It's Critter Time!

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.

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

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.