Reviews

Imagine an Aliens-by-way-of-Gauntlet fever dream rendered in three-quarter isometric pixels and piped into your DOS tower in 1993 by a British studio named for a leather-jacket sub-label. That’s Shadoworlds: four power-suited explorers trudging through a derelict weapons complex where every corridor hums, every door stammers, and every ammo crate feels like your final lifeline. Bizarre or […]

Cast your memory back to the floppy-fringed winter of 1994. The Mac crowd had already been terraforming pixel valleys for weeks, but for DOS devotees February brought the real event: the first PC boxes of SimCity 2000, a sequel so supersized it made its 1989 predecessor feel like a cardboard model left out in the rain. Classic

I’m about to describe a DOS game that simultaneously wrecked my bedtime, my left-shift key, and my naïve belief that good pinball required cigarette haze and quarters that smelled like jukebox grease. Silverball, released for IBM-compatibles in late 1993, feels on first boot like someone poured a Williams cabinet through a 320 × 200 sieve

Confession time: as a ’90s arcade rat I believed every action hero wielded either a shotgun, a sword, or the power of vaguely elemental spikes. Then Sink or Swim (DOS, 1993) splashed into my life like a rubber duck lobbed from low-Earth orbit. Imagine Lemmings transplanted to a half-sunk luxury liner; swap your malleable rodents for panicky “Dim Passengers”

Question: what do you get when you cross a charity telethon, a sentimental cartoon mutt, and an early-’90s DOS platformer engine that animates at the frame-rate of a caffeinated flip-book? Self-answer: Sleepwalker, the 1993 IBM-compatible conversion of CTA Developments’ Amiga sleeper (pun mandatory) published by Ocean Software in aid of Comic Relief. It’s the sort of