Submitted 4 days ago by Zombiepirate@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world
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 FPS and an excellent one. Sooo many hidden rooms and insane enemies.
Apogee was on fire during that whole era
I’ve been trying to remember the name of this game for ages. Thank you!!!
Such a gem… Oh go on then, I will revive my dosbox and play it all evening. You’ve twisted my arm :-P
I spent so many hours as a kid on my dad’s Thinkpad playing Gravity Well. It came on one of those “50 Great Games” CDs or something like that. The goal is to claim all the planets in the system, which you do by simply landing on them, then building defenses against your opponents. It’s so much fun because your ship has pretty realistic inertia and the planets have actual gravity wells. The AI opponents can be quite difficult and aggressive. Challenging and fun, with great sound effects for the time!
This screenshot is from an Internet Archive page for the game, but I’m pretty sure it’s only the shareware version. I gotta check again when I get off work!
I forgot all about this game! My go-to strategy was to attack freighters from the other factions while they were in flight and force them to change sides. My space pirate empire was unstoppable!
Yes!! And you could kind of cheese the game by pressing both fire buttons in rapid succession (down arrow and ‘d’ I think). I loved making passes around an enemy’s planet and staying just ahead of their defenses, and becoming basically an A-10 Warthog in space. It was kind of difficult since your bullets inherited your velocity so you had to shoot at weird angles 😁
That sounds fantastic, I might have to give it a shot.
I played a lot of TetriNET and Subspace Continuum with my old online community. Great times.
I could not for the life of me get my head into the classic version of subspace. Buuuut Trench Wars was sick AF especially when the server admins set up Zombies! Events on the weekends.
Oh I’d forgotten about Subspace; what a classic!
Jesus, that’s a deep cut.
Pinball Fantasies, Raptor, Heretic
Doom, Wolf3d, and Castle of the Winds
Oh my god… epic pinball! I had completely forgotten about this!! Thanks for that hit of nostalgia =)
The music is just as great as you remember.
brave dwarves 1
The graphic design looks so much like Spelunky. Cool!
Realmz
I was always struck by the similarity to the blue robot on that table to Cyborg from Rise of the Robots and I wonder if there was some cross-pollination there.
He’s actually based on the genie from Aladdin
Jazz Jackrabbit, Jetpack, and Combat Tanks.
I played a lot of 2 games that nobody I’ve spoken to has ever heard of: Mordor the depths of dejenol Exile escape from the pit Both were great, I think exile had been remade by the programmer with a different title too
There was a Mordor 2 shareware as well. The game never got a full release but laid the foundation for Demise: Rise of the Kutan (2000). The rights to the game were sold to Decklin and they released expansions Ascension (2016) and Revenge of the Tavern Keeper (2024). Demos for Demise and the expansions are available at www.decklinsdemise.com
Wow, that’s awesome, thanks!
We had to be memory experts back then. QEMM FTW!
There was some bootleg Tetris game I played the hell out of, because it ran on my shitty hand-me-down 286 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives & no hard disk.
Monster Bash! It was one of the better-playing platformers on the PC back in the day and I loved the halloween aesthetic.
Quake
Comanche: Maximum Overkill, the very first game to use VOXELS, the FUTURE of PC GAMING!
Don’t remember the name of it but it was a Geometry Wars style shooter where the playing field would tilt as you moved. Played a ton of that game.
BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
I think this question just fried my brain. I don’t even know where to start.
Most played shareware of all time though was probably Transport Tycoon.
Horrabin@programming.dev 3 days ago
Was It shareware? Didn’t know it!
I’m still enjoying It with OpenTTD www.openttd.org
BlueSquid0741@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
The original Transport Tycoon was distributed as shareware, would have been 95 or 96 when I was playing it off a shareware disc.
Not sure if TTD got a shareware release too, but i got that one as a retail boxed version.
But for 94 or 95 if you didn’t have a shareware version then your game was pretty much doomed.