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.