The above is the screen that confronts you when you boot up the program MISSION.exe which is the main game executable, there is also another two exe’s BRIEF.exe and MISINDX.exe however I believe MISINDX to be something that BRIEF works with so its better to leave it alone. BRIEF.exe when run gives you a menu structure to browse through and read the background infomation on the games story and indepth instructions on how to play the game. The graphics of the game are ascii in nature much like Karel3 and other rogue games of the time but not to the same degree of quality, with this said the game does have a lot of playability and I distinctly remember playing it for hours as a child. The theme of Mission Mainframe is similar to that of The Wizard’s Castle however instead of a castle your in a corporate building taken over by a malfunctioning mainframe, the aim of the game is to blast through the building level by level until you find the mainframe and win the game. Each time you play the game is different, beyond simply being able to choose your intial character from commando, secret agent, detective and private eye and setting up traits by roll of dice; each new game randomly builds up the map so no two games are the same.

While I do have a soft spot for this game there are a few niggles which fixed, would have made it much better, for one the top down map becomes very similar between floors very quickly and while I know its more about imagination and gameplay than being told what things look like a bigger screen area like that in Karel3 would have been amazing. With that said the game has quite a few moments of greatness, especially with the amount of modification you can do to your character to better yourself within the game. A must play for those whom are into classic dos games, especially the early open source home brew section. I have made Mission Mainframe available to download below so more people can enjoy it as I have yet to find another working download location and I would hate for such a great game to be lost to time.

I have included everything in the download zip file that I found with my copy, the CHR files are save games and you can see the last time I played this was 1999 a good 10 years ago, I have left them in the zip so you can play with a working character. Feel free to comment below on the game or any others I should check out.

[download id="5" format="1"]

I found my copy of the game on an old floppy disk which had once contained omnis 7 (1994) that I had obtained from somewhere in 1998 and formatted for my own use, once I had the games full name I googled it and found much to my suprise the game creators personal website (moved from the original homepage). It is really an amazing feeling to find something after years of searching and yes I know that spending so long hunting down a home-brew video game is a little bit sad but it is really worth it in the end. The game concept was put together by Gandalfs friend Morgul in two initial versions Karelitima I and II, of course those are just their aliases and indeed the man responsible for this games pointless inception is Alexandros Karelas whom according to Alexios Chouchoulas (Gandalf) developed them as part of learning how to code games in Turbo Pascal even the name Kareltima is a link to the creators name. In any case Alexios wrote Karelitima III himself in addition to the previous two and published them into the open source scene. You can download various ports of Karelitima III from his project page, however the source for the original two games has been lost to history, much like I thought this game had been.

The game play wasn’t really the point of the game, however it is a typical ASCII dosgame, which in itself is a joke. It is Set in a supposedly mystical world, where Gandalf the Grey is in the fake ID business, pub landlords know their calculus, malacks roam the towns (beware!), and bored priests are, well, very bored. The game is full of inside jokes between the two original developers and is very rude and crude in parts, however the game is still suprisingly very fun to play and I wasted entire afternoons attempting to beat it. I am still not sure if it’s actually completable or if that is part of the joke but it is well worth playing if you are a fan of dos rouge like games and have a sense of humour/irony.

Download

[download id="4" format="1"]

Because I use xp64 on my pc a lot of the good old dos games I used to play wont run, even under dosbox – which is a problem from windows 2k onwards im afraid. One of my favourite games of all time UFO Enemy unknown will install from cd but the actuall game wont run on my pc. Now if i were to admit to being a hard core computer user, I could boot up from dos on a floppy disk (yes ancient technology I know but it works!) mount the cd rom and play the game – but thats a lot of hard work just for one game. I decided to google it, see if anyone had fixed the problems I had come accross, since I used to play it loads under windows 98 and when we upgraded to XP none of my old dos games would run, let alone on my even newer xp64 box. This is where I stumbled into the world of abandonware. After a few hours of searching I had found UFO Enemy Unknown and decided to download it as the website said it supported windows xp. Im not sure of the legality of downloading it but as its abandonware and as I already bought the cd years ago – and still have that cd in my posesion – I dont see it being a problem.

The file downloaded was pretty much the game files so all I had to do was copy them accross to where I wanted to run the game from… D:\My Applications\Dos Games\UFO\ and it worked. It just worked, sound and everything (because im doing this from memory i cant remember if it just worked natively under x64's 32bit emulation, or if I had to use dos box. But thats not important, the important thing is it worked).

Well seeing as todays modern PC games – with a few exceptions: doom III, UT2k4 – are focused totally on graphics and less on game-play I decided to go on the hunt for some free ones online (not the abandon-ware ones mind you, the open-source free ones). My first port of call is sourceforge and I have found a huge list of games that look to promise some good game play. As I am not at home atm I am unable to provide a first person review of each game, so for now this shall have to provide as a preview and when I get home tonight I shall download the ones listed here and play them so as to write a comprehensive review on them.

Automanic

From the description this sounds like it could be a fun game to play. I used to spend countless hours playing twisted metal in turns with friends and my sisters – so it could be classed as a good favorite of mine. It is written in C++ and python and although as far as I can tell they have only ported it to Linux because of the languages used to write it, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to other frameworks – if they don't have an x86 windows port I might try to compile it with native x64 support. The graphics aren't all that good it seems, but then again it was always the game play in twisted metal that kept me playing for hours on end.

Irrlicht Engine

Not a game on its own but the Irrlicht Engine really does look like something good. If you go to the engines website you can find a varied list of games that have been built using the engines base. I have included this here in the list because I shall be checking out some of the games that have been made using it and writing an article on that. Also I am bored of the useless collection of windows screen savers that come with xp, so I may use this engine to create some pretty ones all depends on how quick it is

UFO2000

This one goes back to the beginning of this article my love of UFO Enemy Unknown and looks to be one of the first I shall download and try tonight. Im not too sure how well developed this is as it is still in beta. But from the screenshots it does look to be a pretty good representation of the UFO games, and the developers say that it is able to import the image maps from the actual game to provide an even better representation. Even though I am likely to play UFO Enemy Unknown over this, it does look to be an interesting game and so I shall give it a go and let you know what I think.

EDuke32

Next to UFO Enemy Unknown on my list of games I loved would be Duke Nukem 3D. I haven't been able to find this in recent years, although ages ago I managed to find a demo download which was basically the full first level. The last time I properly played this was on an N64 and since then I have only been able to find and play demo versions for the pc. Alas since getting an x64 pc I haven't been able to find a version of Duke Nukem that will run – however if this one doesn't run the source is available and so I may be able to port it to native x64 architecture – although I don't know too much about such things. In the past I have simply pressed compile and ran the executable it produced. The developers describe this as A cross-platform, OpenGL-rendered Duke Nukem 3D port which provides many new features for mod authors. So if it wont run under native 32-bit emulation I should be able to compile it for native x64. If this works I will be one happy bunny as I have tried numerous times this year to get a version of Duke Nukem working.

Scorched 3D

Summarized Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN. I never played Scorched Earth, never even heard of the game to be honest, what attracted me to this one is the multiplayer function. Many a late night has been burnt up with me and Andrew playing Worms Armageddon and AOE II over the network, and if this provides some good game play then it may be added to our list of multi-player games. The problem with many PC games nowadays, is the fact that you need a fkn cd to play the game, so what if you want to play the game multiplayer on your computers on your network? You can't, unless you crack the cd! I don't know about you but this sounds like the game companies are fueling piracy… all the way though the UT series up-to UT2k3 you could install the game on any PC you owned and not need the cd when I found that UT2k3 wouldn't run without the cd the first thing I did was hunt for a crack! Fortunately the game makers discovered the dismay this caused the UT community and almost immediately released a no-cd patch for the game. Fortunately you don't get this problem with open-source :p

Secret Maryo Chronicles

Described as a Classic Mario game like Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers with an advanced Leveleditor and new Graphics based on SDL, written in C++. Im really interested in the level editor as I always liked the concept of being able to make your own maps for a game. I really liked the Mario Games on the NES and Super NES so being able to play similar on the PC and to be able to edit my own maps for playing is a really cool idea. The graphics look rather good, albeit in a cartoon style. But I'm all about the game play and if they have managed to make that even half of what the original was like then this should turn out to be a new favorite. Says it runs under linux and windows so we shall see if it runs on my x64 box if it does this looks from the screenshots to be a game I may play often.

Cytadela (the Citadel)

From the description it sounds like this is a port of an old doom clone for Amiga. They say that it is OS portable, so I hope they have a x86 version for me to run under emulation. I don't know too much about this as the description was rather brief so all I can comment on is the screenshot that I have got hold of. From the screenshot this looks like a good old 3D FPS and if its based on doom then I'm interested to see what the game-play is like – seeing as I really liked the doom series right up to doom III (which I am having problems getting to run on x64). I shall be able to shed some light on this one and let you know wether its good or not, once I download and play it at home.

As you can see from the tiny selection I have posted above, the world of free open source games is pretty varied and of reasonable quality. Some of these projects have as many active developers as closed-source games and the quality of some can match if not surpass that of retail versions. I chose to ignore any games listed on sourceforge that didn't have screenshots in the main listing when I was browsing. However I am sure I must have missed a few good ones, mainly because Azerius didn't have a screenshot in the browse list either and although I really don't like that torrent program (Im a utorrent guy) it is of good quality.

I shall attempt to get some of the aforementioned games working tonight and get back here with an article explaining a) how i got them to work and b) reviewing how they play.