Back in the day, as a kid, there was a free shareware game that I played an obnoxious amount of times: Graal. Not the shitty “Graal classic” we have today, (it’s a shell of its former self), but the original Graal 1.4.0; I searched EVERYWHERE and I couldn’t even get a blip more than old forums about the game reminiscing about the “good old days”. It’s widely believed that Stefan wiped the OG versions of Graal from the map, but he didn’t. But not only have I found it, I’ve found nearly all the player made creations for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180312164234/http://nekoroy.com/graal/index.html
The site is long since abandoned it seems, but it has EVERYTHING for the classic graal, from clients to server backups to player made levels, etc, and what’s more I actually got the 1.4.0 client running nearly perfect on my steam deck. This, for me at least, is my holy grail. I have a lot of nostalgia for this old game from before it got destroyed for the shitty “new” version we have today, and with it a lot of memories flooding back to me. Probably doesn’t seem like much because hardly anyone knows or cares about the original Graal, but for me, it’s huge, and I just wanted to share I guess.
Oh. Damn. It took seeing a screenshot and the Yin-Yang health but I remember playing this. I was a little too young to fully grasp the systems in place, and I also remember rampant cheating (I think I partook in the Graal hacks too). My friends played a lot more than I did, but it was a good romp.