So, another blog. It's what I do. I find something I think is cool. I think other people need to know about it. Start a blog. Write on it for a while until something happens. Over the past couple years, as the whole world has gone just a bit weird, I've ended up turning back to old hobbies to keep myself entertained and sane. One of those old hobbies have been diving back into video gaming.
Back in the good old days, I was a Collector. I had somewhere near 30 systems, and several thousand games crammed into every corner of my bedroom and basement. The thing was, I wasn't happy with any of it. My tastes were changing, I was discovering new hobbies that excited me, plus the community (save for a small group of online friends I've had for 20+ years now) was getting more toxic than I cared to be associated with.
So, I sold almost all of it off. I traded video gaming for board gaming. It was more social, it got me out of the house more, I met new people...it was kind of awesome. Then...well, you know what happened. After 2 years of basically not being around other people very much... I kind of rediscovered video gaming, mostly through emulation. At my fingertips I had access to all my favorite games, and tons of "new" games that I'd never played before.
One of those online friends told me about a project called eXoDOS. eXoDOS is a valiant effort to try and catalog and make playable as many old PC DOS games as possible. DOS came around at probably the height of my interest in video gaming. Unfortunately, the family PC wasn't all that powerful (I'm pretty sure we had DOS on Floppy disks, it was a couple years before we upgraded to a CD-ROM drive), so I couldn't play a ton of the games that were coming out, especially the ones on CD-ROM. But they sure looked cool. So, I downloaded the "Lite" (52 GB!!) version and my eyes were opened.
There are over 7000 games catalogued on eXoDOS. The Lite version is all the Metadata, box art, screenshots, instruction manuals etc. that they've been able to collect. Then playing the games is a simple download and installation (all done automatically away).
As I've started to explore eXoDOS... I'm finding a lot of extremely weird games. Now, I get it, video games are weird by nature. Have you ever really thought about what you are doing in Super Mario Bros.?? There are some truly bizarre things I'm coming across that I can't wait to dig into. I don't just mean weird game themes, but also odd sections of games, some random aspect that pulls you out of the game... just weird stuff.
As is my style, I had an idea to try and share some thoughts on some of the crazy games I've discovered. This won't be limited to just DOS games. I'll spread out to other consoles and formats as time goes on, but at first, I think I need to talk about some of these DOS and Windows 3.1 games first. Oh, I didn't mention Windows 3.1? It turns out the folks behind eXoDOS also have eXoWin3x - collecting as much of the software released on that platform as well (it goes beyond gaming, so it won't be used as often, but it will certainly be used).
I don't have a set schedule when posts are going to come out. Just whenever I've played a game that meets my totally random and unquantifiable criteria and I need to talk about why it's so weird.
If you would like to check out eXoDOS or eXoWin3x, just check out the links below.
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