MS-DOS -- DOS ist gut! or C:\oWo

[Bobinator]

So, my big wheelhouse when it comes to retro gaming is MS-DOS. I played my first games with it along with Super Mario World and SF2 on my cousin's SNES when I was real little, so obviously, the nostalgia is there. To this day, though, I still find it fascinating. Foe one thing, it went on so long that I'm not even technically sure if you could call it the same system all the way through. What do you even say for an OS that could run both text adventures and Quake?

The thing is, I kind of feel like it just doesn't get a whole lot of love in retro circles, at least not like it used to. It kind of feels like the general impression is that people only really see the adventure games, RPGs, and simulations. And to be sure, there's a lot of those. But there's a lot beyond that. You could point out the shareware stuff, generally the other thing that people bring up when they think about the system.

But the thing is, there's so much stuff on DOS that people simply don't talk about, because they likely never knew it existed. It'd take me forever to list all the stuff I was surprised by, but if I had to throw out some suggestions...



Seek & Destroy is a fast-paced vehicle shooter that's like if Desert Strike wasn't kind of slow and overly frustrating, a recommendation for sure.



Zyclunt is from Korea, where you'll find a lot of really professional stuff if you take a look. It's not a game I've really put time into yet, but you can see just from looking at it that it's pretty slick.



If you want something that kind of pushes up the limits of the system, Whiplash/Fatal Racing is a pretty unique arcade-style racing game with some cool ideas. You've got tracks with huge hills, corkscrews, and loop-de-loops, car damage, and an AI partner who you can give orders during the race. It's not quite like a Ridge Racer or a Daytona -- check out Screamer for that -- but I've had some time with that.

Another big problem with DOS in the retro circles is that it's not always easy to get things going, especially for the later games of the era. Things like Launchbox or D-Fend Reloaded can definitely help with this, although you'll still need to do the work filling in a few fields.

What I often recommend to people, however, is ExoDOS, a truly fantastic piece of software that has thousands of games, all playable just by double clicking them. You might think this would be a really big download, and it is -- if you don't go for the Lite version that lets you download games one at a time, only making you download the images for its frontend. It's pretty easy to find, so I'll let you handle that on your own.

[Southpaw]

i still play DOS games sometimes in DOSbox on linux. i actually have the whole game library i grew up with very early, as it was all kept on a Tandy 1000SX HDD (the whole computer still works) and has been transferred off. almost entirely shareware in it's time, my parents who built the collection up were major cheapskates. some honorable mentions from me are Terminal Velocity, Krypton Egg, Halloween Harry, Crystal Caves, Cosmo and obviously Jazz Jackrabbit plus like three dozen others.

kids these days dont know how to cd and dir /w grr /j

[SlushieCat]

The only DOS game I played as a kid was Disney's Beauty and the Beast. My grandfather taught me how to load up the game when I was like 2, 2 and a half. Old enough to read and understand important words to get to the next picture.

In the past couple years I've explored DOS a little more thoroughly. My favorite games I've played were Arctic Adventure (very old cga platformer by Apogee) and Ecstatica (really neat survival horror game in the style of Resident Evil where everything is balls).

I'm still futzing with DOS games every now and again but I haven't really found much else that grabs me hard. If I had more of an interest in point and click adventures or crpgs I'm sure that would be different.

[hanalei]

An original IBM PC AT with no sound card was the household computer when I was born, and it was the first computer that I ever spent much time on. It wasn't the first computer that I fell in love with, though (that would be our Macintosh Performa). It's not because it's an unlovable computer. I think it's just because I was a little too young to truly appreciate computers at that age. Nevertheless, I have very fond memories of the machine.

I have no idea how, but we ended up with a copy of Pickle Wars and my sister and I played it so much. It's a very silly platformer -- one of the deeper cuts in the DOS world as far as I can tell. And it sounds glorious with the PC AT's chunky square wave speaker. That was mostly the extent of my time with DOS back in the day.

I didn't actually get super into DOS until about 5 years ago, when my interest in older computers was rekindled. I genuinely believe it's a wonderful platform for distractionless writing with WordPerfect or WordStar, and I do use it for that purpose from time to time.

There's some delightful new games for DOS, too. SlipSpeed from 2020 is a personal favorite.

[Gabu]

DOS games was my childhood!!!! we also had a sega mega drive but we never had as many games for that

my brother was the one that got all the games from wherever he got them, i was too young and i just played the ones he installed, but we had duke nukem (sidescrollers), commander keen, also i remember being a big fan of cyberdogs/c-dogs (not sure which one it would've been)

also obviously quake, duke nukem 3d, blood, shadow warrior, goes without saying

trying to think of some of the more obscure ones we had but i cant remember them off the top of my head

[Enbyeon]

The main games I played as a kid on DOS were Supaplex and The Incredible Machine. Both games I wanna go back to, but they have a billion levels (especially Supaplex).

[BatElite]

TIM was so lovely. I'm trying to think what other DOS games we had growing up. I think Dungeon Keeper/Need For Speed 2/Megarace 2 might be able to run in DOS? But I'm not entirely sure that's how we did it back then.

From my childhood and a personal cornerstone, Toffifee Fantasy Forest still has a great artstyle (especially the UI). Possibly the first product placement thing I've ever played, and it'd take me the better part of two decades to find out Toffifee was actually a confection.

I figured I put it up while we're here, since it's quite obscure otherwise.

I only played them sometime in the 2010s via GOG, but I'm kinda fascinated with the Jill of the Jungle games/chapters too. The level design is generally bad, but it's bad in the exact same ways that folks on the yoyogames sandbox would design poor levels for their amateur games. I am extremely delighted that commercial software 2 decades earlier were on the same level.

[Flygon]

To the surprise of literally nobody, the DOS game I grew up with most would've been Heroes of Might and Magic II.

This game's artwork was one of the ones crucial for me getting into doing pixel art. It was one of the only hand-drawn 2D games I saw go full-on into being 640x480 and pure pixel art. I was really looking forward to how pixel art could've been pushed even harder.

Little did I know that I was seeing one of the final Western games to try and push hi-res 2D pixel art in such a way. The game is bittersweet in that way, at least to me.

It's bloody good if tactical RPGs with resource management interests you however, even if it's overshadowed by its Windows-only sequel.