DOS games

[wourme]

Klass of 99 was a game I tried repeatedly to play but I could never quite grasp what I was supposed to be doing. I guess it was a remake of an old game called Skool Daze.

Tetripz was intriguing to me. In it, you choose a drug and the game simulates what it would supposedly be like to play Tetris under the influence of that drug.

Wheel of Fortune was one that I never really played at home but somehow ended up playing periodically while visiting other people.

Chopper Commando was one of several games I had that actually required me to run a little utility to slow down my computer.

[a_new_duck]

Okay, not a game per se, but out of all the time I spent with the shareware I got from my relatives between 1992 and 1995, I spent almost as much time with Storymaker+ as I did anything else.

Storymaker+ : Elson Embry : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

It allowed you to make animations (sprites, basically) and backgrounds. It allowed you to write music. And then you could bring all these elements into “books,” which were screens on which you would place backgrounds and sprite-based objects. You could assign the objects to move and animate when clicked or when prompted. A terrible-sounding speech synthesizer would read what you told it to, or read the books. Clicking on words in the story could also trigger events.

It wasn’t non-linear like Hypercard, but I built a lot of things in it. It was a remarkable creative outlet, and my first digital creative outlet. It was fun to hide things and give it a hint of interactivity. The 16-color EGA palette was a bit crude, but I enjoyed working with the systems. I learned how to work with pixels in Storymaker. My favorite series of creations involved creating boilerplate karate characters (I’d change their hair and skin color and so on), and then draw little animations of them fighting. They’d progress through tournaments.

I looked into its origins a little while ago, and it looks like it was created in the early 90s as a tool for Christian education.

This was my inferior Mario Paint and I adored it. I’ve never heard anyone but myself and my cousins talk about it. It meant a whole lot to me. And I wonder if it had anything like this kind of impact on anyone else.

[a_new_duck]

Oh, and Squarez! From the maker of Jetpack!

Squarez Deluxe : Adept Software : Free Download & Streaming : Internet...

It’s like a chaotic, free-movement Tetris with an eXXXtreme number of power ups. The game is tremendously charming in its attitude (signaled in that radical “Z” in the title), and is a lot of fun to play. It has always (and still now does–I just spent half an hour with it) felt a little bit broken and too random and wacky to be elegant. But fuck elegance. This is SQUAREZ.

Probably the best way to play it is in multiplayer mode, especially since certain items expand your field and shrink your opponent’s, but I never played this with anyone.

[azurelore]

There’s always http://www.aderack.com/game-maker/

[Tulpa]

This game kinda stuck in my memory, I played it a lot from one of those 100+ games shareware discs.

[dongle]

There’s an early- to mid-90s shareware game I’ve been trying to find. It was a game like checkers, except each piece was a ball of clay, and when you captured a piece, the capturing piece would add the captured piece’s clay to its own size. Does anyone remember this? I think it was slightly popular because I remember seeing it as like a $10 floppy game near the checkout lines at Best Buy.

[Victor]

[Iacus]

@wourme

Tetripz was intriguing to me. In it, you choose a drug and the game simulates what it would supposeduly be like to play Tetris under the influence of that drug.

The playtesting/design sessions for this must have been pretty interesting

[username]

Speaking of Tetris knock-offs, I do recall spending some time with either BlockOut or a knock-off of it. It didn’t really recapture the magic of the original, but the knock-off in particular was such an odd almost first person Tetris variant that I kept trying it every so often.

[The_Blueberry_Hill]

Blockout! When we first got a computer it was this hand-me-down thing, with–maybe–a custom DOS menu to launch things from, a Herc. monitor and Blockout and Moraff’s Blast. I played those two a lot.

I also spent a lot of time copying cheat codes out of magazines and putting them into a big wordprocessor file.

[SONNICK]

[quote=“meauxdal, post:31, topic:4996, full:true”]

@SONNICK

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

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

hmmm I’d say it’s more a rose-tinted glasses kind of thing?
When I got access to the internet™, after a short while, I started digging around to find a community for NASCAR1/Indycar Racing 2. Lo and behold, there were some people as crazy as me around then, and suddenly a whole new world was waiting to be explored, a world full of trucks (iirc, it was called CRAFTSMAN TRUCK SERIES back then. From a quick google-check, it must have been the 1997 to 1999 field that I’ve been modding into NASCAR1.

Then I got interested in the tools that made this whole thing possible, and dipped my toes into a lot of the tools that were necessary to pack/unpack the game assets. Made some Windows (3.11…) front-end tools to make packing/unpacking the game assets a lot easier, and without realizing, “got” the very idea about front-ends and back-ends almost naturally.

And from there on, I did a lot of fiddling around in the game, even creating some 3D model assets, and I remember the fun I had when crashing the game because of some mis-calculations. Fun times!

Needless to say, Indycar 2 got treated to an updated pack of cars, and also a High-Res pack that made my PC refuse to start the game, it was a bit _too_ advanced for my trusted DS4-S. Also quite cool, driving some NASCAR1 tracks ported to Indycar2 by community. That was _so cool_ ;__; Hell, I even modded the _intro-bgm_ to some other track. And would re-shuffle the field so that the battles going on in the intro would feel more "natural" in the context of 2000'ish CART era, i.e. Ganassi battling with Penske and Team Green, and not w/ Dale Coyne.

So, with all the modding and tinkering and fiddling over a year (at least), I did actually also manage to do some driving! Joystick only though … and moved away from NASCAR to Indycar2 after a while. In hindsight it is easy to see that due to exposure to F1 since 1994ish, I understood the rules of racing in CART better than NASCAR (pack) racing, and thus ended up playing way more of indy2 than NASCAR1, and the joystick as input meant that I was never able to do close combat side-by-side racing for long, which is a requirement in NASCAR.
Anyway, I started out at Dale Coyne and fought my way up the ladder to mid-field teams after two seasons that were a lot of DNFs … and later on even managed to get a few Oval wins on Talladega and Michigan, so after all, I learned how to trim out a car to survive a few stops.

Ah well, I had a lot of time, youth wasted on the young~~~

… but I’d do it again.

tl;dr: never knows best
~fin~

[jjsimpso]

@Felix

also worth pointing out that x86 was not a popular home computer architecture, and thus very unusual to encounter outside of an office setting (the 68k was overwhelmingly more dominant for 16-bit consumer electronics, including the Mac, Amiga, Megadrive, etc.), until the 486/Pentium era. prior to then if you were making a DOS game you were mostly making it for people who bought computers that let them take their work home.

I get what you’re saying here, but you may be overstating things a bit. At least in the US, where the Atari ST and Amiga didn’t really take off. The 8 bit micros dominated in the early to mid-80s, but by the late 80s I expect the number of x86 machines doing double duty as business and home computers dwarfed the rival 16 and 32 bit platforms. Plus, there were popular and affordable PC clones like the Tandy 1000 series that were marketed as home PCs. I bet there were a lot more commercial games released for the Tandy 1000 series than the Macintosh. I don’t have hard numbers, but there’s a reason that by the late 80s just about every 8 bit game released had a PC port.

Of course PC gaming didn’t really take off until the soundblaster and VGA graphics became standard. The first soundblaster was released in 1989 and VGA debuted in 1987. It took a few years for them to become standard, so the heyday of DOS gaming is exactly as you described, between '90 and '97.

But the only chip ever to outperform the x86 as a home computer in the US is the 6502. (EDIT: and probably the Z80 as well in the early 80s)

[a_new_duck]

Since we’re talking about hardware now, but on a technical and historical level I don’t quite understand, I’m just going to mention my terrible and awesome portable monochrome 286 DOS machine I bought around 1997 for $40, depiste the fact I had a perfectly fine 486 desktop at home.

http://www.oldcomputers.net/compaqiii.html

I bought it primarily for playing games. I played a lot of Monuments of Mars on this in glorious variable tone orange monochrome. Allegedly the purpose was so I could write and work on my QBASIC/ZZT programming.

I tested it out when I visited my mom’s place a couple years ago and was very sad to see it won’t turn on anymore.

This motherfurcker sold for $5,000 in 1987.

[Felix]

Ok, so if anything I might be overestimating the popularity of the 68k platforms vs. early PC compatibles (though I’m still surprised the 6502 and Z80 are competitive sales wise with x86 over thirty years those are certainly the only three that are close to being in that class)

[jjsimpso]

Just to clarify, on the 6502 and Z80 I was just referring to the fact that they probably outsold the x86 in the early and mid 80s in the home market(and I expect the the 6502 did so by a wide margin). Once again, I don’t have any real research to back this up.

My main point is that the PC and MS-DOS was significant as a computer gaming platform as early as the late 80s. I agree that the 486 is when it really blossomed as a platform, but I wouldn’t discount the earlier models.

DOS, by the way, has the best RPGs. It has ports of most of the great 8 bit computer RPGs and basically all the really significant computer RPGs up to Fallout and Daggerfall. The list of great --or at least interesting – DOS RPGs is huge, probably larger than the list of all the notable console RPGs of the era combined.

[creep]

“at least interesting” gives you maybe just enough room to be right

[jjsimpso]

Since I wanted to create a list of good DOS games anyway, I’ll start with what I consider some of the legitimately great DOS RPGS:

Wizardry I-VII (perhaps excluding IV, but that one is certainly interesting!)
Ultima IV-VII
Might and Magic I-V
The Bard’s Tale I-II (II is arguable I guess)
Dragon Wars
Wasteland
Fallout
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
Dungeon Master and Dungeon Master 2: Skullkeep
Daggerfall
Ultima Underworld
Eye of the Beholder I and II
Dungeon Hack
Stonekeep
The Dark Heart of Uukrul
Betrayal at Krondor
Darklands
I’d say only about 3 or 4 of the SSI gold box games are great but some people love them all.
I haven’t played any of them but the Quest for Glory series is supposed to be good.

My interesting list would probably be double the length.

Obviously your tastes can differ, but I’d rather play any of those over most console RPGs. Were there really that many great console RPGs released in the DOS era of '85-'97? A lot of the good PS1 RPGs were after 1997, I believe.

As you can see, I prefer dungeon crawlers to narrative driven games, so that biases me strongly toward computer RPGs. So I’m not saying you are wrong. I just love DOS RPGs!

[Felix]

SC2 is an RPG

Ultima IV NES is kind of great, they JRPGed it

but to answer your question, no, there’s not really much comparable on consoles over that period; obviously there are no DOS games that do what secret of mana or chrono trigger did nearly as well, but neither of those stacks up when judged as an RPG

[meauxdal]

@jjsimpso

Were there really that many great console RPGs released in the DOS era of '85-'97

uh this would include almost every great console rpg there is though? i mean, tastes are a thing but this doesn’t seem a fruitful direciton imo

that aside please continue to collate additional lists of interesting games for DOS, this is great!

[a_new_duck]

Growing up, my cousin had the demo for Creepers, published by Psygnosis, which is a little bit like Lemmings mixed up with the Incredible Machine, but with maddeningly difficult fussiness. I was long obsessed with the idea this game was good, but when I finally downloaded the full version years ago I realized I didn’t have the patience for it any longer, or it’s not very good.