SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Sunday September 12 2021, @01:42AM
If they're going to go up to 1996, Magic Carpet was out in 1994 for DOS and is tremendous fun. Flying over big, deformable 3D textured outdoor landscapes was pretty impressive on the hardware of the day. They used fogging to reduce the draw distance and I liked the way that looked and the castle that you could gradually fortify was great. It was quite an addictive game even though (or perhaps because) the core gameplay was pretty simple and a bit repetitive. I always found it kind of amusing that according to the plot you're supposedly restoring the worlds to "equilibrium" by killing off all the rival wizards and their creatures and taking all their mana for yourself! It's like a satire on human civilization.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?