The Joys of DOSBox

For a while, whenever I tried to find old LucasArts games for download, like "Day of the Tentacle" or "The Secret of Monkey Island" or "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders", I always stumbled upon a website called Abandonia that told me they weren't available for free. Disappointed but not willing to do something illegal (besides jaywalking), I would leave and find some other way to waste my time on the Internet. Then one day, December 14, 2011, I got this crazy idea to look and see what they did have for free. The rest, as they say, is history. The bad graphics are so charming and the games' antiquity - some of them came out in 1993, the year I was born, or even earlier - fill me with a sense of awe and nostalgia.

These games all run on a program called DOSBox, which emulates the antiquated Windows DOS system, although some of them are available in other formats. DOSBox isn't exactly the most user-friendly of programs so I needed a YouTube tutorial and a bit of patience to figure it out. Now I have the procedure memorized and it takes only seconds to start a game. (Random hint:  If you need to get the cursor out of the box, just hit the Start menu key on your computer. Unless it's a Mac, in which case I have no clue what keys you have or whether DOSBox will even work on it. Sorry.)

The procedure: "Mount C", the folder that all your downloads should be in ("C:\oldgames"), switch to that drive ("C:"), then change the directory ("cd") to a specific game folder ("testdriv"), then select the start file in that folder ("tdcga.exe"). Hit enter after every step.  Nothing simpler.

These are the games that have stood out to me. Most of them took a walkthrough for me to get through, if indeed I got through them at all. Maybe I'm incompetent, or maybe I'm just impatient. One of them, "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon", is treated more extensively on its own page. Click on the pictures for download links.

The Adventures of Willy Beamish - 1991

This was one of the first games I saw when I started browsing the website, but since it wasn't sci-fi I didn't actually download and play it until a year later when I was celebrating the first anniversary of discovering DOSBox. Basically it's like a Saturday morning cartoon, except it's a game. Nine year old Willy Beamish has to earn the money to enter and win the Nintari championship, and also unravel a plot to take over his town of Frumpton, without causing so much trouble that he gets sent to cadet school.

Albion - 1995

I'd be very surprised to discover that James Cameron never played this game before coming up with "Avatar". There are many similarities in the storyline and alien species/culture - for starters, it's about a company of Earthlings setting out to strip an exotic jungle planet of its resources with no regard for its tall, catlike, partially naked natives, and then one of the Earthlings gets separated from the group and makes friends with them. But anyway, this game stands well on its own. It involves a lot of walking around, talking to people, and collecting items.

Alien Incident - 1996

This was the very first one that I played! In it, Ben's uncle accidentally brings aliens through a wormhole to Earth and then Ben has to rescue him. It's kind of odd but easy enough to figure out, aside from the stupid maze section. Somehow when I first played it I didn't notice the grammatical errors that came about as a result of its being translated from Finnish. Oh well, I guess they add a certain charm. Oh, and if you download the game from Abandonia, it's missing the intro due to file size limitations, so watch it here. Also, listen to the soundtrack here.

Altered Destiny

This game took a bit to figure out because it wouldn't accept any of my commands, but I just had to be smarter than the game. After that it still took a bit to figure out because there are some tricky parts and I wasn't smarter than the game after all. Anyway it follows P.J. Barrett as he is transported to another planet, Daltere, which he then has to save from tyranny.

Captain Bible in the Dome of Darkness

I found this game fascinating and also a convenient excuse to play a computer game on the Sabbath. Captain Bible is missing a bunch of verses from his computer Bible and you have to find them and then figure out what they mean and rescue the trapped citizens in the Dome of Darkness, where they're being deceived by various lies of Satan which you refute with the verses. Yeah, it's fascinating. Alas, the gameplay and scenery are rather repetitive and bland after a while.

The Geekwad Games of the Galaxy

Aboard the Starship Wacky, a geek has to play some geeky games to rescue the geeky King Wacky from his evil alter ego, Cybergeek. Games are hosted by navigation officer Buzz Armstrong, Science Officer and Chief Cosmologist Carl Raygun, Science Fiction Officer and Phycisist Isaac Claponclapov, Transport Ensign Milton Flglmyyysphtsx, Engineering Officer Wobbie the Wobot, and counselor Yurdle. Since I'm a geek, this should have been easy, but I found most of the games quite challenging. Oh well. The sci-fi and astronomy trivia segments were much easier.

Innocent Until Caught - 1993

This was the second game I played start to finish, and the one I've played most frequently because I can remember how to do everything without a walkthrough. Jack T. Ladd is a thief who has to pay off his debt to the Interstellar Revenue Decimation Service before they torture and kill him. So, naturally, you have to help him earn money, but it takes an unexpected turn or two and ends up involving an evil dictator with a doomsday weapon and a hot daughter. Life is funny that way. I was so enthralled with this game that when I went home for Christmas I lifted several elements from it for my novel "Space Girls".

Guilty (Innocent Until Caught II) - 1995

The sequel to "Innocent Until Caught", originally slated to be titled "Into the Corrupticon". In some ways it's even more interesting than the first, but also more difficult, so I haven't played it as much. There are actually two shorter games in one, because you can play either as Jack T. Ladd or as Ysanne Andropath, the female police officer who's determined to bring him to justice and spends a lot of time in stereotypical mixed-sex hate banter. Listen to the soundtrack here.

Lexi-Cross - 1991

A futuristic game show where you must uncover letter tiles to spell out clue words that all fit a certain theme, and then guess said theme. It's definitely absorbing. The only problem is that if you can't figure out the final word and neither can your opponent, there seems to be no way to forfeit or get another word or anything, so you have to just quit and play again.

Maniac Mansion

Okay, not a DOSBox game, but I had to throw it in here because it's old and it's awesome and it inspired me to look for those other LucasArts games that led me to Abandonia in the first place. You control Dave and two of his friends as they rescue his girlfriend Sandy from Dr. Fred Edison and family, who have fallen under the hypnotic influence of an evil slimy purple meteor.

Museum Madness

I actually played this game in the school computer lab in sixth grade but never finished it because we only had an hour each time and couldn't save, so I was very pleased to find it for nostalgia purposes. It was interesting to see how much I remembered. It was also interesting to see how my perspective on the protagonist had shifted - now he just looks like a little kid. His goal is to fix all the museum exhibits that have been messed up by a computer virus. They're computer-controlled, which is a nice excuse to have them be alive twelve years before "Night at the Museum" was released.

As suggested by the title, this game can get a little risqué.  Also, if you have it set on "naughty" mode there's three seconds of small pixelated boobs. I discovered that by accident and it was kind of surreal. Anyway, this game fascinated me because it was based on the same concept - a gender war between men and women - that I'd had in my childhood daydreams for years and even tried to make into a legitimate novel. I think they pulled it off better than me. The game follows the title character, whose search for a priceless vase brings him to the cloaked planet of Terra Androgena where the women wiped out virtually all men during the Great Gender War. How do they reproduce? The other part of the title has something to do with that. See a neat little fan site here.

Shufflepuck Caf​é

This is basically air hockey against aliens and a few humans. It's kind of fun though.

Trust & Betrayal - The Legacy of Siboot

This game is a very unique concept that takes more than a bit of getting used to. It doesn't seem to have caught on, but I give the designer serious props for his originality. Don't try to play the game without reading the manual, and the novella really helps too.

Universe

This one has a really inconvenient interface system and is impossible to figure out without a walkthrough (at least for me), but if you have the patience, it has an interesting storyline and some haunting music. Boris's uncle (it's always the uncle) has a machine that transports him to an alternate universe.

Vinyl Goddess from Mars

A titular parody of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos", which is somewhat less than family-friendly, this is essentially just a generic side-scroller with rudimentary storyline. I really enjoy it anyway, because I really enjoy wasting time. Apparently it was risqué by 1995 standards, but I'm so innocent that I didn't realize it. Listen to the soundtrack here and some cool symphonic metal remixes here.

Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego?

I'd already played this one from a non-DOSBox download, and I've owned the book for years. But I enjoyed getting reacquainted and actually making some progress this time. Too bad you can't use it to teach your kids because Pluto isn't a planet anymore. Anyway, the game involves interviewing witnesses, finding clues, and solving the cases of several astronomical objects that have been stolen by Carmen and her extraterrestrial additions to the Villains' International League of Evil - Astro Fizzix, Avery Littlebit Phelps, Bea Miupscotti, Enzo di Galaxy, G. Whiz Bang, Hanover Fist, Infinity McMath, Kit Incaboodle, Liebsen Bounz, Marcy Bo Koo, Morton U. Bargandfore, Nebulus Doolittle, Rita Laboudit, and Verna-Lee Kwinox.