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: 2) by Immerman on Saturday September 11 2021, @02:30PM (2 children)
I loved almost all those (missed a few), but there's a few gems I still go back to play - MoO and MoM in particular aged really well , graphics aside, and "Civ with magic" grossly undersells MoM: separate tactical combat that was clearly the inspiration for Age of Wonders. The joys of inducting new races with wildly different strengths into your empire (and army - trolls super-healing and resurrection made them incredible infantry). And of course a parallel universe world map reachable through well-guarded portals.
But no mention of my all-time favorite: System Shock. The only first-person game of that era that I've continued revisiting across the decades. A contemporary of Doom, but far more "cerebral", I'd say far better than Half Life in that regard, though the engine was more like a really advanced Wolfenstein with support for 3D props, bridges, and looking up and down. Wonderful story and gameplay, the joys of inventory management and creating strategically located supply caches, and the eventual addition of a 3rd-party mouse-look hack eliminated the biggest shortcoming to enjoyment by us spoiled modern gamers. Really hoping Nightdive Studios manages to actually finish their remake, and does a decent job of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 11 2021, @10:12PM (1 child)
Master of Magic was a lot of fun, but it was also pretty easy. Turning up the difficulty made the early game harder but the later game was still too easy. By the time you got the portal to the underworld open, you pretty much couldn't lose.
Of course, strategy games today still have this problem of the easy late game!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 12 2021, @03:12PM
True. Though you could make things more interesting by intentionally hobbling your wizard's growth potential during character creation.
More effectively, there was eventually a third-party mod that enabled hot-seat multiplayer. And I think there was another, much later, that enabled online play as well.