Game Collection: Dosvidanya! Or: The Last Days of DOS Part 2 (N-Z)

I wasn't going to finish this tonight but the BUG OF CREATION hit me.  When that little SOB says DOO EEEIT!! the best thing to do is to strike whilst the iron is hot.  Plus I am getting irritated having PC games covering my living room for the last few months in preparation for this project.

As always, click for bigger pictures.

Nomad is kind of like Lightspeed but I never got into it.  PCs After Hours (disk pic to come!) is a collection of stuff some business computer user might throw on their 92-94 era PCs to play around with.  Power Dolls is a Japanese turn based wargame with mechs.  All piloted by women.  PT 109 is sadly the CGA version and not the EGA I think I wanted it for.  Its a kick ass PT boat sim anyhow.  Played a ton of it on the Votech school's Mac SEs.  (About the only things they were good for!)  Quest for Glory is the VGA remake of the Sierra Adventure RPG hybrid and it owns.  Rise of the Dragon is a point and click adventure with some action elements.  Shadowcaster is a FPS adventure game where you can turn into cool monsters.  Shadowlands is a rad isometric RPG.  Sadly I don't have the Sci Fi sequel.

 Siege and the expansion were RTS games.  About attacking or defending castles in the same universe as Magic Candle.  Shadow of Yserbius/Fates of Twinion were primarily early online Bard's Tale styled MMOs to be played over Sierra's network.  But they were offline as well.  Okish I guess.  Cabal/Sidearms/Street Fighter were CGA/EGA ports of the Capcom classic arcade titles.  And kind of pants.  Dunno where the disks went.  Sorcerian is a translation of the Japanese side scrolling action RPG.  It was popular in Japan and got a couple remakes and expansion packs.  We got.. bupkis.  Spellcasting 201 was a cheeky text adventure with point and click stuff plus pictures.  Stunt Island is one of the best flight games ever made.  Fly stuff!  Do cool stunts for movies!  Set up your own movies!

 Strife was a weird Doom engine game merged with an RPG.  Summoning was an action RPG and a sequel in spirit of Darkspire.  System Shock was the legendary FPS RPG follow up to Ultima Underworld.  Terminator was an early "Sandbox" game and mostly using 3d polygons.  About 10-15 years before the tech could handle it.  Terminator 2029 was more or less an FPS with step movement.  Kind of cool but hard.  The 2 Aegis disks are Trek games.  You know the classic computer wargame?  Yeah.  Ultrabots was a simple mech sim.  Kind of alright.  Ultimate Games is where Spectre VR came from.  I think every other disk I either traded or lost.  No big loss.

 Ultimate Wizardry Archives is Wizardry 1-7 (Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord through Crusaders of the Dark Savant and the Windows 9x "Gold" port as well.) with the cluebook next to it.  Veil of Darkness is an isometric action adventure involving vampires.  Vengeance of Excalibur is a real time wargame mixed with some RPG elements.  Wargame Construction Set 3: Age of Rifles is the third Wargame maker game from SSI, this time focused on the 1800s era of warfare.  Warcraft 2 is like the UR RTS alongside Command & Conquer.  I could swear I had Warcraft 1 as well but.. it was kind of butt, especially compared to 2.  (And C&C Red Alert basically perfected it all.)

 Warlords 2 and its scenario maker are the best turn based conquer the world wargame ever made.  Wing Commander 2 and Privateer continue that space flight sim series.  Wing Commander 3 was the last big leap for the franchise, to it's detriment in my opinion.  X Com Terror From the Deep is the turn based strategy game sequel to X Com.  Except it was bugged and is locked on IMPOSSIBLE mode.  Otherwise it adds some cool improvements but is otherwise merely a total conversion of the original.

 Roberta Williams Anthology is basically all of her adventure games pre Phantasmagoria in one collection.  I got it from some Columbia House like Computer Software Club thingie.  I still cannot grok to Adventure games even though I try.  Space Quest Companion is a big cluebook.  Because I was borrowing the original Space Quest and needed help to complete it.  We see a Lucasarts and SSG catalog, plus the Quick Reference version of DOS FOR DUMMIES.  Since my PC didn't come with any tutorials for DOS 5.0.  (And I screwed it up so many times trying to shave precious kilobytes off my 130 meg HD.  Ultima 7 and expansion wanted 25 megs of it!  Windows 3.1 5!  DOS another 2-3!)

 I got rid of this game but kept the box.  I wonder why?

Shareware disks!  Mostly purchased ones!  (And a couple other things like the PC After Hours pack in disk and a collection of useful tools from Dvorak and Interplay.)  See back in the pre Internet age the only real way most people could get shareware was from BBSes or if they didn't have any they could call up, they had to buy them.  Usually 2-5 bucks a disk.  Even if the game sucked it was worth the price of a McDonald's Extra Value Meal or an indie comic book just to try them out.  Some were fun for an hour or two at least.

And that is pretty much all of my DOS games from the DOS age.  

Now they are all nicely binned in some semblance of alphabetical order, with the disks back in their plastic disk holder slowly continuing to die (abandonware sites are wonderful for getting backups to store on a flash drive or burn to CD to use on the old machine.  Or to use on modern PCs with DOSBox), and the CDs back in the drawer in my bedroom.

So many great games here.  And so many I want to go back and play some more, or play for the first time.

Go through your own old games collection.  You might rekindle a lost love.  Or make a new one.