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!
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!
I will cheat a little but pretty I love whole Commander Keen series of games
Basing it on time played, probably Doom II.
100% this
rock on!
- 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.
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
Dangerous Dave. I think it was the first ever DOS game that I got to play. I like good platformers.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Jazz Jackrabbit.
One of my favourite DOS games was One Must Fall 2097. It’s a fighting game with giant robots piloted by humans (similar to Pacific Rim). I really appreciated the diversity in design and move set for the different robots, and it had a killer main theme.
I loved the theme so much. The composer of the theme was surprised by the popularity and did an update/remake of it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvlVaQl7kEk
This is really neat! I always enjoy seeing VGM composers interact with the community like this.
Absolutely my favourite. Met the dev team when they were working on the ill-fated sequel. The forums were a great community. There’s an OpenOMF remake in progress (same game but better connectivity options and compatibility). It’s being reverse engineered IIRC.
The best part was Tournament Mode where you could train your pilot for Power, Agility and Endurance stats and upgrade your 'bot’s arm / leg power / speed, armour etc. Great stuff.
Holy crap, I had erased One Must Fall from my memory until I clicked that video link. I remember waking up super early to play that on the weekends when the house was quite.
Not to seem basics but basically any of the SCUMM games
I only ever played Full Throttle, but damn I loved the music in that game!
Most people named a lot of the games I would have, so I’m gonna give a shout out to probably the first proper video game I ever played: Mixed Up Mother Goose. Can still remember slowly walking around, trying to figure out what the shit was going on lol.
Lol this screenshot brought back so many memories of playing this game as a little kid!
Oh my God I LOVED this game! Probably was what hooked me on a lifelong videogame addiction.
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, but I’ll give Wolfenstein 3D an honorable mention.
That just brought back memories of building massive turret walls in Dune 2 and just laughing as the computer tried sending a small group of units and getting absolutely demolished.
Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars. I got it from a demo disc or floppy in a book from the library.
Lots of good shouts here, but I’ll add one that I haven’t seen: The original Master of Orion. 4X, but in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE
Hell yeah. Moo2 is my favorite though. And the new one was pretty dang good.
A lot of great games have already been mentioned but one of my favorite early gaming experiences was Kaptajn Kaper, a Danish game released in the 80s. You’re a pirate captain sailing around Denmark after the battle of Copenhagen in 1807 looking for English ships to plunder. Most people around my age with an interest in computers remember it fondly and apparently, the source code was donated to the Royal Library for preservation as a part of Danish cultural heritage, which is pretty cool.
