DOS Me Up

OH MY GOD MINDMAZE

qualifies as one of those so-rare-you-conclude-you-dreamed-it childhood experiences! goddamn, i played that a lot, i loved labyrinths and answering questions and it was so eerie. i think i won, once? i only ever had like half an hour to play games and it's hard to win a maze game inside half an hour when you're like, eight.

eta: http://www.wikimaze.me/ omg

 

also did anyone else play ascendancy? like a bajillion incredibly cool and weird alien species, and a pretty sophisticated star-map space-lane thing that was actually in 3D and you could rotate it around...



i tried to replay it last fall like 'surely now that i am LITERALLY TWENTY YEARS OLDER THAN LAST TIME i will be able to win' but no. aliens kicked my ass as usual. i am always going to be garbage at empire-building games, and of course strategy guides don't exist for obscure mid-90's games. but goddamn, there are some cool aliens in here.

 

Yeah, I gave up pretty quick on Africa Trail. I thought it was really interesting, and I gave it a few solid tries with different strategies, but it was so punishing and eventually got disheartening.

and YES AMAZON TRAIL. I knew I was forgetting one that I loved. It was also super hard though, I kept dying. :( I did, however, find an older version of the game, and I went back and played it, and did okay. (I've never been able to find the version we had, though. It was like the Amazon Trail 2.0 or something. better graphics, finer-tuned gameplay.)

I always died in MayaQuest but I found the information so fascinating that I would just keep starting over and trying to find things I hadn't found yet.

:o *gonna play*


ALSO. does anyone else remember the early 2000s version of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I've found plenty of ROMs of the older classic version, with the 16-bit (?) graphics and the silly cell phone (and the ridiculously quick case time), but in this one you had infinite time to catch your dude and you had to ask passers-by for info from the criminal, which would either be info to identify them or riddles about where they were going. I managed to beat it and get top rank when I was younger, but man oh man i wanna play it again.

 

In elementary and middle school, we got to play with computers a couple times a year? All I remember is taking turns to play oregon trail in 1989 (or 1990?) and getting frustrated because I kept dying. Also, printing crappy "art' we made on dot matrix printers in what passed for a computer lab in middle school. What was that mac art program called again?

 

I never played it, but I want to.

I found this manual / guide to it.

 

My older brother played the FUCK out of Ascendancy, I noodled around on it but suck ass at those kinds of Explore/Conquest games.
And old game I did not suck at was Odell Down Under. Did anyone else play Odell Down Under? You got to select a fish from the Australian Coral Reef and then swim around like a motherfucker. Also the Amazon Trail was pretty good, and I more or less owned my third grade class by knowing what a tapir was. And malaria. (we did
a project on animals of the Amazon Rain Forest, it was great)

 

omg I just found a copy of the Infocom Hitchhiker's game (complete with goodies) for the Atari ST on eBay. I didn't think I'd ever find a copy for the Atari, I'm excited

I already own one for the IBM, but this one's in better condition anyway

OMG And I just found a copy of Bureaucracy, too! Today is my lucky day!

 

So when I was in primary school, what literally everyone did when we'd finished computer work was play this game. Zambonis? Zoombinis? Definitly starts with a Z. I think it was intended to teach logic/maths or something. Does anyone else remember this? You had to make a little group of them and take them through like, um, puzzles?

 

Zam... boonies? Beanies? Something like that, anyway. I remember everyone else being obsessed with it in elementary/middle school, while smol!loq played with... some trippy art program I forget the name of. (It had a "rainbow" color option that was The Coolest Thing to me, and also a smileyface brush?)

Zamb-game had like. Mazes or something? And every so often you'd hit a wild pokemon random Educational Minigame? I seem to remember a typing minigame but I might be mixing that up with another game.

Also a random school game: something about being a band manager(?), and "gigs" would have like. Patternmatching, simple math problems, and typing speed minigames? Mostly I remember the obnoxious travel music. ("Are we there yet?" [Three badly-midi'd guitar chords] "Not yet!" [Same bad guitars] [repeat ad infinitum])

 

the logical journey of the zoombinis! i had that game as a kid. the problem was you have like 100 zoombinis to save, but can only shepherd like 20 of them across the country each time, and on each successive journey the puzzles got harder, but by a lot. i tried it again as an adult and i can't solve the tier-three puzzles, fuck that, i think you need genius kids to actually complete the game. it was frustrating as hell. also, they never really thanked you. if someone was handling my immigration process and solving a shit ton of logic puzzles for me as they went, i'd be a lot more grateful than those little blue shitheads.

god, sierra games were so cool tho.

was anyone good at lemmings? my brother was great at it, but i was only good at funneling them straight off a cliff and then laughing so hard i peed. i had a really sophisticated sense of humor at seven.

 

i'd really like to see a Twitch Plays zoombinis, come to think of it. that'd be incredible.

 

Oh my gosh there's a zoombinies (that fucking word, seriously) app.
Yeah, I kind of thought it was hard as a kid, and it's actually tricky as an adult?

 

does anyone else remember that coloring program that came on floppies? Kid pix or something? it had smiley brushes and a ton of stuff like that?
I found it! The name was right, [LINK]. not really a game, but i used to sit there and mess around with all the patterns for hours.

[Edit to avoid double posting] Also, all those various typing games, though when i was going to elementary school it was a bit later, closer to 2001 or so.

 

KID PIX. That was the thing I was messing around on while everyone else played zoombinies!

 

I had an inordinate love for Cross Country Canada, which was basically a game about being a trucker and figuring out which areas of Canada produce which stuff for your quests.

The Belchinator game in the Animaniacs game pack gave me an actual nightmare, which my parents still find hilarious. (tbf it was a ridiculous game to have a nightmare about.) I preferred the Baloney's Balloon Bop and the Smoocher games.

Chip's challenge was also pretty fun, and there was another game in that pack called Rodent's Revenge that I never saw anywhere else.

Was that the one that had the game where you hopped back and forth across logs and crocodiles and whatnot to cross a river?

 

@budgie I totally played Cross Country Canada too! It was so relaxing.

 

I only just registered the title of the thread and it reminded me of all the DOS games my uncle gave us. I actually have a stack of floppy disks over here with a ton of them. Cosmo and Keen Dreams (the Commander Keen fangame, where you fight potatoes and broccoli and stuff) spring immediately to mind. I also played the main Keen games and never finished them, platforming is not my friend. I played a lot of Duke Nukem at his house, too. He (and those games) are the only reason I know how to do literally anything in DOS, even if it's all contextual to those games.

And now I'm randomly remembering Alien Arcade! It was a cd-rom but whatever. Just a bunch of little minigames; the only one I can remember is Quasar Bounce, where you have to bounce the blue alien guys across the screen. The program started up with this little animation of you flying up on a space station and the narration text going "in space...no one can hear you scream...but you can hear people having fun...at the ALIEN ARCADE".

(I remember this but not my doctor's appointments.)

 

nah, that's the actual game they made mostly for consoles, I think. The activity game was just like. You could do a lot of random minigames or do coloring sheets. There was a game where you'd match bugs, one where you'd find hidden animals, a follow-the-leader xylophone game in the outlands, etc.. also you could watch some clips from the movie. it was cool

 

i was just coming in here to bring this up because OH MAN KID PIX THAT WAS MY JAM. i was lucky enough that my dad bought me my own copy so i could play it on our home computer whenever i wanted to. i was obsessed with kid pix.

and that one disney painting game? does anyone remember that? it came with a really shitty tablet and one of the paintbrush options was a toothbrush. i just really loved art games.