patrick_wd
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patrick_wdParticipantMy dad is very into golf, so I have distinct memories of a couple golf games that we had on our 486 and pentium.
The first one is Links: The Challenge of Golf. This is the precursor to Links 386 and the followup to World Class Leaderboard. The line “Looks like I hit the tree, Jim” is permanently etched into our brains and my brother and I would quote it to eachother for years afterward.
The second game was Jack Nicklaus Golf Signature Edition. This one I mostly remember the distinct adlib tune in the menus and the swing power UI that was a solid bar instead of the horseshoe thing that Links used. We played 2 player in this one quite a bit also, but it didn’t have the memorable voice lines of Links.
It’s been far too long for me to recall which one I enjoyed playing more, or if one of them was distinctly better, but I intend to revisit both during the month. These are some of the few DOS games that I played back in the day but have not revisited at any point since.
patrick_wdParticipantI think we should, personally. “Golf” should include any game that follows the basic formula of hitting a ball into a hole in a minimum number of strokes. This should help keep things more interesting than just pro-sports style games.
One neat looking game I found while searching around for good OPL soundtracks was “Fuzzy’s World of Miniature Space Golf.” I have no idea if it’s actually a good game, but the music was good, so there’s that.
patrick_wdParticipantThere’s also the odamex multiplayer port, which I’ve heard has good latency tolerance which should help for the large distances between club members.
In any case, I’m down for all of it. There’s plenty of different modes to try, like the co-op mode where you have to survive as a team against waves of monsters.
patrick_wdParticipantI played this when it dropped and it’s fun; I encourage everyone to give it a look.
patrick_wdParticipantI’d heard of Ultima Underworld and vaguely knew what it was, but had never played it before now. I thought I knew what to expect from this game, and dungeon crawlers aren’t usually my thing, but my actual experience turned out quite different.
At first it felt like a survival game, just gathering food and light sources, but once I discovered the goblin settlements I started to suspect this game was more than it seemed. There are FAR more NPCs than I was expecting, with a reputation system and detailed dialog trees. Luckily, around this point I was tipped off that this game is easily soft-lockable. I went looking for a guide to make sure I wouldn’t make any fatal mistakes, but what I saw was a very long and detailed document filled with elaborate quests and puzzles that I was not expecting to see.
I avoided reading too much (at first), but seeing that was the point where my idea of what this game is started to shift. I was expecting “fight your way to the bottom floor and kill the bad guy.” Turns out this game is also a complex linear puzzle adventure game. More specifically, it has subtle “riddle” puzzles that involve gathering clues and making an intuitive leap about some obscure action you can take to make progress. I actually LOVE this kind of puzzle and am a huge fan of games like La-Mulana with similar puzzle design, but I struggled a bit with it in this game because I realized too late what kind of game this actually is and hadn’t kept detailed enough track of the things I had done or seen.
I’m actually fine with aimless wandering in a puzzle game like this while I search for clues, but the controls in this game (while actually quite modern relative to the time) were still a bit clunky and added just enough friction to exploration that retracing my steps constantly became increasingly frustrating over time. Even still, I found many of the puzzles quite enjoyable. Most notably the quest for the knight order where you find the golden plate. It offered just enough clues to keep me on track, and all the pieces fit together neatly. After some doing I managed to find the plate without using a guide at all, which was very satisfying!
The infamous “Cup of Wonder” puzzle was a bit of a different story. Honestly I actually really like the concept of the puzzle and how it’s constructed, but it felt almost like it was in the wrong game. It would fit right in as a mid game La-Mulana puzzle, but here I kept underestimating its complexity because I just wasn’t expecting that kind of thing here.
I managed to find about half of the talismans myself and the other half with the help of the guide, and eventually made my way to the evil wizard and took him out, made my way down to level 8 and got to the final door of the game. Unfortunately, I was stopped dead by a new key that I needed and had no idea what it was or where to look. The dramatic pacing had really pumped me up for a final confrontation, and the sudden screeching halt spiked my already substantial frustration and I just went to follow a guide for the remainder of the game. Turns out the game had the last laugh when I got hit with the object list corruption bug, so I just youtubed the ending. You win this round, UUW.
Even though I didn’t manage to actually finish it myself, and things like inventory management and general movement could be quite annoying at times, there is definitely something special to this game that kept me going for as long as it did. I can easily see how growing up with this game would smooth over the rougher parts and leave a mostly positive memory. Coming into it late with 30 years of hindsight makes it difficult to overlook some of the considerable flaws, but the spirit of the game still shines through I think. This is definitely my second favorite “never played it before” DGC pick after Gateway. Just be prepared to refer to a guide to keep you on track if you’re going in blind; you’ll need it.
patrick_wdParticipantVL-Bus was introduced in ’92, along with clock doubled 486 DX2 chips, so it would have been very new at the time and require a 486 or one of those rare 386 boards with VL support.
Hitting the 70fps frame cap would have been a big ask for anything but a top of the line DX2 machine of the time. Many games have logic based on framerate and start to exhibit strange behaviors when rendering too fast, so I generally recommend to keep dosbox cycles roughly in line with a high-end machine of whatever period a game is from.
patrick_wdParticipantMichael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book is considered a landmark text of the era. A fascinating read even if you don’t use or need all the techniques described.
patrick_wdParticipantThanks! I still have some tweaks I’d like to make for a final version, but yeah, once it’s all done and dusted that would be great.
patrick_wdParticipantHere’s version 1.1. I’ve made some of the early levels a bit less punishing, but the back half of the pack is still very hard.
patrick_wdParticipantSure, I’m making some adjustments based on feedback and will upload a new version soon.
patrick_wdParticipantAnother useful control tip: If you hold down the right mouse button while picking a lemming, only walkers will be chosen. This allows you to assign a skill in a tight space without cancelling the work another lemming is already doing. This can be extremely useful on later levels.
patrick_wdParticipantAfter a couple weeks of effort, I’ve managed to put together a pack of levels to celebrate the month. Just rename the file to LEVELPAK.DAT and place it in your Customized Lemmings folder, replacing the original LEVELPAK.DAT.
patrick_wdParticipantYeah, honestly that statue is on my bucket list of things to visit one day. Lemmings had such an impact on my life that it would probably be a rather surreal experience.
patrick_wdParticipant“This town didn’t have ANY vicious speed gangs. So we spent a lot of money and got one.”
patrick_wdParticipantFor me I guess it depends how exactly we define DOS game. If we mean games where DOS was the initial or primary release platform, then I think only DOOM would make my cut of best games ever. If we include anything that merely had a DOS version, then Lemmings would be in there too.
I think the reason so few games make the cut for me is also the reason the platform is so interesting. It was a highly experimental wild-west where new and strange things were constantly being tried, many of which either didn’t work, or needed further refinements to really shine. Console games tended more to focus on established formulas and iteratively refining them, which is why the “best of the best” exemplars tend to be found there.
EDIT: And just to clarify, I interpreted this more in an objective “what games achieve the highest quality” sense, rather than just a list of my favorite games. Many of my favorite games are deeply flawed in some way, and several more DOS games would be included in that case, such as Descent, Hexen, many Sierra adventures, etc.
patrick_wdParticipantEven better, there’s actually 4 Christmas editions. ’91 and ’92 are 4 level shareware demos promoting the ONML main game, but ’93 and ’94 were full commercial standalone titles. Thankfully, the ’94 version includes all the levels from ’93, so you only need the ’91, ’92, and ’94 versions to get all the content.
That should be plenty of official content to keep us busy, but I’m also going to dive into the mod scene since there’s lots there to talk about also.
patrick_wdParticipantWhile I don’t have a deck specifically, I do all my gaming (including DOS stuff) on Linux, and it works great.
For best results, you’ll want a version of DOSBox that uses SDL2. I recommend dosbox-staging or dosbox-x, both of them are quite good. The main challenge will just be using the dosbox keymapper to set up usable control profiles for different games so you can play without using a keyboard.
There’s also 86Box if you want a maximally authentic experience, including setting up the BIOS and installing DOS itself. I’m not sure if it supports controller mappings though, so it might not be as suitable for deck use.
patrick_wdParticipantI agree that Hexen would be a better pick for an episode, since Heretic really is essentially a doom total conversion, with the most notable innovation being the ability to store items in an inventory for later use.
Hexen has a fundamentally different game design, with the non-linear hub-based map structure and emphasis on thorough exploration. Also, Hexen brought several interesting technical advancements to the Doom engine. Firstly the custom ACS scripting language which adds much more dynamism to the maps with elaborate scripted sequences and puzzle triggers. Second, there were “polyobjects” which were specially marked sectors that could move and rotate in ways previously impossible for Doom, allowing things like the swinging doors on the first level, or the sliding crusher walls seen later.
My friend and I couldn’t get enough of Hexen and played through it with all the classes on progressively higher difficulties just to get more out of the game, and would do co-op runs over modem, much to the frustration of our parents for tying up the lines 🙂
patrick_wdParticipantThanks. Unfortunately I’m definitely more programmer than musician. I got myself lost in the weeds of designing an efficient song format with support for digitized drum samples because it was a fun challenge and something I hadn’t done before, but now that it’s mostly usable I’m going to need to learn how to actually compose music at all :/
In the meantime I just use converted VGM dumps of classic DOS tunes to make sure it’s working properly, and I’m working more on the renderer, since that’s the most crucial part. I’ll definitely share once it’s far enough along to be interesting!
patrick_wdParticipantIndeed, the OPL3 especially never really saw its true potential. Most games used it merely as a stereo version of the OPL2, and even then only to play MIDI conversions using off-the-shelf General Midi patches. When the chip is programmed directly and its full capabilities are used, it can do some amazing stuff.
