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https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-best-vga-dos-games-period
Every major computing platform has, in terms of gaming, something special about it. The color palettes, the sound hardware, the storage mechanisms, the available keyboards and joysticks... they all lend flavor to the games developed for each system.
The sound of a Commodore 64. The funky colors of a ZX Spectrum. The pure black and white of the early Macintoshes. All wonderful in their own ways.
But DOS gaming... it might just be the most amazing of all. Especially the period of time from the early 1990s through to about the mid-1990s. VGA graphics. Sound Blaster audio. Lots and lots of 3.5" floppies (with the occasional CD-ROM).
And the games... Oh, my. So many games. Bajillions of them. While there were a lot of stinkers (counting them is as futile as counting the grains of sand on the beaches of the world), the great ones were truly spectacular.
Nay. Life changing.
What follows are what I consider to be the 10 best DOS games that capture that "VGA plus Sound Blaster" aesthetic. These are presented in chronological order... purely because ranking them any other way made my brain explode.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by rcamera on Friday September 10 2021, @08:08PM (1 child)
i owned the entire map in sim farm, exclusively strawberry plots, set up automatic everything (auto-sold futures, auto-cropdusting and auto-maintenance), watched the dollars increase, and left it running overnight.
next morning, i'd rolled the 32bit number. was ~1.5billion negative and increasing.
i was able to wrap my head around commodity futures because of that game. well done.
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(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday September 12 2021, @11:39AM
Oh yes Sim Farm! Your comment got me laughing and I had to tell my wife next to me, she didn’t get the 32-bit reference so I explained it but she wasn’t anywhere near as impressed.
I used to always go the strawberry farms too.
Great game.
I saw a comment above about Mod music. I used to use I think Fast Tracker II and open random files until I found game music. I also used to make music and ripped off the instrument samples from other music files to build up a library. I made better music than what you hear these days from big name hip hop artists and I was just mucking around. Like, more complex, interesting, and difficult to make. I guess being aware of that feature of music is why I’m a lifetime big fan of The Chemical Brothers.
Had sourced a Gravis Ultrasound board from somewhere after a while, that was cool.
I also used to (after my mate showed me) use Xtree Gold to open saved game files, view the hex and find the value of the points/money/gold/experience value, then up it by an order of magnitude or two, save then open the game. Most of the time it worked. I remember hacking the original Warcraft a lot that way. Fun times.