-Cadillac.com, one of Lars Schenk’s hobbies.

ShareDirect published many games by Digital Nightmares, but also several programs Lars Schenk and Frank Horn wrote themselves. Among these are four Windows Tetris games with 256-color graphics that are interesting because some of them are variants rarely covered by shareware authors.

ColorStar 2000 is the least unique, it is just Columns, which is not exactly rare, still it is only one of two 256-color Columns for Windows 3.1 that I know (The other is Columns Max, by the author and in the style of Bricklayer).

Magic Words is Wordtris, avery rarely implemented variant on any platform. With the same update I uploaded a demo for a game called Wordtriss, but that demo allows only 45 seconds of gameplay, so it hardly counts.

Pogo’s Dreams is Puyo Puyo, not something you encounter very often either, though there are some Columns clones (like Gemstorm) with a certain Puyo Puyo feel. This is the real thing—without the competitive aspects of course.

But the most interesting and uncommon is WinBlocker. It is based on Quarth, a 1989 Konami arcade machine only ever ported to Japanese platforms. It combined Tetris with shoot ‘em ups: You shoot single squares into the dropping U- and L-shaped pieces, they vanish as soon as a square or rectangle is full. Apart from this unique gameplay Quarth is interesting for having a certain steampunk feel before the word was even invented. The export version, Block Hole, was devoid of the steampunk elements. Quarth never got particularly well known outside Japan.

These games do not need any DLLs. They have two nag screens when you start them and one when you exit. According to the help files there are also some ads during gameplay, but I never encountered them. I uploaded them in the course of a larger update with twelve new Windows 3.1 Tetris games. There are now 40 in total, and I’ve uploaded nearly everything I know about and have on my hard drive.

Five popular German games

These are just a couple of games from Germany that are downloaded more often than others, not necessarily the five most popular, that chnages from month to month anyway. Click on a thumbnail to get to the download page.

The Great Giana Sisters was a 1987 Commodore 64 game, soon ported to Amiga, Atari ST, and Amstrad CPC. The graphics, essentially the same on all platforms, were by Manfred Trenz. It was a clone of Super Mario Bros, too close for comfort in the eyes of Nintendo, who pressured the publisher (Rainbow Arts) to withdraw the game from sale. A planned ZX version not even hit the shelves.

Ten years later Rainer Sinsch started remaking the game, which had achieved a sort of cult status, for PC. At the Mekka & Symposium 1998, his remake was the winning entry in the 32k game competition. A larger version with better graphics soon followed. The games use an uncommon 360×240 resolution (the only other game I know to use it is from Germany as well, it’s Albion). In 1999 Rainer Sinsch started working on a Windows game that sticks less strictly to the Commodore 64 original, Giana Worlds

This is simply Sokoban, nothing else, and as such it is probably the most beautiful implementation ever written for Windows 3.1. It has a nice and fitting Japanese touch about it. The Window background shows the kanji for Sokoban (倉庫番) and the splash screen shows the release year in Japanese style: 平成九年, year nine of the Heisei period.

It’s a strange thing with Shisen-Sho. It’s a Japanese invention, found first on a Tamtex arcade machine, but nowhere has it been as popular as in Germany. More than two out of three of the implementations I’ve come across so far are from there. Maybe it’s because it fits the concept of the arcade puzzle so well.

This game, simply called Shisen-Sho was written ten years after the original boom (which was mostly an Atari thing) by Martin Fiedler. It’s a 32-bit Windows program, has functional yet beautiful graphics and six board sizes to choose from.

MegaPlex is a remake of Supaplex, the somewhat legendary Boulder Dash in a computer. It uses the graphics of Infotron, an earlier Mac remake or port.

The 95 in Dave Dude 95 refers to the year, not to the operating system: This is a 16-bit Windows game. It is probably the only LucasArts-style graphic adventure game written for that platform, the others I’ve seen so far are more like Mystery House and don’t really use the graphics in gameplay.

Germany, Russia, Italy, Sweden

I’ve always been interested in where games come from, and I’ve listed the games I write about or offer for download by country for years. Now I looked at the Download Central stats to see from which country listings people actually click through. The results were not what I was expecting. There’s a steep curve, each entry in the following list has about half as many clicks as the one above it:

1. Germany
2. Russia
3. Italy
4. Sweden

All the other country listings create so few click-throughs that the numbers are hardly relevant and might well be a product of chance.

Of course I cannot say how relevant these numbers are at all. I do not know if people come to these pages because they are interested in games from that country, or if the page just turned up in the search for a game they were looking for. But it’s interesting.

One thing that baffles me is that there is absolutely no relation between the number of games I have from a certain country and the number of clicks. UK, France and Canada for example are very long lists, longer than anything except Germany. I’m especially astonished that there was not a single click from the Finland listing, since this is quite a long list as well and one of the few countries with a distinct game culture of its own.

In der Zwickmühle

A couple of days I uploaded Carl von Blixen’s Nine Men’s Morris. It occurred to me that this is the only implementation of this board game that I remember coming across. It seems to be surprisingly unpopular with programmers.

Nine Men’s Morris is quite an old game. It is well documented since the twelth century. It is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and boards can be found carved into the cloister seats of English cathedrals. The strange name seems to be peculiar to English, in most other European languages it is known simply as Mill, probably because the board somewhat resembles a windmill.

Until around 1800, it was more popular than chess. Since then, its popularity may have declined more in the English speaking world than it did on the European continent, especially in Germany, where it is usually bundled with checkers, since both games use the same stones. The board will have checkers on one side and Nine Men’s Morris (Mühle) on the other. The German language even has a special term for the (usually) winning configuration where one player can shuttle one piece back and forth between two mills, taking one of the opponent’s stones with each turn. It’s called Zwickmühle (literally, pinching mill).

Five games that kept me playing

It’s funny, but when you write about games as long as I have, you don’t really play them that much any more. Nowadays, when a game keeps me playing, it’s something special. Out of the 600 games I newly added since I started Download Central half a year ago, these are five that did keep me playing.

If someone had shown me, some time ago, a screenshot of Zeek the Geek and told me that I would play this game, play it a lot, I might have laughed. But I did. I played it and played it until the levels got too hard for me. What’s so great at collecting flowers and avoiding the carnivorous ones as a bonneted cephalopod in a game designed for children? I really don’t know. It’s cute. Everything fits. Just try it yourself.

I discovered Slay on some old shareware CD I had owned for years. It’s a simple yet complex strategy game. Even though the shareware version is restricted to only one map, only one setting, and every game starts exactly the same, I found Slay strangely addictive. And I never really found anything like it, not even among Sean O’Connor‘s other games.

There aren’t many arcade-style shoot ‘em ups for PC, not from the classic epoch. Half a dozen, maybe a dozen. Among these, Raptor: Call of the Shadows is in my as usual not all that humble opinion the best. It perfectly combines arcade quality graphics with PC style, somewhat RPGish gameplay. You control your plane with the mouse, which quickly gets very intuitive. Instead of lives that you lose with one shot you have a sort of hitpoints. You get money from your kills and use it to buy power-ups. If you want to know how much I played that game, just look at my collection of Raptor screenshots.

I’ve already mentioned Nibbly as the perfect example of the German arcade puzzle. Nibbly’96 frustrated me a lot with its pointless system of lives and time limits. But I kept on playing. Again, look at the screenshots. Currently I’ve reached level 8, but have not solved it yet.

Another German arcade puzzle. Another huge screenshot collection. The gameplay elements of Lomax Boulders are all from Boulder Dash, but the way they are used here is unique and insane. There are five games, the shareware versions have about five levels each (the later ones less, I think), so combined they are a good sized game.

German arcade puzzles

This is a curious type of game that’s mostly popular in Germany, or maybe I should say the German-speaking world, for a few examples are Austrian. From their gameplay, these games are puzzle games, relying on logic and contemplation. But additionally, there are arcade concepts like lives and time limits on the levels.

Strictly speaking, these type of game is not a German invention, but a Japanese one. The two earliest instances that I know are two arcade machines, Puzznic and Shisen-Sho Joshiryo-Hen, both from 1989. But these are coin-ops, they have to have these arcade elements or they wouldn’t make their proprietors any money. Japanese puzzle games for home computers (Sokoban, SameGame) are free of them. Germans seem to love this concept as an end in itself.

The two abovementioned arcade machines found followers, and clone makers, mainly and for a while even exclusively in Germany. Puzznic got only few clones and look-alikes, the most remarkable one probably Michael Riedel’s Brix. But there are lots of Shisen-sho games—nearly all of them from Germany, and, as an added curiosity, mainly on Atari platforms.

But new games of this type were created as well. The most remarkable is, I think, Nibbly. It gave a new twist to the Snake/Nibbler concept. In Nibbler, the snake moves through a maze and is therefore in more danger to block its own way. In Nibbly, the maze is completely filled with fruits, the snake will thus grow much faster. You will have to spend a lot of thought on how the maze can be solved. But, even though it was never an arcade machine, time limits and lives are still in place.

Nibbly is an Austrian invention, created by the demo group Cosmos Designs. It started out as a Commodore 64 game, Nibbly ’92. The next year the group ported it, with many enhancements, to Amiga and PC as Super Nibbly. A few years later, it found a shareware clone in Nibbly’96, which is how I came to know and love-hate it.

For as good as any of these games might be, I never understood the idea behind the concept. If you don’t have to keep the player inserting quarters into your machine, why limit his time? Why force him to repeat already solved levels because his lives ran out?