I’m pretty sure Doom will be the most popular (and my pick too), but I’ll throw a shout-out to Epic Pinball; that Android table was the best one in the game anyway.
My first internet game was a Scorched Earth-inspired game where you’re in space, on planets, with gravity and stuff. I wish I remembered the name of it, it was amazing.
deleted by creator
MY DUDE
Save 5 rounds of cash for a death’s head nuke
Shriek “Now tremble before Thor’s Hammer mortals!” to your friends seated around you
Press fire
Accidentally blow yourself up when the wind pushes it back in your direction 🤡
Spending every lunch hour on the library computer with three friends in 1994 playing this is probably why I didn’t have a girlfriend.
Great game.
Did this exist before or after worms?
Long before
before or after gorilla.bas? i remember there being even old types of this gameplay.
Def after gorilla
Hail to the King Baby (Duke Nukem 3d)
I’m getting flashbacks
One Must Fall 2097
You just heard the lightning strike
So good. I wish OpenOMF matures soon.
The theme song is the shit
Kenny Chou! He also composed Zone 66 which is another awesome DOS game soundtrack.
The .mtm master himself.
Cool, I’ll check it out, thanks for the recommendation! I don’t think I ever played Zone 66.
Man. I love that game. Still fire it up every so often. That sequel was also an early example of just how terrible a sequel can be. So disappointing.
What a banger
Probably Rise of the Triad.
Pretty sure I even bought the full game and never ended up getting very far. I also remember spending a little chunk of time on Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom, but could never figure it out enough to progress very far.
Edit: Another one I was trying to recall, the name was H.U.R.L.
Loved the Hugo games. The jungle one was probably my favorite up to the point where I needed to find out some trivia question about the name of some person’s dog before the time of Internet.
I spent more time with Police Quest, which was similar. I remember trying the Hugo Jungle Shareware multiple times and getting frustrated going back-and-forth, stuck.
Commander Keen!
Jumping around with the pogo stick in Keen 6 was so much fun. I recently found the full game. Was surprised how hard that factory level was. But the music was still how I remembered it.
To me, it was Raptor Call of Shadows, a very nice shmup where you could buy new weapons between missions
ITT: everyone had the same “500 games on two CDs!” Shareware compilation CDs that I had growing up.
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours:
Or we are old enough to remember them the first time around vs reruns.
Jesus, that’s a deep cut.
Oh, I just remembered Castle of the Winds, too. What a great era for games!
came here to post this. my buddy had it and i still play it every couple of years.
I got my ass handed to me by Castle of the Winds when I was a kid. And that doofy-ass default barbarian sprite…
We always called that one Castle Of The Windows, since the entire game engine is constructed of 32x32 pixel Windows icons.
Native Windows UI controls for a game. Classic.
it’s like that Indiana Jones Adventure game.
Castle of the Winds 1 and 2 were incredible!
Wow what a throwback. I feel like i was always getting cursed and poisoned. Now i feel the need to find this game and finish it.
So many great titles in the comments. I’ll add a few of mine:
Jill of the Jungle
Zaxxon
Heretic (Doom clone)
Stellar 7 (can’t recall if shareware or if I just shared it)Heretic was more than a Doom clone, it was developed using a modified Doom engine with the participation of Doom developers. It was a clever game in its own right, adding a lot of fresh elements to the then-budding FPS genre.
All great selections!
I was a fan of all of the Apogee platformers:
Commander Keen,
Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure,
Monster Bash
Also Lucasfilm games:
Loom,
Maniac Mansion
What a great time for PC gaming!
I don’t know if it was their SDK or what, but Epic’s sound design in this era was so good. Jill of the Jungle still stands out to me for that.
Sky Roads, Test Drive 2, Jill of the Jungle, Halloween Harry, Jetpack, so many great games that I played the hell out of their shareware versions.
Oh boy I loved Jetpack and Skyroads!
We used to play Sky Roads on the school computers all the time. Great game.
Avoid the Noid, Raptor, Commander Keen, Epic Pinball, Nibbles
Was that a Dominos pizza sponsored game? I seem to remember “Avoid the noid” was a slogan of theirs.
Yup! There was also “Yo! Noid” on NES
Indeed it was. Despite being mediocre, I played that game extensively. This was before Domino’s Pizza existed in our region - they wouldn’t expand here until a decade later.
“Stars!” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!
A 4X game for Win 3.11 that was set up for multi-player by email and ftp turbo.
Fantastically ergonomic use of early GUI features.
You could design your own alien race and ships, the default races were well balanced, but all played very differently.
Colobot - don’t think it was “shareware” but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.
Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)
I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.
Jazz Jackrabbit always crashed out on my 486 D: I wanted to play it so badly.
Oh, would’ve been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters’ soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn’t handle it.
It would be some time before I was gifted an Acer Aspire with dedicated graphics and a busted screen that I could play 1NSANE again
I’ve been playing some Jazz Jackrabbit and Duke Nukem 1, they are both great. I think I prefer the design of DOS games to the design of console games.
