I know that Sarinee was no longer updating the website since 2006 and a lot of the download links went down over the years, even if the reviews were still there. But on February 9th, the webhost went bankrupt and Home of the Underdogs is no more. :'(
I hope it will be put back online, even if it's only the reviews, but so far there is no indication that it will happen.
What does it means for the RON community?
Oh man :(.
That is bad news, I used to refer to the reviews on there quite a bit.
Guess I'll go and add Mobygames.com to the bookmarks folder :'(
Oh yes, I've read this sad news yesterday.
HOTU was one of the most reliable of its kind, it's sad that it went so downhill with it.
At least there's still Abandonia (which has been in some kind of management trouble lately, too)
:'(
I guess this means that RON has died with it since it was hosted there...
I'm missing HOTU soo much. It's now too late to have some backups and many of the feature games were impossible to found anywhere else.
I went to AGS because of HOTU. Larry Vale was featured on the Hall of Belated Fame and 5DAS / 7DAS were the first game you found clicking on the Adventure Game Pane.
:'(
There's a RON mirror here:
http://aafiles.bicycle-for-slugs.org/ron/
It's a shame, but given the fact that the downloads were down and the site hadn't updated for 3 years, I'm not sure I'm feeling all that sad about it. To be honest, HOTU was one of the reasons the abandonware scene was getting apathetic - all the games were up there anyhoo, and nobody could compete with a site boasting over 5000 games :P
Mobygames is a good alternative if you went to HOTU for reviews and screenshots. For that purpose, I'd even go so far as to say it's a better alternative.
In RoN's case we're simply without a home for the moment. We've got backups and there is the mirror that KhrisMuc mentioned, although it's out-of-date. Once we find a new home, it'll be business as usual.
It's the other affiliates I feel bad for. I hope they have copies of their files so they can continue someplace else.
I can provide a new home if that's what you need. I've got oodles of bandwidth and space lying around, and it'd be a 'real' hosting account, with yer own cPanel and whatnot ;)
Well, that sucks. HOTU used to be one of my favorite sites.
And what's this about Abandonia having problems? They're like the new version of HOTU. I'd hate to see them go away too.
- Ponch
I think Abandonia's problems are of the ego/moral kind. The was a lot of bruhah on the forums over the past while, but it seems to have died down now.
From what I know the big man, Kosta left the site with almost no sign of what happened and there was some struggle about the site organization and administration and that kind of stuff. Nothing they couldn't take care of, I think.
Loss of HOTU is big. Not as a place to download games but as PC gaming history museum & database.
Such place should have kept intact at all costs!
I bet many of those titles are lost forever now, atleast for public.
Oh, codswallop. The idea that HOTU hasn't been mirrored somewhere, or at least that Sarinee never backed up his files, suffers from a disturbing lack of faith.
Aww, Mind's Eye was one of the last games to be featured there, too!
THE MIND'S EYE CURSE BEGINS.
MIND'S EYE: It's like the new version of that "Candlejack" thi
Home of the Underdogs..ah..that's where I first downloaded most of my first games..(I had PTSN connection back then and HOTU was a really slow site to load..but man when it did we would cheer and howl(like a dog of course)..
See? Told you. (http://twitter.com/Fringer/status/1226263594) Remain optimistic.
I win the contest, look at this (http://www.fringer.org/?p=416).
HOTU is dead, long live... its replacement!
"never backed up hisher files"
Now you're completely right ;)
His, her, what's the difference?
Your parents can explain it to you.
In writing, you're supposed to put 'him' if you don't know the sex. At least, that's how it is over here in America....
~Trent
huh, turns out my third year project supervisor is in charge of bringing it back
I dunno, I was burned pretty badly by HOTU's draconian 'no simultaneous downloads' policy, which got me sitebanned on more than one occasion for no apparent reason (Which I think had something to do with having broadband before broadband was widely used). I kinda stopped visiting the site a good 8 or so years ago when it just got too frustrating and I felt there were better alternatives for the services that HOTU rendered in the first place.
Honestly, I think the only reason I even ate up any of their bandwidth in the last however many years was related to RoN. This isn't to say that I think the site deserved to go down, but I definitely approve of some of the ideas that they (I think is the proper asexual term) came up with for a refurbishing of the project regarding wiki-style content, open uploading and what-have-you.
Hopefully the site as a resource will be brought back in some form. A lot of useful information was hosted there, I'm sure, and you can never have too many reviews of games that you're not sure if you want to bother playing or not.
Personally it's the reviews that kept me revisiting HOTU rather than the downloads. Downloads I have no troubles to find, but reviews of games, may they be old or recent, PC or console, professional or indie, as long they were good games and overshadowed by other titles, now that's something you don't see everywhere. I am glad to see all this information will not be lost after all.
It seems that the RON-games are also gone from the backup.... (http://aafiles.bicycle-for-slugs.org/)
Quotehello. everything is currently dead, hardware explosion and all that. something or other will return presently
Luckilly I was in time to make backup. :-\