~/Mr Abandonware

A few thoughts on why I'm dropping Microsoft and moving over to Linux, and why I think we all should do so. mrabandonware.wordpress.com/2025/05/11/t...

Dark Messiah: Community Edition is now available for wishlist on Steam. - new game modes (NG+, co-op, trials) - new mechanics (sliding, relics, spells, weapons, transformations) - updated Source engine (Linux, Win64, CSM) - achievements, cloud saves, workshop, controller support

Now I’m looking for a copy of the book so I can try and do it properly* *follow the step-by-step instructions in the book, maybe learning something in the process

Sweeny’s MIT comment tells me he was obviously intimidated by games like System Shock and Thief, which would explain his preference for peddling low effort slop.

In 2016, we published potentially the largest single feature to ever appear in Game Informer magazine with a full oral history of the legendary studio, BioWare. We've made that feature available online following reports of the studio's impending closure. gameinformer.com/feature/2026...

To honor one of the studios that defined PC gaming, we've republished more than 20 articles about BioWare today. The pcgamer.com homepage is dedicated to interviews, retrospectives, and making-ofs about some of the best RPGs of all time.

WIN NIGHT OF THE DEMON ANNIVERSARY EDITION 666/2000 Unavailable for eight years, our legendary Limited Edition Blu-ray release of NIGHT OF THE DEMON has been resurrected! RT this post for a chance to WIN copy number 666/2000 powerhousefilms.co.uk/products/night-of-the-demon-anniversary-edition-le

Okay, people are already getting really depressed and frustrated with the Next Fest, so I'll say what I said last time round: Wait a day or two. They order the games on the pages by hours played, and 99% of the AI garbage will sink like a stone. Right now it's just undifferentiated and unranked.

Presumably that's the monthly subscription price on the labels.

I could buy myself a new gaming laptop to play Train Sim World 7, or I could buy this…

By my reckoning, we're only 18 games away from 2026 having as many new #msdos releases as 2025. If you like DOS, and you like #gamedev, and you want to see DOS become a more popular indie game target year after year, the MS-TRES jam awaits: itch.io/jam/ms-tres

Find the games of the 2026 IFComp here: ifcomp.org/ballot You have until October 19 to rate them!

Lately I've been seeing a lot of depressing posts about how people discard their own experiences in favor of efficiency and utility, and for some reason I needed to launch into a disjointed and pedantic rant about why useless is good.

My theory is we’re already at the stage where these agents are vibe-coded and the people creating them don’t really understand how they work. But, if you don’t understand your code, and it does something unexpected, that doesn’t mean it’s acting on its own. You’re still responsible.

I’vd actually been using a copy of this book from @archive.org to teach myself Pascal (no dragons coded yet).

A new tactical combat game for #msdos has been released! #StarCadre Team Command puts you in charge of a squad of elite operatives in the far future, conducting special missions on behalf of an interstellar civilisation. Get it from cyningstan.itch.io/star-cadre-t... #ibmpc #cga

New Guide: How to find where Steam stores Proton game files #Proton #Linux #SteamOS #LinuxGaming

"I'm Paul Page, from Papyrus, this is IndyCar Racing" (I'm not Paul Page, he just introduces this game)

🎮 Help us map the UK’s videogame heritage We’ve launched the UK’s first nationwide survey of videogame-related collections, and we want to hear from developers, publishers, studios, collectors and industry professionals. Take part: forms.gle/z9a1qhVopYMT...

I really need journalists to learn that every time OpenAI or Anthropic or xAI says that their model has broken containment and could destroy humanity that it’s a marketing pitch by companies running out of cash with high overheads and no profitable business model wanting more investment.

I haven’t owned many consoles, but the GameCube was my favourite. Played Resident Evil 4 and ended up working my way backwards through the rest, and so many hours on SSX3 (what a soundtrack). Still regret selling it (although I kept the games to play on the Wii).

Oh, Hi new follower, I’m a Senior non-AI Engineer and you’re welcome to stick around and learn how the real professionals do things. Could be useful now the bubble’s about to burst.

LLMs can only look back at the dataset they were trained on. They cannot create anything new, that requires actual human creativity.

The History of Ultima VII, One Of The Greatest RPGs Ever Made kotaku.com/the-history-...

Absolutely spot on with this: “To forego the absurd amount of resources that people have built up over the past couple of decades, and shared openly with the public, and instead sing the praises of systems owned and controlled by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google? And to call that democratizing?”

Finding out the Zork plagiarist is an actual professor, who would be the first to cry foul if someone took his work and failed to cite him…

Cloud infrastructure hardware’s getting expensive, even for Microsoft.

It is interesting to consider that in our digital age our physical goods have become the simulacra; copies that represent something that was once real, now without function, that we buy to experience the feeling of owning something outright

I love this website. You could be paying $70 for a game, or you could be playing games so obscure nobody even bothers to sell them to you anymore.

I not only refuse to believe business must be done this way, but I'd argue we as gamers need to develop strong, unified principles to say, "I will not support publishers that treat their game devs this way." Microsoft is among the worst and most abusive when it comes to layoffs.

Doom has been a toxic franchise to work on over the years. These messages are hidden "Easter Eggs" from Doom 3, of workers apologising to their families. It's tragic, seeing all those personal moments lost, just for a game...

4.6 million scabs. No wonder the game industry’s in such a state…

I've been trying to teach myself Turbo Pascal, so this looks like a chance to show off my (lack of) skills. Maybe you could join too?

Cole Dröws, with permission from the rights holder, released the unpublished UK English version of Blackout. Blackout is a 1997 non-linear point-and-click psychological horror game filmed on Beta with hand crafted sets and stop motion puppets. coledrows.itch.io/blackout

Just got an email from GOG offering me a special discount.... on some of these over inflated prices. I'll pass, thanks.

On a similar note, if the page on itch.io for your indie game contains AI-generated images I'm going to assume the code isn't yours either. Saw a text adventure game that did this, FFS, just describe your game with text as well... Wof3D on C64, sounds too good to be true, it is....

i can't confirm for sure but i absolutely have a hunch that some asshat asked ChatGPT "list popular modern game mechanics" and it spat out skill trees and crafting

Or you could just play the original using something like TRX - Tomb Raider Community Edition* and save yourself spending another £50 for features you don't really need. * other open source re-implementations are available, I just prefer this one github.com/LostArtefact...

Yes! See, this is what I'm talking about. Here's a presentation about Swiss computer game history in English. More stuff like this needs to come from places that aren't America or Japan. youtu.be/e6Krl2CE3eg

Saber Interactive might, by strange coincidence, have a HR and payroll management system called Claude, where he looked up the details of an ex-employee. Or, he might be a complete and utter clown. I know which my money's on.

Another excellent video, hopefully reaching a few more eyeballs. I very much subscribe to the belief that we all have the agency to shape the computing landscape (not just gaming) and, to borrow the phrase, need to keep striking matches in the darkness whenever we can.

A recent thing I added is a Goodreads list of books on video games with a more global perspective: www.goodreads.com/list/show/42... I'll keep saying that "Gaming the Iron Curtain" is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. It really helps you see video games from a different perspective.

Yet another interesting game is on giveaway. Breathedge 2 enters Early Access soon, and on that occasion the developers give away for free the first Breathedge - space survival game with a lot of dark humor and chickens. Take it for free until August,9, 17:00 UTC store.steampowered.com/app/738520

You may not like it, but this is what peak localization looks like (Asterix: Mega Madness (PS1, 2001))

Going off on a tangent, my favourite quiz question is about cheese, from You Don't Know Jack (1995), the one about which cheese would win a fight in a delicatessen. To this day, I still say "Parmesan, it's a hard, hard cheese" in the tone of Paul Kaye (the quizmaster in the UK version of the game).