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

Some licensed games barge in like a rampaging T-rex; others skitter around your ankles like hungry Compsognathus. Ocean Software’s Jurassic Park for MS-DOS somehow does both, depending on whether you’re wrestling the 3-D raptor corridors or trudging across jungle screens stuffed with pixel ferns. Is it bizarre or classical? (Yes. It’s a shape-shifter.) Underrated or overrated? (Depends