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Favorite DOS classics


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There seems to be a little lack of DOS stuff here. What are some of your favorite old-skool DOS games? I know I grew up with Lode Runner, Falcon, and Arctic Fox among others. These were all available on other platforms, but they were what were available to a Montana kid around 1989. I also liked text adventures, such as the stellar Enchanted Castle and (what I didn't even know at the time was) an excellent but incomplete shareware RPG called Dungeons of Kairn.

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Back in the 90s I downloaded a bunch of games from the Download Super Store on the Prodigy service.

 

One of those games was called Nucleon which I found here although this version is for Windows the one I had was for DOS.

 

Here's another game called Finagle which you can play in your web browser here.

 

There was a third game but that title escapes me.

 

I still have the floppies with these games.

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Might And Magic III was the first DOS game I loved. Also Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3D, and of course Dune 2. There were many many many great DOS games in the early 1990s, it's hard to pick just a few.

 

Yeah I had Wolf 3D as well. My brother showed me how to enable God mode which was cool so I could complete the game.

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Definitely Commander Keen initially, and eventually Jazz Jackrabbit...

 

Full Throttle is still one of my favorite DOS games.. Heck, it's one of my favorite games on any system. ;-)

 

desiv

I LOVED Full Throttle too. I also liked Outlaws very much. Interstate '76 was pretty awesome too.

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Definitely Commander Keen initially, and eventually Jazz Jackrabbit...

 

Full Throttle is still one of my favorite DOS games.. Heck, it's one of my favorite games on any system. ;-)

 

desiv

Full Throttle (Which I ironically just got about a week and a half ago) also introduced me to Gone Jackals. I've always had a spot for DOS games... there's just, well, something about 'em. I played more Windows 95 PC stuff but DOS stuff I might have sifted through quite a bit as a kid.

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I have fond memories of ZZT and the like. They were simple games but the imagination put in some levels was fun.

 

Another early game I played a lot was Alley Cat, I found out much later there were better versions on other machines.

 

Also played quite a bit of Moody, it's a Spanish platform/puzzle game which was quite unique. But it is rather hard.

Edited by Newsdee
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Oh man, so many. In the mid-'90s I loved Dark Forces, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Doom/II, Descent, Duke 3D, Wolf 3D, Operation: Bodycount (a Wolf 3D clone with UN special forces and terrorists...and flamethrowers!), Raptor, the Hugo games, and pretty much any Apogee game I could get my hands on. I had a ton of those "1000 Games" type CDs, too. The Epic Megagames ones were the best.


Going further back, I loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles even though it was RIDICULOUSLY difficult. Turns out it was also glitchy and broken and even if I had managed to get to level 3, it wouldn't have mattered anyway since you literally can't get past it without cheating (I didn't know there were cheats then).

Side story: my best friend had this old disk of BASICA games (which as best as I can tell must have been some kind of custom Friendlyware thing, as it had a Friendlyware-looking menu and some of the games--like Battleship--but also some that weren't on Friendlyware) that we played a ton of when his mom brought home a couple of old computers from work when they were upgrading equipment in the mid-'90s. ASCII graphics and everything. In particular there was a Pac-Man game that we played the absolute shit out of. Since losing the disk in the late '90s, I've found exactly zero information on the game until, by some amazing cosmic coincidence, a lot of old PC stuff I bought off a friend last year contained a disk that had the game on it. I'd seen some games that were *like* it, but different, but this was it beyond a doubt. Reunited after 20 years. :)

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Side story: my best friend had this old disk of BASICA games (which as best as I can tell must have been some kind of custom Friendlyware thing, as it had a Friendlyware-looking menu and some of the games--like Battleship--but also some that weren't on Friendlyware) that we played a ton of when his mom brought home a couple of old computers from work when they were upgrading equipment in the mid-'90s. ASCII graphics and everything. In particular there was a Pac-Man game that we played the absolute shit out of. Since losing the disk in the late '90s, I've found exactly zero information on the game until, by some amazing cosmic coincidence, a lot of old PC stuff I bought off a friend last year contained a disk that had the game on it. I'd seen some games that were *like* it, but different, but this was it beyond a doubt. Reunited after 20 years. :)

 

So what was it?

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So what was it?

Looking at the code--which is very well-laid out, btw, with big REM headers summarizing what the following chunk of code does--it's actually called PC-Man, no relation to the machine-code Orion Software game ("PC MAN" is also printed on the game screen, on the ghost house). No indication of who the author is, though.

 

You can choose from 1-4 ghosts (it runs REALLY slow with 4) and it even has a high score board, stored in a separate file IIRC.

 

A really interesting thing about the game that I didn't remember BITD is that ghosts don't return to "normal" after you eat them until the power pill wears off, they only return to the ghost house. So if you can get a power pill, take out one or two of the ghosts (actually card suits :P), and make it back to the ghost house before the pill wears off, you can camp out by the opening and keep spamming them as they come out. :-D

 

That usually results in your own death since it's hard to tell when they're going to change back; I guess the key is to learn the timing of the power pill not get too greedy. Even as a suicide mission, you can quickly rack up scores that would otherwise be pretty insane, or would require clearing the screen six or seven times. :)

 

It's probably not the kind of game you'd go to unless your only other interaction with computers was limited to WordStar or something, but it's a nice piece of nostalgia for me (which is something I'm not normally susceptible to), and for what it is--a Pac-Man game written in BASIC--it's not bad at all.

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