Marking the start of Season 3 of ADG, Descent II seemed like the perfect choice. It's everything a sequel should be: More of the same gameplay but with added new features and all new content. Descent III actually followed this same line of logic too, but since it's a Windows game it's never shown up on the show. (Not against doing a filler of it someday though!)

This fighting game is almost a contender for a game that's so bad it's good... almost. It just needed to be a bit more playable and not have a vertigo-inducing camera zoom feature enabled by default. Actually, the game really does feel like they just put a whole bunch of pieces together without really planning it out.

This episode marks the first gifted game to be covered on ADG, soon to be followed by even more. Quest for Glory is an interesting hybrid of RPG and Adventure gaming elements, where many situations have multiple solutions. Just don't try sticking your lockpicks up your nose... really bad idea...

This is an odd case of a game that feels more like something out of the demoscene than as a fully fledged game, especially given the extremely strange display resolution it runs at and the digitized music. Definitely intended to be played two-player though, despite having to play the game for an incredibly lengthy amount of time just to unlock everything.

You typically wouldn't expect a licensed game to set the bar, but Star Trek 25th Anniversary is one of the best inventory adventure titles out there, even if the puzzles can be a bit trial-and-error heavy at times.

I'm still not so sure what's so "aqua" about this particular Breakout clone, but at least it has a boatload of powerups and powerdowns to collect. So many in fact it has a special indicator to help you determine which ones you should collect and which you should avoid.

Although the notion of making cinematic games wasn't anything new when Wing Commander was originally released, combining this with a fully-featured space shooter was a stroke of brilliance. It's just too bad the game hasn't held up so well on the technical side of things over the years.

I still swear that there were birds chirping in the background despite it happening through my computer's MIDI support. This game is absolutely massive as far as its story is concerned and is based on the popular Riftwar Saga written by Raymond E. Feist. It's also incredibly challenging, meaning you won't simply sit down and beat this thing in a day or two... especially when you're me and suck at strategy games.

Complete coincidence that Pushing Up Roses released a video on this exact same game just two days prior to my video going live! Also, this thing hurt my soul. Let us never speak of it again after you're done watching this video... ...granted, you could always give Roses' video a watch too.

This was one of the last commercial games released for DOS and it really shows as it has all the trappings of an early hardware accelerated game. In fact, the game actually has hardware acceleration support, though at the time I was trying to play this thing emulated on an outdated 2 GHz system which could barely record anything properly outside of DOSBox, so I had to stick to software rendering for this video. As for the game... well... it kinda speaks for itself.

Was still having to get settled after the move back at the end of April in 2013, so for all of May I was making smaller videos than usual on simpler games. As for this particular game... well... it sure goes by enough names...

A friend and I (mostly him) once came up with this ludicrous idea when we were still teenagers about making a game where you mow the lawn. Little did we realize we weren't the first people to come up with that idea... ...TBH though... mowing the lawn is one of the worst concepts for a video game. I think the only chore which could possibly be worse would be hand-washing dishes, and even then I'm not entirely convinced it WOULD be worse.

If you ever thought mixing The Legend of Zelda and The Adventures of Lolo together would make for an epic game... then you're either deluded or one of the guys who worked on this game. Actually, truth be told, it's not all that bad, but you really have to be able to tolerate overhead action and puzzle gameplay simultaneously to be able to get anywhere. Also, be prepared for some ridiculous humour!

Given that this is one of the hardest platformers out there you'd think people would hate it, but this game's incredibly zany and offbeat humour, combined with fairly solid gameplay, made it liked by all... even people who couldn't get past that freakin' underwater section... Actually, TBH, this is one game where you probably want to stick with the Sega versions. This DOS port is still a fun game, but it's a poor port, if that makes any sense... you'll see what I mean.

This is one of those games that makes me hate the notion of "popularity" sometimes. It is extremely fun, exceptionally well made from a technical standpoint, has a ton of content, and earned glowing reviews from the publications of the time... yet because of how expensive it was to make and its lukewarm popularity, as was common for Looking Glass titles, it never recouped its cost to make and thus the sequels they had planned never materialized. This game SO needs to get a sequel someday.

I began a month of doing nothing but text mode games by covering the progenitor of the term "Roguelike". Suffice to say, this is where it all started... and even today, the game trolls everyone who tries to play it.

The Kroz series of games probably amounts to one of the best things ever made in text mode and is a big part of what led to the creation of Apogee. It's a shame they're currently not available from the newly reformed 3D Realms website, though I've been told there are plans to bring back some of the really old titles... I wasn't given a timeframe though...

Being able to play games multiplayer with another computer wasn't a very common thing in the early days of modems, mostly due to hardware limitations, but Worthy Opponent found a way around this by making all of their games turn based... even though some of them are action-based games... yeah... it kinda works and kinda doesn't. Also had a friend help with the gameplay footage given the two-player nature of everything. I didn't MEAN to dominate him (as my extremely lucky Backgammon win shows) but he had fun all the same and that's what matters!

It's kinda amazing that a game with a broken design could actually be fun to play. SimCity 2000 is basically everything the first game was but several times better! ...save for power plants blowing up every 50 years.

This game singlehandedly put the artillery genre back in the big picture and has since spawned a massive series of games, each more ridiculous than the last! There's no denying the series' roots though and even today the very first one still holds up fairly well.

Most of the games requiring you to write stuff down in order to succeed were pure adventure or role-playing titles. This game not only requires you to log all sorts of details as you go along on paper, but is also not really much of a game to begin with, more-so a snazzy wireframe engine that the developers didn't really know what to do with and was made obsolete very soon afterwards.

You'd think after covering Doom way back in Season 1 of ADG there'd be nothing to really say about its sequel, given that the sequel is just more of the same... But Doom II really is a very strong sequel to the original, doubling much of the content (except weapons and items) and adding in some great enemy designs. Also, I'm aware those are rockets being fired by the Revenants, not eyeballs. To me, they LOOK like eyeballs and it seems freakier and more in line with the rest of the game that way.

This game is painful. It's painful to watch, painful to play, painful to think about and has painful sound and music. Given that Xargon came not long after this game I have to imagine the guy who made them both really learned a lot from his work on this thing... mind you, Xargon's not all that spectacular of a game but compared to Kiloblaster it's brilliant.

Another World set the bar for cinematic platformer games. It was easy to play, had a very engaging (although short) story, extremely well done vector-formed visuals and a punishing level of difficulty tempered by frequent checkpoints. Many similar games would soon follow with the same underlying design.

This game had the potential to be one of the most technically impressive DOS games ever made, and to an extent it still is, but its excellent gameplay and presentation is marred by frequent glitches and crashes, just like its predecessor but to an even greater degree... all because EA rushed this thing out so they could start making more sports games... Still, the game has a mid-level save feature, so as long as you routinely take advantage of that you can still make ample progress no matter how often the thing brings up DOS4GW exception text.

There's a very good reason why most combat flight simulator programs stick to just a handful of aircraft: Because every single one works exceptionally different from the last. ATF tries to be an all-encompassing program that offers a massive number of aircraft to fly but ultimately feels extremely inferior, even compared to older programs. Doesn't help either that all of the technical data in the program is a couple decades out of date. All that said though, it was fun to tinker with this thing as a kid, but it absolutely did not age well at all.

Yet another game from Access Software demonstrating the technical prowess those guys had when it came to making the backbones for games to run off of. This particular golf game was one of the best for its time with a wealth of extra content available for those who wanted more. It hasn't stood the test of time very well though, although it definitely fared better than Echelon did.

Blake Stone is often forgotten about given that it came out just one month before Doom, but despite that it had a strong showing for what little time it had before Doom hit the scene and obliterated the competition as far as first person shooters were concerned. That said, it's freaking hard and has some of the most ridiculous secrets-within-secrets chains I've ever seen. It also has some rather unique mechanics to help keep things interesting compared to other similar titles.

So what we have here is a sequel to what was a Street Fighter II cash-in game... The result of which is actually fairly impressive as it follows the proper sequel formula of taking the original game and improving upon it, even though the original game was basically a Chinese-themed Street Fighter II with worse controls. This game includes some rather unique features as far as fighting games are concerned, including a strategy aspect which determines which battles you face against who, and a surprisingly large roster of characters for when it was originally released.

This video is directly responsible for my getting seriously involved with pinball. I joined our local pinball league a little over two months later and have been out to almost every league night since. However, Epic Pinball doesn't feel anything like the real thing. In fact, most computerized pinball software doesn't, however as far as overall design is concerned, Epic Pinball is probably one of the best retro pinball programs out there... easily trumped by more modern programs such as Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX 2, but that's a topic for another video.

This game is fondly remembered for a huge number of reasons, not the least of which is the impressive SVGA graphics it's sporting, digitized module music, huge isometric 3D levels to explore, and curious bits of interaction with the environment. The controls are also overcomplicated and the level of difficulty is insane. Plenty of satire scattered throughout this thing too.

Super Mario Kart on the SNES was a hugely influential and popular game, spawning many clones trying to do similar things. Wacky Wheels isn't quite as good as the game it was cloning, but it's still very fun and playable despite its age. It's a good thing no one tried to steal the game engine and make their own far inferior clone! ...right?!

This game shouldn't exist. The only reason it does is because the person who made the game engine for Wacky Wheels accidentally included the source code when he was showing his prototype around to find a company willing to produce his creation into a full game. Thankfully, Apogee turned Wacky Wheels into something special, so it's really easy to forget that this abomination exists.

It's interesting the kind of stuff you can dig up when you go searching. This episode starts off edutainment month showing a trio of REALLY old yet simple DOS games designed to both teach and entertain. Each of them though has some rather unique points of interest, as you'll soon see for yourself!

Lots of people have talked about the original version of The Oregon Trail given the extreme influence it's had on educational gaming, so because I didn't want to be too obvious (and because the very original version is damned near impossible to find legit copies of) I decided to take a look at this updated version from 1996... only to discover it's surprisingly easy to win it compared to the evil, trolling nature of the original.

I never expected to see these games ever again... The original Googol math games were free, but the bonus games had to be ordered. As a result, there are many, many copies of the original games out there and pretty much no copies of the bonus games. Even illegitimate download sites often fail to have these. Then, a fan sent me a legit disk with the Googol bonus games on it and... well... here we are!

Once again, a game showing just how ahead of the tech curve Access Software was, but unlike some of their past games where the tech came first and the gameplay came second, here, the gameplay is pretty solid and while the acting is campy you get a pretty fun story with a lot of strange twists and turns. This is also probably one of the few inventory-based adventure games with a built-in help system to get you out of issues. Just make sure you NEVER touch that help button unless you mean to...

I've had this game since childhood and I loved it back then because it essentially allowed me to make my own "pinball" tables. I put "pinball" in quotes because the physics in this program are beyond terrible as far as real pinball is concerned, but it's to the point where it almost becomes its own thing, so as long as you approach this program as a fun ball-based design system and not as a pinball-emulating program, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The guys at Apogee were keenly aware when making this game that there was no way they could top Doom, so instead of going for something with a serious tone they decided to stand out in a different way: By being as LUDICROUS as possible! Also, random level generator and massive array of multiplayer game modes. This wasn't a "Doom-killer" but it managed to co-exist with Doom surprisingly well given the relative simplicity of its underlying game engine.

3D was such an interesting thing for computers and games to do in the late 80s and early 90s that making a game where all you did was explore a three-dimensional world had merit. Echelon tried this but failed due to being sparse and boring. Castle Master however has colourful visuals, puzzles to solve, and tons of environmental secrets to find.

Typically, space exploration games are more about charting a life for yourself in space. Starflight however is unique in that the exploration itself is the main focus of the game. It was also pushing so many limits that it has some very strange ways of doing things. It's also perhaps the first game I've covered which looks better with composite CGA video output rather than EGA.

This is another instance where I disagree with the majority opinion that this game is good. The story is decent and the graphics are really good. The overall game design however, including puzzle design, controls, technical aspects, and especially the combat system, all could've used a lot more work or fundamental changes. Still, when this game came out, there weren't many other games like it, so that's probably why it's stayed as fondly remembered as it has been despite its many serious flaws.

This game is often dismissed because as far as LucasArts inventory adventure games are concerned, it's one of the least impressive of them all... but it's still a VERY decent game all the same, even if a bit short. The instructions for installing the DOS version from a Windows CD can be found further down in this video description.

I try very hard not to let nostalgia colour my vision when I talk about these old games, but this was probably the hardest game I ever had to look at because from a nostalgia standpoint, this game ranks extremely high on my scale, even though, all things considered, it's just an average game. But still, even an average game can be fun, and you can always judge for yourself based on what you see in the video.

Extremely few racing games are set to the style of the 60's, which puts this game in a league entirely of its own. As a game it's fairly weak, even though it doesn't have any serious issues other than its difficulty balancing, but as a retro nostalgia trip, this thing has the potential to really dig out those old feelings from anyone who has any interest at all in this part of American history.

I was somewhat surprised when I discovered just how detailed this game got with its scripted events... along with the lack of any graphic violence whatsoever. That said, it also has some questionable design choices... It's a unique game for sure, but very hard to comment on.

This game is extraordinarily blunt in regards to what to expect when you're playing it. Heck, it's right in the title! One can think of this game as a more serious Duke Nukem 3D, as though it sits somewhere between that game and Doom in terms of content. That's an extreme generalization of course. Actually, the game stands fairly well on its own accord... for the most part. There are some quirks which are kinda weird though.

This is one of the most frustrating games I've ever played... but at the same time, I fully understand why people enjoy it. Actually, it's really hard to fault a game when it has a fully-functional built-in level editor... at the same time though, when I spend an hour try to get past just ONE level and keep dying because the collision detection is being finicky... yeah...

I've had a LOT of requests to do Star Control II, which is completely understandable given how good that game is, but I'd never played the original and it'd been sitting in my GOG collection for quite some time so I figured it was about time to give it a go and see how the series began... and much to my surprise, it began as a cross between turn-based strategy and one-on-one dogfighting action!

Personally, I feel this final episode for Season 3 of ADG is one of my best, but here's the crux: Jazz Jackrabbit was THE most requested game, having almost twice as many requests as the next-most requested... People absolutely LOVE this game... to the point where some of my referencing and humor actually upset some people and got me quite a number of eMails, such as in regards to the statue reference in the beginning, or the differences in liquor laws between where I live and where this game was actually made. I stand by much of what I said though, not because I'm being stubborn and ignoring the truth of these matters, which I'm clearly not doing as I just acknowledged it all above, but because spotting the things I did makes for a more interesting video! As it stands though, Jazz Jackrabbit is one of the best games ever made in the days of DOS, though I will admit, its sequel on Windows 95 somehow found ways to be even BETTER!