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?