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.
I wish they’d remake Loom or make a new version. The musical magic system was sooo cool at the time. I remember the first time my brother and I figured how how to untwist the cyclone. Minds completely blown!
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!
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
Dune 2
Gotta be TIE Fighter. X-Wing was great too, but TIE Fighter scored extra novelty points for letting us play as Imperials.
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!
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
The new Monkey Island is actually really good if you haven’t played it already. Also, Sea of Thieves is doing a Monkey Island crossover coming up that looks promising if you’re a fan!
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.
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.
UFO was such an amazing game. I really like the newer XCOM games, they feel like they capture the spirit of the original game.
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.
Wow I see! He exclusively plays the underwater one, and I’ll totally check out the newer ones, thanks for the advice :D
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
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 :(
I will cheat a little but pretty I love whole Commander Keen series of games
I’ll always have a soft spot for Jazz Jackrabbit.
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.
I totally agree with your list. I loved the Quest for Glory series, at least until the fifth game, which has the crappy 3D graphics from the late 90s.
That fifth game was absolutely brutal. Infamy Quest is a decent analog to that series. Not as clever though.
