I'm done!!!! I'M FINALLY DONE!!! I have finished processing the last of the MGE scenarios I took interest in from Dustin's collection including my most wanted long lost ones I spoke of above (will post more details about them over in my
long lost scenario search thread soon) and sure enough it's taken me over the 350 milestone and pushed me quite a close to the 400! Which I'll of course hit pretty quickly in the future when I eventually return to this project for 'part 2' where I preserve a whole lot of ToT stuff. Thankfully that will be nowhere near as much work as there's far less ToT scenarios than the thousands of MGE ones and most are not lost thanks to the efforts of the Scenario League team! In the end I used up all my reserved posts and every other post of mine on page 1 of this thread to list all the scenarios and their pictures so I guess the Part 2 ToT stuff will have to happen here on page 2! The part 2 ToT stuff is going to be a little while away though as now that I'm done with my MGE preservation work I really really REALLY want to get back to my scenario mod projects and finish them all once and for all!
While at the same time I want finish my Civ2 videos and get them out too as they were actually what kicked off ALL of this! It's going to be fun being creative again as the last couple of years doing all this preservation work has been rewarding but quite tiring as it kinda felt like I was coming home from RL work to do more work at home lol! The treasure hunt is addictive and exciting but processing all that treasure is less so haha! I should say however that this may not truly be the end as there are two roads to more MGE scenarios being rescued in the future though in that maybe more private collectors will come forward with stuff none one else had, or maybe someone will come forward with a backup of the last big missing super Civ2 site out there... SidGames!
Back in the day 20+ years ago I never knew about CFC and I used to do a bit on Apolyton but not much as SidGames as that was my home. I spent a lot of time there in their Star Trek Birth of the Federation, Civilization, SMAC and Off Topic forums. SidGames was a huge site and similar to Apolyton it had
it's own Civ2 scenarios area but also hosted a whole lot of satellite Civ2 websites like
Civ2 Ziggurat,
Jorrit's Civ2 Site,
Markus's Ultimate/Planet Civ2, and
Civ2 Scifilization which all had their own scenario collections with quite a few rarities that never made it to Poly or CFC, and they hosted some other cool sites related to SMAC & CTP too, so it's quite the tragedy that it all disappeared without a trace one day with no warning. From what I can tell none of them survived Sidgames's rather sudden disappearance and webarchive didn't backup any of the downloads. Now that we've got Apolyton (& it's satellites), CivFanatics Atomic, and Dustin Dunns DSquared Zandanian League site it means SidGames (& it's satellites) really is the last super site missing from the Civ2 preservation project.
Interestingly if you look at the
SidGames staff list our resident Scenario League legend
@St. Leo held a staff position there so maybe he knows more about what went wrong, however so far every time I've messaged him about lost scenarios or anything else I haven't heard anything back sadly (which made his
recent shock appearance in my HoMM2 mod thread even more surprising lol). Speaking of mysterious legendary characters SidGames's owner and creator Whistler (Kunal Shah) was an interesting character who was great at networking and building things but always seemed to be at war with someone over something and used the old ban hammer a LOT lol. I always got along with him but I was just a loyal forum peon who never stood in his way, whereas those of high standing at Poly (dunno about CFC) seemed to be on 'not so friendly' terms with him (to the point where he was perma-banned from Poly and someone even made a
comical scenario about him invading the Civ world lol). Speaking of invasions I remember there were several into SidGames by angry former members, one of which was from a gaming site forum community called ACOL, and when I joined up over there to 'fight back' I ended up becoming a refugee there when SidGames collapsed and disappeared. Eventually ACOL had its own rebellion against their admin and many ended up at a forum community called CounterGlow that still exists to this day! Anyway I don't know what happened to Whistler and why his huge empire of Civ sites all disappeared one night but it was a huge loss and sadly none of the scenarios across all his sites were backed up by WebArchive, so you can look, but you can't touch. For someone to come along and offer me a backup of Dustin Dunn's amazing long lost Civ2 site collection was the fluke of the century and I really don't expect it to happen again with SidGames and it's satellite sites so that's why I really think this is the end of the MGE preservation project. But that's okay, as it's been a hell of a ride, and I think it's safe to say we've now preserved around 80-85% of the history of Civ2 scenarios with the thousands of scenarios spread across these super collections (although we'll never truly know the % ).
Speaking of super collections since they're currently spread out across this forum thread and a single tiny link in the OP I thought I'd make them more obvious and add a new expandable section to the
bottom of the Original Post in this thread for easy access.
And of course now it's time to add the final addition (maybe) to that super collection section which is the amazing Dustin Dunn's DSquared collection that I'm sure a few of you are eager to get your hands on it as like I said in my last message it's a huge collection bigger than all the others with hundreds and hundreds of scenarios/mods and supplementary stuff like utilities, sounds, graphics, & guides too for MGE and even a bit for ToT too. So here it is.. I'm now making it available to the public and preserving it across multiple sites of course! Enjoy!!
DSquared Civilization 2 Collection
Changes made: Collection repacked in 7zip, reorganised some folders for easier navigation.
Download:
CivFanatics and
Internet Archive
Screenshot & thumb:
Oh and there's also been a few more changes to existing scenarios in the collection too..
Found updated versions for:
The Ascendance of Europe Scenario v2.3 by Nick Holzapfel (FW)
Sengoku Jidai Scenario v3.0 by DarthVeda (MGE)
Found missing sounds for:
Slash & Burn Scenario by Dan Scheltema (FW)
.
/ 
amazing!
