It was pretty basic looking, even for an early DOS game. You were a pink square that needed to be controlled around the floorplans of various government buildings. Behind you was a fuse that had a flame following it after a few seconds of starting the level. The idea was simple: you needed to set fire to the entire floor, destroying virtually everything in the floor while you legged it down the stairs to the next floor. To help you further the conflagration, there were petrol cans lying around that could be picked up and spilt to help the fire spread to the corners of the floor.It wasn’t one to show your mother, and I vaguely recall there being some Mary Whitehouse-like backlash from the idea that you’re setting fire to government buildings. Still, an ace game.
Another DOS game that caused something of a stir from various focus groups, churches, parents against things corrupting their young and pretty much everyone on the planet with a moral consciousness. That didn’t stop a lot of us from buying the disk from computer fairs though.Basically the immoral storyline has you as a small-time drug dealer, in debt up to your eyeballs with a loan shark. The only way you can pay him back is to buy drugs from one location, and sell them for more in another location.Yeah, not very moral.
Wasn’t there some kind of FBI raid at the time that seized all the master disks? Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy. I bought myself a see-through Gravis Joystick, and the game that came with it was the shareware title Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy.Commander Keen: Goodbye Galaxy was the third game in the Commander Keen series, and one of the more popular. The first episode has you rescuing eight sages, who will help you stop the Shikadi from destroying the galaxy.It may not stand up to modern gaming in terms of the graphics, but it was an ace little addictive game that you couldn’t stop playing; it’s even available on Steam. Interestingly, the shareware title was available from the BBS of Leeds Trinity and All Saints University, just as the next one was 47.
“He who controls the Spice, controls the universe.” Dune for DOS was a great adventure strategy game that followed the novel quite closely.You played as Paul Atreides, managing mining the Spice production, the Fremen, and bringing the fight to the Harkonnen to drive them off Dune.It was a stunning game, with the later CD version having stills and clips from the film as well as speech. The floppy disk version though was just as captivating, but those Spice demands were tough. An excellent game, even by today’s standards. I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream. Quite a disturbing adventure game this, as you play as one of five tortured characters trying to outwit the hateful Allied Mastercomputer, or AM as he likes to call himself.Can you remember the opening?
It's About how much he hates humanity, how if every nanoangstrom of the 387 miles of circuitry was engraved with the word Hate, that wouldn’t equal one one-billionth of the hate AM feels towards us. So it's quite chipper.Anyway, AM takes the character you choose into their past and throws them into their darkest fears. With the voice of Harlan Ellison as AM (who also wrote the short story based on the game), there are some real tense and odd moments. Anyone recall playing as Gorrister and talking to Edna while she was strung up on a meat hook with slaughtered pig carcases? Little Big Adventure. Adeline Software International’s Little Big Adventure was a 3D isometric adventure game that featured some of the best graphics of the time, and a compelling storyline.You played as Twinsen, one of several inhabitants of the planet Twinsun that is under the ruthless rule of Dr FunFrock and his clones.
You have to travel over the planet, and eventually stop the evil doc’s plans to drill into the core of the planet. You could choose from four behaviour modes: Normal, Sporty, Aggressive and Discreet, with the latter having you tip-toe around to sneaky music.Little Big Adventure was a fantastic game; the CD version had animated cut-scenes, speech and more music. There’s even an Android version available these days! Epic Pinball. Epic MegaGames’ Epic Pinball was one of the first DOS games I played. The shareware version, the first couple of tables, came free on the front of a magazine.The Android table was incredible, I recall spending hours playing that – two player with friends – to see how much of a score we could rack up. Amazingly, the entire game was programmed in assembly, but the music, sound effects and speed of the ball were simply incredible. If you can get it running, it's still lost none of its hours-sapping power.
Okay, here’s a game that I, er, think virtually everyone reading this has played: Gorillas.BAS.Gorillas.BAS was a part of DOS 5, and written entirely in QBasic. It’s the old artillery game, where you set the gravity of the world, and throw a banana at the other player calculating the angle and velocity. The two gorillas sit on top of a city skyline, while the bananas are hurled from the opposite player. Each banana explodes when it lands, and makes the smiley sun’s mouth go into an O-shape should one go through it.Gorillas.BAS was a great game, and exposure to the code helped form the future of many a developer. Toying around with the code and making the explosions nuclear kept us busy for hours.
You can find a modern version of the source code. Rise Of The Triad. Apogee had a lot to answer for back in its shareware days. Commander Keen, Wolfenstien, Duke Nukem were all much loved DOS games. But one of its oddest releases is the one I’ll mention here: Rise Of The Triad.Rise Of The Triad was ludicrous, gory and exceptionally fast paced.
The modified Wolfenstein development engine was pushed to its limits here, and when you got several players involved, all running around and blindly wiping out everything in their path, it did get a little heavy on the old system resources.Apparently there were supposed to be more enemies in the game, but technical limitations stopped a lot of them appearing. However, the CD version did have the female enemies' voices on it, as well as the artwork. Also, dual pistols! Happy memories. Mindscape’s D/Generation was a fantastic 3D isometric adventure puzzler, where you had to figure out how to evade the security system on each floor of a building while rescuing the trapped employees.I can’t recall the exact story, but it had something to do with a bioweapons lab and you flew in on a jetpack to deliver a package to the lead scientist.
I do remember how you needed to hit switches, collect keys and avoid the tubes in the floor that fired at you. And there were also bouncing balls that turned invisible when they found you.You could collect a laser gun as well, that bounced off the walls when fired allowing you to hit door controls and such like, and grenades too. A great game that kept you hooked for many hours. Battle Chess. Long before Harry Potter’s deadly game of chess in the bowels of Hogwarts, we had Battle Chess.
This is by far one of my most played games in this list; it kept me hooked when the dizzying effects of Rise Of The Triad had lost their shine, and I couldn’t handle another game of pinball.Battle Chess was, as you can assume, a 3D version of chess. But here instead of just taking the other player’s piece, you got to watch a cool little animation as the pieces got into a fight and took each other down.The fight animations differed depending on the piece; the knights cut off arms and legs, like in Monty Python, the Queen did a little hip shake and fried a piece with her magic, and the Rook turned into a rock monster and smashed the opposition. Albion is easily one of best DOS games of the mid-90s.
Enjoying the flight simulation genre with the likes of Falcon on the ST was a fantastic experience, but these modern fighters lack the intense dogfights of World War I games. This was where Red Baron stepped up to the mark.This was a startlingly impressive game, for the time. There were loads of flight options, missions, and just about everything you could list in a flight sim menu at the start of the game. Once you’d got through it all though, and were behind the stick of an ancient flying machine, things certainly heated up.Amazingly, it was one of the few games that actually made you feel every bullet that tore through the canvas and balsa wood frame of your aircraft. And should you progress far enough, and depending on the side you chose at the start of the game, you’d either end up fighting with or against the Red Baron himself. A bit like fighting alongside Vader in Tie Fighter.
Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. To many of you reading this, and me included, Star Control 2 was one of the most played DOS games we had in our library.It was an immense arcade adventure, where you travelled throughout the galaxy in a quest to help free Earth from the evil Ur-Quan. To do this though you needed to gain the trust of the other alien species scattered among the stars and add them to your growing fleet, and gain enough resources to keep your ancient alien technology starship up and running.Combat was handled through a blisteringly fast melee system, where you pitted your fleet of ships against the enemy, with each having its own unique mode of flight, defensive and weapon systems.Who here remembers waiting around the Circini system for the portal to Quasi-Space and access to the Arilou to open? Or spending a worrying amount of time hanging around Betelgeuse in an attempt to win over the Syreen?
Star Control 2 is a Den of Geek article in itself, and although now open source, it’s still one of the best DOS/PC games ever. UFO: Enemy Unknown. Although a turn-based strategy game didn’t sound all that appealing while the likes of DOOM, X-Wing and other such notable games were available, UFO: Enemy Unknown actually turned out to be one the best DOS games of the time. Modern follow-ups have brought attention back to it, but don't let this original pass you by.It was an extraordinarily well crafted game with an intense, nail-biting board on which to play.
Locating a UFO, bringing it down and micro-managing the intercept crew and their weapon loadouts were just the beginning. Once you landed and stepped foot on the terrain where the UFO crashed though, that’s when things tensed up.The turn-based element worked exceedingly well. Rather than going in guns blazing, you had to pick your way through the area, hunting down the aliens and UFO itself while looking for cover and trying to stick together. Then when you suddenly catch movement at the edge of the screen, you scream.
It’s in there! Get it!”.All the while though you had to keep a watchful eye on the world politics, looking for governments that may have made secret pacts with the aliens, and juggling your own resources and cash flow. It holds together today too, and is awaiting you on Steam if you have a few coins spare. Alone In The Dark. For a lot of gamers, Alone In The Dark was the beginning of the survival horror genre. Others would argue that survival horror goes back as far as 3D Monster Maze, however, Alone In The Dark was the first of the magnificently graphical modern representations.Based on the feverish mind of H.
Lovecraft, Alone In The Dark's polygon characters soon became the template for the genre, trapping you as either Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood in the haunted mansion of Derceto.In a tale of grisly murders, curses, lunacy, devil worshipping, evil power, and a host of other supernatural shenanigans, you had a wealth of puzzles that need sorting out before you could escape. Death lurked around every corner, and one false step would mean you having to repeat your steps.A fabulous, atmospheric and often scary game, with hints of old E.A.P. And plenty of content from the Necronomicon.
Splendid stuff, this. Wing Commander. DOS was no stranger to 3D space combat simulators, and while there were some incredible titles to be had, not many gamers seem to recall the original Wing Commander too much these days.Like some cheesy 80s sci-fi film, the intro credits roll to heroic music, space dogfights, and passing asteroids. Then it’s to the bar on-board the TCS Tiger’s Claw for a spot of chitchat with the crew, including Paladin’s magnificent mustachios.With girly pin-ups in the barracks, blue hair, scenes of the crew running to their ships, and such names as Blue Devil Squadron and the Killer Bees, Wing Commander was a hit from the word go. It was a breakthrough game, utilising the current PC hardware to the max. Playing now, it’s amazing how difficult the game actually is.
Hard Drivin’. Hard Drivin’ was one of the titles I really wanted to mention for the, but in all honesty it was the DOS version I ended up playing after tackling it at the arcades.Fair enough, despite the advanced power of a PC Hard Drivin’ didn’t quite have the same look and feel on the desktop as it did in the arcades. Still, it was quite an achievement in 3D graphics and technology for the time.A few questions: did anyone ever obey the speed limits?
Did anyone ever make that first right-hand bend to the stunt track without going off-road? And can you remember what happened when you hit a cow? Hugo’s House Of Horrors. This is a strange little shareware game I recall picking up at a trade fair once in the early 90s. In terms of graphics, animation, music and well just about everything else, it was pretty dire-looking. However, there was something about it that kept me playing.The fact that I refused to be beaten by it was one element, and that I paid nearly a fiver for it was the other. It must have taken me days to realise that picking up the pumpkin and smashing it revealed the key, and working out which button for the green skinned, purple underpants, colour-blind Igor to press was a test of patience at its best.An odd, but also rather good Sierra-like adventure at the same time.
Magic Carpet. Bullfrog Productions brought us Populous and Syndicate, both of which were immensely popular. However, Magic Carpet seems to have been largely forgotten these days, which is a shame as it was one of the best 3D landscape games around.The game was spread over 50 levels, each individually named with the player whizzing around the world on a magic carpet, as the title suggests. You collected Manna, which allowed you to cast spells in defence or attack against enemy wizards. All you needed to do was store enough Manna in your castle to restore an equilibrium to the world. Easier said than done though.Interestingly, some versions came with the old 3D red/blue glasses in the box for the game’s Stereogram mode, and it was also compatible with the VR headsets available at the time.
Redneck Rampage. One of the oddest games I collected over the years has to be Redneck Rampage.
This first person shooter wasn’t the most politically correct of games to ever grace the PC, nor was it all that good to be honest, but it was fun in a strange kind of way.You play as Leonard and Cletus, two deep south brothers whose prize pig has been stolen (pignapped? Feel free to use your own prime minister joke here) by invading aliens. Using a modified Duke Nukem 3D engine, you have to shoot everything that moves to get the swine back.Featuring an immense amount of bad language and redneck stereotyping, there was something oddly appealing about throwing a stick of dynamite at a shotgun wielding Billy Ray while drunk on ‘cheap-ass’ whiskey across all fifteen levels.Any game that finishes with “You’ve withstood the awesome force of Assface, impressive.” needs a mention. NovaLogic, of Delta Force fame (which was an amazing game) first toyed around with its Voxel Space engine technology in Comanche, or Comanche: Maximum Overkill as it was also known.For those who can’t recall Comanche, it was a helicopter combat simulator, and a very good one too.
You could zip through valleys, over seas and mountains and drop down on the enemy to deliver death and destruction from an ultra-modern attack chopper.It looks quite dated now, but if you put a set of headphones on and say 'Roger that' a lot, it feels quite realistic. Realms Of Chaos. Realms Of Chaos was one of the last Apogee titles to make it to the desktop, but it was one that’s certainly worth playing again.The shareware version only had the first of three episodes available, and as far as I was aware it was pretty difficult to get hold of from the game shops in the UK (I purchased it via a 3D Realms BBS).On the face of it Realms was a pretty bland looking 2D scroller, but it was hugely entertaining and it allowed you to swap between the Conan-like character to a Wonder Woman-like character with the Space Bar for different combat abilities.
The best part though was the ability to save at any point in the game for a restart after dinner. Silent Service 2. This is one I picked up as part of a compilation MicroProse pack from a charity shop in the mid to late 90s.
Having played a few older submarine combat sims in the past, on various platforms, the extra power a decent PC offered was something I was looking forward to, and Silent Service 2 didn’t disappoint.After much choosing of your sub, and the area of war you’re planning on taking to the might of the Japanese Navy, Silent Service 2 was a long drawn out game of tactics, and choosing your future operations based on intel from CINCPAC. Finally though, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to face off against the Battleship Yamato. Not many lived to survive that bit, though. Master Of Orion.
Dos Shareware Games
Master Of Orion, the game that invented the 4X strategy term. An immense turn based game that basically took over your life once you started to play it. I’d probably be lynched if I didn’t mention it in a list of DOS games.Despite its popularity though, it’s barely mentioned today. In my opinion, it’s the sort of game everyone should have played at least once in their lives. It's hard to compare too much to the moment where discovering Orion and the Guardian results in a complete loss of all your ships.
Jones In The Fast Lane
Where colonisation, military, research, planning and combat all come together in such a way as to feel like your brain is melting out of your ears.According to myth, the copy protection scheme used was so good (or bad) that the original game couldn’t even load up at times. Anyone have this issue?