Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And say, can you tell me what Quake 2
Diablo, Heroes of Might and Magic 2, and Flight Simulator 98 have in common?
Well other than all being awesome examples of awesome games from the late
90s, the answer is: the Hardcore Gamer Resource Kit by Sonoma Multimedia! Which
is somebody I'm not really familiar with but you know this just looks like any
number of things that you might have seen in the 90s that came from Wizard
Works or GT or whoever. This one in particular comes to me from my friend
Jonathan who found this I guess while out thrifting or something, and he just
saw the cover and was just like "that is the most hideous thing I've ever seen
you need to have it." *chuckles* Thank you very much because I would agree. If only because
this very much captures the hardcore gamer aesthetic as I am familiar with it.
That is the face of the hardcore PC gamer personified. You get items for
Quake 2, Diablo, Flight Simulator 98, and Heroes of Might
and Magic 2. What a strange selection, I'm not really sure why they picked those
four. I mean they were popular but it's kind of an eclectic mix if you ask me.
Just all sorts of stuff that was probably downloaded from like, forums and
boards, and you know just whatever. AOL games, I don't know. Anywhere that
you could find these kind of things that presumably a lot of fans made and then
they just packed it onto a CD or two and shipped it out. It's got three CDs in
fact! I also like this section of 3Dfx Mania -- has utilities, accelerators, tweaks,
add-ons, screen savers, and demos, and apparently much much more, mm.
Let's just open this up and see what we find inside!
Quite a beefy box and it's got some tape on it. Oh! Okay well this is this is a
thing. Here's Sonoma Multimedia from Petaluma, California. Hmm wonder what else
they did I have not looked into them at all. Ah there's a special offer here from
them "our best selling games available to you at 14.95!" So yeah you can see some of
these other sort of packs that I was talking about that other companies were
also very infamous for doing. And yeah they just mixed in all these popular-ish
games together including some shovelware packs apparently look at that: "Universe
of 3,000 Games." It has electronic manuals mmm how advanced. And then yeah there's a
whole bunch of legal stuff which is fine. Cool.
Apparently we get this guide here which is the "Hottest PC Games" compiled and
edited by Michael Knight. I'm quite curious to see what that is but first
let's take a look at these. We've got different CDs here. So this one is
just the enhanced 3Dfx files. Yeah we're gonna drop this into a Voodoo
system of some kind to try it out. We have the game patches here -- it's just
just patches! That's awesome. And then we have add-ons, levels, and scenarios for
all the games. Now those aren't quite split up how I thought they would be but
I don't really know what I was expecting. This is quite intriguing I must say. This
is really what was adding a lot of the heft to this box. So it looks like we
have -- what are the hottest PC games of 1998... Quake, Quake 2, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer:
Red Alert, Flight Simulator 98 Age of Empires,
Riven, Hexen, and Ultima Online. I mean you know if these were the games that
you were interested in like, all of these in one, that's not bad because I remember
buying a lot of individual guides. Or at least going to Barnes & Noble and
looking through a lot of individual guides. Rarely bought them unless they
were like, Duke Nukem related or something. So it really is just a few
pages of tips for UO. Some easter eggs, tips for the recently deceased, ghostly
pranks, and get the latest updates by friggin' going online.
Well that's what that is. All right let's go move on over to the Windows 98
machine and boot these up and see if they work!
First up here I'm going to start with this game patches CD which seems like
it's probably gonna be the most boring one, so let's just do it. And you can
start out by selecting other Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 or NT. And the setup
program says it's from somewhere named Walnut Creek. Thought it was Sonoma
Multimedia just a minute ago but alright. And yeah when you started up you get
this WinView program which is really just a browser with a little bit of
extra information. And yeah it's full of exactly what you'd expect: a whole
lot of game patches for DOS and Windows games. I admit that I really didn't think
about patching my games in the 90s except when something really didn't work.
And then you know I would seek it out online or something, but even then
getting them could be a pain because of limited and slow internet access. So I
could see why this had its uses. Also neat that there's a Gravis Ultrasound
game patches mode which adds GUS support to all sorts of things. I'll
probably be using some of these in a later video. There's also an MS-DOS
version of this program which is the same thing, it just lets you access and
look at all the game patches. You could do this in Explorer as well, it really
doesn't matter. Most amusing to me though on this CD is this Walnut Creek CD-ROM
website backup for cdrom.com. Apparently that was what they owned at
the time. Check out this Internet Mega-Pak!
6 CD-ROMs! $70 for all sorts of world-wide-web stuff. Mm utilities. Also listed in here
is this 3Dfx Mania pack for $30 which actually is included in this Hardcore
Gamer Resource Kit. Which effectively means this kit is a shovelware pack of
shovelware packs. Speaking of the 3Dfx stuff let's get to the 3Dfx
disc which is full of all sorts of fascinating things with 3Dfx
capabilities. And I went straight for the screen savers because I was really
curious about these, especially with names like spaghetti,
butterflies, chrome, and a couple of them that say "sorry no info." They don't even
know what it is they just put it on the CD! Once I got them extracted though
they're just executables and it says that they will be converted to a real
screensaver soon. So yeah these are pretty much just demos
for 3Dfx mode/OpenGL stuff, not actually screen savers. And I don't even know if
it's even that because this one wouldn't even run at all. Spaghetti just was
spaghetti code apparently, and just shut down my computer. I had to do a hard reset.
Next one I tried up was flutterbys with the possessive apostrophe there, hmm.
Anyway this one started up with a 3Dfx logo, that's promising. But then *laughs* It just
ran way too fast! So whatever it was using to simulate
this swarm of butterflies and fog, it was just not timed correctly with this
system. And this Impact screensaver which was supposed to be a Starfox-style game...
It didn't do anything correct at all, though I could see the Starfox type of
ship thing sort of through the corruption there. I'm guessing that these
screen savers are made for Voodoo 1s, Voodoo Rushes, and things like that.
Not exactly a 2 or 3. I have a 3 in this system, which there's a lot of
incompatibilities with certain things like this from like 96, 97, so oh well.
Went on to check out the games section though and there's a whole lot of freeware
and shareware demo kind of games for 3Dfx stuff in here. Again I'm not
entirely sure what's going to work and what won't so I just booted up some of
them starting with Banzai Bug. And it didn't actually detect 3D acceleration
so again I'm guessing is made for like a Voodoo 1 that's just not seeing it. But
anyway here we go. "There's gotta be some crumbs around here somewhere! Look, we're
in this together, ace. You and me!" Yeah this is pretty much like a six degrees
of freedom shooter. But you're a bug mosquito kind of thing just going around
shooting blobs with other blobs and it's not great. But um you know it's kind of
appealing in that weird flat-shaded kind of 3D way. Many of the other demos didn't
work at all, here's one though that I could get to work.
Excalibur 2555 AD, the demo for that. It said it was going to run in 3Dfx mode
but it's very much not, it's running so badly and so slowly and no 3Dfx
logo at the beginning. So yeah again I'm guessing this is made for like a Voodoo 1
so I'm just gonna skip out on the rest of this for now and move on to the
next disc. The final disc, the add-ons and levels for Quake and all the other things.
Although curiously it started up and it just called this the Q2 Tool CD-ROM and
all it showed was stuff for Quake 2. No mention of Flight Sim, Diablo, Heroes of
Might and Magic 2 that it was supposed to have. Just none of that's here. Kind of
makes me think that the other stuff was an afterthought. Anyway let's look at the
Quake stuff because: Quake stuff. And check this out remember Plus! Themes for
Windows 9x? I had to try this Quake one out and wow does this bring back memories of
themed themes.
Silly fonts and weird colors and animated cursors and sound effects everywhere.
Somehow this seems like a more authentic
Windows 98 experience than even just the basic
Windows themes. Also decided to try out these demos and movies, in fact this one
here, BOMBER.ZIP, "the historic first ever Quake 2 motion picture." Yeah this is
machinima before machinima was a thing. At least in theory because when I try to
install it and run it it wouldn't do it. I can play Quake 2 perfectly fine but
any time I tried to run one of these demos it said it was trying to look for
the CD. I edited a bunch of files, I tried some patches, I tried other mods and
downloads, and things that it came with. Not a single one of them would boot up
with my version of Quake 2. I don't know what's going on maybe it's a hardware
issue, so I just got really annoyed after like an hour and moved on to the next
game. Which in this case is Heroes of Might and Magic 2. It includes some
utilities, some levels for different Magic games, and some episode sets. I was
just gonna try this save game editor for HOMM2 here and give myself a crap load
of gold. Booted up my "need money" save game here
and as you can see in the bottom right: I have a crap load of gold and was able to
recruit a whole bunch of units and gave myself a very unfair advantage at the
beginning of this game. And yay, victory by cheating!
I feel successful without any moral qualms whatsoever. Okay let's check out
the Flight Simulator folder here which has audio, flight sim 5, and flight sim 6,
and no mention of Flight Sim 98. In fact, all of these files? Most of them are just
like, skins and basic scenery packs, and a couple utilities for flight sim five
and six. 98 is version 6.1 and I don't know man, I tried to get this stuff to
work in 98. None of it would. None of it showed up at all.
I had the scenery go through and look for stuff, I followed the instructions
for the mods, none of them worked. It never actually found anything so I don't
know why they mentioned Flight 98 being compatible with this because it
doesn't seem to be. There wasn't much here anyway so I don't really care.
Diablo though, well there was quite a bit in here. I've never actually modded
Diablo before but there's a whole lot of files man. I don't know what exactly all
of these do. Bunch of items, it looks like some trainers for very specific versions
of Diablo which is different than the one I had so I couldn't try it. But I did
end up trying out these save games because I don't know, I was curious what
kind of characters it gave me. And check out these names: Bane Longshot, Mr. Dabbelhand,
Bambi Fastab, Sizzle Finger! Man, these
are wonderful names. I had to go with Mr. Dabbelhand though, and it turns out
Mr. Dabbelhand is pretty dapper.
And dabbles in all sorts of magic and cool things that made him really effective.
*laughs* I don't know I just liked his name. And it's
Diablo so I ended up playing this for like an hour. Even though I just needed
like a minute of footage. Well that's Diablo and that is the Hardcore Gamer
Resource Kit! Not really worth seeking out to be honest. It's kind of a stupid
pack but at the same time it's cool, I'm glad it exists. It's neat going through
and seeing what these sort of compilation/shovelware stuff of
downloaded goodies they made available back then. And if nothing else it has
some absolutely stupid ugly hideous artwork that is amazing! And awful at the
same time. But that's it for this video. I hope you enjoyed this rambling look back
at this weird piece of software. Thanks again to Jonathan for picking this up.
This was fun. And if you had fun with his video then
awesome! Might enjoy some of my others. There's new ones every Monday and Friday
here on LGR. And as always thank you very much for watching.