Big Action Garage

Tonka Construction

Zoombinis All the Humongous and Jumpstart games

Spy Fox was the best from Humongous IMO. Ms Monkey Penny?!? Hilarious. And I played that space bullet hell game soooo much.

https://youtu.be/bKoOFRE1dwk

Desktop Toys!

Does anyone else remember the zero-player game Progress Quest?

The first video game I ever played was a Lode Runner clone for the IBM PC called Freddy’s Rescue Roundup.

Whatever you are… MAKE ME A PIZZA (Zoombinis)

Monster Bash!

And Alex the Kidd on my brother’s Sega

one of the best DOS games ever, Battle Chess!

watching the knight lop the arms off the pawns never got old!

gameplay footage

Most of the stuff was whatever demos came with those magazine CDs. Half wouldn’t run on the family computer - none of LucasArts’ adventure games did. Some that did run and I remember playing were:

• Diablo (only the 1st level of the dungeon available, the Butcher would also show up and kill you after you cleared it, got out and went back)
• Age of Empires (3 small scenario maps, which I played to death)
• Stargunner (only 3 levels and most of the equipment wasn’t available)
  
• Raptor (some weapons were locked but, weirdly enough, one time the game “registered itself” and all weapons were unlocked. No idea wtf happened)
  \
• (EDIT) Capture the flag (yes, the game’s name was just that. A turn based capture the flag that really left me wanting that level editor! Also, that’s a link for the developer’s site, he’s still selling his games)

One of the few things we had was Lion King’s Activity Center (Brazilian version, Centro de Atividades). I distinctly remember that, for whatever reason, the VA for Rafiki was different from the movie

At my dad, I played a lot of Lemmings and some of those Arthur interactive books. To my then non-english-speaking ass, the story reading was mostly pointless, but most scenes would let you click around to see what happened, characters would either say something or do something funny (I personally loved one where you clicked DW and she’d ride her bike over a small hill, crashing then coming back)

Also this one, which I don’t think I enjoyed as much as Arthur for whatever reason

(That picture immediately made me “smell” crayons. Is there a word for when a picture reminds you of a smell?)

Gorillaz:

Nibbles:

Word rescue:

Treasure Cove

Telemate, by Tsung Hu, was one of the best pieces of DOS software I ever got to use. It featured internal multitasking via its own file reader and composer. With every other terminal program out there if you wanted to create a new file or use a scratch pad you had to exit the program first and load something else.

With telemate you could download a text, open it in the internal reader, then start copying bits over to the internal composer and then cut and paste the whole thing back into the terminal. This was godlike power at the time.

It had a slew if other really useful comm program features, the file downloading system was super tight and had every protocol, the local file browser was really nice. ansi and other graphics support was superb.

I eventually put it into autoexec.bat so my 286 would boot right into telemate. I was terminally online when online barely existed 😅

I learned to program thanks to this app. I used it to dial up and access shell accounts so i could IRC and MUD. I made friends I still talk to today through it. For years it was my daily companion.

If i could celebrate one single DOS app it would be the humble yet amazing Telemate by Tsung Hu (who went by Winfred Hu at the time)

you can grab it here: https://archive.org/details/telemate

The only reason i ever stopped using it was I graduated on to Slackware!

Kidpix Delux 3

Gen z here. Animal jam was goated
I remember when they removed shelves from the in game stores so there was just a black market of shelves for no reason

Kingdom Hearts Re-coded is the best game ever and you can’t change my mind. I got my dad’s cartridge and DSi and it was the BEST.

Ive actually just now gotten around to playing the actual kingdom hearts 1 and OMG I don’t know how they managed to make the controls WORSE than a DSi game with like 10 buttons, it’s so bad you can’t see anything while in combat.
In the DS one you could at least snap the camera to look at the back of your head

edit: also coolmathgames.com

Chip’s Challenge:

Commander Keen:

Can’t forget good ol’ Ski Free:

DESQview - multi-tasking for DOS:

Norton Commander - shell/file manager for DOS: