Content
The site provided reviews for over 5,300 games, as well as offered downloads of software and manuals for a number of games that were no longer commercially available. This allowed it to be a valuable resource to players who lost the original discs or manuals. While a majority of games available on the site were for DOS or Microsoft Windows, the site also contained a section with games for other platforms. Where downloads for these games were provided, they were usually present in formats compatible with emulators. The site also had scans of several gamebook series, many of them complete. In addition to commercial titles, the site contained a small number of 'freeware' titles.
Downloading was strictly regulated, due to bandwidth costs and limitations. Users could not download more than one file at a time or they would be banned anywhere from three hours to one week. This included speeding downloads using tools such as Getright. One common complaint users shared towards the site regarded the typically extremely slow download speeds, which were known to go as slow as 10 kbit/s on a high-speed connection. This did not, however, prevent the site's continued expansion.
The site tended to focus on underdog games; that is, games that were not a huge commercial success for whatever reason. Some games were classified with one or more of three distinctions:
- Top Dog referred to games perceived by some as gems, but that for some reason failed commercially, for instance because of poor marketing.
- Hall of Belated Fame referred to a small number of games that should have received a number of awards and high ratings, in the opinion of the site's staff.
- Real Dog referred to games that failed for a good reason, usually poor gameplay, but that were requested to be included on the site by fans, or fans of related games. These were classified with a "thumbs down" logo.
The site claimed to be more of a museum than a download site, offering what were by them considered "great" games that never received due attention upon their initial releases. It was also asserted that the site was careful about copyright concerns, so if a game available for download became once more available for purchase, or if a game's copyright holder so requested, the downloadable files were removed and replaced with a link to the site selling the game, if applicable. The site has also removed a number of ESA/IDSA members' titles from its download archive.
The site also had a store in which independent games were sold, and maintained an active member community by means of its forum and IRC channel.
Read more about this topic: Home Of The Underdogs
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