GEOS Gaming

[intric8]

GEOS gaming? Is that a mild joke, in the same way early Macintosh gaming was sometimes derided? Sort of. But look what I discovered recently and just received in the mail.

GEOS Games vols 1-3

As soon as I found this collection of games I snapped them up. They were only 3.50€ each.

I don't read German, but my understanding is the games will work fine on English-based NTSC C128 machines.

Thanks to the advances in technology (we're so close to the Star Trek universal translator), I can hold my phone up to these packages with Google Translate and read the translations on the fly. VERY cool.

In any case, here are the games on each.

Volume 1

• All cheese (cheese box game)
• Logitron (puzzle game)
• Patience (card game)
• Shangrila (Mahjongg variant)

Volume 2

• Black & White (Strategy)
• Pipes (Strategy)
• Solitaire (puzzle game)
• Mastermind (puzzle game)
• Tic-Tac-Toe (puzzle game)

Volume 3

• BreakThru
• Missile Defense
• Dredge Driver
• Quartus

These were all published as late as 1991. And there was even a Volume 4 collection published the following year in 1992.

The packaging says the games will work on GEOS 1.2 for C64 or C128. What I don't know is if any of these work in 128 mode - I'm guessing they don't but will soon find out. I plan on moving them all over to a single 3.5" disk so I can play them off my FD-2000.

But don't worry. You don't have to order these all the way from Germany and hope that they'll work. You can download the D64 files of each right here and get your own GEOS gaming on right now, too.

MSPI M&T Software Partner International GmbH games collections:

mtgames1.zip

Volume 1

(32.11 KiB)

mtgames2.zip

Volume 2

(15.44 KiB)

mtgames3.zip

Volume 3

(37.31 KiB)

mtgames4.zip

Volume 4

(22.81 KiB)

[Shot97]

This is very intriguing. I always felt that if you can't have fun in an operating system, than it's really rather pointless, especially years down the road when every piece of productivity software has been bested 50 times over. So while I have Geos for the 64, it's only ever been a passing curiosity. Same with Windows prior to version 3, you're dealing with very niche applications that don't feel worth it unless you can have some fun. Windows 3 was always worse than DOS at gaming, but it had unique games and thus always felt worth having around, giving you a reason to explore its other applications. There's a lot of little games that work on top of Workbench for the Amiga, and even bigger games, provided they multitask give you reasons to stay in the operating system, I've spent more time coding in BASIC than utilizing Geos, and mostly due to the lack of games. Downloaded!

[intric8]

Over the weekend I moved the games across all 4 volumes to a single 3.5" CMD Native disk. I also played a few games along the way. Every so often, since I don't speak German, I'd use my phone's camera and Google Translate to convert the drop-down menus to English so I knew what the functions meant. After a while I started to memorize these words from game to game. Take that, Duolingo!

All of the games require being dropped into 40-column mode, but that was entirely expected.

The game Shanghai, a mahjong-style tile game, was rather nice after I got used to the symbols and shapes. It does a better job of using the entire screen than the other Mahjong-style GEOS game I have, although that game uses a touch of color to help illustrate the various tile stacking heights.

The pink hue you see on my CRT is not real and is a byproduct of taking a photograph of the screen.

"Missile Defense" is a mouse-driven game clone of Atari's "Missile Command." The graphics are surprisingly good, especially when your cities or battlements are destroyed. By level 4 or 5 the sheer number of bombs dropping from the sky simultaneously is kind of ludicrous, but it's worth a play or two.

Unfortunately, none of these games feature any sounds.

One of the more interesting games graphically is GeoTris, a Tetris clone. This game is on Volume 4, which I don't have the instructions for. The game is keyboard driven and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to control the pieces. So, I went into full keyboard slapping mode. Poof! There went a piece full-speed straight down.

I literally started dragging my fingers across the entire length of the keyboard and finally figured out that to move pieces left and right (this makes sense, right?) you press "O" or "P". Totally baffling. And the spacebar rotates pieces. So it's a bit weird to play in this fashion. On top of that, the animation for the pieces moving left and right is slightly herky jerky. Overall not the best Tetris clone I've ever played at all, but frankly pretty cool to play in the GEOS environment.

There are a lot more little puzzle and strategy games to sort through but will require I do a lot of translation of the instruction booklets.

[Zippy Zapp]

There was a risk like game that I used to play quite a lot on GEOS. I don't remember the name off hand but am 100% sure it is on my disks someplace. I am in the long ongoing process of imaging all my disks so I will get to the GEOS lot soon then I should be able to locate it.

But yeah, there are some decent games on GEOS. Most of which I downloaded from Q-Link.