PC

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

Fire up DOSBox, lower your expectations for glamour, and prepare for the only ‘90s computer game that could make a middle-schooler scream “hail insurance!” louder than “headshot.” SimFarm isn’t merely a quirky cousin to SimCity; it’s a pocket-sized agronomy degree disguised as a pixel playground, a title where a gorgeous barley harvest can be followed—without warning—by a tornado