What is your favorite ever DOS game?

s804@kbin.social to Gaming@kbin.social – 66 points –

I recently played an amazing DOS game where you have your country and you can declare war or peace with other ones, and i really enjoyed it. Growing up one of my favorite DOS games was Gobliiins 3, such cool memories!

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Prince of Persia. I guess that was also the first DOS game I played...🤔

I remember watching my older sister play it and the first time your mirrored version appears I actually was terrified, so unnerving.

Oh, yes. The original speedrunning game that you needed to complete in less than one hour, or else...

  • Crystal caves, for platformers
  • Loom, for graphic adventures
  • Heretic, for FPS, since Doom has already been mentioned.

Edit: I actually forgot about Commander Keen. That's THE platform game of my childhood.

Commander Keen: Episode 4 was the first game I remember vividly enough and there was always one bit I could never get past or figure out what to do next!

Someone else remembers Crystal Caves! I must’ve played that game dozens of times before I got my first proper gaming console.

That, and Lemmings.

Loom and the other games written for that platform can now be run by the modern Scummvm, if you have the data files.

Gog.com currently has Loom on sale for $2.09. IIRC they have something rigged up to run it on modern systems, though I don't recall if it's Scummvm or some sort of DOS emulation environment.

Tyrian. Vertical shooter with top-notch visuals for the time, a ton of secrets, good replay value and an amazing soundtrack (with a jukebox mode)

This is the one. I've been playing Tyrian2k for decades. Honestly I still haven't found a shmup this good. And all the secrets! I remember looking up all the codes to type into the title screen back in the day. Had a sheet printed out and everything haha. It's freeware nowadays if anyone wants to try it. It's also on GOG for like 5 bucks if that's more your thing. Also check out opentyrian2k. It's essentially an enhanced version ported to modern PCs.

Tyrian was great! And also Tyrian 2000 which I was able to play somewhere. Maybe Gametap or some similar service. I remember trying it out as shareware (I think) and thinking it was Epic Games' best published shooter to date. Still holds up, imo.

I loved the upgrades and the fact that you had a health bar instead of a 1 hit kill. Plus all the stuff you said.

I played Tyrian 2000 a ton as a kid and this was such a fantastic game. It even had a great two player mode which I recall had separate weapons for each ship!

I wish I was old enough at the time to appreciate the data logs you collected because I remember there was fun dialog hidden in some of them.

Typing "DESTROY" into the title screen unlocked like an entire new game with multiplayer and everything.

In fact the multiplayer in that game was great in general. One player on keyboard the other on mouse, and you could dock ships and have one steering while the other shot.

Excellent game, not just for its time

TIE Fighter! It's the reason I really got into gaming, PC gaming specifically. Mario on NES and such were fun, but TIE Fighter was the first game I'd spend all day at school thinking about and then spend all afternoon and all weekend playing. It's on Steam and GOG and has aged really well.

Kudos to Sid Meier's Gettysburg, too.

Your comment totally gave me a flashback. I was always fascinated by the huge ships in the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, and I spent soooo much time daydreaming about those games in elementary school. No internet required, just imagination!

Duke Nukem 3D, absolutely no question whatsoever. The first game I played that had environments that aped real life and had real life levels of interaction detail... Light switches, CCTV cameras, so much incidental detail and environmental transformation. No other game had done that to the same extent before then and I'd argue that no other game has done it since!

My parents refused to spend any sort of money on videogaming so my childhood was spent scrounging for anything I could on my Dad’s 386 PC. Shareware of the first episodes of games was a Godsend, I must have played through the first part of Duke Nukem 50 times.

my favorite thing with duke nukem 3d was to start the game, open cheats and get jetpack, and then play normally, it was so much fun!

Gotta be TIE Fighter. X-Wing was great too, but TIE Fighter scored extra novelty points for letting us play as Imperials.

For me it has to be Quake. I was a bit too late for DOOM, but before then I was playing as a child on the Sega Megadrive (Sega Genesis for my US pals) and going from the Megadrive graphics and gameplay to Quake...

I think that was the first time I was absolutely addicted to a game. Like, I was pretending to delete the game and hiding it using Explorer's hide folder mode so I could secretly sneak some Quake in here and there.

Absolutely love that game.

It's still brilliant! Some people hated it because it was unbalanced, but that's just why it was so great! The way each enemy required a unique dance to defeat without taking damage is sheer perfection.

I'm just sad it never got an actual sequel :(

cosmo's cosmic adventure, hocus pocus, the lost vikings, prince of persia. oh shit i miss those days

Prince of Persia is the first game I remember playing, so I have very fond memories of it. Cosmo as well.

I will cheat a little but pretty I love whole Commander Keen series of games

Without a doubt Jazz Jackrabbit. JJ1&2 still hold up better than the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic games.

I was looking for this answer too. Loved Jazz. Never played anything that fast before.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Still amazing to this day.

i have played it SO many times, one of my favorite games as a kid, i thought it was hilarious! EDIT: never mind i actually meant MI 3 haha

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, but I'll give Wolfenstein 3D an honorable mention.

That just brought back memories of building massive turret walls in Dune 2 and just laughing as the computer tried sending a small group of units and getting absolutely demolished.

UFO: Enemy Unknown was a pretty great game for its time.

Quake 2 was insane. I remember crazy lan parties with my pals. You just had to type a simple command to launch the server (no special configuration needed) and then just launch the client on the PCs and that was it.

Point of order! Quake 2 wasn't a DOS game. I know, because I tried to run it on my Pentium 133 in DOS for the additional performance, only to be greeted with a message telling me it only ran in Windows :(

hmm my memory might be warped. I remember the command line part so I might be confused

UFO was such an amazing game. I really like the newer XCOM games, they feel like they capture the spirit of the original game.

This is really interesting actually, because I was introduced to UFO/the underwater one by my dad, and he told me the opposite, that the newer games don't have the feel of the original. Should I give them a shot?

I think so. Oddly enough, I remember hating the underwater one after playing the original! They had a few games in between that I felt didn't really capture the same feeling as the original game, but I think the newer ones do it quite well. You can usually get them for cheap as they go on sale pretty frequently.

Wow I see! He exclusively plays the underwater one, and I'll totally check out the newer ones, thanks for the advice :D

The Dig! It's my favourite LucasArts adventure game, and I still play it to this day every so often. Never stops being highly enjoyable, even though I've memorized the puzzles and story.

Highly recommend it to anyone who likes point-and-click adventure games! It's on Steam for super cheap (I think it's on Gog.com too).

The Dig is great! Not my favourite 90s adventure but definitely underrated.

I liked The Dig a lot, but eh, the climax was a bit underwhelming. Felt it needed another 5-10 minutes to really polish that ending off.

One of my favourite DOS games was One Must Fall 2097. It’s a fighting game with giant robots piloted by humans (similar to Pacific Rim). I really appreciated the diversity in design and move set for the different robots, and it had a killer main theme.

Absolutely my favourite. Met the dev team when they were working on the ill-fated sequel. The forums were a great community. There's an OpenOMF remake in progress (same game but better connectivity options and compatibility). It's being reverse engineered IIRC.

The best part was Tournament Mode where you could train your pilot for Power, Agility and Endurance stats and upgrade your 'bot's arm / leg power / speed, armour etc. Great stuff.

Holy crap, I had erased One Must Fall from my memory until I clicked that video link. I remember waking up super early to play that on the weekends when the house was quite.

Master of Magic. Still spin it up sometimes. It is a Civilisation clone only with magic.

Gabriel Knight 1, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango, Quest for Glory 4.

QFG 2 and 4 were absolute masterpieces, with 4 being the pinnacle of the series. The eastern Germanic lore mixed with Eldritch horror, gorgeously painted artwork throughout, and the voice acting was spot on. John Rhys-Davies as narrator was a perfect fit (even though he thought the whole thing was a shitshow), and the 3 villages riffing off each other was fucking hilarious.

When I was a kid it baffled me that the 3 townspeople's voices never matched the text. It was only a few years ago I learned that when those 3 voice actors were in the studio, they would ad-lib the fuck out of their lines. The Coles kept cracking up and just kept the completely wrong lines in there without changing any of the text.

Just started a new playthrough a couple months ago on my steam deck, but with the new(ish) VGA remake of QFG2, since the text parser would be a bitch on the deck.

Haha I was gonna say QFG1 and QFG3 were absolutely legendary. I had sooo many hours in both as a kid. I still go back and play QFG1 every few years.

If you're a fan, check out Heroine's Quest. It's free on Steam and is a great throw back to the originals.

I totally agree with your list. I loved the Quest for Glory series, at least until the fifth game, which has the crappy 3D graphics from the late 90s.

That fifth game was absolutely brutal. Infamy Quest is a decent analog to that series. Not as clever though.

Most people named a lot of the games I would have, so I'm gonna give a shout out to probably the first proper video game I ever played: Mixed Up Mother Goose. Can still remember slowly walking around, trying to figure out what the shit was going on lol.

Lol this screenshot brought back so many memories of playing this game as a little kid!

Oh my God I LOVED this game! Probably was what hooked me on a lifelong videogame addiction.

Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars. I got it from a demo disc or floppy in a book from the library.

Dangerous Dave. I think it was the first ever DOS game that I got to play. I like good platformers.

TES:Daggerfall, the snow music still gets in my head sometimes.

The snow music is literally the best I sometimes listen to the soundtrack even when playing other games!

Yes, this was my first entry into The Elder Scrolls, great game!

Wing Commander 2. My Dad sourced it and the manual was a B&W photocopy. It took ages to get onto it sometimes as the photocopy was so bad I'd be unable to decipher what letter 6 on line 8 of page 10 was.

My call sign in Wing Commander was always Black Panther and I thought it was so freaking cool 😎

rise of the triad has got to be a classic for me. it was the best when the guards would drop to their knees and beg you to spare them

Daggerfall sherly, but I gotta add that I didn't grow up on DOS games so I don't have quite the expertise. Although I love older games, growing up with it is a different thing.

Ultima 6. It was Baldur's Gate before Baldur's Gate, and it had very deep conversation and morality systems. Also amazing VGA graphics (for the time, 256 colors!) interesting PC Speaker AND Sound Blaster music, and an interesting open world and story that showed that preconceived notions and prejudices can be bad, and that sometimes you can solve cultural misunderstandings through communication and sharing instead of conflict.

Ultima 6 was a masterpiece and way ahead of its time. If any of the Ultima games needs a remake, it's that one, imo. I also played Goblins 2, but never got around to 1 or 3. Did enjoy it, but got stuck on some puzzles and gave up. You couldn't just go online and find a solution like you can nowadays. If I ever got back into the Goblins series, I probably would finish them using those online hints though. I've lost the patience (and more importantly, time) to do it the hard way nowadays.

Star Wars: TIE Fighter was my favorite. Learning how to run the game from DOS and figuring out the joystick controls are great memories of that first computer my family ever had.

I played so much X-Wing and TIE Fighter. Busted two joysticks over the 4-5 years of that. Even joined an early Internet gaming club based on the games too!

I remember playing a lot of Stunts, trying to beat the track times and designing tracks with many loops and jumps and some more jumps and loops... I think I spent more time in the editor than driving.

They have it at the Internet Archive!

Stunts was my favorite game for years, the completely bonkers physics were more fun than actually trying to drive good.

Lots of good shouts here, but I'll add one that I haven't seen: The original Master of Orion. 4X, but in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE

Hell yeah. Moo2 is my favorite though. And the new one was pretty dang good.

A lot of great games have already been mentioned but one of my favorite early gaming experiences was Kaptajn Kaper, a Danish game released in the 80s. You're a pirate captain sailing around Denmark after the battle of Copenhagen in 1807 looking for English ships to plunder. Most people around my age with an interest in computers remember it fondly and apparently, the source code was donated to the Royal Library for preservation as a part of Danish cultural heritage, which is pretty cool.

Going by most influential, it'd have to either be Doom or Ultima Underworld. Both of these inspired entire genre's that still live on to this day (FPS and First-Person RPG's like The Elder Scrolls). Personally? Ultima 7.

Not to be the hispter, but my fav. is a very niche game called "Het Yogo Yogo Spel", it's a promotional game for a drink in the Netherlands. for some reason i have such strong nostalgic feelings for it, i really loved playing it as a kid and even more as an adult because it reminds me of that time so much. and no, it's not an amazing platformer (not bad either) but man...

Probably Lotus Racing (ran off one floppy), then Quake 1 and Carmageddon 1. Never really gamed much after those few.

Duke Nukem II. Also love the first one. Apogee in general made some really excellent DOS games.

Star Control II for sure. Fantastic game, still one of the best story-based games I've played. Heavily inspired a lot of more modern franchises, too, including Mass Effect.

Wow yeah. Also I just answered this one for my favorite space game on that post :)

It's gotta be DOOM! The first game to introduce me to PC Gaming outside of Minesweeper and Solitaire!

I got into ZZT, a "topdown" 2d game with its own map editor and even a rudimentary scripting language. Stumbled on it because I wanted to make games. People made some seriously impressive shit on that thing and its successors.

I didn't play it on DOS, though it also saw a DOS release, but Syndicate would be high on my list.

Carmageddon was a late DOS release that I liked.

I never did actually get around to The Ancient Art of War, though I did want to play that.

I didn't play it on DOS, though it saw a DOS release, but the original Sim City aged pretty well.

Carmageddon was a ton of fun! I'll also add Quarantine to the list, great vehicular manslaughter game!

Hard to say. Secret Agent, Treasure Mountain, Azrael's Tear, Chill Manor, etc. All solid games. Hard to pick just one.

Crusader: No Remorse/No Regret

Sometimes I wish they made an FPS reboot, then I remember EA owns it.

Star Command was my favorite. Loved recruiting crew members, buying and upgrading ships, and going around the galaxy to complete missions. It's the game that got me hooked on RPGs as a kid

I never had a DOS computer back then and only played a few games through emulators in recent years. It has to be DOOM for me.

Supaplex and Gorillas are my go tos!

Every once on a while i get back to Mad TV. Casual game before it was cool. Also Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis

Heroes of Might and Magic II, I still will fire it up to play occasionally! I have so many fond memories of me and my dad playing into the long hours of the night.

Sid Meier's covert action. Absolutely amazing spy game with lots of minigames and a randomly generated hierarchy of bad guys to catch every mission. Really want a remaster but I don't think I'm getting one.

While mentioning Sid Meier: Also Civilization. Sunk quite some time into it.

Wolfenstein 3D, my first ever PC game

my dad gave me a floppy disk from one of his coworkers with instructions on how to navigate and run the game from DOS and I felt like a hacker lol

Probably X-Com: UFO Defense. Got really into it and holy hell got angry at that game. But damn it made me want to play more!

Magic Carpet was my favorite dos game I think, that or Loom.

Magic Carpet had you flying around on a Carpet, blasting fireballs at snake things, collecting mana orbs, building castles, and destroying castles of the enemy.

Loom was a Lucas Arts game where you played as a "can't look at the face of" mystical weaver of reality.. Dude under a robe with a Hoodie. You pick up a Magic staff, learn combo's of letters to play on the staff (I had a little notebook next to me with them all written down) and the game got absolutely wild. Fabric of reality breaking sorta wild.

DOOM

DOOOOM, the first actually good game that i played as a kid. I went from tetris to doom and it was insane haha

Wing Commander Privateer - I love a good economy game in my spaceship game.

Mechwarrior - Battletech 1st person. Get you a 30 foot tall robot and shoot some lasers at other giant robots. Go for the knees.

ZZT was an amazing game where you could make your own games and program "objects" using a simple scripting language. It was my first programming language.

It was Tim Sweeney's first game. I've never played Fortnight.

I cannot remember the name but you got to choose between a boy character and a girl character and each stage you had to get all the collectibles to open the door. It was a 2d platformer as well.
Edit: Turns out the game is called Word Rescue.

Kings Quest games for sure. IV was the one I played the most, it was a buggy mess, but I loved it.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Truly a masterpiece or maybe I have rose tinted glasses A real puzzler with a decent amount of replayability

Bunch of greats mentioned so far. I was a big fan of an older game called “Millenium: Return to earth” in which you colonized the solar system. One of the few games I had that came on the larger, five inch floppies.