Exhaustive list of games made in DOS 3DGCS

[chris]

Nah dude no worries, you've contributed some crazy knowledge here the last few years and you're welcome in any discussion

Yeah this search engine scours a massive collection of shovelware CDs. I found it a few months ago but it didn't dawn on me till recently that you can search it. The search engine is less complicated than it looks, you can just put in something like pnocomp.exe or background.vga and it will turn up a list of any GCS game that has ever been published on CD, BBS, etc. Before I knew this existed I was downloading them from archive.org and searching through them with WinRar which was painstaking. Pretty cool stuff, can't wait to boot up some of these games in Dosbox. Other fun things to try: searching for .IBK, .FGF, etc. files that are useful for GCS and GCSPaint. .MID, .FLI, etc. might turn up interesting results too but who has time to comb through all that lol.

[lgb3d]

This morning I found some interesting stuff But your suggestion for the search criteria Omg... I think I just found the largest collection of vgr images.. like sure a handful of it is going to be stock graphics. But there's a lot more than that. Wow.. it could be a ton of work to weed through it all, because there's a lot of it OMG

[Mystery]

Chris - Haha, I guess we stumbled upon the same thing.
I've missed the Continuum beta though and the Metalhead beta sounds great as well. That would be two additional entries for the collection! As long as the internet archive upload isn't working, I'll put everything into the next update.

I'll try to find the Continuum beta. Looking forward to the Metalhead beta from you as well! Exciting times for the 3DGCS community (I which I guess is just us )

Edit: Continuum beta 1.4 found, thanks for the heads up.

[Mystery]

The archive.org upload function works again. Enjoy the latest version of the archive with a ton of new games to play with: archive.org/details/3dgcs-archive-2.1.1

First post and google sheets master list are also updated!

[chris]

Nice!

One thing missing from your list is Terminal Terror (same name, different game) by Cation Games. It definitely existed, I played it and talked to the author back in the 90s (I think he was 14 or 15 years old at the time). I noticed in a Google search you were talking to a guy on Vogons who said he had a copy, you might try asking him if he still does.

[Mystery]

I'll update the document accordingly.

It's probably time to go back to some of the forums and get the search going again, good idea!


Edit:
Something fun I just thought of. I went through the list to check when the GCS games were made and came up with this:
1993/1994 2 Games (pre GCS)
1995 32 Games (almost all post GCS)
1996 30 Games
1997 21 Games
1998 6 Games
1999 8 Games
2000 3 Games
2013/2014 1 Game



So from 95-97 the GCS was practically everywhere. There wasn't a coverdisk in sight that didn't have at least something GCS related.
From 98-00 everything was on Win9x and DOS got left behind. Probably some people finished their old projects or were just stubborn (like us).

The 2013/14 entries are the MOD_G Demos by our own admin Saturdaynight.

Considering this forum was created well over 15 years ago, we do not have the most stellar record of actually developing some finished games with our beloved GCS But that of course includes me as well.

Who knows how many games are still undiscovered or will never be found and how many games were started but never finished.

So even for those "crappy" GCS games out there: The devs deserve at least credit for finishing what they started and putting their work out into the public, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

[chris]

Interesting I know Pie was advertising the GCS heavily in magazines in 1995-1996, I was 12 years old browsing through Game Developer magazine in late '95 and saw an ad for it and *begged* my parents for Christmas. Santa came through for me and that same day I was making a game.

There were so many lousy GCS games. I made two of them lol. I mean there were a lot of kids making games. People with no budget, people who didn't know what they were doing, and people who just wanted to throw crap out there and to capitalize on the FPS craze. But there were some bold, crazy things that were interesting. That game we just uncovered, Man in the Mirror, definitely a standout among the other recently found games. The game is totally weird and gives no explanation as to what's going on. Super odd. I dig it.

And yeah, hats off to those who released games, even if they weren't great, at least they put out something to share that they were proud of. And yeah it was hard getting stuff out there. My dad just so happened to be friends with someone who ran a BBS, and knew someone else who was running a university research project to install something called the Internet in peoples' homes. He taught me HTML and in 1996 I launched one of the first million pages on the web with my game on it, and had people approaching me about adding it to shovelware CDs, websites, etc. It's too bad Ultimate! was such a stupid game lol, but hey, I was 12, and it was my first time making a game. It's so funny finding it on shovelware archives to this day. My glorious trainwreck of a game, preserved forever for people to laugh at, haha.

[Mystery]

Ha, I got my GCS from Santa on the same day as you did for the same reason. Saw an article in a magazine and I was hooked from 3 screenshots. I *knew* I was destined to be a superstar game dev at 14

Oh I absolutely love going through all those wacky GCS games like you. There's so much weird stuff to discover and every now and then in a totally crappy game the kid did something really clever without noticing it. If I had the time, I'd go through every game and document interesting methods and ideas.

But at least you made something and put it out there! I'd love to find a trashy GCS game I made as a kid on CDs, but alas, I could never finish stuff, started over countless times, switched to other hobbies and went back. It's the same thing today, that's why I'm sometimes super active here and the next day I'm gone for 3 years until the GCS bug bites me again.

Edit: Yeah, Man in the Mirror is really weird, I like it. Haven't figured out much yet though.
I also like games that take themselves way to serious, like Warbride.

[chris]

Nice yeah while I never became the next John Romero with the GCS, I did become a software engineer and I have the GCS to thank for setting me on that path. A childhood friend in middle school who I gave a copy of GCS to actually did become a game designer later in life, I was talking to him last year and we were joking about how GCS changed our lives in a profound way, but seriously it kinda did. Maybe there's not any "programming" you have to do but it teaches you to think like a programmer. You're still editing tons of text files, building if-then logic into animated objects, etc. which does teach you the fundamentals of game design.

I actually had a good bit of old GCS stuff survive my 1999 hard drive crash. My dad moved me off his PC onto my own PC at some point and tried to copy all my GCS stuff using floppies. He got like a dozen floppies in before giving up lol. So in 2008 or so I found them at my dad's house and recovered what I could, glued all the zip pieces together, and actually got lots of old projects back. I had maybe a dozen great game project ideas, but got a few levels in, gave up, and moved on to something else. It's interesting, it's like looking into my young mind and remembering the thrill of making my own games. I was gonna make a game where you pilot a starship and visit other planets. An RPG where you're exploring cave ruins and shooting goblins with fireballs. A post-apocalyptic world where you roam an urban environment in search of food. Some cool ideas that ended up being way beyond the scope of the engine's capabilities lol. At least it seemed that way at the time, now I'm shocked to find all the undocumented features of the engine.

Speaking of games that take themselves too seriously, was glad to see you found Narc, I actually remember playing that one back in the day. The readme says it was created by an actual police officer, so the game is attempting to be fairly serious and realistic, but then you go into the meth lab and the sinks say "METH" on them lol, like okay that's a bit heavy-handed, I was able to infer this is a meth lab without being beaten over the head haha.

[Mystery]

Haha, I remember the "METH" text on the flat sink texture in the middle of the room. Really funny stuff, I love seeing janky implementations like that in GCS games (on top of the overall jank that the GCS engine already delivers).

[chris]

Okay so I tried playing War-Bride. The graphics are pretty amazing, love the comic book look and what they did with the weapons. Like they put some effort into this! But as far as level design, I don't think I've ever been more frustrated in a GCS game before and that's saying a lot lol. I think after the 15th time reloading a game after getting blown up by a barrel I just gave up. What were they thinking putting 100 exploding barrels in this game? And putting innocent people behind them and the only way to get to them is to blow up barrels. I want to like this game but it's so infuriating. The cheesiness is great too, very 90s edgy vibes, but my god, the level design is so horrible. Maybe I'll try playing it again on god mode but I think even then the game will find ways to punish me, and not in a fun way.

This could have been a really great game if the level design were improved.

[Mystery]

That's usually what happens when a game doesn't get tested by anyone but the developers or people already very familiar with the game/genre. It becomes way way too difficult and nobody realizes it.

Happened to me as well when making a platformer. I designed every level with a bunch of little jumping puzzles and exercises. Tested each one by itself in the editor and when I could make the jump(s) with the right timing after a few tries I thought: "That's fine!".

When I gave a beta to some people for testing, nobody could even get to the first checkpoint. The game was insanely brutal and when I couldn't believe what everybody told me and I tested the levels as a whole myself: Even I could only finish a level with a LOT of effort and the later levels were impossible. I went through three or four gameplay revisions making the game easier and easier with each pass until I ended up with the final product...which is STILL not easy for some people.


I think War-Bride is such a game where they had a vision and just went for it without any feedback. There sure was a lot of effort put into this game, at least from an audiovisual standpoint.

[chris]

Great point. My games suffered from the same extreme difficulty and lack of testing. The games are easy when you know where the secret doors and enemies are hiding. In Ultimate there's that room where you open the door and you get surprised with 20 very fast, armored ninjas that don't chase. It's stupid difficult to kill them all without using up all your weapons and dying (the kind of situation in an FPS where an exploding barrel would have made things more interesting actually). In Metalhead there are cheap booby traps everywhere. The worst offender is in a later level there's a room with black and white tiles, and if you walk over the white tiles, you fall into a spike pit. Problem is, this is a checkerboard pattern, so in order to avoid the white tiles, you have to line up the crosshairs exactly, and I mean pixel perfect, with the edges of the tiles and walk diagonally over them. Even I can't do this anymore without failing a tile or two. It's total madness, but I shipped it like that.

But yeah, I did get to level 2 in War-Bride. It was full, literally full, of even more barrels. I was just like, ffs, if you wanna defeat this enemy just report them to OSHA, it'd be easier.

[lgb3d]

Both you guys have a super solid point, games need testing. Maybe not as much if you just goofing around trying to spoof people.. but if you're serious about what you making you can't be complacent.