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!
- Crystal caves, for platformers
- Loom, for graphic adventures
- Heretic, for FPS, since Doom has already been mentioned.
Edit: I actually forgot about Commander Keen. That’s THE platform game of my childhood.
Commander Keen: Episode 4 was the first game I remember vividly enough and there was always one bit I could never get past or figure out what to do next!
Someone else remembers Crystal Caves! I must’ve played that game dozens of times before I got my first proper gaming console.
That, and Lemmings.
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.
Prince of Persia. I guess that was also the first DOS game I played…🤔
I remember watching my older sister play it and the first time your mirrored version appears I actually was terrified, so unnerving.
Oh, yes. The original speedrunning game that you needed to complete in less than one hour, or else…
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/2023/6/8/23754342/ubisoft-prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-release-date
i was obsessed with it!
Dune 2
Tyrian. Vertical shooter with top-notch visuals for the time, a ton of secrets, good replay value and an amazing soundtrack (with a jukebox mode)
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
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.
my favorite thing with duke nukem 3d was to start the game, open cheats and get jetpack, and then play normally, it was so much fun!
I will cheat a little but pretty I love whole Commander Keen series of games
Gotta be TIE Fighter. X-Wing was great too, but TIE Fighter scored extra novelty points for letting us play as Imperials.
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.
That looks incredible, thanks for the link!
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Still amazing to this day.
i have played it SO many times, one of my favorite games as a kid, i thought it was hilarious! EDIT: never mind i actually meant MI 3 haha
cosmo’s cosmic adventure, hocus pocus, the lost vikings, prince of persia. oh shit i miss those days
Cosmos was epic
Prince of Persia is the first game I remember playing, so I have very fond memories of it. Cosmo as well.
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 :(
Without a doubt Jazz Jackrabbit. JJ1&2 still hold up better than the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic games.
I was looking for this answer too. Loved Jazz. Never played anything that fast before.
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.
I liked The Dig a lot, but eh, the climax was a bit underwhelming. Felt it needed another 5-10 minutes to really polish that ending off.
That soundtrack though 👌
I’ll always have a soft spot for Jazz Jackrabbit.
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.
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