old PC games seem like they're being forgotten

[skykiii]

I just thought I'd point this out because like.... even here, 99% of video game discourse is console games, and if its anything from the 1980s or 1990s, I've never seen classic PC games brought up except in two circumstances:

A) I'm the one who brought them up.

B) They're entries in a still-running franchise.

So I thought.... we needed a space to talk about these forgotten classics. A sort of... home of the underdogs, if you will.

So what are your favorite classic PC games? DOS, Windows 3.1/95/98 (including SE)..... you know what? let's include stuff like the Amiga, Apple II, and Commodore 64 as well.

And especially what's a game you like that nobody ever talks about anymore?

Here's a few of my picks behind the spoiler:

Spoiler

The Dizzy series - This is one I only discovered recently (and admittedly, thanks to the NES ports). The "main" series is interesting as they're basically kinda like Metroidvanias (coming out before either Metroid or Castlevania) but with an emphasis on inventory puzzles where you have to figure out the correct place to use items to advance. There is some obnoxious design though, like dying in one hit and needing to do the entire game over if you run out of lives. These elements seem to run counter to the more intellectual focus of the games, and if these games got modern remakes I would do away with the more actiony elements. Nevertheless, I do understand why these were big in Britain for awhile.

The Journeyman Project - The version I have is actually called "Journeyman Project Turbo" and is apparently a re-coded version to run better (the docs included claim the original release was badly coded). This is a first-person point and click with an interesting premise: a government agency invents the world's first time machine, and for the first time in history the govt DOESN'T fuck up but instead says "wait, shit, we might wanna keep tabs on this" and also realizes if they did it, so could someone else, so they set up a sort of history-monitoring agency... which apparently almost never sees action. Naturally, you play an agent on the day where something finally happens... which happens to also be on the eve of mankind making first contact with aliens. Coincidence?

Unfortunately, the Turbo version does not run on modern hardware because it requires 16-bit compatible windows (and no, its not emulated by ScummVM--I checked). There is a remake, Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime, which is an acceptable alternative but honestly I feel like the original is more atmospheric and the storyline makes more sense in the original version.

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness - My resident "part of a still-going franchise" entry. Honestly as far as I care, Warcraft should have probably ended with this game, as the war was basically over. I never played Warcraft III.

I don't even like RTS games, but I love this one. Part of it is the simplicity and part of it is the simple charm. The atmosphere can be best described as "if Tolkien wrote for saturday morning cartoons." It's bright, colorful, and orcs make cute noises. It's very pick-up-and-play though there are minor nuances only an experienced player will pick up on.... still, it never gets overwhelming the way I feel Starcraft sometimes does.

I should note I actually prefer to play the Battle.net edition, as there are minor QoL improvements, but the original release is fine too.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I was never too into PC gaming, but Outlaws, Beast Wars, and that 3D Pinball Space Cadet game stand out. I was terrible at them but they were still fun anyway.

I played more Flash games and emulation than anything else on PC.

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

I was never too into PC gaming, but Outlaws, Beast Wars, and that 3D Pinball Space Cadet game stand out. I was terrible at them but they were still fun anyway.

I played more Flash games and emulation than anything else on PC.

Emulation also covers older PC stuff. What is DosBox but a PC emulator.

 

[skykiii]

Emulation also covers older PC stuff. What is DosBox but a PC emulator.

I think SSJ_Ness is just saying he didn't get to play a lot of the classics.

But yeah, as it happens my only experience with the Commodore 64 is via emulation. I can't imagine how much of a pain those things must've been to use in real life, with five minute load times and all.

On that note, this may touch on why classic PC games get overlooked--I remember having a DOS computer as a kid and it was obtuse as all hell, with endless resource management conflicts, which I recall still happening in the Windows 95/98 days. And while we have Dosbox for DOS games, to my knowledge there is no convenient solution for running the majority of Windows 3.1/95/98 (and hell, sometimes even XP) games. I have a Linux laptop I'd love to run games on but if its not supported by ScummVM, Dosbox, or WINE then you're basically shit outta luck.

That's before the issue that Linux works in autistic ways anyway.

 

[Fag Albert]

when i was a little albling i loved might and magic world of xeen and ultima 3 even though it was pretty old by that time. I kinda miss ultima in general but im glad that EA hasnt really done anything with it and the originals are pretty easy to find now

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

I think SSJ_Ness is just saying he didn't get to play a lot of the classics.

But yeah, as it happens my only experience with the Commodore 64 is via emulation. I can't imagine how much of a pain those things must've been to use in real life, with five minute load times and all.

On that note, this may touch on why classic PC games get overlooked--I remember having a DOS computer as a kid and it was obtuse as all hell, with endless resource management conflicts, which I recall still happening in the Windows 95/98 days. And while we have Dosbox for DOS games, to my knowledge there is no convenient solution for running the majority of Windows 3.1/95/98 (and hell, sometimes even XP) games. I have a Linux laptop I'd love to run games on but if its not supported by ScummVM, Dosbox, or WINE then you're basically shit outta luck.

That's before the issue that Linux works in autistic ways anyway.

Don't forget that some old PC games have obtuse control schemes. A lot of times you have to read a Manuel to understand what you are doing. God help you if you want to get into old vehicle simulator games. Which is not as much of a problem for Console games with the controllers having less buttons, you don't have much room to fuck up the controls.

 

[The Ugly One]

Classic PC games get overlooked because not that many people played them. Quake 1 was, at the time, one of the biggest PC games ever, selling 1 million units. Around the same time, Goldeneye on the N64 sold 8 million units. Lots of well-regarded PC games from the olden days sold under 200K units, some even under 50K. There were a couple basic problems. One was that computers were expensive. You think a gaming PC is expensive now? Our 286 cost well over $5000 in today's dollars. Not only that, but frankly, PC games looked like shit compared to console games until the 1990s. Commander Keen did not look as good as Super Mario Bros 3 or Sonic the Hedgehog. If you had a computer, and your friend had a Nintendo, or even better, a Sega Genesis, your friend probably played cooler games than you did. It really wasn't until every computer had a Pentium CPU and VGA graphics that PCs were, in general, holding their own, and the price of a good PC had come down to 2x-3x what a Playstation or N64 cost, rather than than 10x-20x what an Atari or NES cost.

Anyway, I played a lot of Commander Keen back in the olden days. Jazz Jackrabbit, too.

 

[libRT]

There is some obnoxious design though, like dying in one hit and needing to do the entire game over if you run out of live

I know it seems like a cunt of a mechanic, but it would make games last for months, rather then the few hours they do now, and the perpetual cycle of buying the same game just reskinned for 3 hours at a time

 

[Dan of Steel]

I don't think older PC games will ever be "forgotten" or lost to time, mainly because of how the PC platform works. Any game that has at least 1 autistic fan dedicated enough to port it to modern systems will always live on. Abuse, one of my favorites from the 90s is like that, just one guy has been making sure it's playable on contemporary computers. PC games have and always will be niche, but that's what I like about them. I like console games too, but PC games have more of a focus on mechanics which is what I ultimately enjoy the most in vidya. Plus there's always GOG and Steam if you want to throw three bucks at the publisher for some reason.

 

[Londo]

I grew up with PC games in the 90s but trying to replay them in 2023 is pretty shit. There is a lot of awkwardness in older PC games when they reach the 3D era. They're pretty god awful to look at and even worse to play directly. The amount of issues with older games playing on modern processors feels like pulling teeth. Nintendo, Atari and Sega were better for platforming and games overall and I feel like this is where a lot of the nostalgia for older games goes.

DOS games just aren't that fun compared to games that came out on consoles around the same time.

A lot of PC games from the 90s just aren't that good. There are examples like DOOM and RTS games that still hold up but for every game that can be enjoyed today there are 100 that in retrospect weren't actually that fun beyond the novelty of using new technology or gaming for the first time.

Flash Games from the early 2000s have it even worse. They were normally pretty fun but so many have been lost over the years that trying to retrieve them is impossible now unless someone finds a copy (which is becoming harder to find due to the deteriation of digital storage).

 

[Anon88]

A lot of those older PC games seem to involve you using your brain and actually having to think to beat them. Something that it seems like most people who like games these days don't want to do. Look at the difference between Fallout 1 to Fallout 4, 4 is way simpler. One of the best games from this time period is Riven and that's a puzzle game which doesn't hold your hand at all. They're just way too hardcore for most people to want to touch them.

 

[Stasi]

and your friend had a Nintendo, or even better, a Sega Genesis

Based and 100% true.

Anyway, I quite liked the first two Broken Sword games. There is some bullshit in there puzzle wise but nowhere near the level of some of the worst offenders in the genre. I think they might have been ported to the Playstation but really PC is the only good way to play a point and click game.

 

[cybertoaster]

That's because gaming on PC was ass until the very late 90's and early 2000's when standardization meant you could actually get the fucking games to run for once. And even back then a high-end PC was like $3000 in 1999 dollars, which is like what $7000 now? all to run games at Dreamcast-levels which was $199 at the time or I guess over $400 now, only difference is that you could do XGA-resolution instead of VGA, big deal...

Like @The Ugly One says those were the console years, right now its like the early 80's (I guess, wasn't even alive back then) when you were better off with a microcomputer if you wanted to game, that is until the NES and SMS showed up.

 

[whatever I feel like]

I was never too into PC gaming, but Outlaws, Beast Wars, and that 3D Pinball Space Cadet game stand out. I was terrible at them but they were still fun anyway.

I played more Flash games and emulation than anything else on PC.

You probably don't care enough to track it down but Space Cadet was actually just the one free board to a 3 board title, Full Tilt! Pinball (by Maxis.) There's two more boards out there for you to try if you want, five if you include the three released in the sequel. And all in double the resolution, too!

 

[Uncle Sid]

Original TIE Fighter was good. Descent was decent. Otherwise, most early PC games are pretty forgettable.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

The thing I like about old PC games, is that they genuinely tried to be something different.

Console games were "crash bandicoot clone" or "nintendo game clone".

 

[The Ugly One]

Until the 1990s, the vast majority of PC games used these 16 colors, or a 4-color subset of them:


The NES could display 25 of these colors:


The Genesis could display 64 of these colors:


Early 256-color VGA games all used the standard palette, which still didn't look as good as any Genesis or Super Nintendo game. Once PC devs started customizing palettes (first time I saw this was Doom), that's when PC games really started looking good. But that was the mid-90s already, and by then, we're really only talking parity with the Playstation.

 

[Shroom King]

Anytime I find an excuse to plug the game Darklands, I do so. This is the only game that I can think of where you can throw sulfuric acid in the faces of degenerates and get rewarded for it.

Play this game, thanks in advance!

 

[Michael Wade]

I miss early 2000's PC shooters. Are there any good sites for easily playing those with minimal effort?

 

[skykiii]

If you had a computer, and your friend had a Nintendo, or even better, a Sega Genesis, your friend probably played cooler games than you did.

Me and my best IRL friend somehow had all three and yet the consoles did not stop us from playing things like Hugo's House of Horrors, Jill of the Jungle, or Realms of Chaos (or, yes, Commander Keen).

Heck, later in the 1990s I remember a period where we did a sort of exchange where I beat Space Quest 1 (the VGA remake) while he played my copy of Mario 64.

For us, games were games, we didn't really think of them as "better" or "worse." We just wanted to play what we could get our hands on. My friend wound up exposed to cool stuff first a lot of the time (I remember in particular he got Alone in the Dark before I did).

(And no, we weren't particularly rich families--it was mostly our dads had connections or were allowed to bring home computers that their employers were about to throw out or something like that. I think my friend's dad really was a tech geek though, as I recall having to play a lot of games without sound).