Descent II should at least have an honourable mention
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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No Sierra adventure games? Those were awesome in the mid-late 80s. Also no Lucas Arts adventure games. Mean the list isn't awful but none of those really were a staple game type for awhile. You could get your money's worth with some stupid puzzle or figuring out the exact text to type ah fond memories.
Arstechnica had a writeup a few weeks ago about classic Sierra games. I loved them at the time but they don't hold up. There's like 20 minutes of actual game spread with slow walking and impossible puzzles where you were encouraged to call pay per minute game tip phone numbers.
Learned how to cd into C:\Program Files\Games when I was 5 just to run doom.exe on the family computer. Duke Nukem 2D, Commander Keen, Wacky Wheels, Blakestone, and many others too.
Wacky Wheels! Thank you, I had long since forgotten the name, but not the game.
I just checked, I have a copy of it!!!! One day I'll set up a DOSbox. I thought Star Control 2 might be the game that persuaded me, but it might be this garbage kart racer.
I used to play tons on Doom over serial cable with one of my friends, and when we went around looking for other games we could set up Wacky Wheels was one of them. I don't remember how we found it, or even that it was very good, but it was a lot of fun.
DOSbox is pretty easy to run btw--you don't need any special hardware or a dedicated environment like a virtual machine or anything. Just mount the C: drive by pointing it to your games folder and you're good to go.
I'm just lazy. All my nonsense is virtual now. I found a DOSbox docker image last updated 4 years ago. Also all my dos games are .7z currently. Setting it up is as simple as a docker compose and extracting the games I wanna play, but I have to fire up my virtual laptop and... I'm just lazy
There's always !TipOfMyJoystick@retrolemmy.com if you need to find the title of a game you vaguely remember.
Micro Machines and Raptor: Call of the Shadows deserve a mention as well.
I liked Raptor, but I LOVED Tyrian
My preferred scrolling shooter was SWIV, which I had for my Amiga. I doubt that a lot of people know that one though, and it isn't DOS. Never heard of Tyrian.
Tyrian is freeware and open source!
https://www.gog.com/en/game/tyrian_2000
https://github.com/opentyrian/opentyrian/blob/master/README
https://github.com/opentyrian/opentyrian/releases
also the DESTRUCT cheat code is a very fun mini game
Blake Stone was my jam.
No love for Commander Keen? Aside from Doom, that was my most played.
Got a weird DOS shell "OS" at Walmart for $5, favorite shell of all time. Made icons with the built-in editor of all the Keen beasts!
The green guys with the eyestalk? Iconic.
Obviously missing The 7th Guest, strangely missing Monkey Island
Why both Wolf3d and Doom?
TIE Fighter and X-Wing. Pretty sure they were DOS... Gotta send some love to Roger Wilco, too.
Apogee ftw
Syndicate (better on PC than Amiga)
X-Com gang rise up
Crusader No Remorse and No Regret were top tier DOS games.