My very first episode of Ancient DOS Games! I decided to cover Stunts first because it's had the greatest impact on my life as a DOS gamer and I've been playing it on a regular basis longer than any other DOS game. (Though System Shock almost beats it for that record!)
In order to present a good contrast between good and bad DOS games, I felt doing Mega Man after Stunts was a great way to achieve this... Not only because both games came out in 1990, but because the DOS version of Mega Man is a joke compared to the NES games it was riding on the popularity of. I don't hold it against the guy who made it though, because leaving an important project in the hands of one person and giving them tight deadlines is how we ended up with ET on the Atari 2600... ...granted, 10 years later, we know now that WASN'T the way it happened, but still! :P
Tyrian 2000 is one of my favourite 2D shooters, primarily because it's also one of the most feature-filled ones out there with plenty of things to try out and secrets galore, but also because it's one of the few out there with decent mouse controls. It's not a perfect game by any means, but certainly enjoyable.
One thing that was important to me when I started this series was to cover not only popular, good and bad titles, but also indie titles and obscure titles even DOS gaming experts might not know about. This is one of those games... sort of. It's not so incredibly obscure that virtually no one knows about it, but unless you're talking about games made in Finland it's one that's easily forgotten.
Making this web show also gave me a good excuse to start getting some games I had wanted to get for quite some time but never got around to. Oddly enough, Terminal Velocity is probably one of those games with one of the largest gaps between the number of people who played it and the number of people who bought it, especially considering Fury3 (which is basically the same game just dressed differently) came out shortly afterwards for the then new Windows 95 operating system. Also had very steep RAM requirements for the highest graphical settings.
It's hard to make a Breakout clone stand out considering the sheer number of such games out there. Cybersphere stands out on a technical level for using OPL3 synthesized sound and music at a time when everything was going digitized, as well as for being surprisingly difficult by design, as opposed to being difficult because of poor controls, physics, or balls moving at mach 7.
Those of you who've played all three Descent games will understand my... umm... "mildly psychotic" start to the video. ;D Basically, Descent was billed as a "six degrees of freedom" game, in that you could move your ship along any axis and spin along any axis, giving you an unprecedented level of control, mind you at the cost of having rather complex controls for what basically boils down to a first person shooter, even when using a joystick. Definitely not a game for those who suffer from frequent bouts of vertigo.
Most Accolade titles have some difficult-to-break disk-based copy protection, so playing them in DOSBox can be troublesome on modern computers. Fortunately, Serve & Volley is one of the easier ones to get working and it's very unique as far as tennis games go since it actually plays kinda like an action/golf game of all things. :o Alas, it's also one of those games that plays better with a friend rather than against the AI. A lot of early sports games on the PC were like that.
A lot of FMV games are terrible. MegaRace is one of the few that isn't. ;) Don't be caught off guard though, this isn't technically a racing game, since your objective is to drive down a pre-rendered FMV track and destroy all of your opponents before you complete three laps. You CAN technically do this by outrunning them, but you're far more likely to exceed the three-lap limit when you do this.
While System Shock was never all that popular in the days of DOS gaming, it's since developed a cult following of epic proportions. So much so that a number of Shock fans complained about how I didn't use modern mods to add mouse look features (among others) or how I didn't mention where you could go to download "free" copies... ...yeah, I don't get that either. I try to look at these games the way they would've been played. Occasionally I recommend more modern source ports for games, but System Shock is not one of them. I much prefer this game in its fully original state.
Apogee had made some fun shareware titles back in the days of DOS gaming, but one of the troubles a large number of their games had was that buying their full versions didn't actually get you any new features, just more levels. Dark Ages is one such example of this since the free shareware episode is fairly decent, but the second and third episodes you originally had to pay for were just more of the same. :P Good thing the ENTIRE game is freeware now.
Thexder is one of those games that seems like it would be incredibly easy when you're told how it works, having a laser that automatically and instantly reaches its target and being able to fly anywhere, but the game's actually incredibly challenging. Also, let's see if a Tandy 3-voice rendition of 200-year-old music from Beethoven makes another erroneous Content ID match. (It thankfully didn't!)
I think most people would agree that TMNT on the NES wasn't a "good" game, mostly because of the extremely poor difficulty balancing, but it certainly could've been a lot worse. At least the game had awesome music, fast gameplay, powerups, and could actually be completed. TMNT for DOS however... This is a great example of how NOT to port your game. I think the trouble ultimately was that they gave too few people too little time to port the game to multiple computers, and when the order came to release the game, the DOS version simply wasn't ready. The entire game has an unfinished feel (especially from the end of Level 3 onward) and can't be beaten without cheating.
Although I've only played maybe about 15% to 20% of all the DOS games ever made, chances are that if I haven't played a particular game, I've at least heard of it. This is one of the few DOS games I had never even heard of, which is odd considering it came out roughly around when I was really getting into expanding my knowledge about DOS games. While it's not a terrible game it's extremely generic and has almost no replay value once you've beaten it.
My main reason for wanting to cover this game was because it looks really good when run in DOSBox without aspect ratio correction on a wide-screen display. Not a lot of games made for DOS look good when you stretch them to fill a wide screen, but any time you run across a game that runs in EGA 640x350 resolution, it's always worth a try! Actually, the game's pretty neat too, just not too much to say about it.
This is the first episode of ADG to be scripted and the difference in quality DEFINITELY shows. As anyone can plainly tell, I'm much more comfortable working with a script than without. (Though I've improved unscripted since this episode first went up for sure.) Plus, this is also the first requested game I ever covered! On top of all of that, while I was getting ready to put this episode together, James Rolfe of Cinemassacre had released his "Back to the Future ReRevisited" episode, where the jet from Top Gun on the NES escapes and he asks anyone who's seen it to let him know. ...yeah, my acting quality was still meh in this video. It's hard to make your eyes follow something that doesn't actually exist in reality.
One of the least-popular episodes of Ancient DOS Games ever! Why? Probably because the game itself is kinda boring to watch or has such a generic name no one cares about it. That's just a guess though.
Xargon semi-proves that both Apogee and Epic Megagames had similar approaches to shareware: Make the parts of the game you have to pay for just more of the same... maybe with a few colour changes. I think Epic may've been a lot more hostile towards Apogee than vice versa though. Not just the moment that happened while I was playing through this game for the show, but another example would be the Apology Mode in Jazz Jackrabbit. Meanwhile, Id chilled in the background, watching the two shareware companies duke it out, then made Quake.
This is probably one of the best fighting games ever made for the PC. It has impressive graphics for when it was released, countless secrets and features, a tournament mode where you could customize your robot, it even had a combo counter show up, something extremely few fighting games had when this game was new. It's also very easy to play as far as fighting games are concerned, making it something everyone into DOS games can enjoy! ...also, my rank for the Jaguar's destruction move is "Average".
...I'm so very glad I don't use that dilapidated webcam anymore. In doing research for the original Thexder, I had no idea they had made a sequel, possibly because the sequel was called "Fire Hawk" first and "Thexder" second. When searching for the game I found a copy that was fully boxed and everything and felt it would make for a good way to introduce the video. Then, when I realized there was a short comic smack-dab in the middle of the manual, that just gave me a million more reasons to put a lot more effort into this episode. "Atop the 4th Wall" was one of my favourite web shows (even though I'm not a huge comics person, I just find Linkara does a fantastic job) and thought it would be fun to review the comic in a similar sort of style.
SPEAKING of games I couldn't play as a kid because of graphics adapter stupidness... Yeah, I still have my original 5 1/4" disk for this game and when I tried to play it back in 1990 I couldn't find a way to since it needed EGA and I was using a Tandy system without EGA, so the game was a complete mystery to me as to how it played or what it was like. It wasn't until I was older and was able to find a copy on the internet that I finally got to play it.
I've been a game designer/programmer for the majority of my life thus far, so games like Ken's Labyrinth are special to me in that they have that raw feel that can only come from games made almost entirely by single individuals. I've spoken to Ken a few times in the past few years too, even since before starting ADG since I had an idea for a game made out of cubical worlds and one of Ken's earlier engines before the Build Engine worked on this concept. My timing was terrible though, since this was just months before Infiniminer and Minecraft hit the scene. Still, whenever I need to spark my game design creativity, this is typically the game I turn to!
The first CGA-only game to show up on ADG! This is actually a sequel to another game by the name of Pharaoh's Tomb with virtually identical gameplay, though there are a few differences which made me want to cover this game instead. Typically I try to cover original games first, then their sequels, but it doesn't always work out this way.
You know, not a lot of people really take a good look at this game anymore. I suppose because we've all heard about it so many times in the past that we no longer feel like talking about it. I felt that was the PERFECT reason why to bring it up again and present my own thoughts and opinions on the controversies this game has generated over the years, while at the same time giving it my usual once-over. Of course, with a more modern reboot of the Doom series out now, everyone's been talking about both it and the original game again.
So what makes this game so dangerous? Umm... uhh... because it was made by one of the guys who made Doom? ...maybe? Actually, just like Ken's Labyrinth, this is another example of a game that plays a lot better than it looks and has that "made by a single person" feel, and once again is a game I like for those exact reasons.
When this game was new, inventory-based adventure games either took the form of single screens you could walk around, or pre-rendered areas that you could look around but couldn't actually move within. Normality presented players with an actual 3D-engine so they could explore a proper 3D world yet still have an inventory adventure experience. I consider this personally to be one of my least impressive ADG episodes. I was having a heck of a time trying to come up with stuff to talk about for it without the episode becoming nothing but spoilers, but because I had played it so much as a kid I really wanted to give it a once-over. Some games are just hard to review, regardless of how good or terrible they are, and this is one of them.
It's not often you run into a game that plays differently depending on if you had CGA, Tandy, or EGA hardware, but this is one of them. Actually, it plays differently in all of its various ports and iterations as well, even though the levels are pretty much the same across the entire spectrum. Nowadays, a game on one system plays pretty much the same on all other systems, but because the hardware specs were so vastly different between various consoles and computers of the 80s, making a game on multiple systems usually meant completely different source code for each. Oh yeah, the story for this game is ridiculous too.
This is one of those games that had much better presentation than gameplay for when it was released. It's obviously a cash-in fighting game that tries to incorporate elements of every popular fighting game of the time, yet if it were balanced better and had controls that weren't convoluted it could've been much more awesome.
Who knew Apogee released a game with nudity? Mind you, this is one of the extremely few games made outside of Apogee, as opposed to internally as many of their titles were. TBH, I like the music in this game more than the gameplay, but the gameplay's not that bad considering the 3D fixed-perspective style that was used. There was this sort of fad in the mid-90s where making your game in 3D, even with a fixed perspective, somehow made it better. Really, all this did was make such games look good in screenshots as the gameplay of most of them suffered from failing to convey spatial awareness to players. The best ones to use this type of 3D were pretty much all puzzle games, like this one! (Or sims.)
Finally! Audio quality that doesn't suck! Getting a new camera, even if it was just an SD camera, definitely helped to improve the quality of the show. Before this point in time I was using a webcam for the video and audio... yeah... I guess we all have to start somewhere. I don't have many boxes and manuals left for my DOS games since most of them I got as a kid and thus didn't save the boxes. This is a game I got later in life and thus I was smart enough not to toss any of its contents out.
The idea of the "Game Creation System" or "GCS" has been around for quite some time, since not everyone has the programming know-how to produce computer software, but you can be good at making games without being good at programming. Megazeux is quite a bit more in-depth than most GCS programs, which is crazy considering it runs in text mode. The first half of the video shows games made by other people, while the last half shows games I've made myself, all of which can be obtained from my website.
Similar to what happened with Street Fighter and Street Fighter II, when MechWarrior 2 came out, virtually everyone forgot about this original game due to the massive jump in quality. This isn't to say the original MechWarrior is a bad game, but it's definitely showing its age.
The developers learned from making the original MechWarrior what worked with their game and what didn't, but they also didn't have the MechWarrior license anymore, so they took all the things that did work and compiled them together into their own franchise, resulting in the "MetalTech" game universe and ultimately this game, EarthSiege. This is also the episode that originally caught the attention of everyone's favourite Lazy Game Reviewer and put me under his radar! Ironically, not long after his 100th video where he said he wasn't going to do stuff like that.
Decided to cover both games in a single episode since there wasn't a huge amount to say about each of them. The term "Line Wars" is actually referring to the fact that the original game was meant to be played across phone lines using modem connections. LineWars II supports networked play as well but I guess ethernet cables count as lines too.
My first experience with SimCity was the SNES version, then I moved on straight to SimCity 2000 for Windows, so when I first got hold of the original DOS version of SimCity, I was a bit surprised by how much more basic it was... and by the fact that its highest speed setting could process an entire year in under a few seconds!
Artillery games were originally very basic with nothing too special about them, but then this game came around and completely blew away all the other similar games! ...then Scorched Earth came along and everyone thought THAT game was the one that revolutionized the genre and Tank Wars was promptly forgotten about. Probably didn't help that there was already another game out there called Tank Wars that was a lot less advanced.
There weren't a lot of scrolling 2D shooters in the late 80s and early 90s on DOS computers because the fundamental differences in hardware between computers and consoles didn't make smooth scrolling an easy thing to do. Heck, figuring out how to accomplish this was a major part of what drove the formation of Id Software when they made Commander Keen. This game is a good example of why smooth scrolling was such a big deal, because this came out in 1993 yet still used a reduced framerate and large scrolling jumps to give the impression of faster-paced gameplay.
Yeah I know, I can't pronounce Chinese words to save my life. As far as Steet Fighter II clones go, this is actually one of the better ones, possibly because it doesn't really take many risks or do anything too unique. Also, the request to cover this game came straight from Brandon Cobb of Super Fighter Team himself, so I wasn't about to turn him down!
I think most people who've played this game are probably familiar with the C64 version over any of the others, as pretty much everyone I knew who had a C64 while I was growing up had this game. Also, while this was originally a PC Booter game, meaning you had to boot your PC while the game was loaded into your disk drive, it's since been converted over to run from DOS, which is why it goes nuts when you hit ESC. That said, DOSBox can handle PC Booter games too in their original state, provided you have the disk image for it!
I'm pretty terrible at strategy games for the most part, but they are definitely a part of DOS gaming history, so even though I won't be covering very many such games, I'll be sure to cover one every once in awhile. Command & Conquer happens to be one of the most important ones to come out of the DOS era, so covering it sooner or later was a must.
While I'm not typically a huge fan of inventory adventure games, there are a few that I like or am curious about because I have never played them. This is one of the ones I like because it's relatively short and doesn't take itself seriously, granted it is fairly linear compared to most.
I think it goes without saying that the number "42" has had quite an impact over the years, thanks mostly to Douglas Adams. So it seemed appropriate to cover a game that was related to this number, even if only in the number of levels it had.
It kinda sucks that the Magic Carpet games have been long since forgotten. Both the original game and the sequel are extremely fun, have a lot of stuff to do, numerous spells to cast, and have a well defined difficulty curve. Unfortunately, due to being rushed to store shelves, they also happen to be extremely glitchy and love to crash. (Though Magic Carpet Plus doesn't crash anywhere near as often as the original game or the sequel.)
There's very few modes of gameplay that I'm terrible at. One of the more generic ones is that I'm bad at strategy games, however, there's a handful of action/puzzle games that I just can't wrap my head around, one of which is Boulderdash, which was the direct inspiration for this game. Still, there are lots of people who enjoy games like this one and while I personally suck at it, I can see the extreme potential in the idea and can understand why people enjoy it.
Battlezone was an incredibly popular game when it was first released because it was essentially one of the first (or perhaps even the very first) game to give players a first-person view of the battlefield to move around and shoot in. Many games came along to try and capitalize on the idea, some of which were fun, some of which weren't. Stellar 7 is definitely one of the more interesting ones and has quite the history behind it, but this DOS version was somewhat late to the party and easily forgotten as a result.
Pre-episode ridiculousness FTW! (Actually, turns out a lot of people don't like these segments I debuted with this Episode so you may not see them in the future...) This is a REALLY old game as far as DOS games are concerned and kind of goes to show just how intriguing the old titles can be. With no established standards as to what makes a game good or not, a lot of developers had to just come up with ideas and try them out and see where they ended up. Flightmare is one of the extremely few games of its kind where you move in 3D space by having two 2D views and it takes a lot of practice to get anywhere near good at this game.
Breakout clones are a dime a dozen and while some of them have some unique and interesting ideas, Electranoid is a prime example of how, even when you have decent graphics and programming, your overall design can be flawed to the point of frustrating the average player.
While the Elder Scrolls series of games is highly regarded nowadays, it had quite the rocky start. The first game in the series, Arena, was originally going to be about gladiatorial combat, but that focus shifted over the course of development. While the final product has a ton of content it can be very finicky and ultra-fast paced. And yes, I'm aware there's command line parameters to turn the speed down, but this affects the overall framerate, mouse cursor, and control responsiveness too so it doesn't really help make the game any "better".
Ah, text parsers... While text adventures were an interesting breed of games, Sierra came along one day and made them more dynamic by actually placing the player into a graphical world, using the text parser only so far as to determine what actions the player wanted to perform. There's a few reasons why I decided to cover KQ2 first and not KQ1, since I normally go in sequel order for these old DOS games, but the big reason is that I was having trouble getting my copy of the original version working in DOSBox. Got past that problem eventually though.
One of those experiences that has sort of been lost to time thanks to the internet and digital download services is coming home from school as a child, plopping a CD full of shareware and demo versions of software into your computer, and just picking games at random to try out. So, I figured it would be fun to share this experience as best as I could. While this is a very long episode (split into two parts) and is fairly slow paced, it really does get the experience across... at least a little.
You remembered to watch Part 1 first, right?
Season 2 of ADG sort of became the Season of Duke, as I covered all three of the original Duke Nukem games, starting of course, with the very first one. It's kinda crazy how far the character has come from his early days and the sheer number of different kinds of games Duke's been in, so it's interesting to see how it all began. Also, LGR's not the only one who can do the Duke voice! (Although he does it better.)
I'm very surprised how little attention this game has gotten over the years, as it's one of the simplest games of its kind and is very enjoyable despite its simplicity. OK sure, all the sounds are ripped from Doom for the most part, but because the game has always been free I'm less bothered by that. Making assets for games is a time consuming process and many people just wanna code stuff and see where they end up.
This is one of those games that I really shouldn't like, since it relies heavily on memorization and split-second reactions to the area around you. Surprisingly though, I find it enjoyable in its simplicity and you don't have to do extreme amounts of memorization until the very late stages. It's freeware now too and that's always a plus!
The "dungeon crawl" genre has been around a very long time and it's interesting to see just how primitive, yet feature-rich, the old ones were in comparison to the other kinds of games that were available. Telengard is extremely similar to an earlier dungeon crawl called DND, but where most copies of DND created for various systems were text-based, Telengard has graphics! I also really like that, as of this writing in mid 2016, Dan's website is still up, as is the page for this game and its download! Not 100% certain who's maintaining its presence, but they're awesome for doing so!
Few people had ever heard of or played the original MechWarrior for DOS as MechWarrior 2 basically eclipsed its predecessor, raking in critical acclaim due to its extreme amounts of customization and content, along with being very simple to play given its simulation nature. Even nowadays, this game is still just as fun to play as it was 18 years ago!
This is one of those curious games that nostalgia remembers extremely fondly, despite the fact the game is beyond hard... not quite Battletoads level but certainly somewhere between that and Ninja Gaiden. This game's also had one of the most confusing post-release licensing issues to date and I think it's changed even more since I made this episode years ago so... feel free to debate about it in the comments; I have no desire to try and disseminate it any further.
This is probably one of the most inventive Breakout clones to come out of the 80's. It just kinda sucks that it also has one of the smallest paddles in the entire history of Breakout games.
The action shooter game where you can't see more than five feet in front of you! To be fair, this game's less about the action and more about the story but it would've been a much more enjoyable game if you could see more of the action around you at a time given how fast paced this thing's supposed to be... and had a better story. Ah well.
There's not a lot of F1 racing games for some reason, though they were definitely more common in the past than they are now. Grand Prix Circuit is surprisingly playable given its age, though ultimately nothing special in the grand scheme of things.
Many people love this particular 2D shooter, but me personally, I feel its not very well designed, which isn't to say it's a bad game, just not something that sits well with me as a game designer. Amazingly, this video hasn't been downvoted nearly as much as I expected it to be given my controversial opinion of this game, though it's still downvoted a lot more than most ADG episodes. Also, monkeys.
Artillery games weren't really anything special in the early days of gaming, but Scorched Earth was one of the more popular ones considering its massive number of features and options. Though one thing that may come as a surprise to some retro gamers is that this game is technically a clone of the lesser-known "Tank Wars" which I covered back in Episode 36, though really, both games have their pros and cons. Tank Wars is more approachable, better balanced, and has better AI, while Scorched Earth has more features and is more customizable.
The episode in which it becomes very apparent that I've never watched Dr. Who... (Hey, if anyone knows a legit way to watch the original series nowadays, let me know!) But yeah, OverKill is an easily forgotten 2D shooter that's actually not that bad, but is a bit quirky and not very long or difficult. It also borrows a bunch of its planet names from other popular space-related things.
I'm still left to wonder what this game would've been like if it had all the stealth elements they had originally planned for it... Instead though, they left it simple so anyone could play it. Well... anyone who could adapt to its extreme difficulty.
I first played this game in the arcades and it was not only fun, but challenging without being sadistic. It had pretty cool special effects too. Thus when the PC port was released it seemed like it would be a fun thing to pick up. I mean, previous ports of Taito's arcade games to the PC were pretty top notch! ...well... not this one... ...sigh... where's Novalogic when you need 'em?
Very few games have been released into the public domain, but this happens to be one of them... which is kinda odd considering the game it's based off of is not in the public domain but whatever. As far as old CGA games go, this one's probably a bit obscure, owing to its BBC Micro roots, but is relatively simple to understand, even if the controls are a bit cumbersome.
It's curious that The Elder Scrolls series has endured as well as it has, given that the first game was frenetic, the second game is swimming in bugs, and everything between the second and third game really don't have the same feel. However, this is a rare case where despite the massive number of bugs, Daggerfall offers an extremely huge amount of content and things to do, which makes it fun despite its problems... at least until your save game becomes corrupted.
I found out not long after making this video that the side shields actually protect you from touching the sides of the road, which is why they don't appear on easy difficulty, since the sides of the roads don't hurt in that mode. Not a lot of mouse driven 2D shooters out there so while this one is very basic, at least it's very simple to play. Come to think of it... not a lot of 2D shooters where you DRIVE down roads either. Quite to mix of features going on here!
There's not a lot of games out there which are a total mystery as to how they even exist, but this is one of them. This game is incomplete and lacks credits and the hours I spent searching for details as to who made this thing simply led to a bunch of dead ends and false leads. However, I played it back when I was just 10 years old in the early 90s, so it qualifies as highly nostalgic, at least for me.
Nope, not a coincidence that I covered this game for my 69th episode. In fact, you can blame Al Lowe himself as it was his idea!
Yeah, ended up having to go with a different game because of the sheer amount of time required to make solid progress in X-Wing, but the Kroz games certainly weren't the only text-mode action games to come out of Apogee, as this lesser-known trilogy of games can attest to.
The Star Wars games had a really strong start as space combat simulations, but somewhere along the line they became less sim and more straight-up action. Whether this was a good or a bad thing mostly depends on how much you enjoy escort missions...
It's still interesting how humble Duke's beginnings were before he went all 3D and macho. It's also interesting how many people think this game uses 256 colour graphics, when in fact, save for the title sequence, it's pretty much all 16 colour VGA with heavily modified palettes. Also, this game would've played much better if you could see more of the stuff around you.
This was a game that came on the exact same disk as John Romero's "Dangerous Dave", and as you might expect, this game was made by John Carmack, both of whom eventually left Softdisk to form Id Software. Like the Dangerous Dave games, the original Catacomb games are now maintained and sold by Flat Rock Software. This one's always been freeware, though the pseudo-sequel "The Catacomb", the one that comes with a level editor, is not.
It's somewhat easy to draw parallels between this game and "party" games where you go around boards and play minigames, except this game came out long before Mario Party was a thing... It's also surprising how non-violent the graphics are given the kinds of things you actually DO in this game.
It's somewhat amazing how many similarities this game has to Skyrim despite being more akin in terms of gameplay to a cross between Ultima and dungeon crawls. Heck, you can even dual-wield!
Games revolving around taxi services rarely have anything to do with reality. Case in point: The taxi service you run in this game is with a flying thingamajig in prehistoric times with dinosaurs threatening you.
I originally found it odd that I had so many more requests for TIE Fighter than for X-Wing, but after playing this game for a bit it was easy to understand why. TIE Fighter is just an all around better game than X-Wing, which given the fact that it came out later, makes perfect sense.
This is quite the polarizing game for me, given that the shareware version is well enough, but the level designs in the registered version are just downright sadistic. Also, awkward fighting-move-style combos in a gun-wielding platformer are awkward. Even Epic MegaGames was guilty of this sort of thing back in Tyrian.
Extremely few games use the perspective this game does for presentation and control... and I learned not too long after trying to make a game with a similar control scheme and perspective that it's because it makes some people dizzy. shrugs I still enjoy it all the same.
Being a programmer, this game has a sort of special meaning to me. Even though it's technically flawed and extremely minimalistic, it feels very much like something I would've made on my own accord when I was much younger, given the proper tools to do so.
This is why you never have other people host your own shows... they play with all your neat little toys and break everything... or in my case trying to take over LGR, completely alienate your viewers. Also, for all the things we intentionally did, the whole rinse and repeat thing we both said was actually NOT intentional, as we didn't share any of the scripting we had planned after the collab segments. Hooray for coincidences! 8D
Making good educational games is hard enough, given the necessity to balance educational context with fun... usually to the detriment of fun. However, not only are the Googol Math Games fun, they were made pretty much entirely by a single person. Incidentally, having programmed math software professionally myself, I can safely say that math is much easier to make fun games out of than other educational topics like History, English, etc., although such games do indeed exist.
Something which came pre-packaged with a lot of early PCs with CD-ROM drives were "activity centre/studio" software intended for kids, often with an educational slant to them, where each such program was essentially a sandbox of pointless activities and mini-games. 3-D Body Adventure only barely qualifies as such a program given how few activities there are. The bulk of the program is just an encyclopedia on the Human body and medical procedures... with an apparent reverence for male genitalia given the way everything's been worded. (Female genitalia though? No issues.)
Usually the best way to go about making edutainment is to make a game where the educational component is as subtle as possible, where knowledge of the topic at hand is necessary to play the game, but players aren't actually direct questions about said topic. Word Rescue is one such game, which is part of the reason why it's as fondly remembered as it is. It was also shareware, making it far less expensive, both when it was new and nowadays, than most edutainment titles.
YES, I'm aware this game has AdLib support! I'm still not entirely certain how I missed this, though really, I still prefer the Tandy 3-Voice sound over the AdLib sound. This happens to be the only Super Solver game I had when making this video, mostly because it was the only one we had access to in elementary school, yet the school only had one license for it, not a site license, so only one person could be playing it at a time, meaning most students had to either watch someone else play or just play something else. It's funny... this is one of those edutainment titles which really shouldn't be all that fun because of how direct the educational component is, but what makes it fun is that there's more to the challenge than simply answering questions... plus the massive number of "prizes" to win as you play through several dozen times.
Whenever someone tells you gameplay is more important than graphics, the Moraff games are prime examples, as they're all fun to play but look hideous... the irony being they also were some of the most technically competent games, supporting a massive number of video modes and video hardware. TBH, that's par for the course for skilled, solo game developers. I speak from experience.
Sierra's old parser-based adventure games had a tendency to be non-linear but also tended to have some extremely ridiculous puzzles to overcome. Space Quest is atypical in this regards as it's a lot more straightforwards and linear and not nearly as challenging, but makes up for this by being something of a parody.
Pac Man was highly popular in arcades and with such a simple concept you'd figure PC ports and clones would be decent... except most weren't. Even the actual port of Pac Man in the early days of DOS was lacking. CD-Man isn't exactly the greatest clone out there, but it didn't have much competition to run against and is still better than most of the PC-based Pac Man games of the time.
AKA: The episode in which I make every brony jealous. It's still crazy how the transition from the original cartoony Duke Nukem to the womanizing, wisecracking Duke took place, but given that the game which resulted is one of the best and most innovative first person shooters ever made I don't think most people were complaining. Then 3D Realms tried to make Duke Nukem Forever... eh heh...
Populous was the progenitor of the "God Game" concept, where instead of controlling minions directly, you instead "influence" them by shaping the land and performing miracles. It was a very unique concept in strategy gaming... and oddly enough, I never knew a single other person who could play it while I was growing up and it remains one of the extremely few strategy games I'm actually really good at.
Dungeon crawls are rarely innovative, as most follow the typical formula set by classics such as DND/Telengard and Rogue, but Reaping the Dungeon (aka: Dungeon Rogue) was a very original take on the genre... even though the difficulty curve is a bit reversed.
Long before Wolfenstein 3D, John Carmack had made a little game called Catacomb. Well, that game turned out to be the perfect candidate to translate into three dimensions and the first Catacomb 3-D game was pretty much exactly that. Later Catacomb 3-D games were quite a bit better, with stronger controls, better graphics, more balanced gameplay (though still not quite as balanced as it could be), and time travel. ...yes... TIME TRAVEL.
Sometimes it surprises me how certain games end up getting published at all. Star Quest I has a lot of neat ideas in it, but the execution doesn't live up to any of them... save for the racing aspect. If this game was nothing BUT racing it would've been many times more fun.
Everyone has to have a hobby. In this case, we have an actor by day and a game programmer by night, who came up with a unique, difficult, and extremely random dungeon crawl. Just make sure you play the Windows version. This old DOS version is... pretty lacking by comparison. I've also since played the beta of CoX2 and the number of features in there trumps the Windows version several times over!
Commander Keen is a surprisingly significant game given that the engine which drives it is what led to the formation of Id Software and the many titles and engines which came from them following. That said, I'm not a huge fan of the Commander Keen games. They're not bad by any means, just not my cup of tea.
This game kinda goes to show how ridiculous the whole publishing thing was not too many years ago. Absolutely terrible games like "Big Rigs Over the Road Racing" and "Extreme PaintBrawl" easily found their way onto store shelves and sold numerous copies before people clued into just how bad they were. Amulets & Armor on the other hand was a surprisingly decent game which never really got any attention due to a lack of proper publishing, selling fewer than 100 copies. I should point out too that not too many months after this video was made, the game was re-released as freeware and a Windows port has since followed with enhanced features!
Galactix kinda goes to show why having a ship limited to horizontal movement in a space shooter is an outdated concept, but on the flip side, at least it's easy to play.
I am generally terrible at strategy games, but X-COM was one of the most requested games on my requests list... so I had to give it a go. I can see why this game is as well received as it is, but that doesn't negate some of its odd design decisions, as well as my inability to play it that well.
Normally I don't like to cover games out of order, but I had to make an exception in this case as I was having issues getting my copy of the original EGA version of the game working at first... stupid copy protection. In any case, this game really set the bar towards Sierra's adventure titles and I don't really feel like any other AGI engine titles come close to the same level of dynamic progression without being overly difficult... well... maybe Gold Rush, but I haven't played it... yet...
Who knew they made super-large, perfectly clear beachballs? Bubble Bobble is my all-time most favourite game. I had first played it in arcades when I was very young and got this DOS version back when I was about 7 years old. The overall design has stood the test of time extremely well, although not just because of the bubble-based mechanics. The massive number of items and levels, as well as the surprisingly non-random nature of the powerups, all add to the game's fun factor and removing any one of these aspects completely derails the experience. Mind you, this DOS version has some curious omissions... as well as unusual effects caused by improperly breaking the copy protection, which John Butrovich himself confirmed via eMail not too long after this episode first went live. Whoops. Also, bonus points if, without looking ahead at Filler #20, you know what I'm parodying in the live action at the end of the episode .
Marking the start of Season 3 of ADG, Descent II seemed like the perfect choice. It's everything a sequel should be: More of the same gameplay but with added new features and all new content. Descent III actually followed this same line of logic too, but since it's a Windows game it's never shown up on the show. (Not against doing a filler of it someday though!)
This fighting game is almost a contender for a game that's so bad it's good... almost. It just needed to be a bit more playable and not have a vertigo-inducing camera zoom feature enabled by default. Actually, the game really does feel like they just put a whole bunch of pieces together without really planning it out.
This episode marks the first gifted game to be covered on ADG, soon to be followed by even more. Quest for Glory is an interesting hybrid of RPG and Adventure gaming elements, where many situations have multiple solutions. Just don't try sticking your lockpicks up your nose... really bad idea...
This is an odd case of a game that feels more like something out of the demoscene than as a fully fledged game, especially given the extremely strange display resolution it runs at and the digitized music. Definitely intended to be played two-player though, despite having to play the game for an incredibly lengthy amount of time just to unlock everything.
You typically wouldn't expect a licensed game to set the bar, but Star Trek 25th Anniversary is one of the best inventory adventure titles out there, even if the puzzles can be a bit trial-and-error heavy at times.
I'm still not so sure what's so "aqua" about this particular Breakout clone, but at least it has a boatload of powerups and powerdowns to collect. So many in fact it has a special indicator to help you determine which ones you should collect and which you should avoid.
Although the notion of making cinematic games wasn't anything new when Wing Commander was originally released, combining this with a fully-featured space shooter was a stroke of brilliance. It's just too bad the game hasn't held up so well on the technical side of things over the years.
I still swear that there were birds chirping in the background despite it happening through my computer's MIDI support. This game is absolutely massive as far as its story is concerned and is based on the popular Riftwar Saga written by Raymond E. Feist. It's also incredibly challenging, meaning you won't simply sit down and beat this thing in a day or two... especially when you're me and suck at strategy games.
Complete coincidence that Pushing Up Roses released a video on this exact same game just two days prior to my video going live! Also, this thing hurt my soul. Let us never speak of it again after you're done watching this video... ...granted, you could always give Roses' video a watch too.
This was one of the last commercial games released for DOS and it really shows as it has all the trappings of an early hardware accelerated game. In fact, the game actually has hardware acceleration support, though at the time I was trying to play this thing emulated on an outdated 2 GHz system which could barely record anything properly outside of DOSBox, so I had to stick to software rendering for this video. As for the game... well... it kinda speaks for itself.
Was still having to get settled after the move back at the end of April in 2013, so for all of May I was making smaller videos than usual on simpler games. As for this particular game... well... it sure goes by enough names...
A friend and I (mostly him) once came up with this ludicrous idea when we were still teenagers about making a game where you mow the lawn. Little did we realize we weren't the first people to come up with that idea... ...TBH though... mowing the lawn is one of the worst concepts for a video game. I think the only chore which could possibly be worse would be hand-washing dishes, and even then I'm not entirely convinced it WOULD be worse.
If you ever thought mixing The Legend of Zelda and The Adventures of Lolo together would make for an epic game... then you're either deluded or one of the guys who worked on this game. Actually, truth be told, it's not all that bad, but you really have to be able to tolerate overhead action and puzzle gameplay simultaneously to be able to get anywhere. Also, be prepared for some ridiculous humour!
Given that this is one of the hardest platformers out there you'd think people would hate it, but this game's incredibly zany and offbeat humour, combined with fairly solid gameplay, made it liked by all... even people who couldn't get past that freakin' underwater section... Actually, TBH, this is one game where you probably want to stick with the Sega versions. This DOS port is still a fun game, but it's a poor port, if that makes any sense... you'll see what I mean.
This is one of those games that makes me hate the notion of "popularity" sometimes. It is extremely fun, exceptionally well made from a technical standpoint, has a ton of content, and earned glowing reviews from the publications of the time... yet because of how expensive it was to make and its lukewarm popularity, as was common for Looking Glass titles, it never recouped its cost to make and thus the sequels they had planned never materialized. This game SO needs to get a sequel someday.
I began a month of doing nothing but text mode games by covering the progenitor of the term "Roguelike". Suffice to say, this is where it all started... and even today, the game trolls everyone who tries to play it.
The Kroz series of games probably amounts to one of the best things ever made in text mode and is a big part of what led to the creation of Apogee. It's a shame they're currently not available from the newly reformed 3D Realms website, though I've been told there are plans to bring back some of the really old titles... I wasn't given a timeframe though...
Being able to play games multiplayer with another computer wasn't a very common thing in the early days of modems, mostly due to hardware limitations, but Worthy Opponent found a way around this by making all of their games turn based... even though some of them are action-based games... yeah... it kinda works and kinda doesn't. Also had a friend help with the gameplay footage given the two-player nature of everything. I didn't MEAN to dominate him (as my extremely lucky Backgammon win shows) but he had fun all the same and that's what matters!
It's kinda amazing that a game with a broken design could actually be fun to play. SimCity 2000 is basically everything the first game was but several times better! ...save for power plants blowing up every 50 years.
This game singlehandedly put the artillery genre back in the big picture and has since spawned a massive series of games, each more ridiculous than the last! There's no denying the series' roots though and even today the very first one still holds up fairly well.
Most of the games requiring you to write stuff down in order to succeed were pure adventure or role-playing titles. This game not only requires you to log all sorts of details as you go along on paper, but is also not really much of a game to begin with, more-so a snazzy wireframe engine that the developers didn't really know what to do with and was made obsolete very soon afterwards.
You'd think after covering Doom way back in Season 1 of ADG there'd be nothing to really say about its sequel, given that the sequel is just more of the same... But Doom II really is a very strong sequel to the original, doubling much of the content (except weapons and items) and adding in some great enemy designs. Also, I'm aware those are rockets being fired by the Revenants, not eyeballs. To me, they LOOK like eyeballs and it seems freakier and more in line with the rest of the game that way.
This game is painful. It's painful to watch, painful to play, painful to think about and has painful sound and music. Given that Xargon came not long after this game I have to imagine the guy who made them both really learned a lot from his work on this thing... mind you, Xargon's not all that spectacular of a game but compared to Kiloblaster it's brilliant.
Another World set the bar for cinematic platformer games. It was easy to play, had a very engaging (although short) story, extremely well done vector-formed visuals and a punishing level of difficulty tempered by frequent checkpoints. Many similar games would soon follow with the same underlying design.
This game had the potential to be one of the most technically impressive DOS games ever made, and to an extent it still is, but its excellent gameplay and presentation is marred by frequent glitches and crashes, just like its predecessor but to an even greater degree... all because EA rushed this thing out so they could start making more sports games... Still, the game has a mid-level save feature, so as long as you routinely take advantage of that you can still make ample progress no matter how often the thing brings up DOS4GW exception text.
There's a very good reason why most combat flight simulator programs stick to just a handful of aircraft: Because every single one works exceptionally different from the last. ATF tries to be an all-encompassing program that offers a massive number of aircraft to fly but ultimately feels extremely inferior, even compared to older programs. Doesn't help either that all of the technical data in the program is a couple decades out of date. All that said though, it was fun to tinker with this thing as a kid, but it absolutely did not age well at all.
Yet another game from Access Software demonstrating the technical prowess those guys had when it came to making the backbones for games to run off of. This particular golf game was one of the best for its time with a wealth of extra content available for those who wanted more. It hasn't stood the test of time very well though, although it definitely fared better than Echelon did.
Blake Stone is often forgotten about given that it came out just one month before Doom, but despite that it had a strong showing for what little time it had before Doom hit the scene and obliterated the competition as far as first person shooters were concerned. That said, it's freaking hard and has some of the most ridiculous secrets-within-secrets chains I've ever seen. It also has some rather unique mechanics to help keep things interesting compared to other similar titles.
So what we have here is a sequel to what was a Street Fighter II cash-in game... The result of which is actually fairly impressive as it follows the proper sequel formula of taking the original game and improving upon it, even though the original game was basically a Chinese-themed Street Fighter II with worse controls. This game includes some rather unique features as far as fighting games are concerned, including a strategy aspect which determines which battles you face against who, and a surprisingly large roster of characters for when it was originally released.
This video is directly responsible for my getting seriously involved with pinball. I joined our local pinball league a little over two months later and have been out to almost every league night since. However, Epic Pinball doesn't feel anything like the real thing. In fact, most computerized pinball software doesn't, however as far as overall design is concerned, Epic Pinball is probably one of the best retro pinball programs out there... easily trumped by more modern programs such as Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX 2, but that's a topic for another video.
This game is fondly remembered for a huge number of reasons, not the least of which is the impressive SVGA graphics it's sporting, digitized module music, huge isometric 3D levels to explore, and curious bits of interaction with the environment. The controls are also overcomplicated and the level of difficulty is insane. Plenty of satire scattered throughout this thing too.
Super Mario Kart on the SNES was a hugely influential and popular game, spawning many clones trying to do similar things. Wacky Wheels isn't quite as good as the game it was cloning, but it's still very fun and playable despite its age. It's a good thing no one tried to steal the game engine and make their own far inferior clone! ...right?!
This game shouldn't exist. The only reason it does is because the person who made the game engine for Wacky Wheels accidentally included the source code when he was showing his prototype around to find a company willing to produce his creation into a full game. Thankfully, Apogee turned Wacky Wheels into something special, so it's really easy to forget that this abomination exists.
It's interesting the kind of stuff you can dig up when you go searching. This episode starts off edutainment month showing a trio of REALLY old yet simple DOS games designed to both teach and entertain. Each of them though has some rather unique points of interest, as you'll soon see for yourself!
Lots of people have talked about the original version of The Oregon Trail given the extreme influence it's had on educational gaming, so because I didn't want to be too obvious (and because the very original version is damned near impossible to find legit copies of) I decided to take a look at this updated version from 1996... only to discover it's surprisingly easy to win it compared to the evil, trolling nature of the original.
I never expected to see these games ever again... The original Googol math games were free, but the bonus games had to be ordered. As a result, there are many, many copies of the original games out there and pretty much no copies of the bonus games. Even illegitimate download sites often fail to have these. Then, a fan sent me a legit disk with the Googol bonus games on it and... well... here we are!
Once again, a game showing just how ahead of the tech curve Access Software was, but unlike some of their past games where the tech came first and the gameplay came second, here, the gameplay is pretty solid and while the acting is campy you get a pretty fun story with a lot of strange twists and turns. This is also probably one of the few inventory-based adventure games with a built-in help system to get you out of issues. Just make sure you NEVER touch that help button unless you mean to...
I've had this game since childhood and I loved it back then because it essentially allowed me to make my own "pinball" tables. I put "pinball" in quotes because the physics in this program are beyond terrible as far as real pinball is concerned, but it's to the point where it almost becomes its own thing, so as long as you approach this program as a fun ball-based design system and not as a pinball-emulating program, there's a lot of fun to be had.
The guys at Apogee were keenly aware when making this game that there was no way they could top Doom, so instead of going for something with a serious tone they decided to stand out in a different way: By being as LUDICROUS as possible! Also, random level generator and massive array of multiplayer game modes. This wasn't a "Doom-killer" but it managed to co-exist with Doom surprisingly well given the relative simplicity of its underlying game engine.
3D was such an interesting thing for computers and games to do in the late 80s and early 90s that making a game where all you did was explore a three-dimensional world had merit. Echelon tried this but failed due to being sparse and boring. Castle Master however has colourful visuals, puzzles to solve, and tons of environmental secrets to find.
Typically, space exploration games are more about charting a life for yourself in space. Starflight however is unique in that the exploration itself is the main focus of the game. It was also pushing so many limits that it has some very strange ways of doing things. It's also perhaps the first game I've covered which looks better with composite CGA video output rather than EGA.
This is another instance where I disagree with the majority opinion that this game is good. The story is decent and the graphics are really good. The overall game design however, including puzzle design, controls, technical aspects, and especially the combat system, all could've used a lot more work or fundamental changes. Still, when this game came out, there weren't many other games like it, so that's probably why it's stayed as fondly remembered as it has been despite its many serious flaws.
This game is often dismissed because as far as LucasArts inventory adventure games are concerned, it's one of the least impressive of them all... but it's still a VERY decent game all the same, even if a bit short. The instructions for installing the DOS version from a Windows CD can be found further down in this video description.
I try very hard not to let nostalgia colour my vision when I talk about these old games, but this was probably the hardest game I ever had to look at because from a nostalgia standpoint, this game ranks extremely high on my scale, even though, all things considered, it's just an average game. But still, even an average game can be fun, and you can always judge for yourself based on what you see in the video.
Extremely few racing games are set to the style of the 60's, which puts this game in a league entirely of its own. As a game it's fairly weak, even though it doesn't have any serious issues other than its difficulty balancing, but as a retro nostalgia trip, this thing has the potential to really dig out those old feelings from anyone who has any interest at all in this part of American history.
I was somewhat surprised when I discovered just how detailed this game got with its scripted events... along with the lack of any graphic violence whatsoever. That said, it also has some questionable design choices... It's a unique game for sure, but very hard to comment on.
This game is extraordinarily blunt in regards to what to expect when you're playing it. Heck, it's right in the title! One can think of this game as a more serious Duke Nukem 3D, as though it sits somewhere between that game and Doom in terms of content. That's an extreme generalization of course. Actually, the game stands fairly well on its own accord... for the most part. There are some quirks which are kinda weird though.
This is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played... but at the same time, I fully understand why people enjoy it. Actually, it's really hard to fault a game when it has a fully-functional built-in level editor... at the same time though, when I spend an hour try to get past just ONE level and keep dying because the collision detection is being finicky... yeah...
I've had a LOT of requests to do Star Control II, which is completely understandable given how good that game is, but I'd never played the original and it'd been sitting in my GOG collection for quite some time so I figured it was about time to give it a go and see how the series began... and much to my surprise, it began as a cross between turn-based strategy and one-on-one dogfighting action!
Personally, I feel this final episode for Season 3 of ADG is one of my best, but here's the crux: Jazz Jackrabbit was THE most requested game, having almost twice as many requests as the next-most requested... People absolutely LOVE this game... to the point where some of my referencing and humor actually upset some people and got me quite a number of eMails, such as in regards to the statue reference in the beginning, or the differences in liquor laws between where I live and where this game was actually made. I stand by much of what I said though, not because I'm being stubborn and ignoring the truth of these matters, which I'm clearly not doing as I just acknowledged it all above, but because spotting the things I did makes for a more interesting video! As it stands though, Jazz Jackrabbit is one of the best games ever made in the days of DOS, though I will admit, its sequel on Windows 95 somehow found ways to be even BETTER!
