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Old 03-08-2020, 01:28 PM   #1
MrFlibble
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Default Valhalla by Anarchy Entertainment - beta of an unreleased DOS game

Reposting this from elsewhere, JIC anyone finds this interesting.

A while ago I was browsing sites preserved by the Wayback Machine and stumbled upon a more or less intact copy of the GamesDomain download site:
http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/gamesdomain/demos/

Among other things, it has a file called valbeta.zip, which turned out to be a playable beta demo of a versus fighting game called Valhalla. It was developed by Anarchy Entertainment bu apparently never completed. The Wayback Machine has preserved a pretty intact official page of the game:
http://www.anarchyent.com/val/val.html

There isn't a lot of stuff on the site but the premise is that this is a versus fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat but featuring gods from the Norse pantheon. In the beta, you can play three of them (Odin, Heimdall and Modsogner). There are four different stages and you can play against the AI to successively defeat all three characters, or against another player on the same computer.

The game runs well in DOSBox in 320x240 resolution, and is quite playable. Here are some screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/sJt1K6z

It appears to have received very little (if any) magazine coverage but the beta demo was published on the February 1997 coverdisk of the Czech/Slovak gaming magazine Score. Here's the GamesDomain download page for reference.

The exit screen calls this released Public Beta Revision #1, but in spite of the file being available for download from multiple places (GamesDomain mirrors, ftp.wustl.edu and ftp.cdrom.com) the documentation reiterates the Do Not Distribute clause, including "Electronic Distribution is not Permitted" in LICENSE.TXT.

Usually I try to follow the terms of licenses that come with software, but the need to preserve this release for historical reasons (especially considering that the full version of the game was never released) seems to be compelling to disregard it in this case. What do you think?
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Old 03-08-2020, 10:48 PM   #2
Smiling Spectre
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Great find, MrFlibble!

Also, long time not seen!
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Old 09-08-2020, 04:11 PM   #3
MrFlibble
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Yeah, haven't checked back here in ages.
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