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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @08:49PM (2 children)
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Lemmings, Privateer, X-wing, Tie fighter, Dark forces, Syndicate. I don't know if these count, cause these already had accelecation and stuff but Quake and last, but best of the best, Interstate '76.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @10:24PM (1 child)
Quake is the dividing line between the games of the 90s and what became modern gaming. It originally came out in a DOS version with only software rendering, and would run - barely - on a 486. But it quickly evolved into a 3D accelerated game (the first serious one) that was primarily played in multi-player form, over the Internet (the first serious one). It's not a stretch to call it the most significant game of all time.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday September 12 2021, @11:47AM
I agreed but then I remember when a mate got a Pentium 150 and overlooked it to 187MHz, which was insane for the time but the 150 was a beast. And we played Interstate ‘76 heaps on it, I think he might have had some Voodoo card too. I thought that was the first real 3D game for me.
My neighbour got a Pentium 100, this was a bit earlier so that was a wicked processor at the time, and we played the first Need For Speed endlessly on that. I managed to get it going on my 486SX-33 but it was slow as. I think it was about 20 x 3.5” floppies all arj-ed to multiple 1.44MB images.
But yeah this is 95-97 from memory.