Favorite DOS games?
 

What are your favorite DOS games? Bonus points if they can be bought on GOG or, less preferably, Steam, Origin, or other services.

I'm working on some improvements to DosBox (yes, really) and I'm far ahead enough that I can start thinking about how I'm going to reward myself.

So far, my to-play shortlist is Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Al Qadim: Genie's Curse, and Crusader: No Remorse.

Colonization.

Well, there are about 600, but top of the list...
 

Star Trek, Oregon Trail, and Treasure Mountain.

Which Star Trek game in particular?

Chip's challenge is always enjoyable as well as Indy 500.

I played lot of Allan Border Cricket in the era of DOS games. Lately I was playing Wolf 3D on Dosbox.

Other old games I play sometimes are NES games. There are ROMS available and Nestopia is a good emulator.

As emulators go, I recommend RetroArch.

You will never look back.

Master of Orion 2

My all-time favorite DOS game by far was the original Terminal Velocity. The physics of flying were all wrong compared to reality (in which most changes feel very slow, thus never creating the "roller skater" effect) but because of that it FELT like one imagines flying to feel. It always had me feeling like I was banking and swooping long after I quit playing - the Roller Skater Effect. Anyone that I let play it was very quickly exerting extreme "Body English" and thoroughly captivated.

Second Place was always held by the original Road Rash. The follow-up sucked. The good one has a great Grunge Era (think SoundGarden "Rusty Cage" era) soundtrack and once again the physics just had a great feel with the lower Rat Bikes feeling unstable and either slow and boring or fast and dangerous and each increment up was highly noticeable. The final Big Bike was simply a real pleasure to ride.

I would have included Quake 3 Arena since it does play in DOS and beyond any doubt in my mind the all-time best game ever for fun physics, but IIRC it came with instructions for installing in a Windows environment so possibly is disqualified on that account.

Gee, can't help but mention all the DOOMs, Heretic, Hexen. Descent I and II and they run very well also in DOSBox.

I also like Megarace
Discworld and Discworld II

I don't really have a single favorite, these are just games that I like that happen to run in DOS.

I assume you are not talking about the Road Rash that has all the cut scenes and awesome music? Since that was also titled just 'Road Rash' by EA, which I have a copy of for PS1, 3DO and PC but I think it is Windows only executable (95). Image related:

That snapshot of the cover is THE version I referred to and now I am confused or maybe it's just that my memory is cloudy and that era was a time of change from DOS to Windows so a LOT of software was in transition. I looked at wikipedia for Road Rash and it pointed out that the game debuted in 1991 (obviously pre-Win95) but was later updated to include cut scenes (oh yeah! the long-legged Lady in Red Leather! yum!) I suppose now I will need to blow the dust off my dedicated old game box featuring FreeDOS to see for certain that it did install and run in DOS.

Yea if you are referring to the '91 version, then it would have had to be like AMIGA DOS and maybe MS-DOS. The update to "Road Rash" was around '94, but AFAIK it hit consoles first (CD-based), SegaCD, then 3DO (which had better video quality), then PS1 and Saturn (even better video quality), though for some reason the PS1 version, navigating through the menus took a LONG time, I think because it was a 2D menu-system, and the PS1 was geared more towards 3D, and had very little 2D memory. But now I digress since I have gone into a tangent.

I don't think there is a DOS version of the Road Rash with cut scenes and music though... Probably just Windows (PC).

Duke Nukem[12] on 1.44 floppy.
circa '95'ish

It is hard to recall all the details but I seem to remember that up until Windows 2000, all previous versions were still heavily dependent on DOS and there were available both Win95 Lite and Win 98 Lite and even some apps to create your own with as few Windows libraries as possible and only retaining those needed to run games of that era. Given that, the line is rather blurry IMHO.

I just can't recall exactly how Minimal one could get.

I forgot...
 

I believe that the early DOS Castle Wolfenstein was the first 3D FPS I ever played.
I should have mentioned it in my first reply, but I have not played it in years. Time to go through my old disks and see if I still have a copy.