Playing Four Shareware Games from Software Evolution

Trying out a quartet of '90s MS-DOS shareware games I've never played!
Here's the video where I go over each package from Software Evolution:
• Software Evolution - E...

[@TheNostalgiaMall]

ALLHUMANSMUSTDIE

[@DatOneCat]

*Rapid head jerk motion to the left*

[@obliviousmode575]

BadDriversOf Georgia Me too!

[@jhhwild]

Man that guy's got an attitude!

[@IcidLink]

If this don’t become an Meme I don’t know

[@fuzzydunlop1753]

So true.

[@catriona_drummond]

"Abort actual game" is a beautiful false friend that tells us that the developer is most likely from Germany. "aktuell" means "current" in German. :)

[@staticfanatic]

i love stuff like this.

[@paradoxmo]

Actual or a cognate means “current” in almost every European language except English...

[@pedrofelck]

In Portuguese, "current" is "atual", and in older Portuguese it was spelled "actual", a LOT of people get this confused when learning English.

[@BilisNegra]

@@paradoxmo Yes, I do know its the case with German, and so it is with all Romance languages as long as I can tell: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese...

[@BilisNegra]

That said, Risky Woods is a Spanish game by Dinamic Software, as I mention elsewhere.

[@rjhelms]

The insufficient memory bit was the most nostalgia-inducing part of this whole video..

[@marccaselle8108]

Brings back a memory of me downloading the demo of mortal Kombat 3 and tried to start a match. The game threw a divide overflow error and then I found out that the demo requires 16 megabytes of RAM and I only had 8 megabytes of RAM on my Packard bell back then

[@lmackintosh]

Quick FYI: The "Ok PC" logo at 17:42 is from a Spanish computer gaming magazine that used to include demo discs.

[@LaCasadelOcio]

Ver ese logo me llevó directamente a mi infancia, ojala alguien tuviera las revistas en PDF para volver a leerlas.

[@namebrandmason]

You know you're playing with shareware when you find a game that's unplayable because its performance is tied to your cpu clock speed.

[@troytakesphotos]

Amused that Creative Game Design’s logo is literally just text in a boring font.

[@yuricorrea2491]

In their defense, they're definetly not called Creative Logo Design

[@dougsisk619]

Remember when we were kids and getting a EA game meant it was going to be GOOD?

[@ahandsomefridge]

We old people are blessed

[@appalachianexploration5714]

I just remember the era of "ea games, Challemge everything"

[@dougsisk619]

Appalachian Exploration I think the glory days ended when they stopped calling themselves “Electronic Arts” and started going with “EA Games”. However, I do have some fond memories of old “EA Sports, it’s in the game” titles from the 90s.

[@IkeFoxbrush]

Remember when EA was a new and innovative publisher that would challenge big corporate publishers like Atari, e.g. by putting a spotlight on their developers, unlike Atari which liked to claim all the praise for their developers' work?

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Yup. Why my need for speed collection ends at Carbon

[@AWsounds]

Man, even you just pointing a camera at a monitor and playing Epic Pinball gives me warm tinglies. Heck, that could even be a 20 minute video of it's own!

[@BandenIndarys]

Epic Pinball was one of the games I got in my first pack of Shareware.

[@davidmcgill1000]

Epic Pinball was one of those games that was best as shareware. Android was so much better than every other table.

[@theodorerelic2718]

@@davidmcgill1000 My favorites on that collection was Android and Cyborgirl (both of which I had as individual shareware titles before I found the set).

[@KOTYAR0]

Seconded

[@Monotonegent]

Gonna need you to show off some of them Star Trek games in the corner there.

[@BaumInventions]

Oh man... That "Dongle Ware" Logo ... I remember a game "Oxyd extra" i played a lot back in the days. Must be around 1996. If i remember right i bought this game in a "Gold Games" collection. Dongle Ware and Top Ware (maker of gold games collection) are both german brands. Top ware is gone. The "Gold Games" series was bought by Ubisoft and slowly got worse and worse until they scrapped it after "Gold Games 9" (due to upcoming online game distribution in the early 2000s) . Ohhh memories :D i love it.

[@ColdPie]

I loved Oxyd :)

[@staticfanatic]

you guys should look up "enigma", it's a modern re-imagining of oxyd.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Back in primary we had it Oxyd on the old Macs in school. Glad I found enigma to play it again.

[@obliviousmode575]

We can literally hear you choking on your coffee when “AllHumansMustDie”was said!

[@finonevado8891]

I just finished making breakfast, you got perfect timing good sir

[@ahandsomefridge]

And I'm just starting lunch. Also perfect timing!

[@fubaralakbar6800]

So did I, what a coincidence :D

[@Jamal_Tyrone]

Body Blows provided literally minutes of fun back in the Amiga days! A weird knock off of street fighter 2 with simplified controls designed for a one button joystick, the best bit? Hold down the button to do the special moves! (Although, if I recall correctly you had to fill a special move bar up first.)

[@chrisb7528]

Yes and Team 17 made awesome Amiga games, I loved it on the Amiga.

[@pascalharris1]

I was playing Tubular Worlds, the Mac Version, yesterday on my LCIII - which is nothing like as quick as a Pentium - and you’re right. It shouldn’t be that slow. It’s a great game when it’s running properly.

[@RetailArchaeology]

Tubular Worlds! I bought it when I was a kid from one of those shareware mall kiosks. It looks like it's running really slow on your system for some reason. It's supposed to run faster, even the music sounds slow on your system. I was running it on a 486SX 25mhz with 8 megs of RAM when I was a kid.

[@XmorganlamiaX]

*"Shortly in the screen of your computer"* Needs to be LGR's new tagline :p

[@AndreiNeacsu]

I remember playing Tubular Worlds on a friend's 386 in 1994.

[@isaackracoff1021]

Really hope there's more of these, it'd be great to eventually make it through the whole box!

[@KombatGod]

Tubular Worlds! For 20 or so years I wondered what that game was, I remembered it was a top down shooter with a lot of domes on the map, but the thing that really stuck was the creepy intro where we see the guy get the eye implant. As I've been able to remember and get my hands on every single game from my youth, that memory used to piss me off as it was one of the only ones I was never able to search for. That's until a month of so ago, when I found my old floppy case full of games, and found that title, instantly identifying it. So yeah, a pretty nostalgic game, and now that you posted it I kinda regret having found it, as this video would have blown my mind. Great video as always though.

[@nibblrrr7124]

The intro is _really_ cool, from the art to the creepy sound effects as the text comes in.

[@adamkrason53]

These blerbs remind me so much of classic LGR. I know that your channel has shifted much more to tech reviews, and I really miss the particular style of DOS game reviews that you had. Regardless, it's definitely worked out for you and I'm very happy for your success. Thanks for the videos clint, you've always made creative and fun content, and it's helped me out immeasurably in some of the most difficult times in my life. Can't wait to see what the future has in store for you :)

[@MysticMage255]

Blerb is such a great, fun word. Exciting to speak. Blerb. It has this silly, informative yet comforting tone. Just like these videos! Thank you

[@Denkozilla]

I was raised on "Body Blows". It's a great game, you should really try the full version. It was sold in the 90's as a big box game.

[@HassassinCat]

I need to say, your videos are so relaxing. Sometimes I just let youtube playing your videos randomly in the background while I work or study because of the ASMR quality of your voice. And sometimes I get extremelly happy and exited with some oddware because where in the world would someone find such cool things and show us? Anyway, thank you so much

[@ahandsomefridge]

Ahh I remember Tubular Worlds, that was pretty fun back then! Might even had the full version at a certain time in my life.

[@Discostick55]

I know you put a lot time and effort in your LGR videos and it shows, but I really like these more unscripted looks at odd things too! Also I'm amazed there's still DOS games out there you've never heard of

[@LGRBlerbs]

Oh yeah, DOS gaming is unbelievably vast. There are tens of thousands of releases spanning two decades, it's pretty endless!

[@Blackadder75]

I just discovered some other Old Dos Games YT channel. Guy apparently has been making weekly videos since 2011, I never heard of it. He has hundreds of titles and plenty I never heard about, although I read DOS Games magazines like a zealot in the nineties.

[@LongStepMantis]

When the Genesis-sounding music kicked in at the start of Tube World, it hit me like a freight train of nostalgia. Thank you.

[@pawnstarrickharrison7225]

yo poo poo STANK

[@VitorMach]

That Tubular Worlds game looks pretty intriguing actually

[@4strfox853]

It's like I'm sitting beside my buddy watching him play classics of my youth. Thank you for this.

[@MaximilienNoal]

Relaxed MS-DOS gaming. Reminds me of the old "LGR on VHS" days. Perfect. :)

[@rionthemagnificent2971]

good name for a 80s punk band "Silent uppercut"

[@nibblrrr7124]

3:48 That pattern in the background looks like a Voronoi tesselation, also known as Worley noise or cell noise. But Worley published his paper "A cellular texture basis function", which first suggested applying Voronoi patterns to computer graphics, only in 1996 - two years _after_ Tubular Worlds was released... 🤔

[@andrewfinley459]

The first game I thought was just trying to be dramatic till I saw how slow the gameplay was hahah. Great stuff.

[@A.I-GAMING]

I have a huge collection of shareware games, they were a dollar back in day. The classic gravis gamepad works with most of these games combined with a early 90's soundblaster videocard.

[@Ryodakun]

Interesting how LGR Blerbs actually inherited the original spirit of LGR and the actual LGR channel evolved into something beyond that. Actually... I take that back, it's more like old LGR meets Druaga1.

[@AntiChangeling]

I'm glad that "allhumansmustdie" made you laugh at the same time I did. That and 'dongleware'. Heh heh, dongle.

[@jasonblalock4429]

6:07 Does anyone else get weirdly nostalgic for the scratchy sound of MOD files being forced through a Sound Blaster? (Which is doubly funny since, at the time, I bought a GUS Max mostly to get rid of that scratchiness.)

[@nickwallette6201]

I’ve always noticed that stereo sound seems way more wide at low sample rates. Like, without the upper octave, you just get a deeper sound field. I think I first noticed this when I uploaded some sample clips of MIDI tunes I was writing to my GeoCities page, and the 8bit 11kHz stereo samples just sounded so lush. Scratchy and lo-fi, but lush.

[@starquake1565]

It's chrunchy

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Crunchy is exactly how I would describe the OP2/OPL3, even got a SB soundfont exactly for that.

[@Estaran]

Tubular Worlds, Epic Pinball, Halloween Harry, Sango Fighter, Risky Woods, Skyroads etc. - all those were my childhood when I was around... 9? Was so thankful for every new game I could play back then, even if it was shareware only. ^_^

[@theodorerelic2718]

Oh man, I remember out store getting loads of shareware titles back in the mid-90s...we sold them for a buck each (we were a department store, in Columbus OH we were called Schottenstein's after the founder, elsewhere we were called Value City) and these particular titles were on 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" floppies. I got a ton of them after I got a computer that could play them. Doom, Sango Fighter, Commander Keen, Bio Menace are the ones I remember from back then. Oh, yeah, I remembered Body Blows because GoG sells Ultimate Body Blows, which includes BB and it's Amiga-only sequel. I still have a number of the old DOS shareware collections, packed with just about everything they could cram onto 2 or 3 cd-roms :)

[@esper86]

Ah man unboxing and running weird ass shareware games on DOS was my entire childhood

[@BitQuest]

Oh wow, I played Risky Woods back when I was 5 or 6 at a friend's house. I've been trying to find it for years but never knew the name of it!

[@randomninja]

Those shareware packages bring back so many memories! We had tons of those back in the day.

[@xJuantxu]

A small funny fact about Risky Woods: Is the last game made by Dinamic Software (Spanish developer) before entering bankruptcy. Their successors (Dinamic Multimedia) were the same staff, and were also developers of good games in Spain (They did a soccer franchise, "PC Fútbol" that had the licenses of the Spanish, British, Argentine and Itatian leagues), and sadly, had the same demise as the former studio.

[@JohnSmith-ii3cu]

Definitely a trooper for playing a fighting game with a keyboard!

[@Noedell]

YES! Do a Risky Woods review! I have this game on the SEGA Mega Drive, I almost beat the game once.

[@benk7849]

When you went through the box I was convinced these were CDs! Totally makes sense when I actually thought about it

[@Yusuke_Denton]

Glad you started this side channel man. I've been following you for like 10 years and this is one of my favorite videos from you in a long time. Just you sitting here playing the games. Also that PB monitor is nostalgic goodness on its own.

[@sandyamaulana2317]

Clint, there was a time in the 1990s Indonesia that almost every office PC came preinstalled with DOS games, which often included Doom or Doom 2, Raptor, Domark's Formula 1, and... Body Blows. It took me hours to just figure out the controls to Body Blows while waiting for my dad to finish his project. Hours were wasted to do just that. I should've just played Doom 2.

[@mik4k6]

GOG regularly has _Ultimate Body Blows_ on sale for under $2. That's where I learned about it.

[@LKRaider]

I am amazed your floppy disks and drives seem to work so smoothly. It was not my experience even back in the day!

[@L2Nuku]

Interesting, i had no idea that some of these Amiga classics were also released on PC (especially Risky Woods, which was also released on the Genesis)

[@killerbee2562]

When I got my first pc around 98 I had a friend who subscribed to NextGen and GamePro magazines and he give the pile of Demo discs that came with them. I spent months going through them looking for good game demos. This video reminds me of that.

[@MrTomFTW]

So with Body Blows, it was a somewhat weird set-up designed to work around the Amiga's one button joystick set up. To do both normal and special moves you have to hold down fire, then press a direction. The diagonal directions do special moves - it doesn't have Street Fighter like quarter circle inputs. Like up-towards and fire with Nik does a dragon punch equivalent. It's not good, but it was popular enough to get a sequel and I own Ultimate Body Blows for the CD32 which is a Mortal Kombat Trilogy style mashup of both titles.

[@ethanlowe9369]

My stepdad used to have a collection of old MS:DOS games that he'd let me play when I was around 6/7 years old (I'm 24 now) and I used to love Risky Woods, I also fondly remember Road Rash

[@nathanc6516]

Trueblood was running at full speed, the background is literally just 4 frames, so at full speed it looks incredibly fast. The reason for this is so the player doesn't realize it's just 4 frames.

[@awake4ages]

That Tubular Worlds intro looks dope as heck man great art there

[@makrostheblack4791]

Holy crap! Team 17! There's a blast from the past!

[@AngryCalvin]

These were the biggest impulse buys of my life. I could not help but buy a lot of these no matter how bad they were. And I never had the full versions. What was really awesome was years later finding Starsiege, Decent II, and Incoming, and paying about $5 for all of them combined. How I missed those bargain bins. Paying $2.00 for a giant mech game Starsiege was a steal considering I paid over $50 for other giant mech games with no regrets.

[@marcus_w0]

ahhhh, a blast from the past! I played all 4 of them back in the days.

[@martin1b]

I like the reflection off of the monitor. Gives it a sort of 'picture in a picture' effect.

[@ZacL324]

Because of you I have begun to fill my room with old 90s PCs and it is definitely the most fiscally responsible choice I have made.

[@twocvbloke]

"Risky Woods", the act of getting excited and hoping nobody notices... :P

[@pseudotasuki]

When you see a hottie at a nude beach.

[@j.d.6915]

I remember my dad and I trying out those blue 5.25 inch shareware disks from the late 80's. Good times. I think maybe they came in a Tandy magazine or other magazine we got.

[@JanusKastin]

Ah, the Risky Woods shareware demo. Forever scarred into my brain for constantly crashing my Packard Bell Win95 machine.

[@ronsmith4325]

Shareware from Software Evolution.... AND A PRICE TAG FROM THE BAY!!!!!!! Holy nostalgia trip!

[@FyberOptic]

When this video started I had this sudden flashback to a DOS text editor I used to use. I think it was called Qedit? Man, it's weird how memory works. I haven't thought about that in forever.

[@cirinaharvey1466]

Had most of these on the Amiga. Great times

[@csward53]

I haven't seen Body Blows in 25 years. I remember playing the shareware version at a friends house. It wasn't that great and I didn't have a gaming PC at the time, so I forgot about it. Thanks for the nostalgia trip. Oh I should mention Clint we played it with a flight stick, so you can play with some peripherals.

[@bgtubber]

17:45 OMG, I remember this game! I played it so much as a little kid and I remember being so fascinated by it. I never knew how it was called until now. Thank you! I'm so tempted to get it and play it again.

[@lobstarooo]

I've played hours of that same Tubular Worlds shareware version, even with my little brother in two player mode if I recall correctly. They ended up on the same sort of shareware disks here in the Netherlands I guess.

[@pollock8000]

Risky Woods is actually a great game, it has some RPG components to level up diffrent weapons that is really cool, great level design and pretty decent graphics and sound.

[@ScanLinesAU]

Love these blerbs, really relaxing!

[@QuintusAntonious]

Digging those vintage Altec-Lansing speakers. I have the surround sound version in black of those same things, been using them on all my PCs since I think around 2000ish.

[@exquisitecorpse4917]

Man....this reminds me of why I had such a love/hate relationship with PC gaming back in the day. Some games ran, some games didn't, and there's just this weird wizardry to the whole thing where you try running it with every combination of settings until you find one that's almost playable. Funny story, we didn't play the original Doom because - when we got it on shareware - we couldn't get the damn thing to run =P

[@Extrema22]

Tubular Worlds was great, I've played it a lot as a kid. Brutally difficult, even today (for me anyway). Awesome to finally see it make an appearance on LGR!

[@aidancommenting]

I'm literally only here because I just re-soldered my Xbox chat headset. I mean, what's better than hearing the satisfying tone of LGR through a resurrected headset?

[@pseudotasuki]

I was unaware those were capable of outputting anything other than 12-year-olds dropping n-bombs.

[@CJRahz]

Oh my god I haven't played Tubular World in YEARS. I instantly remembered that weird intro though.That took me RIGHT back.

[@MusicFromAnotherTime]

Oh my God Risky Woods. I used to have a CD called the Encyclopedia of 1001 Games that had that game along with Dangerous Dave. Played those so much.

[@artchic528]

Nothing like an LGR Blerb and a cup of joe to start the morning off right!

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Or better yet 1 day old pizza for breakfast

[@Zazzlebips]

Your laugh is super contagious. I love seeing your Blerbs!!!!

[@ColpoRosso]

I love body blows galactic on the ami, and being native to the ami, it's a one button fighter, which means you have to hold the attack button and a direction to perform a move. Hold it to charge the special move.

[@BilisNegra]

RISKY WOODS was developed by Dinamic Software! They used to be really big in Spain, EA just distributed the game elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I just realized because of the D-shaped logo of theirs on the start screen.

[@seanwieland9763]

Love the cyberpunk artwork. The music is very Dune 2.

[@SteveSkafte]

Obscure shareware! This is the content I subscribed for. Love this video.

[@SleepingCocoon]

holy SHIT, true blood! i had that on a software evolution shareware CD! WOW, what a blast from the past

[@retropuffer2986]

Not bad for early 90s. Shows there were tons of good games that weren't tied to 4 color CGA that PC haters seem to bring up.

[@jessragan6714]

The power up system in Risky Woods is... kind of weird. Apples don't kill you, but they fill up your health meter while possibly making you fall asleep, costing you precious time. Left facing arrows send you backward, and 1UPs run away from you, forcing you to catch them. It gets even stranger in the Genesis version, where the coins are armor scales that up your defense; but only after you've collected a ton of them.

[@JimPlaysGames]

If I remember rightly, Body Blows uses the IK+ or Barbarian style of controls. But you really need a joystick / gamepad for that. Check out the Amiga version if you can get hold of it.

[@gen_angry]

Man, I played that 'True Blood' demo back in the day too - I found the intro just as hilarious. Insta-memory. Time to dig that out for my rig. And yea, it looks way fast but no, that's about how its supposed to run.

[@DeckardGames]

I asked for more Body Blows in the first video and here it is. Very nice uppercut.

[@ComandanteJ]

Body blows music = instant memories. That's a game I hadnt seen in like 20 years, LOL. I played the shit out of that game, i had the full, big box version.

[@SylentEcho]

This was fun. Please do more of these!

[@eddiehimself]

@18:00 "Sweet dreams are made of these..."

[@nibblrrr7124]

Heh. The bassline is similar, although the last chord in the progression is different (minor parallel): *i - i - VI - v* (Sweet dreams) *i - i - VI - VII* (Risky Woods)

[@wemstrum]

My feet get warm when I watch these videos.

[@mefpazur]

Daaamn, some of those tunes are just amazing!

[@tremorist]

When Electronic Farts was still Electronic Arts.

[@eddiehimself]

In my head I always imagine AVGN saying "Electronic Arts? More like ELECTRONIC ASS!" lol

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

When EA stood for Electronic Arts instead of Extended Argh

[@fuzzydunlop1753]

Elongated Anus?👍🎂

[@deeess6027]

Man, I remember tubular worlds. Saw it at a computer fair and got the shareware. Loved it, though I seem to remember it being faster.

[@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939]

_Tubular Worlds_ was also released for Mac; I remember thinking that it most likely began life on a different platform as it had a pixel-doubled mode (unusual for a non-3D Mac game - native Mac games would usually use higher resolution artwork), and I also remember it playing almost too fast on a 75MHz PowerPC 603

[@baddoomguy1986]

NBA Hangtime for MS-DOS was my childhood.

[@greenhowie]

An important lesson in proper opimisation from TubeWorld there... a lot of modern companies who specialise in PC ports of console releases could learn something here.

[@tonk82]

Risky Woods. It's always a delight seeing a spanish game appear on LGR. Its a hard game... but one key element is that... well... you should not pick everything xD you need to learn which items are good.