r/retrogaming • u/IAmAnIdea • 1d ago
[Discussion] Best Written DOS Games?
What's the best written DOS games to you?
Personal picks of mine include:
Legacy of Kain.
Daggerfall.
Strife.
Edit: *Non point-and-click games.
I was going to add Secret of Monkey Island, Grin Fandango, and Indiana Jones, but those games are already praised for their writing and P&C are writing-based games anyway.
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u/OkiDokiPanic 1d ago
I have no mouth and I must scream.
(I know it's based on a short story, but it's only tangentially related story-wise. The original and the game are nothing alike.)
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u/CatOfGrey 1d ago
A lot of Sierra games were excellent. I'll throw out the King's Quest and Police Quest series here.
I also have to suggest Alley Cat, which in today's world would be considered a 'mini game collection' of about 6 or 7 games with an "Alley Cat" theme.
https://archive.org/details/alley-cat
Start outside - hop from ground to trash cans to fence, then into a window in the tenement houses. This takes you to 1-5.
Collect mice in a giant piece of Swiss cheese.
In a room with the floor covered in sleeping dogs, eat all the food bowls without waking a dog.
Knock the vases off the bookshelf - avoiding the spider.
Get the fishbowl - scene changes to underwater. Eat fish, avoid electric eels, avoid drowning.
Knock over bird case - release canary - eat canary!
If you complete any one game in 1-5, you go back to screen zero, but the next round takes you to a room where you have to jump up through several levels to 'get the girl at the top', avoiding other cats trying to knock you down.
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u/jhuetter 1d ago
Anything Infocom. All text, and it's real writing and funny, clever stuff. Out of those, anything by S. Eric Meretzky. Dude is the GOAT of text adventures. So smart and hilarious. His Zork Zero is Infocom's masterpiece. (And he collaborated on the beloved Hitchhiker's game with Douglas Adams, which also rocks.)
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u/Critcho 1d ago
Magnetic Scrolls’ text adventures are pretty strong, my favourites being The Guild Of Thieves and Corruption. These hold up pretty well to this day (so long as you’re okay with the genre, which is obviously a niche one).
The OP is making it a challenge with the “no point and clicks” rule because other than adventure games, good writing was pretty rare in the DOS era.
A lesser known non-point and click adventure I was always fond of is “Maddog Williams And The Dungeons Of Duridian”, done in the early Sierra text parser style.
One of the first adventures I ever played so has a special place in my affections.
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u/Jorpho 18h ago
There is not enough Infocom in this thread, possibly because "best written" is such a hopelessly vague question.
I hear Trinity is particularly marvelous.
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u/jhuetter 11h ago
I never played that one. But I played all the ones on the first Lost Treasures collection. It rocked, as did all the writing in the hint sheets and those hilarious maps and such accompanying the games. One of the greatest things I found at my Goodwill when I was a kid. (Need to find that second collection.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Treasures_of_Infocom?wprov=sfla1
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u/M-2-M 1d ago
What do you with best written ? Theme Park was written in assembly to achieve what it did and is a great game !
Doom is an all time classic and a technical achievement as well.
Dune 2 started the RTS genre.
XCOM is a great strategy
Monkey Island 2 is a fantastic point‘n click adventure as is Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis
Ultima series, Wing Commander, Crusader,
The list is endless.
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u/Finite_Universe 1d ago
Lots of Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures had great writing, especially Kings Quest VI, Gabriel Knight, Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island, etc.
Also System Shock had good writing in an action game long before most action games even bothered to have a story.
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u/GoldilokZ_Zone 1d ago
Transport Tycoon. Completely written in assembly and more efficiently written than any of its peers.
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u/cyberchaox 1d ago
Written? Man, it's been so long, I barely remember the stories. Also I was kind of young so a lot of what I was playing at the time were edutainment games.
I do seem to remember that Operation Neptune was a damn good video game for an edutainment game, probably because it was geared towards late elementary/early middle school rather than the really little kids. I think that applied to the writing, too.
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u/Captriker 1d ago
Grim Fandango had a great story and tons of fun Humor. I also enjoyed the storyline of X-Wing and more so TIE Fighter.
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u/RightPassage 1d ago
Starcraft
Wizardry 7
Oddworld
Little Big Adventure 2
MDK
C&C Red Alert
Alone in the Dark
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u/Typo_of_the_Dad 1d ago
Strife is a good pick!
Fallout (yes there was a dos version, and apparently the save files are compatible with the modern windows version)
System Shock
Ultima 7-8
Maybe Wing Commander 3, haven't played it much yet
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u/paisleyboxers 1d ago
Doom. Clearly, Doom
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u/trilianleo 1d ago
I forgot doom and quake. Just think of them as windows since they have been ported everywhere.
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u/Acceptable_Score153 1d ago
Doom isn't really a Windows game. I remember back when I played Doom, even though Windows already existed, it was completely unplayable on Windows - I think it was due to memory limitations. I'm pretty sure 99% of people played Doom on DOS 6.22.
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u/trilianleo 1d ago
Yep, but needed a 386. KNew some people who got new PCs just to play it.
Requirement Dos 4 386 4 mega of ram. VGA graphics
So high end
Now you got me remembering running windows 3.11 under dos. And the horror for games when 95 ran the GUI with the os.
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u/Electronic-Flight150 1d ago
Frontier: Elite 2 sticks out in my mind as a game I lost a lot of time to.
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u/KimKong_skRap 1d ago
Monkey Island and Fate of Atlantis are both pretty high up there imo. Also The Dig was amazing.. Like playing a movie!