old PC games seem like they're being forgotten

[Pissmaster]

You know, back when I used to collect games, I never really got into collecting anything for PC.

• There's no standard for packaging, so you can't have them all lined up on a shelf all neat and tidy - jewel cases get dwarfed by big boxes
• Very few of them can be pulled off the shelf and started up within a minute, unlike cartridges
• Most need installs, which means you have to go to the trouble of uninstalling them when you're done
• Even their medium of distribution is all over the place, and floppies are notorious for going bad
  • I wouldn't be surprised if at least 95% of the world's remaining 8" and 5 1/4" floppies are now dead
• Many old 32 bit computers aren't iconic or interesting in the least
  • Most aren't even all-in-one systems, and modern accessories tend to trump older ones overall (e.g. optical mice vs. ball)
    • 20th century laptops tend to be very underpowered
• So many old games are best enjoyed with a very particular video or sound card
• Because of hardware issues, a lot of old games are best enjoyed on a modern machine, pirated and/or repacked, running through DOSBox or PCEm, which tends to support a whole bunch of old video & sound cards, unifying the whole platform

I like the NES and I think it's a fascinating console. When I read all about how emulators for it work, I didn't realize the crazy amount of edge cases that needed to be covered over time. All sorts of random games out there use unique hardware layouts in their cartridge. Some games use unique chips. Some use illegal opcodes. Some games use special controllers. A full NES emulator needs to preemptively account for all of these edge cases. If you wanted to make your own, you'd only be able to play a fraction of the library before you start going into emulating individual cartridges. If you made a full-fledged NES emulator and minimally touched the cartridge side, only supporting the most basic of games, here's the compatibility list you'd end up with. It becomes an insane task that's never really complete, as long as Chinese Famiclones keep being made.

Now, trying to apply every edge case from every single PC game, as in, THE ENTIRETY OF x86, it becomes a practically impossible task. But, a whole lot of older games are forever preserved and playable on modern computers, so I guess we're pretty much at a stage where we can call it all good enough. The smattering of random 8-bit 8088 games I've tried in DOSBox have worked flawlessly, so I guess I'm happy.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Alley Cat was a really good game, it's impressive for being from 1984 with the cat animation being fun and the levels/stages being distinct enough.

For the second time I will plug Internet Archive and their integrated Dosbox emulator that lets you play them right in the browser, it even stores save games locally on your computer!

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

Gather all your co-worker around a computer and play Jones in the Fast Lane!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Jones_in_the_Fast_Lane_Enhanced_CD-ROM_1992

 

[skykiii]

Early text mode games don't get nearly as much love as they deserve.

Probably spent hunders of hours playing Kingdom of Kroz on an old 8088.

Written by Scott Miller and was one of Apogee's very first titles.

Not even just text mode games either...

For awhile I was a fan of text adventures, I actually own both the Lost Treasures of Infocom sets (meaning the only Infocom game I don't have is Leather Goddesses of Phobos).

The genre combines the best aspects of playing a game with the best aspects of reading a novel. You really couldn't do anything like them and have it have the same effect because no amount of graphics will ever be as good as what your imagination conjures up.

Granted that can be a problem too, since when I was younger I had a problem of not knowing what words meant. It got me into a habit of keeping a dictionary and a set of encyclopedias around (its mostly digital ones these days... in my younger years I lived with my grandparents and they had a 1970s set of Encyclopedia Britannica).

Though to be fair, Infocom's games really were the highest quality. I had trouble getting into things like Scott Adams or the Colossal Cave Adventure because of their relatively sparse descriptions that I feel don't tell me enough, along with their more limited parser interfaces where you have to type two-word commands. Infocom being descriptive and also letting you type like an actual human being does a lot to make them more accessible.

Don't take my word for it though, head over to Archive.org -- bonus, the original Zork trilogy (which has been freeware for awhile) are also some of the few Infocom games that don't require external feelies to solve a puzzle.

@Pissmaster Honestly I feel you, and these days I basically don't collect games--I only set out to get physical copies if they're a game I really want to play, and only care for boxes/completeness if either A) its a game that requires the manual for whatever reason or B) its a game I really really love/have an attachment to.

 

[Deckard Bane]

I grew up on the Sierra adventure games - my dad was big into them and naturally I played pretty much everything we had sitting on the shelf. Big one was Quest for Glory, I still find that entire series to be fun even now. King's Quest I never really got into - we had 5 and 6 and I've played 6 a ton and while I remember playing 5 with my dad when I tried revisiting it as an adult I hated the absurd logic and instant game overs. Police Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry were all solid choices too. I think they fell off when they got into the FMV/3D era though. Dragonfire wasn't as remarkable as QFG 1-4, LSL7 I couldn't get into, Police Quest turned into the SWAT series which didn't find it's calling until 3, and King's/Space Quest also had very lackluster games. When it wasn't Sierra it was stuff like Under a Killing Moon, Lands of Lore, Legends of Valour, etc.

GOG originally only focused on the classics and I was buying a ton of them up on release. Not just adventure games, but the late 90s stuff like Shogo, Dungeon Keeper 2, etc. Unfortunately they kinda stopped bothering with a lot of their fixes for games and Night Dive are really the only ones doing it but very, very slowly. Shogo used to work flawlessly when it was first released. Now it needs a lot of user tweaking to get stuff like music working and even then I can only launch it 50% of the time.

Still, a lot of the classics are still fun with a crazy amount of depth to them. I still load of Covert Action to get a mystery solving fix while having some action thrown into it. I've also gotten a kick out of playing through a lot of stuff with General MIDI soundtracks now that I have a Sound Canvas module. I always used to see it on game installers back in the day and they still work on modern PCs as long as you have a USB MIDI Cable or interface to send the signal out.

 

[Fatboi Gus]

I still fondly remember being 8 years old and trying to figure out the 53 steps required to beat Hexen's 1st level

 

[skykiii]

I still fondly remember being 8 years old and trying to figure out the 53 steps required to beat Hexen's 1st level

"A passage has opened on the Seven Portals!"

ME: "The fuck is the Seven Portals?"

(I eventually realized it was that central hub area, but the fact remains the game presented that name as if it expected me to recognize it even though at no point does the game actually tell you area names).

King's Quest I never really got into - we had 5 and 6 and I've played 6 a ton and while I remember playing 5 with my dad when I tried revisiting it as an adult I hated the absurd logic and instant game overs.

I remember one piece of extreme bullshit, where Graham suddenly declares he's hungry, and if you don't eat, you die. At that point you only have a pie and a leg of ham.

At this point anyone would expect that once you use an item, its gone--that's how games usually work--so I eat the cake because I know I need to feed the meat to an animal soon. But then I get attacked by a yeti and it turns out, I'm supposed to throw a pie at it.... the fuck?

..... Turns out, if you eat the meat Graham will actually not eat ALL of it, so you have some to feed to the animal later.

That... is bullshit.

.......

That said, I was a Sierra fan for a long time. Space Quest IV holds a special place in my heart because it was one of the first Point n' Clicks I beat without the help of a walkthru. Before then, I always got stuck and needed outside help.... some of this was due to me being young and not always making logical connections. I remember Return to Zork was this way: I figured out where I needed to go up to a point, but then would get stuck.

These days, I always try my best to solve these games without help. You always feel smart when you do.... or like you're going crazy. I recall this one puzzle on a game called Timelapse that, when I realized the solution, figured "no, that's too crazy..." only for me to realize yeah, I actually had hit upon the developer's intended solution.

.......................

On another note, and getting back to PC Collecting... one of the joys of buying PC games, especially boxed ones, is sometimes the seller includes unadvertised extras. For some reason my copy of the afformentioned Timelapse included the Prima strategy guide for example. Another game I bought for some reason included a pre-release copy of Windows 95 (this wasn't even a Windows 95 game, incidentally). Probably my favorite "unintended extra" is when games include other games that weren't mentioned in the listing or advertised anywhere on the box.

 

[Deckard Bane]

At this point anyone would expect that once you use an item, its gone--that's how games usually work--so I eat the cake because I know I need to feed the meat to an animal soon. But then I get attacked by a yeti and it turns out, I'm supposed to throw a pie at it.... the fuck?

Yep, that's exactly the logic that made me hate playing through it again. Also, don't forget the mouse with the shoe! Forget to throw the old shoe at the cat and you won't be able to get a key item - and the scene is so quick and seems so innocuous you'd think it's just part of the background stuff with a cat chasing a mouse. Another game that did that was Leisure Suit Larry 2 - specifically the lifeboat scene. If you don't throw the dip out the side of the boat it goes rotten and you die. That's the thing I hated about the logic for some of those games - they demanded the player know through trial and error not to do certain things, but there's little to no reason that the character should know to do it. LSL gets a little bit of a pass for being satirical but there's no excuse for KQ.

On another note, and getting back to PC Collecting... one of the joys of buying PC games, especially boxed ones, is sometimes the seller includes unadvertised extras. For some reason my copy of the afformentioned Timelapse included the Prima strategy guide for example. Another game I bought for some reason included a pre-release copy of Windows 95 (this wasn't even a Windows 95 game, incidentally). Probably my favorite "unintended extra" is when games include other games that weren't mentioned in the listing or advertised anywhere on the box.

One thing I miss was the in-universe type stuff you'd get. with Sin you got a diary that gave a load of backstory on Blade, built on the world so you had a sense of it before you even played it, and had some cool additional concept art or bonuses tucked in. Even some of the copy protection back in the day worked, like the LSL3 and PQ1 newspapers. Mechwarrior 4 had a load of lore and hand written notes in the tech manual included. Then there were the installers that would give you tons of additional info - Red Alert 2, Mechwarrior, and Soldier of Fortune come to mind. Those install screens and backstory are long gone with modern rigs being able to install from ISOs in seconds compared to the 5-10 minute installs we had back in the day.

 

[Overwritten Tapes]

Original crimson skies, rocket jockey, viper racing

 

[skykiii]

That's the thing I hated about the logic for some of those games - they demanded the player know through trial and error not to do certain things, but there's little to no reason that the character should know to do i

Actually, this reminds me of one of my biggest gaming disappointments.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to play Dark Seed, a point n' click adventure horror game with H.R. Giger artwork.

As an adult I finally get the game, and....

Well.... it has EXACTLY the problem you just named: nothing you do in the game makes sense from an in-character perspective. Instead what you're actually meant to do is experiment until you find the perfect sequence of things to do over the three in-game days. And, again, a lot of these only make sense from the perspective of the player. So the game is more a puzzle to be solved, rather than a coherent story.

Which would be fine in some games, but this one opens and presents itself as if its gonna be narrative-focused.

I've been told the sequel is better, but I wouldn't know.

.........

As for Leisure Suit Larry 2, a part that stands out to me is how you actually have to die at a point (waiting too long on the cruise ship, so that the fat woman comes in and squishes you) and its the DEATH SCREEN that tells you "you realize your objective is to get off this ship!"

I otherwise actually liked LSL1 and 2. One thing I find a bit funny about that series (besides the whole "Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies" thing) is how the earlier games feel like they have a more realistic style, but starting around the time of the LSL1 remake they switch to a more cartooney exaggerated style... which I'll admit I didn't like at first, but it grew on me.

... On that note, in general I usually prefer the originals over the remakes. Pretty much the only exception is Space Quest 1, where I prefer the remake... and part of me thinks that's only because its the only case where I played the remake first. Quest for Glory 1 though, the original is objectively better.... especially aesthetically. There's a beauty to it that the remake just does not do justice. Especially Erana's Peace.

 

[Deckard Bane]

I've been told the sequel is better, but I wouldn't know.

It's not. Dark Seed was kind of annoying gameplay wise but the story had me intrigued and while the writing wasn't the best it was still good enough to keep me entertained. Dark Seed 2 is terrible on almost all fronts. The art style is this weird mix of shitty 3d rendered backgrounds (non Giger) that aren't always to scale with real actors digitized into the game. Mike Dawson becomes this extremely annoying and whining manchild who doesn't remind me at all of his character in the first game. The puzzles are even worse and some have absolutely no purpose other than wasting your time (the clown's medicine). The ending is generic 90s edge and disappointing. The only purpose to play it is if you're a hardcore Giger fan and want to see how they incorporated his work, which is the only reason I really played these.

As for the VGA remakes with Sierra I never played the original Quest for Glory but QFG1 VGA is still amazing. I'm not sure the fighting would be better though, QFG2 is my least favorite only because the combat is so awkward compared to the others. Though 4 I just throw on automatic because I didn't care for the fighting game style. Police Quest 1 VGA is an improvement over the EGA version but it's still really cheesy.

 

[The Ugly One]

even though at no point does the game actually tell you area names

Map names are on the lower left of the map screen. Easy to miss, but they're there. By the way, it's been 20 years since I played it.

 

[macrodegenerate]

Back in the day during my childhood there used to be a bunch of learning games for children on the PC. I remember those quite fondly specifically Treasure Mountain and Math Blasters. I guess not as cool as ultima.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

I've been an avid gaming sperg ever since I was old enough to figure out basic DOS commands. my parents were PC gamers themselves, we were lucky enough to have a family computer with reasonably good hardware and a huge collection of games my parents regularly added to until they got too old to keep up. we had the id classics of course - going all the way back to Catacomb 3D - as well as the full back catalogues from Apogee (which later became 3D Realms) and Epic MegaGames (yes, that Epic, they made great games long before they became The Fortnite Company). old PC gaming was a special kind of space, devs back then were often adventurous and trying to create never-before-seen levels of immersion and/or technological feats, as well as trying to copy improve upon popular console games. listing all of my favorites would turn this post into a ten page spergfest, so in the spirit of the thread, I'll stick to the ones I feel are more obscure or less-remembered:

Spoiler

Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold - built on the Wolf 3D engine but massively expands on it. the setting is a bizarre combination of something like James Bond and a 70s sci-fi epic. you play as a futuristic secret agent sent to assassinate the mad scientist Dr. Goldfire, but you have to wade through his legion of soldiers and assorted bio-horrors to do it. has a source port that works for both the main game and its sequel, Planet Strike.

Mystic Towers - the farty, geriatric wizard Baron Baldric has come home to his wizard towers to find them full of a bunch of asshole monsters. this is an isometric action/adventure game, with some puzzle and platforming elements, corny humor, and bastard difficulty.

Monster Bash - another game with bastard difficulty, starring the somehow untraumatized Johnny Dash, a spunky kid on a quest to get his dog back from off-brand Dracula, armed only with a slingshot and sociopathic immunity to seeing severed heads and corpses and shit. a remaster was recently released.

Strife - Doom clone with an RPG twist. rather than having a progressive level structure as was typical of the time, the game takes place in a more contiguous RPG-style world with town areas and dungeons that branch off of it, along with NPCs with dialogue trees and side quests and whatnot. other than that, it plays sort of like a sci-fi Heretic. Nightdive released a remaster a while ago.

Descent - the original 6DOF shooter. plays similar to Doom but you're piloting a small fighter ship in zero-G. has an extremely good spiritual successor called Overload.

Terminal Velocity - another futuristic sci-fi shooter, but this one is more of a dogfighting-style game. the soundtrack still slaps. a remaster was recently released.

One Must Fall 2097 - a Street Fighter clone, but with robots. looks cheesy as hell but I had a blast with it. the soundtrack is one of the era's best: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Sacrifice - a real-time strategy game with a twist: it's also a third-person RPG. you play as a summoner, a powerful character that can cast all manner of spells, but mainly, you can harvest souls and use them to spawn friendly units that do your bidding.

Evolva - a third-person action RPG where you manage a squad of customizable bio-horrors. you can harvest enemies for DNA, which allows you to adapt their unique abilities or appendages and use them to mutate your squad members.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto - another Interplay classic, this game features three different playable factions with radically different gameplay: the Meccs, a squad of goony alien space marines; the sea reaper, a bow-and-magic-wielding naga; and Kabuto himself, an honest-to-god kaiju. had a great multiplayer mode where all three factions fight each other.

Messiah - a cheeky game where you play as a tiny cherub named Bob who is sent by God to single-handedly save Earth from its degenerate cyberfuture. Bob is very weak on his own and all enemies freak out and attack him on sight because he's a fuckin winged baby. however, Bob can possess any enemy in the game, giving you total control of them. this allows you to disguise yourself, or interact with the world in ways that Bob himself can't, i.e. if you need to pass a biometric security checkpoint, or kill somebody. you have to be clever about it though, because enemies will figure you out if they see you possess somebody, or you do something the unit you're controlling isn't supposed to.

Heroes of Might & Magic - HOMM3 was the GOAT. Ubisoft massacred my boy.

Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Tyrian, Stargunner - the landmark DOS shmups. Raptor has a remaster but it's shit, just play the original in dosbox. Tyrian 2000 is an old remaster that still runs great on modern systems, and it's the best price - free. Stargunner is freeware too.

SimAnt - made back when Maxis was popping off with all kinds of weird sim games, SimAnt has you managing all aspects of a virtual ant colony, from digging the anthill, to finding food and leaving pheromone trails for the other workers, to fighting competing ant colonies and murdering their queen, to managing birth ratios for workers/soldiers/breeders to optimize your colony's performance. has a campaign where you colonize somebody's back yard one square at a time, with the ultimate goal of invading the house and driving the humans out.

there are so many more but I need to stop. maybe I'll post more later.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

One thing I miss was the in-universe type stuff you'd get. with Sin you got a diary that gave a load of backstory on Blade, built on the world so you had a sense of it before you even played it, and had some cool additional concept art or bonuses tucked in. Even some of the copy protection back in the day worked, like the LSL3 and PQ1 newspapers. Mechwarrior 4 had a load of lore and hand written notes in the tech manual included. Then there were the installers that would give you tons of additional info - Red Alert 2, Mechwarrior, and Soldier of Fortune come to mind. Those install screens and backstory are long gone with modern rigs being able to install from ISOs in seconds compared to the 5-10 minute installs we had back in the day.

the old Blizzard games were big on this. the original Diablo has little in-game story beyond a few spoken lore snippets (by Paul Eiding of all people - better known as Colonel Campbell from Metal Gear Solid), but the manual has pages and pages of world building on the history of the region, the different factions like the Horadrim and Vizjerei, as well as backstories for all the player characters, complete with ridiculous, Heavy Metal style illustrations by Chris Metzen. Warcraft 2's manual also has histories on the different clans, kingdoms, races, and regions. another one of my favorite examples of this was American McGee's Alice, which included a booklet purported to be the diary of the doctor observing her in the asylum.

 

[skykiii]

Back in the day during my childhood there used to be a bunch of learning games for children on the PC. I remember those quite fondly specifically Treasure Mountain and Math Blasters. I guess not as cool as ultima.

To give them credit, they were probably most kids' first exposure to dying of dysentery.

there are so many more but I need to stop. maybe I'll post more later.

Please do!

I don't know if this says more about me or what, but most games you listed are ones I either owned or at least heard of somewhere.

Descent was another case of me getting an unexpected bonus. I had just bought a cheap copy off Amazon Marketplace, expecting it would be just the CD in jewel case... turned out to be a fully boxed "Anniversary Editon" that included a fuckton of level packs.

I need to get Descent II though. I have Descent 3, so I'm only missing the middle of the trilogy. One thing though... I've seen Descent II clips and weirdly, I find the "escaping the exploding mine" clips way cooler in the original game. The 2nd game's version is an example of trying to ramp it up but in doing so kinda losing what made it work.

Also thanks for reminding me that I need to get Strife. What sucks is all the digital storefronts only have the remaster version, and I'd rather have something I can play on an actual old rig.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

Also thanks for reminding me that I need to get Strife. What sucks is all the digital storefronts only have the remaster version, and I'd rather have something I can play on an actual old rig.

idk if this is true for the GOG version, but the Steam version at least comes with the original DOS files and a preconfigured DOSBOX install:



alternatively you can get strife1.wad and voices.wad from here and run it in gzdoom. gzd will run well even on extremely dire hardware, especially if you use the OpenGL ES renderer (it's in the display options). my shitty work computer runs off an A6-7400K APU - a budget-tier laptop chip that was middling when it was released 10 years ago - and it runs the old unmodded WADs at a stable 60 FPS. yes I play Doom on my work computer, don't @ me.

btw if you go the gzdoom route, get ZDoom Loader too, it'll make your life easier. proper setup for Strife will look like this:

 

[skykiii]

alternatively you can get strife1.wad and voices.wad from here and run it in gzdoom. gzd will run well even on extremely dire hardware,

I actually have a version of zDoom (not sure if its GZ or not) set up on a 500mhz Windows 98SE desktop... specifically for the sake of that new Doom II episode that's only in some versions and can't be made to work with the original DOS executable.

Which is just kinda amazing, running an expansion made in the late 2000s on hardware that old. Someone apparently also got Doom 3 to work on systems that have Voodoo Graphics cards.

 

[whogoesthere]

Games were just things you played, maybe talked to your friends about. But as a kid, you might only get 3 or 4 games a year so you just sort of accepted what you got. Swaps with mates was still shit, because every fucking got Mario 3.

Only ones that spring to mind for me are stuff like Moonstone on C64, or some shit Bruce Lee game I played on the old tape atari.

Amiga Workbench was a fucking legend though. The first time you got workbench, I think they took that feeling and just made The Matrix, you feel like such a hacker lord.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I like the NES and I think it's a fascinating console. When I read all about how emulators for it work, I didn't realize the crazy amount of edge cases that needed to be covered over time. All sorts of random games out there use unique hardware layouts in their cartridge. Some games use unique chips. Some use illegal opcodes. Some games use special controllers. A full NES emulator needs to preemptively account for all of these edge cases. If you wanted to make your own, you'd only be able to play a fraction of the library before you start going into emulating individual cartridges. If you made a full-fledged NES emulator and minimally touched the cartridge side, only supporting the most basic of games, here's the compatibility list you'd end up with. It becomes an insane task that's never really complete, as long as Chinese Famiclones keep being made.

That sounds like you're describing "NES-on-a-chip" technology, which was a customized chip created in the 1990s and basically hidden under a blob of epoxy, and used in cheap "Famiclones" well into the 2000s. It was cheap to produce but compatibility was terrible and basically had what that list showed, if it came out after 1985, it had issues, with games running incorrectly (bad colors, sound, etc.) or not at all.

But that's hardware. The software side of NES was running fairly smoothly from the start after the .nes format was created (the games had two ROM chips, not one) and I don't think any licensed NES games had special equipment in them beyond batteries (for saving). It didn't hurt that the NES' chip was also well-documented. Super NES was another issue, where a lot of the games did have special chips. I remember when Snes9x would play something like Super Metroid perfectly fine but choke on Star Fox.

The way computers worked was harder because there were dozens of manufacturers with specific configurations, and an OS that needed to run on top of the hardware.

The funny thing about DOS and Mac games when it came to the mid-1990s was that DOS games had all sorts of configurations and all that, while Mac games just worked, yet nowadays its almost always easier to get the DOS version up and running than to screw around with Mac emulation.

 

[skykiii]

and I don't think any licensed NES games had special equipment in them beyond batteries (for saving).

I've heard that most did--something called a memory mapper I think? Which apparently basically every mid-to-late-era NES game used because it was necessary for things like multidirectional scrolling.

When it comes to NES emulation, I remember for a long time Startropics would not run in emulators, or would be a glitchy mess if it did. I never learned why though.

The funny thing about DOS and Mac games when it came to the mid-1990s was that DOS games had all sorts of configurations and all that, while Mac games just worked, yet nowadays its almost always easier to get the DOS version up and running than to screw around with Mac emulation.

Same basically goes for Windows. At the time one of the appeals of Windows 95/98 games was that you just installed them and that was it. Nowadays you need to jump through a million hoops.

On my Linux laptop, its basically impossible to make Windows games run most of the time (though I have found ways for a few of them). DOS games? Just fire off Dosbox and have at it.

....................

So recently I was reminded of another nostalgic PC gaming aspect....

Magazines.

.... Actually, should discussing classic gaming magazines be its own topic? I just know recently I looked at some 1997 PC Gamer magazines and they got me teary-eyed, but thinking back on it, the same happened when I looked at some early-90s Nintendo Power magazines too. Which probably tells you a bit about where I was as a gamer during those years.