I stumbled upon an older computer game called Impossible Creatures, and it sounds like a lot of fun. Is there a way I can download it for free? I know next to squat about this stuff.
Google is your friend.
Just for reference: gog.com is a great place ot find old games, They’re packaged up so that they cna be easily played on modern systems too.
They tend to be under $10 as well. Unfortunately they don’t have this particular game.
It doesn’t appear to be legally available for download through anyone, much less for free. If you want a legitimate copy, you’d have to buy a used CD copy from someone. Seems pretty expensive ($75?!) from Amazon so maybe you’d get lucky on eBay or something similar.
I own it. It’s fun for a while though it’s not especially well balanced. Zerging scorpion-coyotes seems to be the answer for every occasion.
Yeah I looked at GOG and Amazon (and eBay, where it’s similarly expensive). It’s a pity, because it’s a neat concept and I’d love a remake. I was just hoping there was some source I was missing. An LP’er named BestInSlot did it, which is where I found it. And if I had my druthers: HyenaApes, or Hornet-bears (also known as Buzzlies).
Don’t suggest to illegally download the game on here, that’s against the rules. I took your link out.
Impossible creatures was awesome! i thought i was the only person who even heard of that game. Until a few months ago i still had my cd, alas it got tossed in a move.
There used to be what was considered a grey area (not so much quasi-legal as it was not-worth-prosecuting) with abandonware sites, but a lot of those old games have been given the DosBox treatment and are for sale at reasonable prices and now I hardly ever hear anybody say ‘abandonware’. Partly, because there’s now a channel by which companies can still monetize these properties, so presumably they’d be quicker to prosecute, but I also think that sites like Good Old Games actually offer a better deal either than futzing around with DosBox yourself if you have an original copy, or navigating the shady world of warez where you might catch a virus.
That’s silly. DOSBox usually just works, and malware from abandonware sites is extremely rare. Plus now we’re to the point where you see abandonware on official archives like archive.org.
But more importantly, the fact that a lot more older games have been released doesn’t change the core concept. It just means there are fewer abandonware titles out there. As long as it’s not being sold by the current copyright owner in any form, it’s still abandonware.
The big hole right now are 16-bit Windows games. GOG won’t offer them because there’s not a good 16-bit Windows emulator for Windows, and their policy is that their games must be playable on all current versions of Windows. The only way you can play them is via abandonware, using the abandonware of Windows 3.1.
(I’ve always hoped GOG would make a deal with Microsoft and be able to use a minimal version of Windows 3.1 for games. It’d be nice if Wine would get ported to Windows, but I’m not holding my breath. The 16-bit part is the hardest to port, and that’s the only part that is valuable.)
It’s been a while, but I’ve found that even using a gui front end something glitches when you go through the installation procedure on the emulated PC with its emulated floppies and emulated hard drive.
Looks like Home of the Underdogs is still out there. It does have titles that I know are now available on Steam or GOG, but yeah, I am a bit surprised that the new market model hasn’t pressured ‘legitimate’ abandonware sites to close shop.
And yet, they’re selling games that run under Amiga emulation.