My sister sent me a link to an article in Mental Floss where they picked out ten items from a recent addition to the Internet Archive: a large collection of MS-DOS games. Excitement! Recently I’ve started playing video games a bit – escape and match-3 games, to distract myself on the elliptical machine or rest my brain – but before recently there was a long gap, and before that DOS games are pretty representative of what I was playing.
The organization of the games leaves a little bit to be desired; you can sort them by title, views, date, or creator, and you can search, but you can’t, say, jump to a particular letter of the alphabet. My M.O. was to gradually scroll down so the “infinite scroll” made all the entries visible and then peruse at my leisure, with some find-in-page searches. I clicked through to anything that seemed familiar or interesting, which meant under 10% of the total, but that was still a lot of games.
Some notes on the emulator: Be patient with DOSBox. It takes its time, but in general does load eventually. Of course, not all of the implementations worked well. Nothing I tried that requires a mouse functioned well enough to play, for instance – the in-game and out-of-game pointers would be misaligned in the browser, and in full screen mode the in-game pointer would lag or double my clicks. I had trouble with other games because they relied on processor speed and hence were too fast in the emulator. Frogger, for example, has to cross a strip consisting of one continuous turtle.
And, of course, not all of them panned out as worth including, so now we’ve cut our original 2301 results down to ten of our own.
The very first game I tried was Moria, a simple RPG rather similar to the one I hope to make to learn PHP. My sister has no recollection of it but it seemed very familiar to me. I died quickly – into the dungeon and whoop! dispatched by a kobold – but this is one game I see myself returning to.
We had a number of Sierra games when I was growing up, nearly none of which (assorted King’s, Space, and Police Quests) are in this archive. We did have the ever-tacky Leisure Suit Larry, which I tried to play with just as much (read: little) success as originally (1 point, killed by a mugger; 1 point, flattened by a car). The only other game which I think I may have played in this exact version is Wheel of Fortune, which is entertaining as a brief trip into the past, but I’m thinking that even at the time its appeal must have been largely novelty.
As someone with a small collection of artificial intelligence books, I clicked right through to Racter, a conversation program used to write the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed. It’s amusing but definitely more of historical interest.
For your arcade pleasure, I liked Beyond Columns (though I didn’t know how to rotate the symbols within the columns the first couple of games: K or 5). In that you have three-symbol columns falling from the sky and you have to place them to three or more symbols line up horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Those symbols will disappear, and like Tetris, the point is to keep the stack from reaching the top of the screen for as long as possible. I should probably note that I played on the second-easiest setting and it was still quite… perky, so it probably is another game relying on processor speed, saved only by having many difficulty settings.
Actual Tetris is also available, of course, though it makes for poor playing unless you have a number pad. Doing a find-in-page for “tris”, at least once you’ve made all the entries visible, will net you many clones (though not Nyet, which is a good one). Dig Dug and Burger Time both work reasonably well (though I have no idea what the goal of Dig Dug is), and you can find many versions of Pac-Man of varying quality; do a find-in-page for “pac”.
Finally, The Quest of Kwirk’s Castle is a puzzle game that had a sibling available for GameBoy, Kwirk the Chilled Tomato. You have to move boxes and revolving doors and sometimes push the boxes into water to provide crossing. While I could have used an undo command, this one holds up well. I would love to know how to trigger backspace to restart the level (none of the something-delete key combinations worked) but hitting escape and clicking down to the level you were on isn’t a huge impediment.
Is that ten? Well, perhaps I cheated. The only ones I’m likely to play again are Moria, Beyond Columns, and The Quest of Kwirk’s Castle. Three’s plenty for me, though.
DOS logo by Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay.