After releasing Blackthorne for free on Battle.net, Blizzard have again released two more titles - The Lost Vikings, and (an apparently cut-down version of) Rock n' Roll Racing. You can find them on Battle.net. http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/05/02/b...the-lost-vikings-rock-n-roll-racing-for-free/
They replaced Rock n' Roll Racing music for a generic one that keeps looping and there's only three stages and one car to play... I downloaded it and it's just an .exe with a SNES emulator with an updated ROM from the game, but still nice to see a company to still support old/classic games.
Free Vikings? Aaaand there goes my sunday... Seeing how some things (title screens, background music) have changed - I'm kinda impressed they still know how to build (compile) DOS games and even SNES ROMs. Most companies I worked at would've lost knowledge like that ages ago.
I can understand changing the music, but why would they strip it down to what basically amounts to a demo... of a game that's no longer commercially available? It's amazing that a multi-million dollar corporation would actually go to the trouble of releasing a version that's WORSE than what you can get on any ROM site. At least it's free, I guess.
They might have plans to release the full game elsewhere. Is it on the Virtual Console? I did think it amusing that they basically gave you a ROM and an emulator, too! Still, it's one more ROM to add to the complete set, I guess. Interesting to see someone still coding for SNES, then!
Because time, I'd guess? TLV came out in '92, RnRR in '93. WC:O&H is from late '94 - so maybe it's coming soon (Blackthorne's from 94 too).
By the way, am I wrong by guessing. That the free version of TLV is in fact running in a custom DOSbox, just like Blackthorne is ? Cause then it is not a new compile. But in fact just the "cheap" way of doing the free shit. Sorry if I am sounding negative, but it just irks me some times.
Not sure if they had to recompile the exe too, but at least the data files have to have been touched, since there's a new intro screen. Which also showed up when I ran the game in a self-compiled DOSBox, so it's definitely in the game itself. RnR on the other hand... I read on another forum that the music is just a short, looped .wav that gets played by the emulator (i.e. run that rom on a real SNES, you get no music at all). *That*'s a cheap thing to do imho. To make it even worse, when the emulator loses focus, it'll stop the music, but not the game sounds (or the other way round, don't remember).
