SB Recommends MSDOS Games

Alien Legacy
- CubaLibre: I was obsessed with this game called Alien Legacy that was in essence a 4X but was really a hugely ambitious hybrid game. You had to manage the personalities of your advisors, build stations and colonies SimCity style, manually fly your ships around to discover stuff on planet surfaces… No idea how it would hold up today.

Arcade Volleyball (also on: Amiga, C64)
- a_new_duck: I think about this game a lot.

Big Red Racing
- The Blueberry Hill: A racing game with several vehicle types that's a real good time over a network. Spent a lot of time playing this at school when I was supposed to be studying computer animation; a choice I do not regret.

Helious
- VirtualClint: An utterly baffling looking game that actually is fairly simple. You play as a balloon that must deflate to move. If you deflate too much you die. If you fill up with too much air at a pump you die. And some areas can only be gotten through by deflating to a smaller size on purpose. That said, there's so much going on graphically that I was never able to figure out if I was doing something wrong or not. So much information, so little of it valuable.

Hexen (also on: MacOS, N64, PlayStation, Saturn, Windows)
- meauxdal: why is this game so cool? it's also bizarre and i get stuck not too far in every time. love it anyway. much more ambitious than the more low-key heretic (which is more or less doom with a different aesthetic).

The Labyrinth of Time (also on: CD32, Amiga, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows)
- meauxdal: my favorite adventure game. don't spend your only quarter on the fortune teller.

Lemmings 3D (also on: PlayStation, Saturn)
- meauxdal: i really like this game even though it is difficult to control and the camera is a pain. it's quite bold and very difficult (to me at least).

Little Big Adventure / Relentless: Twinsen's adventure (also on: Android, FM-Towns, IOS, PC-98, PS) - forum thread
- misadventurous: Twinsun is is, i think, a unique setting in videogames: a cartoon fantasy world where the struggle between good and evil is expressed with very modern, real-world imagery. The goofy, storybook looks of its natives jar with unmistakable scenes of oppression & despotic rule. Armed soldiers guard barbed-wire covered ferry checkpoints; robotic clones patrol the streets, looking for people to shoot at or chuck into jail. Twinsen, the hero, is a fugitive from justice, an enemy of the government. In every town, on every island, he is at risk of being imprisoned, or even killed. should he be captured, it's The Man himself who shows up to slap our hero across the face, in a clever, cartoon exaggeration of government interrogation.
- Brooks: Really wonderful soundtrack (rare excellent use of synth-horns), and the actual pacing of events is nigh perfect, I can't think of a single section that dragged or felt redundant. At the time I also recall being legit terrified of certain enemies like the higher tier robot animals and those skeletons in the Temple of Bu; Twinsen's lack of mobility had much to do with this.

Little Big Adventure 2 / Twinsen's Odyssey (also on: Windows)
- HarveyQ: It's really imaginative and charming. A little bit clunky, but man! Getting your wizard diploma, going to the Moon, going to the alien planet… it has a real sense of adventure and scope. The first game is even clunkier but lovable for the same reasons.

Loom (also on: Amiga, FM-Towns, MacOS, ST, TG-CD, Windows)
- gary oldman dwarfism: I finished Loom. I wish I'd played it as a kid, so I could really like it. Talking birds? An anvil city? No inventory? Puzzle design so spare that it's nearly impossible to get stuck? Short enough to finish in a day, switching off with my cousin? AND there's a spellbook of my very own to fill out? Sign 1995-me up! I would totally take this over King's Quest 7 or Mixed Up Mother Goose. But now, it's too linear, too simple, and over too fast. Well, and the ending that's nearly a giant TO BE CONTINUED….. sign, with no sequels. There also doesn't seem to be much reason to go through it again on other difficulty levels.
  It's still fairly beautiful, though more childishly cartoonish than I'd expect from LucasArts (Hetchel's portraits, mostly). I might grab some of the landscapes for backgrounds. Oh, and Chaos vaguely resembles the Head of the Navigator, especially those slight grins.

Mixed-Up Mother goose (also on: Amiga, Apple II, FM-towns, ST, Windows)
- LaurelSoup: It's like a chill fetch quest King's Quest for new readers. It was the cool thing to play at the public library when you didn't want to deal with Carmen Sandiago.

Nahlakh
- T.: Another one that opens with the ambush of the [player characters]. Meshes the world design and lovely CGA graphics of ultima v with a detailed combat system influenced by the wizard's crown and gurps (locational damage! no exp!)

Nascar Racing (also on: Mac)
- meauxdal: an amazing game that somehow still holds up. papyrus in general was a fantastic studio.

Star Control 2 (also on: 3DO)
- Broco: GOTY 1992 for me as well. But, I agree with your criticisms. Ships have jerky turning behavior, making it easier to over/undershoot targets, and the camera likes to unpredictably flip to a totally different perspective. SC3 made both of these things gradual and smooth, and that's the one place where it's an improvement over SC2. But the SC2 way just takes some getting used to and it's fun, in fact the jerky turning becomes part of the tactics of it (you can squeeze between enemy turn increments).
  I don't think SC2 combat is particularly “unfair” either, I'm not sure what you're complaining about exactly there. Sometimes the battle starts with both ships very close to each other, but you just have to be aware of that possibility and you can take advantage of it as much as the enemy can.
  Aside from these details though, SC2 still stands up really well as an ambitious game successfully fusing together many different scopes in a way that still today few games either try or succeed at doing. You've got freeform exploration, RPG development, excellent sci-fi writing, and live-action battles, all cohering together to give you the whole awesome space-captain experience. It's like Mount & Blade in space and with a well-written story.

Stunts / 4D Sports Driving / 4D Driving (also on: Amiga, PC-98)
- vamos: I played the DOS version. It has a brilliant track editor with loads of weird glitches / exploits. Hours of fun setting up tracks that launched the car high into the sky.

Syndicate (also on: 3DO, Acorn, Amiga, CD32, Jaguar, Mac, Mega Drive, PC-98, SNES) - HG101 article
- Bennett: Easily the best Peter Molyneux game, and the model for a whole line of Western-made realtime tactics games.
- The Blueberry Hill: You're best going for the Syndicate Plus version (Amiga/PC), which includes the expansion American Revolt.
- meauxdal: the game is fundamentally terrible because you can't see what you're doing when you're inside buildings. meanwhile the music, the cutscenes, the concept and, the overall aesthetic are excellent.

Warlords II Deluxe (also on: MacOS}
- meauxdal: briskly paced fantasy-themed conquest-oriented turn-based strategy game with some minor RPG elements (you can explore ruins for items which upgrade your heroes, which in turn grant benefits to their stack of units). the frame of reference re: scale is small country instead of continent (probably arguable, actually, depending on how you interpret the scale), which makes the maps feel just sprawling enough. unbelievably fun in hotseat play. when 3 heroes offer to join you in one turn and your friend still just has their starter hero things will get dicey. keep this in mind before you lose all your friends and loved ones to warlords rage.

Zone 66
- Hojules: […] always stood out for being a sort of free roaming SHMUP style of play, plus a fucking great soundtrack, The intro music is one of those tunes I can always pull out of my head ever since I first heard it.

SB Recommends MSDOS Games

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