The hotud.org admin: “Home of the Underdogs is still alive”
Lord Pall, administrator of the spiritual heir of abandonware site Home of the Underdogs, sent me an e-mail in the past days letting me know that works for pushing forward the almost-dead project of Sarinee Achavanuntakul continue at full pace. “We’re still alive with most of the games listed, a semblance of a community, and a nice chunk of user added listings and reviews“, Lord Pall writes, saying that there is still a lot of work to do but the site development goes on as expected.
In spite of controversy and splitting of the HotU comeback supporters, in disagreement on the kind of web platform to use and how to manage the site stuff, hotud.org not only was able to rebuild the original database but also started to carry out the guidelines set by Fringer aka Achavanuntakul on users active involvement into extending games, files and downloads archive. Home of the Underdogs is back, with a different interface and an upgraded hardware but with the same target to be the reference point for abandonware and classic videogames on the whole.
That Lord Pall & partners are working hard to achieve such target is beyond any doubt, what to me seems more difficult to understand in light of the current situation of PC retrogaming is the need of such effort, that is if it’s worth expecting that Home of the Underdogs will have in the future the same role it had more than 3 years ago. Since Fringer has slowly but steadily let the original HotU die out of starvation things have changed radically, from a niche interest retrogaming has turned into a commercial reality on PC and consoles and the same abandonware community has matured and grown a lot.
Comparing with the many currently active sites dealing with classic gaming, the new HotU incarnation appears not like a step forward but like two steps backwards: there are so much sources to get information, downloads, screenshots, troubleshooting guides and reviews from, some portals like Abandonia and The Good Old Days can count on a good mix of stuff to browse and userbase and above all on the fact that they are alive communities here and now, not just the result of a reanimation attempt out of time.
Conversely what does HotU have to offer? Microscopic screenshots, a blue-purple interface and a download archive that not so rarely brings embarrassing side effects from the user’s standpoint: it isn’t pleasant at all to download The Humans or also a classic like Flashback and find that in the middle of the second level the crack stops working and you must go find a working version of the software. And I don’t think these are the only issues the site has. As of reviews and stuff posted by users, furthermore, the best abandonware sites are just looking forward to actively engage videogamers and visitors.
Home of the Underdogs, in the end, does not seem to be destined to be that magnificent videogames archive Lord Pall said he wants to build because it has too much flimsy and badly assorted foundations. Of course, the effort to maintain a freely accessible archive of historical software is always something to value, and from this standpoint HotU isn’t different from all the other sites of this kind. But in its current form it’s only one of the many and not the “definitive abandonware resource” as it was considered a long time ago.
Related posts
- Home of the Underdogs is back on-line. Twice. With downloads
- Home of the Underdogs, the phoenix of abandonware
- Requiem for the champion of abandonware
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