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Wiki for 3-Demon is here.

Download 3-Demon here. It's a 19 kilobyte download.

Let me join your rant.

GK3 was the worst offender. Not only did you have to be at the right time at the right spot with little indication given. It also had the worst puzzles(and also some great puzzles). Having to molest a cat to get a fake mustache for your Mosley costume must be the worst thing ever done in an adventure game.
The only adventure that ever did the real time thing right was The Last Express which sadly has to be the best game nobody ever played. But even that had its fair share of problems. Putting an action sequence into an adventure game is propably lost on your audience. Fighting on the roof of a train may be fun in a fighting on the roof of a train game but not in an adventure game. Some did it right(you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon) and some did it wrong(the kneel down sequence in Indiana Jones 3 springs to mind).

But the worst puzzles were those that referenced popular culture. In Day of the Tentacle you had to scare off a couple of morons. What you had was white paint and a black cat sitting on a fence. A friend of mine is from Romania and it took a couple of highly educational Pepe le Pew cartoons to explain to him why painting a white stripe on the back of a black cat was the obvious choice to do things.

It's the cultural equivalent of why none of us old farts will ever get why painting some obnoxious kid's hair orange and gel it into a spiky mess will scare off bullies. Kamekamehaha...whut?

I very rapidly understood why adventure games are best played with a walkthrough. And it is best to consult it only when needed. Being stuck was the worst thing that could happen to you. Being stuck because youd didn't pick up something at a place you can't get to anymore was even worse. And that is what never happened to you in Lucasfilm Games adventures and that was also something that made them awesome. That and you very rarely got stuck. And they were great fun. And they sometimes even made you think. They had great atmosphere. And diversity. They sent you on tropical islands, the afterlife, who knows where(Loom was odd), the future, the past, on a bike, on a zeppelin and even Atlantis(which would have been the better choice then looking for alien glass skulls)


Sadly they fell victim to the Doom clone craze and continued to produce rehash upon rehash of the least cerebral game concept since shooting gallery shareware was invented. Only with light sabres! And Jedi! Yay!
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/shooting-gallery/

I'm sure 10,000 other Slashdot geeks are falling all over themselves to reply, but you can play Keen in minutes for free simply by downloading DOSBox and then getting the game from one of the many DOS gaming download sites like this one. Just about everything that ran on DOS is either abandonware or public domain now. Welcome to emulated retro gaming!

Try this

Anyone else remember this game? Came out same time as Descent, but I found it to be quite more enjoyable.

Ok here we go, first wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(computer_game)
Then for source http://rogue.rogueforge.net/
and for windows (or dos) users, the original pc port http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/176
and lastest development as at 2008 http://www.freewebs.com/drussell/ClassicRogue.htm

I've been playing this game for nearly 20 years since my cousin introduced me to it on an old 286, scary thing is it still runs fine today under windows xp. Long live x86 I guess. And I still haven't beaten it...

Ah, great memories. I also have fond memories of EGATrek, which had almost the same game mechanics but updated EGA graphics. Ran great on my Amstrad PC1640.

The greatest game that's less than a meg. http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/144

"the original Duke Nukem 3D"

Say what?

This is Duke Nukem 2:

http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/dnukem2.gif

Does anybody have a picture of the 'Original(c)'?

Even the little DOS game Sopwith Camel by David Clark, was network capable (1986):
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/127

This little game still works!

probably

instead of a thumbstick controller on a gamepad, they don't include a thumb-sized trackball

Back to mice as a control device ... I think back to Freelancer. Now, most space combat games have been best played with a joystick (with a hat if the game let you slide to the side like Descent did (and though you were underground, it still played like a space combat game)), but Freelancer was different. It let you control your spaceship with a mouse in a reasonable way in an arcade-like setting, and it was wonderful -- all because they decided that the weapons were on a controllable turret rather than just pointing straight ahead from your ship (and since your ship is massive, it can't be turned as quickly as your mouse moved.) It just worked ...

It's a well-known fact that the Xbox and Xbox 360 excel at first-person shooters. This is no surprise, given the FPS-friendly controller design.

I've been playing FPS games on PCs since The Catacomb Abyss came out. And I recently got an Xbox (the original) and have tried it for a while. And let me say that the Xbox does NOT excel at FPS games. It does OK, but it does NOT excel. Having two analog joysticks does work nicely in that it lets you run and shoot in different directions, which worked very nicely in MechAssault (which is a 3rd person shooter, but it's close), but it wasn't perfect.

Basically, the ideal contoller for a FPS is a mouse and keyboard. I'm aware of nothing better at this time, though the keyboard could be replaced with a better keypad of some sort. The mouse lets you zoom right in on a guy's face quickly and fill it full of lead (or plasma, rockets, etc.) To make controllers like the Xbox's work well with a FPS, generally they either add auto-aiming (you get close to a guy, and the target jumps right to him, like in MechAssault) or they slow the game down so quick aiming isn't so important. And head shots? Auto-aiming kind of defeats the purpose ...

I haven't played the Xbox 360 so I can't really comment on it, but considering how similar the controller is, I doubt it's much better. On the plus side, the controllers are straight USB (the Xbox 1 also used USB, but with a custom connector) so maybe some games will actually support using a mouse and keyboard. I'm pretty sure the Dreamcast had some games that would support that ...

Of course, on the other hand it's hard to play a mouse/keyboard game while siting on your couch. ...

I played this game back in the day on my trusty PS/2 Model 30.

I think every other Duke Nukem version after this one was gilding the lily.

No need for a drive :-)

The Catacombs game must be older. Look at its credits--it was written by id software, and it features a Wolf3D engine but in 16 colors. http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/3

I wonder if a Christmas theme would be so bad? It worked for Lemmings. :)

I drove Drivey after an hour long commute in my BMW.

Know what?

I prefer the BMW! #1 reason: Predictable body roll physics. I turn the wheel left, and the car follows. Not so in Drivey, where I turn the car right, and the horizon tips over to the opposite side. Does Drivey think it's a boat?

Drivey has fine acceleration however, and I dig the everlasting twilight/dawn.

It reminds me a lot of the Ford Simulator that existed in the oldenne days (1987). Not as much instrumentation, but who really needs a tach or speedo anyway?

I am confused on two points.

(1) The list is 99 entries too long.

(2) Paratrooper is not on there.

Cheers for the link, i'll have a look at this :O. Oooh also, another classic. Along the same kind of lines as Monkey Island is Sam and Max dosgamesarchive.com. Hilarious!

I clicked on that link. Saw a source comment with 'Ken S.' on it.

Sure enough, Ken Silverman (of Duke3D/Build fame) wrote it.

DOS...

=Smidge=

... Prince of Persia?

You're welcome.

...you should teach ZZT OOP.

Here ya go...

Anybody remember Abuse?

I remember the game ran really fast on a 486DX100. It had the end of stage game save like console games -- unique for the time. Anyone know if it runs under DOSEMU?

A friend and I wrote a 1st person perspective view Pacman-like game back in 1982-1983.

While the Human PacMan site is slashdotted, you can sate your appetite for dots by playing 3-Demon. -Rick

You mean Hocus Pocus? That game was passing fun, but it had some issues where you could get yourself stuck, because special effect potions would run out before you got to where you needed to be unless you ran there.

Yeah old games rock.

I've just got an old Toshiba laptop real cheap and it came win DOS. I've been replaying all sortos of old games from dosgamesarchive and other sites. I've rediscovered DOOM and Quake and Sam & Max hit the Road and Warcraft and sh!tloads of others...

Man old games were (are?) cool. :)

Gamespy site with classic ROMs and emulators.

Some old DOS games.

More recent games at Kev's Classing Gaming.