A stack of nostalgia

Recently one of my siblings moved out of the house, though when I went to his room today to see what was left I saw a very familiar stack of PC CD-roms in his desk.

There's all sorts of stuff in there, regular PC video games, 25-games-in-one compilations, edutainment software and some miscellaneous stuff like pension fund planner software, carshow software, a geography project and some encyclopedias, including one of human anatomy with a naked man and woman on the cover. Oh my!

Lots of nostalgic stuff in there, mostly the video games of course. All of it, I 100% assure you, legal. Totes legal. No burned CDs or anything here.

With that said, let's just dive right in, see what I've found and what I remember about all this!

Dune 2000

Here's a familiar game. It's Dune 2000! Apparently based on a literate series by the same name, Dune 2000 is a RTS game, I think one of the early RTS games too? I recall this game having FMV, which is of course delightful, and some of it was probably way too mature for a child to be playing, but then it's not like I ever got anywhere in this game anyway, I was a kid, knowing barely any English, so I mostly just let my brother play it instead and watched. He and I used to do that a lot, it was fun, given it was the sort of game that was fun to actually watch.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

A pretty big-name game, I think. I remember playing Prince of Persia on DOS and how precise and unforgiving the game was, though this game here came out much later and is a 3D platformer sort of game, I guess? I suppose you could say it has a lot of that parkour stuff where you need to navigate a giant 3D space filled with traps with some combat on the side, with the game's gimmick being the ability to reverse time, provided you have enough sand. I also liked watching this game, though I think at some point it got too difficult for my brother, perhaps I should try it myself and see how far I can get.

Super Speurder: Rekenen

Well, this one is probably gibberish to non-Dutch people! If I had to translate, I'd say it was something like "Super Sleuth: Maths". You can guess this is edutainment! I always liked edutainment as a game, especially when they merged the education and the gameplay together so it felt like a puzzle game rather than a lesson. This game was about navigating the ocean in a submarine, solving math riddles and dealing with nautical foes. I recall it being somewhat difficult, though mostly due to the gameplay and not the puzzles.

Super Speurder: Techniek

Another Super Speurder! This one has the protagonist, the enigmatic character in the coat with the ridiculous collar, and the villain, the insane scientist, on the cover. The theme of this game was physics and mechanics. You'd navigate around this 2D screen with a ton of doors collecting parts for a vehicle, like a solar-powered car or a miniature plane by solving all these physics puzzles, like stuff about balancing a scale, use of pulleys, electricity grids, that sort of technological stuff.

De Brand Slakkenrace

Oh man, now we're getting real obscure. This is a Snail Race game by a dutch brand of beer. Yeah. It promotes itself as "The slowest race in the world as an exciting computer game" and boasts having online play against the best snail racers in the world. I dunno if it actually has online play, I only ever played against the AI. The game itself is pretty simple, there's a 2D racing path in some sort of forest and you need to avoid obstacles such as bouncing tires, BBQs and oil slicks and use try to use boosting pads to speed up and get to the finish before your opponent. I sometimes played this and I have doubts it'd run on my modern PC. 

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Back to something more well-known, it's a 4-CD bundle of Red Alert 1 plus its expansion packs! This is another RTS game like Dune 2000, set in an alternate timeline after WW2 in which there's a war between the Allies and the Soviets as the game describes them. I know the later Red Alert games would get very silly, especially Red Alert 3 with its hammy FMV and ridiculous units, but Red Alert 1 mostly kept things about as serious as it can be for a story about a time-traveling Einstein. I don't think I ever got far, though, due to being real bad at RTS games as a kid. Probably still am today. 

Competitie Manager 2000

A lot of the CD games I found were football stuff, your Pro Evolution Soccers and Fifas, nothing I care about. But there's one game that stood out; Competitie Manager 2000. It's a football competition manager sim, but with a twist. There's FMV commentary and game analyses from Wim Kieft! WIM FUCKING KIEFT! The star, the legend, the overlords of football commentary Wim Kieft! I don't know anything about football but I do know that Wim Kieft is the best thing since canned bread and everyone must bow to him in reverence for his infinite wisdom. Also the game itself is both a management sim and a 3D football game but for me the management sim parts have always been more memorable, and of course the brilliant FMV scenes with Wim Kieft.

THE BEST GAMES EVER
Dubbel-CD 50 games

Next there's a compilation of 50 games on two CDs. A bit much to talk about them all, so let's just over any notable ones. There's Doom, Hexen and Quake for FPSes. Alone in the Dark II, Magic Carpet, Transport Tycoon, Sim City 2000, Theme Hospital for 'Adventure'. There's a Sam & Max game! I have some of them in my Steam folder I need to get to. Hm, there's Warcraft II as well. 

Then there's Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, Day of the Tentacles, Dungeon Keeper, System Shock (Made by CH people, I think!), Carmageddon, Go, X-Com and Heroes of Might and Magic 2. Haven't played all of those, but some of them do interest me. Might try some of them, see if they work or not.

Aerokid

Another edutainment game. This one is a series of puzzles centered around an airport, such as checking in bags, assigning passengers to seats and apparently a basic flight sim. It also has some bonus games like a colouring tool and an ABC-wordgame. I recall playing this, vaguely. I don't think I ever did the flight sim part good, I mostly did the colouring minigame.

Redcat: De Reusachtige Letterraket

Another Dutch title, it translates into "Redcat: The Giant Letter Rocket"Oh my god, this game has a video walkthrough. It is pretty much the typical crappy 3D edutainment game. It has an obnoxiously cool cat as a protagonist and a rat and dog as the villains and it's all animated in 3D and it's awful and it's amazing, and there's singing and the OST is like a really bad protoSplatoon OST or something? The gameplay is 3D platforming with bad controls interspersed with these word-recognition puzzles. There's also combat and weapons and a health system, and any command you give Redcat has voiced lines and it's the worst thing, which is the best thing.

GTA2

You've probably never heard of this game. It's the second game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Real obscure stuff! Yeah, this is on the same list as kiddy edutainment games, I just played games like this too. GTA2 was a  3D bird's eye-view crime game. It's pretty much like recent GTA games, you can steal and drive cars, run over or kill pedestrians with weapons and do missions for all sorts of criminal organizations. I dunno if I played it much, I probably mostly watched my brother play it. 

JoeJoe

What am I even looking at here. The game's cover is this except there's also some very poorly drawn deviantArt anime OCs there. Apparently this game is pretty much just an advertisement for a paid 'real SAFE, real FUN, real INTERNET' online browser for children. Doing a bit of research online shows that this is pretty much a scam and that the browser doesn't offer any real security for kids and just comes with some crummy edutainment software. It costs like 60 guilders a year! Since this was back when the euro didn't exist yet. Anyway, the game comes with an Arkanoid/Breakout-type game but that's it basically.

Trick & Treat
De Budget Serie
De Kometenknaller
Howie's Avonturen

Well, that's a mouthful. It's a "Budget Series" from Trick & Treat, specifically "The Comet Shooter" in the "Howie's Adventures" series. Another edutainment game, this one a comet shooting game where every comet is a math problem and you need to shoot the right rockets. It's not in 3D like that Red Cat game and the protagonist isn't trying be all cool, he's more the congratulatory type who is always saying how well you're doing and how much you're learning. This is pretty much the sort of game right at home on a public library PC.

LocoKid

Hm, looks a lot like Aerokid. This is pretty much the same concept, except with different games based around railroad systems and for younger ages. Again, I mostly recall doing the colouring minigame.

Winnie Poeh en de Honingboom

Here's an 'animated storybook'! It's Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. This one has a video walkthrough of the English version. This game is pretty much what it says on the cover, it's a series of screens of Winnie the Pooh doing things and you need to click on certain things to advance the game, so it's mostly like a point and click adventure game I guess. It does have pretty good production values, I recall liking it.

De interactieve rekenreis

More edutainment software. This one's "The interactive math trip", which is a series of maths puzzles taking place all around the world. I rather like this one, you're accompanied by a pink frog and a beige cat on a quest to find the mathemagician (rekentovenaar), and after completing all puzzles it turns out you're the mathemagician!! The game had a nice variety of visuals and puzzles, doing additions, subtractions, division, multiplication and fractures. I recall some of the levels being sharing pizza in Italy among cats, making a house out of lumber in America, planting crops across the Nile, a ski-lift in the Alps, making snowmen on the North Pole, snail fractions around a wrecked ship undersea, mixing fruit drinks on Hawaii and probably more. Nice game.

That's quite a lot of games! I might see if I can get any to work, most edutainment software probably doesn't run on Windows 10, but there's a few other games that might be worth a shot.

Also nice to just think back on a time when I played stuff like this, that's so long ago now!