DOS games

seriously, though

very nice!

maybe of interest:

if this thread lasts long enough a ton of weirder stuff will come out, but i’m fine with the absolute most generic stuff too. the sbwiki for DOS is just straight-up blank, and hopefully this thread will provide a base for changing that eventually

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Magic Carpet is actually pretty simple once you get into it. Basic if awkward 3D flying. Pick up spells by flying into them (or do you start with them in retail? Can’t remember). Hit ENTER for map and click on a spell with the mouse button you want it set to (start with fireball on left and castle on right). Cast the castle spell somewhere to build it, then fly out to find an enemy and blast them with your fireball. Change your right-click to possession and cast it on the little balls dropped by enemies.

(instructions lifted from here: https://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/524288-magic-carpet/faqs/2058)

King’s Quest:
read about 1 through 4, maybe look at the VGA remake of the first or some fan remakes. The spell/schedule systems of 3 are particularly interesting. There’s some videos on the Let’s Play Archive, and a ss lp of KQ VGA.
Play 5 until you get frustrated with how nonsensical it is. Gorgeous, though.
Then play 6 and marvel at how much better it is (ps: you NEED the manual).

http://cd.textfiles.com/ has a significantly smaller selection than archive.org but is, uh, safe for work. Easier to search through using google, too.

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honorable Commander Keen mention.

also Tie Fighter.

and since I’ve started already,


and

and

and

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an amazing game that somehow still holds up. papyrus in general was a fantastic studio.

hit it into the upper deck on their first swing. legendary

actually, I still should have that CD (f)lying around somewhere, if it didn’t die during one of the last two times I moved in/out of places.

also, NASCAR1 and Indy1/2 do not feel right without heavy modding.

Okay this thread is dredging up so many games, but I can’t remember their names! It took me a long time to find this one:
http://www.allabout.com/afs/software/games/helious.htm

An utterly baffling looking game that actually is fairly simple. You play as a balloon that must deflate to move. If you deflate too much you die. If you fill up with too much air at a pump you die. And some areas can only be gotten through by deflating to a smaller size on purpose. That said, there’s so much going on graphically that I was never able to figure out if I was doing something wrong or not. So much information, so little of it valuable.

There is also a game that I cannot remember the name of, or even how it played. What I do remember is that it was some sort of zen/mindfulness game.Something about navigating a maze and collecting words of wisdom. I remember lots of palette cycling to create a strange psychedelic rainbow effect. There were lots of weird glyphs I think? Does anybody know what the heck I’m talking about?

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the port of Genocide 2 is the only DOS game i care about

dang this looks great


the soundtrack is pretty cool too

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i have a real soft spot for Origin Systems games. they don’t hold up well but they captured the imagination well when i was young enough for it; particularly Ultima 6 and 7.

That, X-Com, and Master of Orion (1/2, 2 had a dos version!) were probably some of my largest influences on being a bit of a simulationist wrt game design.

I also remember playing a lot of the Xeen era Might and Magic games but thinking it was more fun than it was good. Also breaking the mechanis as much as I possibly could.

Shareware was probably more influential on me; all these unfinished games I could play if I just waited to download them… 14 year old me couldn’t help himself and just played everything, no matter how janky, and now it all kinds of blurs together in my head.

Zone 66 rules, though the full version of the game adds almost nothing that wasn’t in the shareware. Don’t expect a sweet anime ending cutscene. (edit: it had some sweet house music tho)

would love to hear this expounded if you don’t mind <3. did they feel wrong then or is this a modern retrospective take?


what are the best 2D platformers for DOS? keen? duke nukem?


^ this version seems to shit on the amiga version which just seemed hella janky for some reason. also the music is much better i think

e: idk actually, there seem to be pros and cons. YOU DECIDE

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Abuse has great animation and a cool control scheme you don’t see very often (kb+m but in a 2D run n gun).

I was obsessed with this game called Alien Legacy that was in essence a 4X but was really a hugely ambitious hybrid game. You had to manage the personalities of your advisors, build stations and colonies SimCity style, manually fly your ships around to discover stuff on planet surfaces… No idea how it would hold up today.

If you’re gonna play King’s Quest, forget playing King’s Quest and play Quest for Glory instead.

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As for adventures, a lot of the horror themed ones were pretty dumb, but I thought Shivers was legit scary.

Rama is beautiful and utterly mysterious and intriguing, but also impenetrable. Apparently at some point you have to decipher a non-base 10 number system?!? Might be worth FAQing through.

gabriel knight 2

quest for glory iv

conquest of the longbow

Quest for Glory III

but you’ll need the manuals for some of these. there’s remakes for all the earlier king’s quests except 4 that bring them up to 5 & 6’s visuals and controls.

None of these screenshots are the right aspect ratio. okay, fine, sierra games don’t look too distorted like that and it fills out a 16:10 monitor nicely. but youtube is even worse, nearly every lp of an old game they just go with the horrible blurry filters gog turns on by default for some reason.

being able to have really nice crt filters in retroarch has ruined looking at old games on the internet for me forever.

LucasArts games you would just want to run in ScummVM not dosbox. and Ultima VII has exult.

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started playing this last night. needs a fucking manual, lol

a lot of old pc games need manuals

i loved


and

it’s like a French Zelda, kind of.

i didn’t so much love

but it’s entertainingly strange and looks cool

there’s a sequel

which looks better, but i haven’t played it

Oh weird i just realized these games came out in the same years as each other (LBA1/Ecstatica in '94, LBA2/Ecstatica II in '97). They’re linked in my mind probably for playing in a broadly similar way with a vaguely similar aesthetic.

This thread is making me think about all the DOS games I cherish so dearly, and discovering I lack anything like proper critical distance for most of them. Most of my impressions are mint condition straight from 1996.

That said, I really like the later (and even the earlier, though I don’t know them as well and they’re not as pretty) Commander Keen games (4, 5, and 6). I played 4 a lot. I’ve become terrible at playing it, but I think it’s an exemplary specimen of the secret-dense, open design of DOS platformers. And the 16-color EGA palette is really beautifully exploited for these games.

I’m really a fan of the CGA-colored “Fluid Animation Software Technology” single-screen platformers Apogee put out in the first few years of the nineties (Pharaoh’s Tomb, Monuments of Mars, Arctic Adventure), though I maybe shouldn’t recommend them to people with no nostalgia attachment?

A significant portion of my teenage imagination revolved around Return to Zork, a game I fell in love with when I was 11, and I think is hated by most? It’s the only adventure game I’ve bothered to play all the way through more than twice.

I never played that much of God of Thunder for some reason (maybe because it was hard), but it’s a super-actiony Zelda-ish thing made very much the way you would think a DOS developer might make an action Zelda thing.

I loved Jill of the Jungle. Jill of the Jungle may not be all that great. The sound effects are baffling, which had a certain mystique to me at the time.

You may have already heard all the things about ZZT. That was how I actually spent my teens. It’s a whole scene unto itself.

I have never encountered an RTS that gave me more of what I wanted out of an RTS than Command & Conquer: Red Alert. I also have not played Red Alert in over fifteen years.

Lemmings is probably better on an Amiga, but the DOS version is what I know. But everyone knows about Lemmings. But I also love Lemmings more than basically any game.

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I had fuzzy vague childhood memories of playing Helious off of a “250 FREE GAMES” shareware CD that had another greyscale-only no-sound game that made our emachines PC crash.

Keen for sure. He’s up there in the sprawling-level-design-with-secret-areas department.

There were several Dizzy games but I don’t know if they all made it to DOS.

Dangerous Dave is early John Romero, there were three or four other episodes. Also on archive.org. Crystal Caves has sequels too.

And the King himself:

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I don’t know how many of these levels are actually good but out of 666 of them there’s bound to be more than a few.

edit-This runs really slowly. Maybe that’s how it was back in the day! I’d recommend downloading the zip and trying to get it running in a source port if you’re curious.