Vintage gaming community.
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I'm pretty sure Doom will be the most popular (and my pick too), but I'll throw a shout-out to Epic Pinball; that Android table was the best one in the game anyway.
ZZT, the game that launched Epic. Say, there's gotta be a ZZT community somewhere on lemmy, right?
Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.
My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I've zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.
There was some bootleg Tetris game I played the hell out of, because it ran on my shitty hand-me-down 286 with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives & no hard disk.
Duke Nukem 3D probably. That or Rise of The Triad.
I eventually bought DN in the 90s and played the shit out of it.
Oh, I just remembered Castle of the Winds, too. What a great era for games!
I got my ass handed to me by Castle of the Winds when I was a kid. And that doofy-ass default barbarian sprite...
We always called that one Castle Of The Windows, since the entire game engine is constructed of 32x32 pixel Windows icons.
Pinball Fantasies, Raptor, Heretic
Monster Bash! It was one of the better-playing platformers on the PC back in the day and I loved the halloween aesthetic.
I spent a lot of time playing Raptor: Call of the Shadows, a vertically-scrolling shooter with an upgrade system.
There was also Rise of the Triad, a pretty decent Doom-clone
Doom, Wolf3d, Diablo, and Castle of the Winds
Want a fun piece of trivia? Epic Pinball launched Digital Extremes, the developer behind Warframe.
Wolfenstein 3d, and commander Keen
Might be pushing the limits of shareware, but the demo of Quake 1 on cd for a buck. A simple console command unlocked the full version.
Mordor 1 The Depths of Dejenol
still available from Decklins Demise
Its the game that got me into dungeon crawlers particularly Demise: Rise of the Ku'Tan, and the epxansions Ascension and Revenge of the Tavern Keeper
My first FPS and an excellent one. Sooo many hidden rooms and insane enemies.
Apogee was on fire during that whole era
I spent so many hours as a kid on my dad's Thinkpad playing Gravity Well. It came on one of those "50 Great Games" CDs or something like that. The goal is to claim all the planets in the system, which you do by simply landing on them, then building defenses against your opponents. It's so much fun because your ship has pretty realistic inertia and the planets have actual gravity wells. The AI opponents can be quite difficult and aggressive. Challenging and fun, with great sound effects for the time!
This screenshot is from an Internet Archive page for the game, but I'm pretty sure it's only the shareware version. I gotta check again when I get off work!
Edit: I'm 99% certain it's from this exact CD for anyone interested. I've never been able to find a full version unfortunately...
I forgot all about this game! My go-to strategy was to attack freighters from the other factions while they were in flight and force them to change sides. My space pirate empire was unstoppable!
Yes!! And you could kind of cheese the game by pressing both fire buttons in rapid succession (down arrow and 'd' I think). I loved making passes around an enemy's planet and staying just ahead of their defenses, and becoming basically an A-10 Warthog in space. It was kind of difficult since your bullets inherited your velocity so you had to shoot at weird angles 😁
That sounds fantastic, I might have to give it a shot.
Don't remember the name of it but it was a Geometry Wars style shooter where the playing field would tilt as you moved. Played a ton of that game.
Escape Velocity and its sequels.
Geez, I'd forgotten about that game. I spent an unreasonable amount of time playing those.
No such thing as unreasonable with those games because they were brilliant.
Tyrian
Oh my god.. epic pinball! I had completely forgotten about this!! Thanks for that hit of nostalgia =)
The music is just as great as you remember.
I played a lot of TetriNET and Subspace Continuum with my old online community. Great times.
More detail edit: TetriNET walked so Tetris 99 could run. Version 1 does not install on Windows anymore (but has a Linux version). Version 2 works, complete with its archaic user registration that asks for too many details.
Continuum is a large PvP arena Asteroids-like 2D space shooter. It's on Steam now. Starts tough to control and with a high skill ceiling, so be wary of the veterans. The Death Star Battle map is a blast with a big group. It feels like trying to speed through a narrow maze on bumper boats during a huge battle.
Oh I'd forgotten about Subspace; what a classic!
Quake
I was always struck by the similarity to the blue robot on that table to Cyborg from Rise of the Robots and I wonder if there was some cross-pollination there.
