Dos games

 

Computer gaming goes where no other form of entertainment has ever gone before, mostly because it is interactive and you get to be the hero. You get to do things you can never do in real life and that's  the fun part. However, games today are pretty costly and take up a lot of system resources. For someone who uses his computer mostly for work, it is impractical to have around six MB of space for a game that will get pretty boring after some time. And then the high requirements of the games force you to constantly upgrade your system if you want to play them. Classic, old fashioned, dos games come to the rescue. They provide the same intriguing gameplay, and essentially pick the same chords as any other game available in the market. Around fifteen games will fit within a megabyte, and best of all its available on the net for free! Even the serious gamer would enjoy the old fashioned charm. However, if you do not know exactly where to find free dos games, you'll end up wasting a lot of net time going around in meaningless circles and reaching dead ends.

dosgames.com

This site has almost all the games that were created from the dawn of computer games (around 1984!) till the Prince of Persia 2 demo. It has a convenient navigation, with the games divided into 3d shooting, action, adventure, ball and paddle, sidescrolling, miscellaneous, puzzle, educational/kids, RPG, sim, strategy, space shooting and Tetris. The picks of the lot are doom (everyone will remember this), keen (addictive), hocus pocus (really funny) and skyroads (the best). If you are looking for anything specific, you can search or look in the all games index. There is also a page of newest additions which is a very convenient feature if you have downloaded half the site already. Then there are a lost of small games <50 k, and the game makers have excelled themselves here. The Mario brothers is one of the games here, taking only 47 k of your system, but providing hours of overwhelming gameplay. Classics here make you go totally nostalgic, pong, digger, pcman, and the best, volfied. Check out alleycat (1984) also, a little known but a total timepass game. Some of these games will run very very fast on your PC, so you'll need to download a free software called mo'slo from the utilities section, to enable some games to run. Be sure to stop it after playing or your system will continue to go slow and eventually crash.

dosgamesarchive.com

Second choice to dosgames.com, because the games are sorted in alphabetical order, and each page takes a long time to load… Yet a practical site, it has many dos games that dosgames.com does not have. These games include the lion king (I still remember using the dwarf cheat code) Aladdin (as stunning as ever), Abuse, Biomenace and Prince! If you go to this site, it is a must to download the duke nukem series, hexen, dave (yessss!) and the commander keen series. However, you must know the name of the game here unless you want to waste a lot of time wading through pages of needless games. If you are in a mood to experiment, this is where to do it. I tried our catacomb abyss, and was not disappointed. There exists an equally remarkable doom modification here called rouge spear.

Other resources

I wanted a game called comix zone, and could not find it in the two sites above. I went to google search and after some time, found it. However, this is one of the few rare games that are neither in dosgames.com nor dosgamesarchive.com. Usually, if you know a game that is not available in either of the two sites, then the games are not shareware, or not yet freeware or abbandonware (public domain). It’s a good idea to ask friend to e-mail you the old games that still hang around in little visited corners of their systems. I did that with a game called earthworm Jim. If all else fails, google is the best place…

 

At the end of the day, dos games are still thriving and still have as much charm as they had when they were first released. The best way to spend some time when it rains relentlessly outside…

-Aditya MJ