I recently played an amazing DOS game where you have your country and you can declare war or peace with other ones, and i really enjoyed it. Growing up one of my favorite DOS games was Gobliiins 3, such cool memories!
I recently played an amazing DOS game where you have your country and you can declare war or peace with other ones, and i really enjoyed it. Growing up one of my favorite DOS games was Gobliiins 3, such cool memories!
I remember watching my older sister play it and the first time your mirrored version appears I actually was terrified, so unnerving.
The new Prince of Persia game they just announced looks really good. An action platformer, hopefully it’s a ton of fun. https://www.theverge.com/...
This is the one. I've been playing Tyrian2k for decades. Honestly I still haven't found a shmup this good. And all the secrets! I remember looking up all the codes to type into the title screen back in the day. Had a sheet printed out and everything haha. It's freeware nowadays if anyone wants to try it. It's also on GOG for like 5 bucks if that's more your thing. Also check out opentyrian2k. It's essentially an enhanced version ported to modern PCs.
Tyrian was great! And also Tyrian 2000 which I was able to play somewhere. Maybe Gametap or some similar service. I remember trying it out as shareware (I think) and thinking it was Epic Games' best published shooter to date. Still holds up, imo.
I loved the upgrades and the fact that you had a health bar instead of a 1 hit kill. Plus all the stuff you said.
Tyrian's data was made freeware, and a modern open-source reimplementation that can use the data was done.
On Debian Linux, it's in apt as opentyrian.
I played Tyrian 2000 a ton as a kid and this was such a fantastic game. It even had a great two player mode which I recall had separate weapons for each ship!
I wish I was old enough at the time to appreciate the data logs you collected because I remember there was fun dialog hidden in some of them.
Typing "DESTROY" into the title screen unlocked like an entire new game with multiplayer and everything.
In fact the multiplayer in that game was great in general. One player on keyboard the other on mouse, and you could dock ships and have one steering while the other shot.
Excellent game, not just for its time
Loom and the other games written for that platform can now be run by the modern Scummvm, if you have the data files.
Gog.com currently has Loom on sale for $2.09. IIRC they have something rigged up to run it on modern systems, though I don't recall if it's Scummvm or some sort of DOS emulation environment.
TIE Fighter! It's the reason I really got into gaming, PC gaming specifically. Mario on NES and such were fun, but TIE Fighter was the first game I'd spend all day at school thinking about and then spend all afternoon and all weekend playing. It's on Steam and GOG and has aged really well.
Kudos to Sid Meier's Gettysburg, too.
Your comment totally gave me a flashback. I was always fascinated by the huge ships in the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, and I spent soooo much time daydreaming about those games in elementary school. No internet required, just imagination!
@brandonsh there has been a lot of work done to upgrade the engine to modern standards and support things like widescreen.
Duke Nukem 3D, absolutely no question whatsoever. The first game I played that had environments that aped real life and had real life levels of interaction detail... Light switches, CCTV cameras, so much incidental detail and environmental transformation. No other game had done that to the same extent before then and I'd argue that no other game has done it since!
My parents refused to spend any sort of money on videogaming so my childhood was spent scrounging for anything I could on my Dad’s 386 PC. Shareware of the first episodes of games was a Godsend, I must have played through the first part of Duke Nukem 50 times.
For me it has to be Quake. I was a bit too late for DOOM, but before then I was playing as a child on the Sega Megadrive (Sega Genesis for my US pals) and going from the Megadrive graphics and gameplay to Quake...
I think that was the first time I was absolutely addicted to a game. Like, I was pretending to delete the game and hiding it using Explorer's hide folder mode so I could secretly sneak some Quake in here and there.
Absolutely love that game.
It's still brilliant! Some people hated it because it was unbalanced, but that's just why it was so great! The way each enemy required a unique dance to defeat without taking damage is sheer perfection.
I'm just sad it never got an actual sequel :(
cosmo's cosmic adventure, hocus pocus, the lost vikings, prince of persia. oh shit i miss those days
UFO: Enemy Unknown was a pretty great game for its time.
Quake 2 was insane. I remember crazy lan parties with my pals. You just had to type a simple command to launch the server (no special configuration needed) and then just launch the client on the PCs and that was it.
This is really interesting actually, because I was introduced to UFO/the underwater one by my dad, and he told me the opposite, that the newer games don't have the feel of the original. Should I give them a shot?
I think so. Oddly enough, I remember hating the underwater one after playing the original! They had a few games in between that I felt didn't really capture the same feeling as the original game, but I think the newer ones do it quite well. You can usually get them for cheap as they go on sale pretty frequently.
Point of order! Quake 2 wasn't a DOS game. I know, because I tried to run it on my Pentium 133 in DOS for the additional performance, only to be greeted with a message telling me it only ran in Windows :(
hmm my memory might be warped. I remember the command line part so I might be confused
The Dig! It's my favourite LucasArts adventure game, and I still play it to this day every so often. Never stops being highly enjoyable, even though I've memorized the puzzles and story.
Highly recommend it to anyone who likes point-and-click adventure games! It's on Steam for super cheap (I think it's on Gog.com too).
The Dig is great! Not my favourite 90s adventure but definitely underrated.
That soundtrack though 👌
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Still amazing to this day.
Basing it on time played, probably Doom II.
Without a doubt Jazz Jackrabbit. JJ1&2 still hold up better than the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic games.
Dangerous Dave. I think it was the first ever DOS game that I got to play. I like good platformers.
Not to seem basics but basically any of the SCUMM games
I only ever played Full Throttle, but damn I loved the music in that game!
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead
But I won't let it go to my head
My momma's face has dripped down into the dirt
But I'm still chasing chitlins, whisky and skirts.
The snow music is literally the best I sometimes listen to the soundtrack even when playing other games!
Yes, that was my favorite strategy game of that time. I tried to recreate the experience by playing Age of Wonders, but it didn't quite feel the same.
Slitherine released a remake of it late last year. Haven't tried it myself, but the reviews seem decent.
Gabriel Knight 1, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango, Quest for Glory 4.
QFG 2 and 4 were absolute masterpieces, with 4 being the pinnacle of the series. The eastern Germanic lore mixed with Eldritch horror, gorgeously painted artwork throughout, and the voice acting was spot on. John Rhys-Davies as narrator was a perfect fit (even though he thought the whole thing was a shitshow), and the 3 villages riffing off each other was fucking hilarious.
When I was a kid it baffled me that the 3 townspeople's voices never matched the text. It was only a few years ago I learned that when those 3 voice actors were in the studio, they would ad-lib the fuck out of their lines. The Coles kept cracking up and just kept the completely wrong lines in there without changing any of the text.
Just started a new playthrough a couple months ago on my steam deck, but with the new(ish) VGA remake of QFG2, since the text parser would be a bitch on the deck.
Haha I was gonna say QFG1 and QFG3 were absolutely legendary. I had sooo many hours in both as a kid. I still go back and play QFG1 every few years.
If you're a fan, check out Heroine's Quest. It's free on Steam and is a great throw back to the originals.
That fifth game was absolutely brutal. Infamy Quest is a decent analog to that series. Not as clever though.
One of my favourite DOS games was One Must Fall 2097. It’s a fighting game with giant robots piloted by humans (similar to Pacific Rim). I really appreciated the diversity in design and move set for the different robots, and it had a killer main theme.
I loved the theme so much. The composer of the theme was surprised by the popularity and did an update/remake of it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlVaQl7kEk
Absolutely my favourite. Met the dev team when they were working on the ill-fated sequel. The forums were a great community. There's an OpenOMF remake in progress (same game but better connectivity options and compatibility). It's being reverse engineered IIRC.
The best part was Tournament Mode where you could train your pilot for Power, Agility and Endurance stats and upgrade your 'bot's arm / leg power / speed, armour etc. Great stuff.
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, but I'll give Wolfenstein 3D an honorable mention.
Most people named a lot of the games I would have, so I'm gonna give a shout out to probably the first proper video game I ever played: Mixed Up Mother Goose. Can still remember slowly walking around, trying to figure out what the shit was going on lol.
Ultima 6. It was Baldur's Gate before Baldur's Gate, and it had very deep conversation and morality systems. Also amazing VGA graphics (for the time, 256 colors!) interesting PC Speaker AND Sound Blaster music, and an interesting open world and story that showed that preconceived notions and prejudices can be bad, and that sometimes you can solve cultural misunderstandings through communication and sharing instead of conflict.
Ultima 6 was a masterpiece and way ahead of its time. If any of the Ultima games needs a remake, it's that one, imo. I also played Goblins 2, but never got around to 1 or 3. Did enjoy it, but got stuck on some puzzles and gave up. You couldn't just go online and find a solution like you can nowadays. If I ever got back into the Goblins series, I probably would finish them using those online hints though. I've lost the patience (and more importantly, time) to do it the hard way nowadays.
I remember playing a lot of Stunts, trying to beat the track times and designing tracks with many loops and jumps and some more jumps and loops... I think I spent more time in the editor than driving.
They have it at the Internet Archive!
Stunts was my favorite game for years, the completely bonkers physics were more fun than actually trying to drive good.
Could not tell you how many hours my brother and I spent taking turns playing Wacky Wheels
wacky.exe
A lot of great games have already been mentioned but one of my favorite early gaming experiences was Kaptajn Kaper, a Danish game released in the 80s. You're a pirate captain sailing around Denmark after the battle of Copenhagen in 1807 looking for English ships to plunder. Most people around my age with an interest in computers remember it fondly and apparently, the source code was donated to the Royal Library for preservation as a part of Danish cultural heritage, which is pretty cool.
@s804 One Must Fall: 2097. This is the way.
God man that into still slaps so fucking hard to this day
Daggerfall sherly, but I gotta add that I didn't grow up on DOS games so I don't have quite the expertise. Although I love older games, growing up with it is a different thing.
Going by most influential, it'd have to either be Doom or Ultima Underworld. Both of these inspired entire genre's that still live on to this day (FPS and First-Person RPG's like The Elder Scrolls). Personally? Ultima 7.
Wing Commander 2. My Dad sourced it and the manual was a B&W photocopy. It took ages to get onto it sometimes as the photocopy was so bad I'd be unable to decipher what letter 6 on line 8 of page 10 was.
I got into ZZT, a "topdown" 2d game with its own map editor and even a rudimentary scripting language. Stumbled on it because I wanted to make games. People made some seriously impressive shit on that thing and its successors.
Probably X-Com: UFO Defense. Got really into it and holy hell got angry at that game. But damn it made me want to play more!
Not to be the hispter, but my fav. is a very niche game called "Het Yogo Yogo Spel", it's a promotional game for a drink in the Netherlands. for some reason i have such strong nostalgic feelings for it, i really loved playing it as a kid and even more as an adult because it reminds me of that time so much. and no, it's not an amazing platformer (not bad either) but man...
While mentioning Sid Meier: Also Civilization. Sunk quite some time into it.
I didn't play it on DOS, though it also saw a DOS release, but Syndicate would be high on my list.
Carmageddon was a late DOS release that I liked.
I never did actually get around to The Ancient Art of War, though I did want to play that.
I didn't play it on DOS, though it saw a DOS release, but the original Sim City aged pretty well.
Probably Lotus Racing (ran off one floppy), then Quake 1 and Carmageddon 1. Never really gamed much after those few.
Theme Park. So classic.
Ultima Underworld. Bought my first sound card for this game.
Wolfenstein 3D, my first ever PC game
my dad gave me a floppy disk from one of his coworkers with instructions on how to navigate and run the game from DOS and I felt like a hacker lol
ZZT was an amazing game where you could make your own games and program "objects" using a simple scripting language. It was my first programming language.
It was Tim Sweeney's first game. I've never played Fortnight.
Doom, Duke Nukem 3d, Zak McKraken and the alien mindbenders, One Must Fall 2097
I never had a DOS computer back then and only played a few games through emulators in recent years. It has to be DOOM for me.
Star Control II for sure. Fantastic game, still one of the best story-based games I've played. Heavily inspired a lot of more modern franchises, too, including Mass Effect.
Ultima series.
Gunship 2000. Shit was amazing.
Hard to say. Secret Agent, Treasure Mountain, Azrael's Tear, Chill Manor, etc. All solid games. Hard to pick just one.
Space Hulk would definitely be mine
Every once on a while i get back to Mad TV. Casual game before it was cool. Also Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis
Crusader: No Remorse/No Regret
Sometimes I wish they made an FPS reboot, then I remember EA owns it.
> bind q "impulse 255"
Magic Carpet was my favorite dos game I think, that or Loom.
Magic Carpet had you flying around on a Carpet, blasting fireballs at snake things, collecting mana orbs, building castles, and destroying castles of the enemy.
Loom was a Lucas Arts game where you played as a "can't look at the face of" mystical weaver of reality.. Dude under a robe with a Hoodie. You pick up a Magic staff, learn combo's of letters to play on the staff (I had a little notebook next to me with them all written down) and the game got absolutely wild. Fabric of reality breaking sorta wild.
I cannot remember the name but you got to choose between a boy character and a girl character and each stage you had to get all the collectibles to open the door. It was a 2d platformer as well.
Edit: Turns out the game is called Word Rescue.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Truly a masterpiece or maybe I have rose tinted glasses A real puzzler with a decent amount of replayability
Bunch of greats mentioned so far. I was a big fan of an older game called “Millenium: Return to earth” in which you colonized the solar system. One of the few games I had that came on the larger, five inch floppies.
was road rash on DOS? played that a lot. wolf 3d too.
Wing Commander Privateer - I love a good economy game in my spaceship game.
Mechwarrior - Battletech 1st person. Get you a 30 foot tall robot and shoot some lasers at other giant robots. Go for the knees.
go to feed...
go to feed...
Prince of Persia. I guess that was also the first DOS game I played...🤔
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