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About the site.

3D Shooter Legends is a site dedicated to collecting info on and keeping old 3D shooter games alive. Please don't ask us about games from other genres as our site has that narrow focus and it takes a lot of work to just compile all the info on this site let alone anything more. First person shooters (where you view the game with the perspective of you being inside it) are our main focus. There are other sections: Third-Person Shooters (where the camera is behind an in-game character) includes action-adventures which fall between the cracks of the two genres but deserve attention nevertheless. Also included are Car Combat games, and hoverflyer shooters in the style of the game Descent. Simulations are usually slower-paced and recquire higher technical in-game knowledge and involves games such as Mechs (huge robotic combat machines), Animal Hunting, Tanks, Flight-Sim Planes/Jets, Helicopters and Space shooters. Shmups are shoot 'em ups (both 2D and 3D). Before 3D, these type of fixed, scrolling and dual-stick shooters popularized the action genre. The rapid fire shooting and dodging of bullets still appeals to dedicated fans with a rich community, especially in Japan, which continues to make games in the genre. Free Fan-Made Games encompass all of the previous categories but are amateur games offered free to the public which sometimes even rival commercial games. No uploads of games from previous 3 years are allowed nor are a few other games "still too popular in retail". As of Mar/2019 we have over 8300 individual game entries.

We also have a page of mods and addons created by the fan community for many of the popular games. FPS games have created a richer subculture of fan-made product than almost any other genre and is an important attribute to the popularity and continuing life of even older FPS games. Ports of classic games to new systems or game engines, enhancement of graphics, and completely new content for existing games offer unending replay value for the best shooters.

During the first 3 years of our site's existence, it was totally in the German language. You can see archive of the original start of the site here and an old forum. To attract more visitors and contributors, it was decided to change it to English so as to be more universally understood. Thanks go out to loki1985, TheLifeForce and especially Lovely for the translations. It took us 15 months but as of September/2005 the site is now totally English. You can see older versions of the site at internet archive. In November/2005 the design of the site was revamped to give it a new gui/menu and to remove the frame setup. This concided with the opening of a similar site Adventure Legends for the genre of adventure games. On August, 2011 the site was changed from hmtl pages with a javascript index into a database-driven one thanks to the work of loki1985. This is a labor of love for us that work on the site and we hope it will continue far into the future with your help. Our special thanks, on the event of our decade anniversary, go to all previous contributors without whose help we couldn't have made this site the most comprehensive PC 3D shooter game compendium on the internet.


Download links explanation.

1.) "Level Demo". This means an actual demo from the developer or shareware usually limited to 1 level or sometimes with a time limit.
2.) "Mod/TCs". These are usually fan-made additions to a game which can include new levels, graphics, and gameplay. There are also source ports where a game's code is made to run on a more sophisticated modern system or even some recreations of a game on a different game engine.
3.) "Full Demo". This is more commonly known as a rip meaning that certain elements such as music, movies or speech were removed or "ripped out" in order to make it smaller and quicker to download.
4.) "ISO Demo". This means a cd-image of the complete game on cd which you can burn and get an exact copy.
We use the word demo for all of our game uploads, because it's important to us that the downloads are really used as a demo . If you like the game then go and buy it; the developers deserve it.

Full and iso-demos are either our own uploads or lead to Oldgames- & Abandonware sites  (usually from 1991-2000). Direct links to downloads from other sites/boards are of course not included.

Due to copying of our links to other forums and sites, we now have a Download Script for most uploads which will work only if links are clicked from our site and nowhere else.

Dialer/Traffic popups on warez pages can be blocked with options in your browser.


Games listing order.

Games are listed in alphabetical order in each release date year. Note that at times some are released in non-English languages first so date may be different than English release date. The upcoming game section of the current year is also changing all the time as release dates often change, though it is the most up-to-date list found on the web as we use various sources to accumulate the data. We welcome your input and are happy to make corrections.
Post correction or new game info on the forum


Broken downloads & resolution.

When using our Download Script, what to do if you get these messages :
1. "You did not get this download from 3D Shooterlegends" / "Please start this download from the 3DSL Site" : You could not be validated as a 3D Shooterlegends visitor. This is to prevent copying and pasting of our download links. The urls of our game entry pages are allowed to be shared.
2. "No valid download mirror specified" : Occurs when someone supplied a bad link to the script. Please report this error, and tell which download it occured with on our Broken Downloads Forum.
3. "Download link not available" : There has been an internal script error. Please report this error, and tell which download it occured with on our Broken Downloads Forum.
4. "The page cannot be displayed" or "HTTP 500 Internal server error" or if the page does not even load : Your browser or firewall may be blocking the referrer information as to where the link originated from. If so, you won't be able to connect at all to those pages unless you disable that function for our site.
5. "The specified mirror seems to be offline at the moment." : The download script page was brought offline due to it coming to our notice that some files were down. If files are not reupped within a few weeks then download will be completely removed.

For 4shared (host we use the most):
1. Use jDownloader, MiPony, or another download manager to copy each file link to be queued and downloaded automatically. Multiple files can be downloaded at the same time as well.
2. You have to be registered and logged into a 4shared account to download them. If you don't want to use a personal email account to register, simply create another email address with which to use.
3. If you get error message "The file link that you requested is not valid." then click "Add to my account" (at bottom left) and then you can download from folder in your own account. If that still won't work, then let us know in our Broken Downloads Forum. 4. If you have uploaded files to be shared with others on our site, please remember to sign in to the 4shared account at least every six months to keep it alive. 5. If you can't download files from one specific account, it may be that you have exceeded the 3GB daily traffic limit on your account. To download again on that account, you have to wait until the next day or use another 4shared account.


Unpacking files.

To unpack the compressed uploaded files, use the following programs for their respective types: (note that zip files can also be opened with either winace or winrar)
*.ecm - ECM to uncompress ecm file, drag it on top of unecm.exe
*.zip - Winzip
*.rar - WinRAR
*.ace - WinACE
*.001 - can be opened with Winrar for mostly 1990 games. They can also be 7-Zip archives if they are games after 2000.

Passwords for some downloads are "3dsl", "3DSL" or "3dshooterlegends" or "3dshooterlegends.6x.to".

SFV files - To verify that your downloads aren't incomplete/damaged. Extract the .sfv to the folder with your downloaded archives and open it with a program like QuickSFV. When a CRC error in a file occurs, try to download those files again first. However, an error could have happened while uploading a file, so if you can't resolve it yourself, post in our Broken Downloads Forum

NFO files - Rips (full demos) usually come with important installation instructions in a *.nfo file from the release group, which can be opened in either the installer, Damn NFO Viewer (recommended), or in simple text format using Windows Notepad.


CD Images.

Extensive Faqs are available in our forum written by Molitor - (Uploading A Game)

To use an uploaded image, the simplest way if you don't want to burn the image to a cd or dvdr is usually loading the image into the CD-Emulator Daemon Tools or using a virtual drive, installing the game from there, patching it and finally searching for the right no-cd crack if needed.


Running older DOS-games.

A manual hasn't been written so just these links will have to do :
PCem (PC emulator that specializes in running old operating systems and software)   Flopper (emulator to run booter images)   DOSBox (Dos-Emulator)   Windows Compatability Tool (for WinXP)   Virtual PC (Emulates older PC operating systems on Windows 7) Info  
Hyper-V (can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems for Windows 8 & 10)
VmWare Player (another free virtual machine to run other o/s) Info; FreeDOS (free DOS-compatible o/s)
Cpugrap (CPU slowdown for Win32, 3.7Kb)
VDMSound (Sound-Emulator for WinNT4.0/2k/XP)   Dosfix 3 (for WindowsME)   DOSBox (Dos-Emulator)   GliDOS (Glide-Emulator)   OpenGLide (Glide-Emulator)   WinGroove (Midi-Emulator)   Vogons Guide For Old Games   NT Compatible Old Game List

You can try asking other users for help on our Games Support Forum but we can't guarantee a solution to everyone's problems.


[Last updated on 11.19.19]

 

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