DOS Gaming when PC gaming was truely Unique

[Ack]

Solar Winds

Hell yes, I love Solar Winds! "You are so ugly," remains the greatest statement anyone can randomly tell a hostile alien race ever.

[Gunstar Green]

DOS remains one of my favorite nostalgic platforms for gaming. Many of my formative experiences as a gamer happened in DOS in the early 90's.

[ExedExes]

I'm shocked there's even talk of Star Goose, let alone Skyroads here, right now!

SG was one of those "reset and retry" games for me back in the day. Skyroads offered a neat perspective.

One thing that bugged me about Solar Winds - that one objective you get early on to go a very long distance to investigate something. Even the objective read "when you have time". I always wondered if it was something good (or bad).

[Gunstar Green]

I played SkyRoads to death. Very simple and addictive, always leaving you with that "one more try" feeling.

I thought it would make a great tablet game and sure enough there are loads of Android clones. None are quite as good as the original though.

[Ack]

One thing that bugged me about Solar Winds - that one objective you get early on to go a very long distance to investigate something. Even the objective read "when you have time". I always wondered if it was something good (or bad).

It was the ugly alien's home world and their seat of power. You could engage in diplomacy with them or piss them off...which was a bad idea, as they had a massive battleship sitting right outside ready to blast you to space dust.

[Exhuminator]

Man I'm trying hard not to totally spaz out here and start dorking out over all the DOS stuff I grew up with. DOS is still my favorite operating system. I used to read DOS manuals for fun, even for versions I never used. And oh man.. man the games. I have fond memories of optimizing custom autoexec files for particular games, just to eke out every last bit of optimization from my system I could, to get a bit better fps or a few more simultaneous audio samples. These are aggravations and victories kids today just have no frame of reference for, for better or worse. Myself and a few other key nerds used to trade diskettes full of BBS pirated games in the library... Rusy n Edie's 4eva! I distinctly remember one friday night when I was in high school doing everything I could to get Privateer to run on my 486 33mhz (it didn't like my soundcard). Finally in the wee hours of the morning, I had that game running like a dream... despite having to get up for my part-time job 3 hours later. Normal dudes my age were probably spending their friday night out trying to get laid and getting high and stuff. But I was high on MS.DOS man. And she was a sweet lay.

[Tanooki]

Sigh this topic makes me wish I had the time to really remember and then dig back into all the games I used to love in the 90s when I had a whole hard drive of old warez thrown on it and backed up on tapes/discs.

Solar Winds was fantastic and I'd love to play that one again even if it probably hadn't aged all that well. It's nice GoG has a sliver of the past up to enjoy, and DOSBox allows even more too. There was just so much done in that era before Win95/98 took off that never really has been repeated, or even if it has, not at the level of quality. A time before FMV got huge, space was a concern, and people did anything and everything they could to squeeze a little more juice out of the low spec PC parts of the day and the little VGA cards and what not. One thing I'd love to dig into again and I have it sitting around is The Ur Quan Masters (aka: Star Control 2) but it is a HUGE game that takes a long time to properly appreciate. I'd also like to make the time to dig through the five release of the wing commander universe I picked up on GoG not that long ago too.

Back in the day though something that really stuck with me was just how damn consistent Apogee, iD, and Epic Megagames were at shoveling out gold pressed bars of awesome to enjoy. I've been considering picking up a few GBC homage carts lately (Duke Nukem modeled after DN2 and Commander Keen) and have got some too (Lemmings/Oh No More Lemmings, Pinball Challenge Deluxe and Pinball Advance both on GBA from the UK.) I hope GoG gets Apogee/Epic Mega Games stuff up in there library some day in full force. I'd go nuts.

I too am surprised how long it took Skyroads to come up. You know another one most probably don't even think of, was my first boxed PC game too, but the unique conversion of the Simpsons Arcade game was tough as nails but damn it was fun.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Man I'm trying hard not to totally spaz out here and start dorking out over all the DOS stuff I grew up with. DOS is still my favorite operating system. I used to read DOS manuals for fun, even for versions I never used. And oh man.. man the games. I have fond memories of optimizing custom autoexec files for particular games, just to eke out every last bit of optimization from my system I could, to get a bit better fps or a few more simultaneous audio samples. These are aggravations and victories kids today just have no frame of reference for, for better or worse. Myself and a few other key nerds used to trade diskettes full of BBS pirated games in the library... Rusy n Edie's 4eva! I distinctly remember one friday night when I was in high school doing everything I could to get Privateer to run on my 486 33mhz (it didn't like my soundcard). Finally in the wee hours of the morning, I had that game running like a dream... despite having to get up for my part-time job 3 hours later. Normal dudes my age were probably spending their friday night out trying to get laid and getting high and stuff. But I was high on MS.DOS man. And she was a sweet lay.

Oh man, I am 100% with you on all of this. My family was one on a budget, yet we would always be on the cutting edge of game releases, so we needed to find every work around possible without having to spend the egregious amounts of money to upgrade. The games are spectacular and filled with an endless amount of creativity. The DOS era of gaming was a primordial concoction that can only be somewhat be comparable to the modern indie movement. Even with that, though, DOS still had a magical charm to it that could never be replicated.

Not only did we have the SSI D&D games, the Lucasarts and Sierra Adventure games, the Star Wars games, the Wing Commander series and Ultima series, you had games like Darklands, Loderunner, Lemmings, One Must Fall 2097, Star Control series, and so much more!

I even loved the garbage DOS games like the Skunny series... especially Skunny Kart, because unlike Mario Kart on the SNES this had AI Battle mode! BOOYAH!

[noiseredux]

I really need to play Skunny Kart.

[ExedExes]

So that was the distant goal? I wish I had the patience to find that out, but now I know.

Normal dudes my age were probably spending their friday night out trying to get laid and getting high and stuff. But I was high on MS.DOS man. And she was a sweet lay.

Well said.

Yeah I remember a local BBS had the second episode of Jill of the Jungle, cracked by the fine folks at RAZOR 1911 remember them? All those pirates and their crazy graphic ID files.

A boot disc was absolutely needed for X-Wing and Tie Fighter.

I also used to get CDs of shareware and demo games at local computer shows. They had hundreds of games with these graphical menus to get around to them, crazy. One of those I remember was some game from South Africa of all places called Dschump.

Now if I can find out how to obtain Zone 66 again, that would be awesome. Overhead shmup by Epic.