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I also, for the longest time, thought that "Miscellaneous" was just a fancy term for medicine, since that's primarily what I equated to the "miscellaneous" category of supplies.

While part of me is interested in playing Oregon Trail again, I think I'd much rather play Gato ; the first game to really hook me.

Action Biker signifies a depressing trend to link grotty software with expensive advertising campaigns. Let's kill this off instantly by refusing to buy such garbage.

Software like this gives junk food a bad name.

It was revolutionary in its ability to combine both single-player and multiplayer gameplay in ways that satisfied many different users; it was revolutionary in its marketing strategy (E1 was shareware; the rest was only $40, which was still less than most games at that time); and it had the right market timing.

(not as apparent in Doom, but in D2 and Heretic when you can look up)

You mean Heretic and Hexen. Doom 2 did not have look up/down.

Descent, AFAIK, was the first *real* 3D game, and it ran on 486s with 8M of ram;

The first real 3-d FPS game I saw on PCs, was Continuum by Data East. It ran on 386s with 640 KB of RAM. It came out in 1990, 3 years before Doom or Descent.

Descent may have had better 3-d graphics, but Doom had better textures and better gameplay, especially for single-player, and at the time, not everyone had networking or even modems, so good single-player gameplay was critical.

Why is he sticking with DOOM, of all things?

Ease of editing? Doom familiarity? Doom fan base?

I played this for hundreds of hours on the SNES.

The stealth fighter was revealed to the general public before the gulf war, they even had a really good game that was released during or before the war.

It seems to me that the adventure gaming genre pretty much died when 320x240 went out of style.

Once King's Quest 8 went to 640x480 hi-color, that series went downhill, with Space Quest coming soon after.

For anyone looking to return to the low-res days, though, do some searching for abandonware. A great place to start is The Gaming Depot.

It's a great game.

-Jade E.

It was released in 1994 (I'm picky maybe, but I KNEW it was earlier than 95) and is available:

for purchase at http://www.spun.com/games/browse-date.jsp?platid=2 &page=15

and for download at http://www.gamingdepot.com/Masterorion.htm

underdogs
Abandonware Oasis (has a search engine) The Abandonkeep Gaming Depot
DOS Graveyard Adult Games - Plenty of jerkables here

As I mentioned in an "Ask Slashdot" I submitted the other day but was never posted, there are other old games that a lot of people would love to see open-sourced. For example, Darklands, the 1992 Microprose/SSI RPG of medieval Germany. It was originally supposed to be part of a larger set of games, but Microprose never got around to doing the sequels. It was buggy at first, but in many respects was far ahead of its time; people are still playing it today.

But even though the game itself is no longer sold, and even shows up on abandonware sites for people to download, its source is still locked away in Microprose's vaults, doing no conceivable good to anyone. Writing to support@microprose.com hasn't done any good, though people have been trying for eight years.

Any thoughts?

Checking those links right now, I see that Underdog's is currently down for maintenance, but I recommend checking them periodically as it is one of the best sources of quality old software. Note that while abandonware is not always sanctioned by the companies who originally created the games, most abandonware sites make an effort not to provide games that are still being marketed or whose manufacturer's request that the games not be made freely available. If you hold extreme negative views regarding what constitues software piracy then you may want to stay away from abandonware. I can't speak for The Gaming Depot, but Underdog always honors requests from game manufacturers requesting removal of games.