Yours portly has been playing excessive amounts of Colonization lately (my latest game, as the Dutch, ended in disaster when my New York-based colonies fell to the Stadtholder’s forces in a doomed war of independence), and writing about and thinking about old games has sent me down a rabbit hole. Regular reader and contributor Ponty got me searching down an old Lord of the Rings game; while I didn’t find it, I did find RetroGames.cz.
RetroGames.cz bills itself as the “ONLINE Museum of Old Video Games,” and the designation is apt. According to the website, its goal is “to keep alive the games of the 1980s and 1990s, which were created for consoles and systems that can no longer be purchased and are no longer supported by its developers and manufacturers.” It does so through the emulation of games, which can be played directly in your browser.
For example, the site includes the (in?)famous Castlevania’s II: Simon’s Quest for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I’m pretty sure one of my brother’s has that game, but why not play it from the comfort of your computer?
As I mentioned, I could not find the LotR game I had in mind, but I did find 1990’s The Lord of the Rings, Volume I, a top-down roleplaying game that created a massive world for the Fellowship to explore, complete with numerous side quests and a map that apparently allows players huge amounts of freedom to veer from the path taken in the novels. I played a few minutes of it this weekend—not even long enough to get out of the Shire, but long enough to get a sense for the game’s most basic mechanics—and it would be great to see a modern RPG set in the LotR universe with that kind of openness and freedom.
The website itself looks like it was built in the 1990s (it even has a guestbook—remember those?). As someone who remembers the Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I possess my generation’s weakness for nostalgia, and that includes nostalgia for the homemade web design of my teenage and college years.
In total, there are 1811 games on the site, so there’s a rich library of beloved classics (and probably some games that might deserve to be forgotten). If you’re into old games, check it out!
The Portly Politico 
I’ve found that if you want to play retro games, you need a patch to do so and then rely on Windows not to have an update that invalidates the game. We have an old game we like to play on the PC – The Movies plus Stunts & Effects – but to open it, you need to remove a Windows update. If you permanently remove it, it’s resent under a different line of code so you’re better with the devil you know; it takes little time to get rid and then you’re free to play.
Of all the software companies, I really despise Microsoft. They’re so intrusive and they make no apologies for it.
By the way, Tina and I have started on LA Noire, a murder mystery set in the ’40s. I’ll review it soon.
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My biggest beef was when Microsoft shifted from the old FAT32 system and update to 64-bit for their OSes. That made it impossible for me to run Cakewalk 3.0, my old music composition software. I love Noteflight, but I have two main beefs with it: 1.) you must be online to compose, with an uninterrupted connection; and 2.) it does not have any synthesizer sounds. It is super easy to use and incredibly robust, but the inability to compose with a completely uninterrupted Internet connection is a major pain. I should at least be able to compose offline and save to the cloud later.
I stopped composing digitally for a long time because I no longer had a way to run Cakewalk. I attempted to create a Windows 95 virtual machine a couple of summers ago, but utterly failed. I know there is a way to do it, but I couldn’t figure it out—d’oh!
The beauty of Colonization is that it runs automatically with DOS Box via Steam. Come to think of it, I might need to try Cakewalk 3.0 with DOS Box. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that until now!
Can’t wait for the LA Noire review. I’ve heard good things.
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