90s PC Gaming Poll, Episode I: A Question of Vengeance (1990-1994) - NOMINATIONS thread - deadline Nov 15

the console poll series' sloppier shadow!

this is PART ONE of ILX's poll of the decade that took us from commander keen to quake iii arena. planning to interleave these with will m's terrific console generations polls, so the 1995-99 sequel won't run until after the next one of those, and of course after you have sent me a check or money order for $29.95.

nominations will continue for about a month, assuming our civilization persists. this is a huge field, covering all games originally released between jan 1990 and dec 1994 for DOS, Windows 3.x, Apple IIe, C64, Amiga, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, whatever.

half a decade is, of course, an arbitrary division of an arbitrary division, but if you prefer your world to make sense, some things to think about:

1990 saw the introduction of windows 3, the discontinuation of the ZX Spectrum, the first mouse-driven ultima (VI), the first VGA king's quest (V), and the first wing commander (I). it was the first year since 1980 not to see the release of an infocom text adventure. the period of this poll covers the ascension of VGA, the birth of sprite-scaling 3D (wing commander, ultima underworld, wolfenstein), the beginning of the CD-ROM era, DOOM, myst: the surrealistic adventure that will become your world, high lucasarts, 829579324892 apogee games, etc.

cross-platform games will be nominated only once, except in specific cases (can think of none offhand at 1 AM HST) where significant differences exist between versions.

expansions, level packs, etc., will be combined with their parent games.

socialists, feminists, and justice warriors/mages/rogues of every description are enthusiastically invited to occupy and hopefully annex the poll. we are not the PC master race we are the PC rainbow coalition. this virtual machine kills fascists.

nominate away! view-only spreadsheet here which i will try to keep current. going to bed now tho.

superhero league of hoboken

Ah yeah! I'm down with this.

also, how are we doing release dates? cosmology of kyoto was released in japan in '93, in the us for mac in '94, and for windows in '95.

original country / earliest date, so CoK (great game -- well great something) is '93. this will cause anomalies around the cutoff -- i def didnt play CoK until at least 1996 -- but o well.

fuck yeah, these are my gaming coming-of-age years

as i think i said somewhere else on here recently, the pace of invention in these years was really staggering

MARATHON

Just makes the cutoff — 21st December '94.

oh fuck yeahhhhh, this is gonna rule big time.

now typing up a list of major obvious heavy-hitters (for me anyway)

Any other Amstrad CPC 6128 owner here? For now everything that comes to mind seems to be from the late 80's.

as a spectrum owner i enjoyed a bitter rivalry with my best friend over his amstrad ownership

Betrayal at Krondor (aka Raymond E. Feist's etc) (1993)
Civilization (1991)
Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood (1991)
Commander Keen VI (aka Commander Keen in Aliens Ate My Babysitter) (1991)
The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992)
DikuMUD and derivatives (1991)
DOOM (1993)
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)
Lemmings (1991)
Master of Magic (1994)
Minesweeper (Microsoft version) (1990)
Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire (1990)
The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
SimCity 2000 (1994)
Star Control II (1992) aka The Ur-Quan Masters (1993 port)
UFO: Enemy Unknown aka X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)
Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (1992)
Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)
WarCraft: Orcs & Humans (1994)
Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991)
Wolfenstein 3D (1992)

Oh, and

Alien Carnage aka Halloween Harry (1993)
Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
Hexxagon (1993)
Loom (1990)
Raptor: Call of the Shadows (1994)
Scorched Earth (The Mother of All Games) (1991)

Turrican
Rick Dangerous 2
Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O'Fun
Pang
Shadow of the beast
The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants
Strider II
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles

great list, doc - i'd have picked a lot of those myself

here's a few more:

cannon fodder (1993)
the chaos engine (1993)
sensible world of soccer (1994)
beneath a steel sky (1994)
dune ii (1992)
syndicate (1993)
indiana jones and the fate of atlantis (1992)
monkey island ii (1991)
skidmarks (1993)
super stardust (1994)
pga tour golf (1991)

Doctor Casino's post above already contains most of the games I enjoyed during this period. I guess I can add:

Eye of the Beholder (1992)
Might & Magic: World of Xeen (1994) <- possibly cheating, but I never actually played Might & Magic 4 and 5 individually so this is all I know
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)

I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff

Kinda surprised how many things I think of as early 90s games actually squeaked in in '89. Populous and Prince of Persia especially feel like they belong with the above.

Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993)

Day of the Tentacle (1993)

d'oh, of course those should both be on the list

Championship Manager '93 (1993)

Alien Breed (1991)

Cadaver (1990)

never seen 'cadaver' before. looking at youtube, i would have been all over this in the early 90s.

it was a delight. i know it has been discussed at decent length somewhere on ilx

fucking hell, i forgot all about cadaver!

Legend aka The Four Crystals of Trazere (1992)

I think all my predictable Lucasfilm favourites are already listed, so, please may I have:

Speedball 2 (1990)

(and yes re 1989/90 confusion, was going to nom Xenon 2 but that was 1989)

I'll be back later, probably to nominate some of those 829579324892 Apogee games, some other platform games that were probably not even very good examples of the art, a text adventure that nobody else on ILX has ever played, etc

I really liked the Cadaver demo but then PC Format said it was the worst Bitmap Bros game yet and I was at the age where I believed all reviews to be 100% true so I've never played the full thing

I almost nominated Gods but then I realised it was kinda boring and I only liked the music (the theme song which John Foxx was something tenuously to do with)

Speedball 2 (1990)

a thousand times yes to this one

the 'ice cream!' sample from this still swims unbidden into my consciousness every now and again

Spaceward Ho! (1990)
SimAnt (1991)
Spectre (1991)
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (1991)
Hellcats Over the Pacific (1991)
Panzer General (1994)
Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994)
System's Twilight (1994)

Probably doesn't deserve votes but I would feel like a traitor to my family if I did not name:

Return to Zork (1993)

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)

Worlds of Ultima 2: Martian Dreams (1991)

Another World (1991)
Myst (1993)
Curses (1993)
The Incredible Machine (1993)

Been waiting for this poll to come round.

Master of Orion (1994)
Railroad Tycoon (1990)
Star Wars: X-Wing (1993)

Nahlakh (1994)
Ancient Domains Of Mystery (1994)
One Must Fall: 2097 (1994)
Thexder 2 (1990)
System Shock (1994)
Castles (1991)
Druglord (1991)
Jones In The Fast Lane (1990) (this was an enormously underrated multiplayer game)

Never cared for Duke Nukem or Kroz but they had titles in this period
Origin really was MVP of this era, huh, Sierra kind of blew it

was going to nom Xenon 2 but that was 1989

I guess you have to draw the line somewhere, but damn. Wonder how many of my early period Amiga faves will miss the cutoff.

Is there a previous era poll I either missed or have forgotten about?

not yet but i am planning to double back! wanted to do this period first out of selfishness and to more or less align with the console poll. but '89 favorites will get their turn. there aren't a lot of clean ways to do this unfortunately.

compiling platform info for everyone's noms so far, will actually put stuff in sheet later today. v exciting response thanks yall!

Simon the Sorcerer (1993)
SkyRoads (1993)

This is sort of Sierra's New Jersey period. All those VGA-era, mouse-driven games were stunners at the time, but have mostly not aged well as games. As many observed at the time, the mouse interface takes away a lot of the mental energy one could expend on these...as frustrating as the text parsers could be, you certainly felt more like you were doing something when you worked out the solution to a puzzle... versus "click on the tree and the game decides for you that what you're doing is climbing the tree to look under the nest to find a key." The VGA remakes of a couple of earlier titles in particular laid bare the problem.

Anyway, very few of them seem as robust as the immediately preceding generation of late-80s, late-EGA games (QFG1, Conquest of Camelot, Colonel's Bequest, even King's Quest IV is pretty good IMO). Some are basically as tolerable as their predecessors (which is to say that Police Quest III sucked about as much as Police Quest I-II). I didn't even bother nominating KQV, it's really a poor entry in the genre in terms of puzzle design, character, the much-vaunted "story," everything. It's essentially a remake of KQ II, which was already the flimsiest and most seams-showing entry in the series. Also noteworthy how poor the world-building was - KQV's just makes no sense at all with this big town, some wilderness with miscellaneous unrelated obstacles each screen, then desert. KQVI just does the lazy thing of "five different, disconnected and arbitrarily themed islands." I will say that besides the bugs and some dull stretches, the third and fourth Quest for Glory games do manage to have a little bit more going on, and despite its serious flaws I am all about Dagger of Amon Ra. LucasArts games are much, much more tonally consistent and absorbing even if the veneer of Gen X ironic distance sort of flattens out the differences between characters (and games, to an extent). They're pretty much all great.

Original Duke Nukem shareware is pretty dull key-finding platformer stuff imho. It's fine but not really better or worse than Secret Agent, etc. Figured I'd either vote for original Commander Keen (which basically nails down the genre after the promising but not really fun Captain Comic of '88) or the best of those Apogee titles, which I think is probably Keen VI.

Are there any other worthwhile FPSes from this period, besides Wolf and DOOM? I'm not going to be the one to nominate Heretic or Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (god what a title).

Under a Killing Moon (1994)

Are there any other worthwhile FPSes from this period, besides Wolf and DOOM? I'm not going to be the one to nominate Heretic or Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (god what a title).

Rise of the Triad? I don't know, I didn't really play it much, I remember some people liking it. For me, nothing came close to DOOM and DOOM 2 and I didn't really waste much time playing other FPSes up until Duke Nukem 3D was released.

I remember ROTT being just kinda ugly and flavorless, and maybe also having a movement/control feel that just didn't feel right after DOOM. Can't remember if you moved too fast or too slow or what. Agreed though, I mostly goofed around with shareware of all the DOOM clones and then just fell deeply, deeply in love with Duke 3D (one for the next poll).

Also now wondering if should have nommed DOOM II instead of DOOM - I think the sequel is the more complete experience, with the full range of monsters and the Super Shotgun adding to the fun. Also the soundtrack just completely rules, and the level design is (mostly) more interesting and memorable. OTOH I'd hate to see vote-splitting between them, and the first one has both the sense of being a watershed smash 'event' in gaming, and most of the great OMG moments and set-pieces, especially the unveiling of the big bosses.

ROTT was awful, and I remember my friends making such a big deal about it but it was a Wolf engine in the year of Doom iirc

Marathon I'm told is the best FPS of this era but I've only played a few levels

Doom and Doom 2 single-player were so obliterated by their successors (Hexen and Dark Forces were infinitely superior imo (both 1995)), I wonder if I could vote for Doom 2-multiplayer although at the time it really required nerds hauling towers for LAN parties to actually create an experience that could compete with so many other games of this era

i had considered combining doom and doom 2, because nowadays i think we'd call doom 2 an expansion pack, and because the new netcode and LAN support in 2 was also retroactively applied to 1 (tho not the super shotgun). open to this if enough doom voters would prefer it this way.

that leaves final doom as the "no i really like THESE maps" 95-99 vote.

otoh doom is going to have lots of votes and maybe splitting would teach it some humility

Btw re: Jones in the Fast Lane - I sort of mocked this a minute ago but it's worth at least playing once or twice. A decidedly odd twist on Game of Life themes, and not exactly the most thrilling, otherworldly gaming experience... but the basic mechanics, given a totally different skin, could probably be a moderate hit web game in 2016. Maybe you're a pirate or space captain or something. Basically you're balancing limited moves per turn with a longer list of things you want to do - very trusty bones for a game there. Of course, it's multiplayer solitaire, but that could be fixed too.

I wonder if I could vote for Doom 2-multiplayer although at the time it really required nerds hauling towers for LAN parties to actually create an experience that could compete with so many other games of this era

i used to play with a long serial cable stretching across the house and connecting two computers together. had lots of fun doing deathmatches and co-op using this method.

shame about the 1994 cutoff, Dark Forces came out in 1995 and is probably the first best post-DOOM fps. ROTT was ok but the maps were too maze-like, DOOM series had wonderful level design.

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles

i had this game. HATED it. the PC one right? you know it is a broken game, literally impossible to beat.

stunts
secret weapons of the luftwaffe

I can definitely see Marathon picking up a bunch of support from those brave enough to follow the appropriate wave of "no this Mac is a competitive gaming machine". Which would be good, as it's the best FPS by some distance.

Wonderland (1990)
Hunter (1991)
Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (1991)
Knightmare (1991)
The 7th Guest (1993)

I guess I was still involved in my Amiga during this time but I've played a serious amount of games from Abandonware on dosbox lately, so might be able to bring something to this table.

anyone using a comprehensive list to remind themselves what came out or just trying to remember?

ultima: worlds of adventure 2: martian dream (1991)
alone in the dark (1992)
lands of lore: the throne of chaos (1993)
sid meier's colonization (1994)
conquest! 2.1 (1994)

have mostly hazy memories of pc gaming from this time - while the snes was hooked up to a tv in my playroom our only computer was in my dad's home office and thus all the games on it were ones he wanted to play himself. there are a few titles ive gone back in played but i dont have much first-hand nostalgia for anything except commander keen, which i played with real fervor one summer.

sorry, a lot of edutainment but a lot of the bigger games have been mentioned and also i was 6 in 1990

Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994)
Theme Park (1994)
Visual Star Trek (1990)
Life and Death 2 (1990)
Gobliiins 1 (1991)
Mixed Up Fairy Tales (1991)
Spellcasting 101 (1991)
Super Munchers (1991)
Amazon Trail (1992)
Codename: ICEMAN (1992)
Echo Quest 1: The Search for Cetus (1992)
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (Enhanced) (1991)
Battle Chess for Windows (1991)
Neuromancer (1990)
Mario Teaches Typing (1992)
Oregon Trail Deluxe (1992)
Spellcasting 201 (1992)
Battle Bugs (1993)
Caesar (1993)
Dinopark Tycoon (1993)
Eric the Unready (1993)
Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993)
Jazz Jackrabbit (1993)
The Settlers (1993)
SimFarm (1993)
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1993)
Eagle Eye Mysteries (1993)
Eagle Eye Mysteries in London (1994)
SimTower (1994)

Meanwhile on Macintosh

Pax Imperia (1992)
Mission: Thunderbolt (1992)
Crystal Crazy (1993)
Marathon (1994)
Maelstrom (1992)

Robosport (1991)

Did Transport Tycoon come out in this period? I remember Railroad Tycoon (this period sees the isometric version as opposed to the weird but interesting earlier one?) as well, and Myst. Wasn't clever enough to get Myst but used to like going on it. Genuine sense of, uh, mystery.

Went back to TT recently using the current free version, OpenTTD.

There's still a chunky niceness about clicking to place track and roads, but even the availability of new formulas to create demand and supply, and new graphics to do real-life locomotives and more realistic looking coal mines etc, and trams, doesn't change the fact that you can't do things like shunting cars around or build up and break down bigger trains at local yards to be sent long distance. You make a train up out of cars in your depot and it goes to a series of locations of your choice on repeat but it's basically stuck in a solid state.

And in fact it rewards you for sending unit trains around carrying one commodity from source A to destination B, which is semi-realistic for coal but bollocks if we're talking about finished goods. You can just about make a local run but it'll cost you in-game money. You don't ever get to build (and have to think about the placement of) functioning water towers, ash pits, coal bunkers and machine shops to service your locomotives. Second half of the game, from 1950 onwards, really suffers from this lack of detail as the diesels also lack the visual flair of the steam locomotives. If the shunting mechanics were there to justify the existence of RS1s and NW2s or if you had to build sandhouses and fueling points this wouldn't be such a problem.

In other words it holds out the promise of being a top-down railroading simulator but ends up being a business simulator. Trenchant commentary aside, still something fascinating about simulation games.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

i haven't played a lot of star trek games but this is definitely the most star trek one i've played, canon afaic (it probably is canon)

The Search for Cetus

LOVED THIS. LOVED THIS. can't remember why.

shame about the 1994 cutoff, Dark Forces came out in 1995 and is probably the first best post-DOOM fps.

agree, but dark forces is so good and takes doom-style mazey level design to such heights, partic in the detention center level, that i think it easily bests quake and quake 2 as single-player experiences and am comfortable pitting it against half-life (a ride).

Did Transport Tycoon come out in this period?

1994 -- but the "deluxe" version, featuring (reading from wikipedia here) unidirectional as well as bidirectional signals (this sounds key!) came out in 1995. everybody is gonna hate me when this is over i guess.

Dinopark Tycoon (1993)

this of course was my tycoon game.

Yeah it allowed you to set up double track mainline without fear of something deciding to come down the up track and cause a head-on collision. Which is alright I suppose. You still couldn't do the proper crossover system you get on a real mainline, where the direction of traffic on a given section of track is not set in stone but subject to needs and timing (i.e. fast passenger trains routed around slow freight trains by passing briefly on to the other track so not stuck behind them).

How did dinopark play out?

Operation Stealth aka James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair (1990)
Super Off Road (1990)
Escape From Colditz (1991)
Heimdall (1992)
Sabre Team (1992)
Shadowlands (1992)

played a lot of the amiga port of Smash TV but feels like a weird inclusion here

dinopark was great. breakable tho - if you went into an auction every time you went to your balance sheet the bid was automatically raised. when i figured this out i gave myself all the money and bought all the things.

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (Sierra, 1991)
Quest for Glory (Sierra, VGA remaster 1992)
Quest for Glory III: Wages of War (Sierra, 1992)
Secret Agent (Apogee, 1992)
Space Quest V - The Next Mutation (Sierra, 1993)
Epic Pinball (Epic Megagames, 1993)
Magic Carpet (Bullfrog, 1994)
Heretic (iD Software, 1994)
Wacky Wheels (Apogee, 1994)

Magic Carpet is a great DOOM knock-off I completely forgot about! the same year Descent came out as well but i found it very boring comparatively.

Wacky Wheels is a near-perfect Super Mario Kart knock off. there was so much great shareware out in the early 90s.

oh whoa surprised nobody (inc me) remembered magic carpet until just now. adam otm, that was the answer to "are there any good shooters". DOOM knockoff is selling it short i think (tho it is also a good way to think about it; it's def part of the post-DOOM wave). it has so many weird features that yr average FPS (or arcade flight game) would assume were beyond its ken: base-building, destructible terrain (still seen as a big deal in games from the 2000s, or 2010s), basic resource collection/management, a spellbook with serious shit (volcanoes, etc) in it. my dad (my dad is a software engineer) was not partic interested in video games by the time i was interested in them but that was an exception; it always impressed him and we used to deathmatch.

my apogee platformer pick is prob crystal caves, which is almost indistinguishable from secret agent but less beholden to representations of anything vaguely real. i didn't play much cosmo's cosmic adventure but it seems like it could have fans; at least it had a gimmick. hocus pocus was one of the prettier ones but its gameplay was generic even for apogee. for a long time i had a memory of realms of chaos as a cut above but it showed up on GOG a little while ago and i didn't have any fun with it.

How did dinopark play out?

dinopark had this great juxtaposition of entrepreneurial mundanity -- decisions about bathrooms, parking, advertising, feed prices, fencing, etc -- with the part where you buy dinosaurs. however, its being nominally for kids prevented it from featuring the horrific carnage that would have made this friction complete.

A few more:

Gods(1991)
Formula One Grand Prix ( the Geoff crammond one) (1992)
Frontier: Elite 2 (1993) ( shame FFE missed the cut as that was the one I played the hell out of)
Robocop 3 (1992?)
Flashback (1993)
Another World / Out Of This World (1992)

(purple kush,white rhino,afghan,ak47,sour diesel,white widow,panama red and g13)

man microcomputers used to have the coolest names

The thing is, I could actually use some purple kush,white rhino,afghan,ak47,sour diesel,white widow,panama red and g13 at the cheapest rates. Oh well.

Bargames (Accolade, 1989)
Sharkey's 3D Pool (Aardvark, 1989)
California Games 2 (Epix, 1990)
Arctic Adventure (Apogee, 1991)
Blues Brothers (Titus, 1991)
Falcon 3.0 (Spectrum Holobyte, 1991)
The Games: Winter Challenge (Ballistic, 1991)
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker (Virgin, 1991)
Lemmings (Psygnosis, 1991)
Alone in the Dark (Infogrames, 1992)
Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge (Magnetic Fields, 1993)

Oops, scratch the '89 ones

"oh whoa surprised nobody (inc me) remembered magic carpet until just now."

who the heck had a computer fast enough to play it?

i did! it came bundled with my blazing-fast apricot pentium 75 system. i didn't actually like it much as a game, although i thought it was super-beautiful

#braggin1994

Rampart (1990, Atari)

i've played so little from this generation, i think we first got a pc in... '96? really not long afterwards at all, but maybe the advent of windows 95 presented the pc as a bit of a blank slate? i dunno. anyway, gonna have a list that is just 1. x-wing.

i have played magic carpet, and it's fun, but i remember finding the controls very very difficult.

This period is kind of my homeland, as far as gaming goes - mostly for the Amiga. Don't think I got a PC until 96 or 97. I'll try to think of stuff (though so much has already been mentioned). Did anyone mention the always controversial Frontier?

i thought about including frontier but i'm still slightly traumatised from buying it when it first came out. i'd wanted to play it forever and then when i got it, it ran like shit on my amiga 600 and i was devastated :(

for some reason i've always remembered a sub-head from a frontier review, i think from amiga power, which read 'elite was pretty fronty but elite 2 is frontier' and i thought was hilarious

can I get a ruling on Rainbow Islands on the Amiga (1990)? original arcade version was 87.

Darklands (1992)

hired guns (1993)

Magicland Dizzy (1990)
Spellbound Dizzy (1990)
Fantastic Dizzy (1991)

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1990)

Ishar: Legend of the Fortress (1992)

Magic Carpet was a lot of fun, though I didn't really get to play it until years after it was released (I had a demo when it was released, but it was really slow on a 486). One of the weirder things I remember about it was that you could change the display to be in stereogram (i.e. magic eye) mode. It was basically impossible to play this way, but I spent a lot of time trying. So much free time back then.

can I get a ruling on Rainbow Islands on the Amiga (1990)? original arcade version was 87.

― legitimate concerns about ducks (Noodle Vague), Friday, 14 October 2016 13:52 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a good point - are we strictly speaking about games on IBM compatible PCs here or do all personal computers count?
( Rainbow Islands PC was apparently 1996!)
( I happen to think Rainbow Islands is just about perfect so I would be happy for it to be included )

i had looked up rainbow islands for amiga and from what i saw it was 1989 but i just went with the first thing i saw, may be wrong

D/Generation (1991)

Amberstar (1992)
Castle Master (1990)

Some more if we're including ST/Amiga classics

Fire and Ice
Flood
Leander
Killing Game Show
Harlequin
Mega lo mania
Kick off 2

I think all the computer ports of Rainbow Islands bar C64, Speccy and Amstrad are 1990 or later. (Spectrum was probly my most played version but Amiga was prettiest and I'm pretty sure I tried beating it on acid one time)

From wiki:

1987 Arcade
1988 NES
1990 Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum
1993 SEGA Master System, TurboGrafx CD
2001 Game Boy Color
2005 J2ME

(which is basically what NV said already, soz)

sweet. in that case, i nominate Rainbow Islands (1990)

"oh whoa surprised nobody (inc me) remembered magic carpet until just now."

who the heck had a computer fast enough to play it?

― fat fingered algorithm (rushomancy), Friday, October 14, 2016 5:09 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

never had much trouble running it! i think it was up there w DOOM in being a fast smooth optimized 3D experience. there were lots of 3D games then and most of them ran like crap. things like Blake Stone or Ultima Underworld didn't even hold up on the same hardware, or it's choppy, etc. Magic Carpet was always pretty smooth sailing.

I thought this was later but ace game:
Blackthorne(1994)

nominations will continue for about a month, assuming our civilization persists. this is a huge field, covering all games originally released between jan 1990 and dec 1994 for DOS, Windows 3.x, Apple IIe, C64, Amiga, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, whatever.

Battle Chess is a good pick - in a way it sums up this era: well-established game, given a boost with lush (if sloooow) VGA sprite animation. Obviously, real chess heads would tire of the novelty fast and switch back to THE CHESSMASTER (tempted in part, no doubt, by the wonderful bearded wizard on the cover, and god did they ever get their money's worth out of that photo shoot).

The flipside of this trend is that Quest For Glory I remake (like the KQI and SQI remakes), which I really feel weird about having in the poll... but maybe only because the original game would easily be in my top five for an 85-89 poll. I found the screenshots of the remake in the Sierra magazine/catalog tempting for sure. Just seems, idk, like voting for the Star Wars special editions in a poll of great 1990s sci-fi movies. But if it's the one you played at the time, I totally get it!

I played all the shareware versions of all the Apogee platformers. They were great time-passers with Nick at Nite running in the background in my childhood basement. As a rule I think they all felt like they were trying too hard to deliver a cool iconic mascot (I think this came up in the "poochies of 90s platforming" thread), after Commander Keen kinda lucked into something genuinely idiosyncratic and cute. I think another thing those games struggled with was getting a sense of weight or materiality - a common trait of knockoff platformers where running over an item just makes it instantly disappear and add to your inventory. Looking at footage, I think Cosmo's overcame this with some nice little sparkles every time you pick something up - a smart swipe from Sonic I believe. I still think the best version of the formula is the second half of the Keen franchise. (1-3 were basically the equivalent of DOOM's three episodes, viz. shareware, 4-5 were shareware-plus-registered, and 6 was standalone but with basically the same engine as 4-5. Looking at footage online, I'm surprised to rediscover that they were from that sad AdLib era where the music was very nice MIDI stuff, but the sound effects are still PC-speaker and very annoying...

Recommended viewing for anyone who didn't experience this era firsthand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAt_OKfjS3E

the Commander Keen games were quite fun. they weren't insanely memorable though and i have a hard time remember which one i played.

Quest For Glory VGA remake was the first one i had played. it was fun and entertaining enough but those Sierra games didn't grab me like the more linear Lucasfilm ones. i did love the ending confrontation with the wizard. btw there is a great VGA remake of Quest for Glory II available for free:

http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/qfg2/homepage/homepage.html

Battlechess, yes that game is great, those kill animations were just terrific

iirc Quest for Glory VGA lost the text parser and replaced it with point + click SCUMM-esque parser? i think it lost a lot making that shift.

It's the KQV mouse engine, yeah. A particular loss in this series was switching to dialogue options chosen from a list (a la Monkey Island or Ultima VII), rather than having to think for yourself, "hmmm, maybe the sheriff might know something if i were to ASK ABOUT BRIGANDS."

never played QfG but in general I think dialogue is where I missed text input least of all. So much typing "say bandits" "ask mayor about bandit" and then it turns out an hour later that you actually needed "tell mayor about brigands" and also you're stuck because right at the start of the game you never thought to ask the first NPC about some abstract concept that would have made them hand you the Dagger of Instant Dragon-Slaying

also I'm afraid I only skimmed your long post y/day (sorry) and have now actually read it:

after the promising but not really fun Captain Comic of '88

oh, I loved Captain Comic! tho the first level of CC is p boring; I'd say it livens up later on but my memories of it are def more of a sedate/frustrating exploration game than a thrilling arcade adventure so, eh, OK, I guess you're right after all

This is sort of Sierra's New Jersey period. All those VGA-era, mouse-driven games were stunners at the time, but have mostly not aged well as games.

Anyone got any thoughts on the Dynamix titles of the time, e.g. Heart of China, Rise of the Dragon? Screenshots looked stunning and they got good reviews but I don't hear much about them now.

^ games I wanted but have never played. I did get Willy Beamish and Freddy Pharkas but WB was no real fun and I'm p. sure FP would be horrible to my adult self

Of Dynamix's titles, not counting the action stuff like A-10 Tank Killer and Nova 9, I played Heart of China and Willy Beamish. They were interesting in that they were basically Sierra games without a "house style." They were definitely very good-looking, in particular the backgrounds; the character animation in Beamish hasn't dated well, particularly the linework. The attempt at a Bart Simpson-esque rapscallion that would rope in both young and adult players is probably a little hamhanded. It also has serious, serious problems with dead-ending (much worse than most of these titles IIRC) and a bizarre time-limit based system where you really can't fuck around at all. The Adventure Gamer blog (generally a tough read given its writers' tendency towards summary and overworded humor, over analysis) does give a clear sense of this as they keep having to save and reload trying to nail a 'perfect' run at the game's various days. I guess that counted as getting your money's worth back then but IMO it's a better game to look at than to play and I've never felt the urge to revisit it.

HoC has some similar problems (maybe not as bad), plus Orientalism; OTOH you get some kinda okay action minigames. I never played Rise of the Dragon or David Wolf: Secret Agent, which looked (and were marketed as) "adult" or at least PG-13-ish.

As for the text-based dialogue system, YMMV - - - to me the conversation/investigating stuff was a huge part of the game and really made it feel longer and more substantial. Good way of handling lore, too, where you can kinda dive deep with ASK ABOUT SHAPIER and other stuff not related to the game currently at hand. Partly though, it's less the engine and more that the Coles wrote a ton of script and backstory, the absence of which is partly what makes the King's Quest entries in this period feel 'thin' despite their finely-hewn surfaces. Every character is basically a puzzle painted over as a humanoid sprite, they have nothing else to do but their one thing that you come in and resolve once you've found a honeycomb or a mechanical nightingale or whatever.

...OK wow, I am reading day one of the Willy Beamish entry on The Adventure Gamer and I had totally not worked out (playing this as a kid of the protagonist's age) how much trial and error fine-tuning was required for every single decision. No wonder I found it not fun, I must've shut down a whole lot of necessary game paths by the time I got stuck

I had been used to saving and reloading every 2 minutes from Police Quest but I guess the cartoonish graphics lulled me into a false sense of security, plus there were enough sudden deaths that I thought not dying = everything is fine

(I may be wrong but ISTR there are limited save slots so that makes the whole "you did day three wrong so now you find out on day eight that you're stuck" thing even more annoying)

uh, sorry to derail nominations thread, have been thinking about some more actual noms too. Is there a limit to how many we're allowed?

i hope we get a lot of votes - i have a lot of games i want to vote for

Wow Magic Carpet, that takes me back. I only played it on Saturn though. Overall this thread and the Console poll have been a massive nostalgia rush.

Seriously. If I close my eyes I can almost smell the generic gray retail carpet, shelving, and off-gassing computer plastic and packaging of a thousand visits to Egghead, Software Etc., and CompUSA. Oh, the hours I'd roam the games section, gazing at the backs of boxes while my dad and siblings were off somewhere else evaluating new hardware or nominally upgraded versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

Oh, and another nom - - - Continuum, a very strange and obscure French title that I think I've rambled about on ILX recently. Near-total abstraction as you explore a VERY early, polygonal, 3D platforming environment, and (sez Wiki) curiously named for its supposed ability to stimulate the different emotional centers of the brain with its use of color and music. Suggestive of Spindizzy (1986) in that you play as a geometric figure exploring kind of meaningless environments with no clear purpose, but that was sort of enough. The box-like surroundings in particular suggest the "interior" levels of Mario 64. It's worth pulling up on YouTube (though the vids have a lot of flicker, probably an emulation speed issue) just to get a sense of the thing.

Continuum, aka Alpha Waves (1990)

hello!

-- spreadsheet now updated to time of this post, check it out here.

-- nominate as many as you want! but we're not starved for material so don't feel as if you have to rack your brains for every title you remember.

-- was thinking a ballot max of 40. 50 seems a little much to me but i'll see how people feel.

-- "PC" here just means home computer, not specifically IBM-PC or DOS or whatever; thanks DC for highlighting that section in original post. in cases like rainbow islands, where some of the home versions (C64, Spectrum) are from outside the cutoff (according to wiki) and others (Amiga, Atari ST) are from inside, i've just listed the latter on the spreadsheet, but i'm not gonna require pledges that you played it on those systems. games like this may end up duplicated in a future '80s poll, which is annoying but fortunately isn't happening much so far.

-- on the other hand, "enhanced" versions of pre-cutoff games (quest for glory vga; where in the world is carmen sandiego? deluxe) really are different and i'd urge e.g. '80s quest for glory fans not to vote for the VGA version in substitution.

-- glad everyone's prousting!

this is already way harder for me than the 4th gen console list. haven't nommed anything i haven't played and enjoyed iirc

it's weird there were 2 dolphin related franchises called echo/ecco coming out at the same time

Jagged Alliance
Warlords (1990) (link at bottom)
Tank Wars
Scorched Earth

i'm sure i'll think of more :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlords_(game_series)

not sure if these count but...

Trade Wars 2002 (1991)
MajorMUD (1994)
Planets: The Exploration of Space (1992)
The Pit (1990)
PimpWars (1990)

(LORD apparently came out in 1989.)

for the honest and the sick-of-torrents, the following are on GOG sale this weekend for $1.49 each:

master of orion 1+2 bundle (1 eligible; 2 not)
sid meier's colonization
darklands

and two nobody's nominated (i've never played them so these are not nominations):
f-117a nighthawk stealth fighter 2.0
sid meier's covert action (this looks kinda cool)

also $4.99 for every falcon game, but i believe only 3.0/Gold is eligible.

never played QfG but in general I think dialogue is where I missed text input least of all. So much typing "say bandits" "ask mayor about bandit" and then it turns out an hour later that you actually needed "tell mayor about brigands"

by the time i was old enough to buy games myself all these VGA remasters were out and i was really into the art. QfG3 was like reading a fantasy comic or something, all these cool ancient Egypt-inspired temples and marketplaces, populated with talking lions (maybe a nod to Wing Commander?), and the savannah, which was very vast and dangerous. i loved the demo for Quest for Glory 3, i saw it and once i saw the jungle waterfalls instantly decided to get the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t2_OPi3BQ4

that came with Space Quest V. that game was a fucking riot, just a non-stop Monty Python style parody of sci fi culture. it came with a jokey manual parodying supermaket Bat Boy-style tabloids. this was also the year i discovered Weird Al which had a song pretty much about the same thing called "Midnight Star".

Warlords had a decent Macintosh port too. Even on the hardest setting the AI was thoroughly predictable and beatable, I think?

I also remember using ResEdit to mod the hell out of it into a weird sci-fi thing. My adolescent pixel art skills left a lot to be desired. Mostly ended up as a really labor-intensive palette swap.

If I close my eyes I can almost smell the generic gray retail carpet, shelving, and off-gassing computer plastic and packaging

For me it's the smell of a new mousepad. Nothing else smells like that. It's 1990s computer gaming in its purest indoor pollution form.

the soul of a new mousepad

Fuck it, I'm nominating ResEdit (199X) - last stable release was 1994, I think 2.x was/were the versions I used the most?

ResEdit added a lot of life to any number of games I played on the Mac during this period. Icons, sprites, strings, sounds, etc. You could futz with all that stuff and make any application your own, and this was before packageable mods were even close to mainstream.

will allow that and will also nominate QBasic (1991), which to me was game platform and programming tutor in one, but i feel the slope slipping and don't want to go too utility-crazy.

I just remembered I changed almost all the sound effects in SimAnt. You know where Maxis really fucked up with that game? Not enough flange.

ResEdit was indispensable. I remember spending hours poking around looking for easter eggs, but for me it's most closely associated with modding Escape Velocity. Sad to find that it wasn't released until 1996, ineligible for this poll.

EV is going to own the next one, though

yeah like others in thread my own peak years are in the second half of the decade and EV was def the juggernaut for my mac friends, a point of lunchroom pride for its exclusivity.

I was first thrilled but ultimately dismayed by the parameters of this poll. One of my most active gaming phases was on the C64 but I'd wager that very few of the games I played obsessively came out as late as the '90s. I'm sure I can find a handful of stuff to nominate and vote for but I would've had several dozen if this covered the '80s, as well.

Red Baron (1990) also dynamix >>>> sierra

The '90s were truly the golden age of flight sims.

did anyone ever get into the real serious microsoft flight simulators? i think i got one but after a few weeks of boringly failing at taking off and dramatically failing at landing i gave up on it

there was a story several years ago, maybe somewhere else on the internet, maybe somewhere here, about some guy who liked to do real time transatlantic flights, dressed up like an airline pilot, built his own mini cockpit iirc

Lode Runner: the Legend Returns (1994)
Incredible Machine 2 (1994)
ZZT (1991)
Squarez (1992)
Jetpack (1993)
Traders (1991)

Had no idea Master of Orion was 1994, that game felt ahead of its time

xp I used to build a spaceship around me to play Elite so I guess that guy's not much different. Saying that, I was about 7 though.

I'm definitely super stoked for the 80s poll whenever it comes around. Both C64 and all the games are still in the attic back home. But this one is also a big gaming era for me and I'm kinda glad to not have to make brutal ballot choices between them...

A friend of mine (an RAF techie) likes serious flight sims. Spends hours and hours doing routine flights, days downloading maps and textures etc.

A couple of borderline non-game nominations, for things that I basically used as games during this period:

Dr Sbaitso (1992) (DUH!!!!)
Wired For Sound Pro (ca. 1992)

Dr. Sbaitso you surely know. Wired For Sound was an apparently obscure Windows 3.x utility that let you do some things with .wavs (or maybe .pcms), I think probably reverse them and speed up/slow down (though I may be mixing this up with taking them into Sound Recorder and fucking with them. The main idea though was that you could link things up with system functions, in a way that IIRC was not built into the operating system until Win 95 (though again I could be misremembering). It came with a bunch of miscellaneous and predictable sounds - doors slamming, sirens for error messages, a woman breathily saying "goodbye" for when you close down Windows, etc.... all of which my sister assuredly still has tucked away on her machine though not in regular use.

Popular sounds in our household, still quoted during holiday gatherings, include "Pick one o' these things!" and a duck-quack sound that once hilariously interrupted a camcorder sketch we were trying to shoot. Also permanently burned into my brain is a goofy-voiced guy saying "Have you registered your copy of Wired For Sound Pro yet?" Like icon-editing programs (e.g. IconDoIt!) this was endless, endless entertainment in the days of the otherwise fairly blah Windows interface.

^^^^^ we did this! I think all our system noises were bits of dialogue from young guns where they all get high (did you guys see the size of that chicken?!?!, etc)

Marathon I'm told is the best FPS of this era but I've only played a few levels

― fgti, Thursday, October 13, 2016 4:46 PM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Marathon 2 was my favorite

That's the best FPS of the next era (jk but it's definitely second).

I remember two great Windows themes of my youth. There was an MST3K one (sounds only) where the error sound was "Mitchell!" and the dialogue box was a long, irritating, "It's that THING again! WHY!? WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEEAN!" - - an odd choice tbh, can't even remember what episode that's from.

The other wasn't til Win95, and it was the Guardian, from Ultima VII. Sounds, cursor, colors, wallpaper, the whole deal. When you shut down the computer it was his booming "NO! YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU MUST NOT!!!!" Ahhh, 90s PC humor.

James Pond II Codename Robocod (1991 Amiga)

Battle Isle (1991 Amiga)
E-motion (1990 Amiga)
Lemmings 2 The Tribes (1993 Amiga)
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (1990 Amiga)
Nitro (1990 Amiga)
Paradroid 90 (1990 Amiga)

that reminds me, i am fascinated to hear Mordy's logic in favor of Codename: Iceman. but big ups for nomming Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. dlh is right, this is the most trek-feeling game i've ever come across, despite its occasional or maybe frequent adventure-game dumbness. just kirk, spock and bones, poking around dealing with weird problems, on dinky planets that consist of just a few sets apiece. i can't really remember if any of the puzzles were all that good, but, man, great sprite work - looks almost as good as lucasarts games - and apparently the CD-ROM had the actual original cast providing the line-readings!

never played the sequel but it looks very similar.

xpost

holy shit i played so much Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge

Checkpoint! (there are probably a million games that said 'checkpoint!' when you reached a checkpoint but I think the one burned into my memory is from lotus esprit turbo challenge.)

at the time i originally played it my only comments in favor of iceman were that it was kinda unique and i remembered it enough to vote for it. i've since tho enjoyed the RPG addict (and Adventure Gamer) play through it - though iirc they both felt the gameplay was lacking in fairly significant ways. http://advgamer.blogspot.com/search/label/Codename%3A%20ICEMAN?updated-max=2012-10-24T17:01:00%2B11:00&max-results=20&start=8&by-date=false

shit, hadn't thought of lotus esprit turbo challenge in years and didn't even recognise the name, but the word 'checkpoint' brought it all back

Ooooh just thought of a couple of space shooters, in the spirit of Raptor:

Major Stryker (1993)
Galactix (1992)

Stryker is EGA, very much an Apogee house-style take on a Xevious-type shooter, with parallax scrolling and by the general standards of the early 90s, very fast, nearly console-speed action on the PC. It was probably a little bit dated-looking by 1993 to be honest, but maybe Apogee had a sense that their market was people who weren't looking to shell out for consoles, who hadn't shelled out for a 486 (let alone this new "Pentium" thing coming down the pipe) - they just wanted to have some good fun on the machine where they did their word-processing.

Galactix is a VGA Galaga clone, with very satisfying explosions and the sense that enemy ships are really taking damage. It also has an indelible intro, with voices, one assumes, by the programmers themselves. In today's news, Brazilian lumberjacks cut down the last tree in the rainforest. A spokesman for the Acme Toothpick Company said, "Gee. That's too bad."

Damocles, Mercenary II 1990 Amiga
Air Warrior 1990 Amiga
Circuit's Edge 1990 PC
Lost Adventures of Kroz 1990 PC
Islands of Danger 1990 PC
Cruise for a Corpse 1991 PC Amiga
Elf 1991 Amiga
Legends of Murder II: Grey Haven 1991 PC
SWIV 1991 Amiga
Frederik Pohl's Gateway 1992 PC
Nethack 1992 PC
Pacific Islands 1992 PC Amiga
Pinball Dreams 1992 Amiga
Capture the Flag 1993 PC

Wasn't sure Nethack was a legit nom

Yeah feel free to pull it if not, I was just frantically going through the abandonware site list this afternoon.

Nethack's chronology is fascinatingly old-school. I'm definitely NOT an expert but I think the 'core' releases are all late 80s? Although, CRPGAddict gives us this fascinating summary:

... it was under continuous development from 1987 to 2003. As reader Ryan ("Pipecleaner Creations") put it in early 2011: "To play NetHack 3.4 is to play a 2003 game, not a 1987 game." Thus, I decided to follow the lead of the NetHack wiki and regard the game as occurring in six "versions": early NetHack (culminating in 2.3e), the 3.0 series, the 3.1 series, the 3.2 series, the 3.3 series and the 3.4 series. These were released between two and six years apart between 1987 and 2002...

... and then he plays a 1990 build of the 3.0 series. But, I don't get the impression that really huge, major changes were made at that point, and I kinda think it makes a lot more sense as an 80s game than 90s. More a case of incremental versions or upgrades than sequels, in other words. OTOH, I nominated DikuMUD which I think is an original 90s engine but obviously very closely indebted to an evolving scene and sharing of code that I think really has its roots in the 80s, even as its explosion depends on the proliferation of 9600 and 14.4 modems in the early 90s.

Would've definitely nominated it, I just thought it was too old. Nethack came to be in 1987, but that version was basically the same as Hack, which was born in 1985. I played this in 1986 on a Xenix Sun machine.

I'd still make a case for allowing it, as the pc version falls in the 90-94 window, allowing it to spread way further.

(Thoroughly disagree with playing nethack = playing the 2003 version tbh)

A few things with the caveat that most of them I haven't played since the 90s:

Little Big Adventure aka Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure (1994)
The Lost Vikings (1992)
Dreamweb (1994)
Darkseed (1992)
Chip's Challenge (1990) (Lynx version was 1989 but PC/Amiga/etc all 1990 + Windows 1991)

And uh here is the "text adventure probably nobody else has played" I mentioned earlier. The author is not very Googleable but appears to have died; RIP Dennis M. Cunningham, thank you for:

T-Zero (1991) - standalone DOS game, not Z-Machine etc

ah was going to say Dreamweb too.

regarding "T-Zero"

It understands even sophisticated verbs not commonly seen in IF, such as FIND, WHERE, and IMAGINE, the latter which allows you to visualize objects and locations you have not encountered.

insane.

You unlock the more exotic verbs through puzzles later on in the game and tbh I don't remember them bringing a lot to the game - I think "imagine" in particular was quite frustrating.

But other quirks work better (the time mechanism is neat) and the descriptions are all v evocative, some fun wordplay though maybe a little corny for some. It's playable on archive.org but I'd recommend downloading it and playing it in DOSBox so you can save games and come back to it.

(iirc it doesn't let you die very often but I think there are a couple of places, and I did encounter an irreversible way to lose an item I didn't know I still needed*, so saving occasionally is still good)

* probably a bug as the game seems quite fair about that kind of thing in general, but I got such a fitting-seeming response to the action that I thought something productive must have been achieved somehow, somewhere by putting the <thing> in the <thing it wouldn't come out of>

The road to the South
is IM-passable.
Absolutely impossible to pass!
Impassable.

Canuck? Brilliant engineer. Genius with Illuminite. He made the whole thing work.

you're not as bad as you smell
well you're not as dumb as you look

We seem to be working at cross purposes. I must relieve you of your belongings... until you learn.