Keen on Steam

[Dark Jaguar]

Well if you go into Steam's online store, you see that apparently ALL of id's old games are there, and advertised all at once.

Well not ALL of them. Most of the Keen games are there, but the 6th chapter, the final one of the second trilogy, is missing. Also, the "mid-chapter" between trilogies, the veggie dream one, is missing. At least that one's a free download anyway from id's site.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/quakecon07/id-f...285898.php

[A Black Falcon]

Aliens Ate my Babysitter can't be there because it, and Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny (the retail stand-alone expansion to Wolf 3D), were retail releases, originally sold by FormGen, which has since been bought up by someone or gone out of business or something. I don't know if ANYONE has the rights to sell those two games anymore... though given that Spear of Destiny is part of this deal, maybe that game was also sold separately, and just Keen 6 (Aliens Ate My Babysitter) is currently unavailable? I'm not sure...

As for Keen Dreams, it was shareware, but the shareware version is complete (like Keens 1 and 4), so you can just play the shareware version. Buying it isn't necessary to play the whole thing.

On another note, it's kind of ironic that Kotaku used the Aliens Ate my Babysitter box art as their image there when that game isn't part of this deal... :)

Also some of those games (all of the Quake series expansion packs and the Heretic and Hexen series games) weren't actually made by id...

[Dark Jaguar]

If the rights are floating in limbo, wouldn't that mean they could go ahead and release the game and there's no one around who could sue them?

Anyway, yeah I know Keen Dreams is free, but it's not a Windows game like these are. They could offer it as a free Steam download.

[A Black Falcon]

It seems that FormGen was bought by GT Interactive which was bought by Infogrammes, so I guess that "Atari" now has the rights to Keen 6 if they just transferred along... if that is true I don't see why id couldn't have worked something out. Oh well... given that I own a copy of Keen 6, it doesn't really affect me... the only Keen game I don't own is 5 (The Armageddon Machine), actually. ... Well, I don't own Dreams or 4 either, but those are full shareware which is pretty much the same thing. :)

[A Black Falcon]

And that's not the only awesome thing Steam is working on...

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=164661

[Dark Jaguar]

Now that's what I call a good move. Seems Valve wants to match XBox Live's feature set. This is what I was saying they needed to do a while ago. Now if only Nintendo would start taking online seriously...

[Dark Jaguar]

I apparently jumped to conclusions when I thought id had made Windows ports of their back catalog to put them on Steam.

They are using dosbox.

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/06/id-and...ating-gpl/

That thing's really getting some milage these days with lazy developers isn't it? Oh well, it's certainly better than not being able to get the games, but the thing is, I can get those games anyway and also be able to play them when not connected to the internet through id's store anyway.

Dosbox is a great emulator though. It's just that a proper port would null out the need to use it and any customizations I might have to mess with. Come to think of it, if it's a straight file dump, I don't need to use the steam client. I could just execute the program directly from the folder it was dumped in.

I still think that whoever currently does own those rights to those long lost games need to be contacted so that the aliens can eat babysitters all over the country.

[Dark Jaguar]

Looks like the Steam Community is live now. Go into settings and find the beta "opt in" option to get it downloaded. I'm giving it a try now.

My current "game ranking" as a part of Steam's new online system is literally the following:

Steam Rating:0 - Teh Suck

Nice.

[A Black Falcon]

DJ, of course they aren't Windows ports. That would require completely reprogramming all of the games, which would be a stupidly hard and unnecessary task when all you need is an emulator wrapper around the original version... particularly when DOSBox works so well now for so many games.

I still think that whoever currently does own those rights to those long lost games need to be contacted so that the aliens can eat babysitters all over the country.

Hmm, I don't know...that'd make what I have (an actual copy of the game) less valuable, right? :D

Now if only I hadn't lost the manual and that watch that came in the box... I still have the box, disks, and "Keening" 'newsletter', though! :)

As for Steam's online service, I think that the only game I own that actually might use it is Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, since Geometry Wars is offline-only and the other couple games I have through Steam are also not online really...

[Dark Jaguar]

Actually if they still had the old source code, they wouldn't really need to do that much reprogramming of the old game. Most of the code and assets should be transferrable pretty well. I get the impression though that a lot of the time this old source code gets somehow misplaced.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, companies definitely do not seem to be very good at keeping track of old source code. It's not surprising though, holding on to files for that long isn't easy... I know that I've completely lost all of those games I made in Klik & Play back in like 1995-1997 or so, for instance, to my sorrow...

[Dark Jaguar]

I've got old game saves from ancient times stuck on mine. Come to think of it, every single new hard disk I ever get involves a direct dump of all my data onto that new drive from my old drive (with NT's file system as it is, that means I need to do a small "repair" operation to get XP starting up off the new drive, but it's a minor thing). That's not to say I still have old windows 3.11 system files sitting in my XP folder, because I've had enough catastrophic system file failures requiring the total deletion of my Windows folder (at least 5) that those old ones are gone. I do however have ancient files from the elder days I simpy don't intend on getting rid of.

By the way, Spear of Destiny IS in fact being sold by Apogee/3DRealms/id (they sure have had a lot of names over the years) over Steam. Not sure what they did to get that liscense back, but I sure wish they'd do it for chapter 6 of the Keen-venture.

[Dark Jaguar]

Okay so I guess id isn't 3Drealms/Apogee (confusing though), but somehow they are releasing their games as part of the id-pack on Steam, though not all of them. Yeah, they should do that.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I try to copy stuff, mostly, but while I've got copies of savegame files from several computers ago and a complete archive of all my school papers going back to 9th grade sitting on this computer, for some reason I never backed up any of my KNP games... :(