Underdog games: underrated worth playing

Power Drift feels like a rollercoaster decided it wanted to be a racing game. The tracks are tilted, twisted, and occasionally seem designed by an architect who had a personal grud...

Gorillas, also known as "Gorillas.bas," is a turn-based artillery game that was included as a sample program with Microsoft QBasic, an IDE and interpreter for a variant of the...

Red Baron is a 1990 flight simulation that recreates the aerial combat of World War I, putting players behind the controls of early fighter aircraft. The game combines dogfighting,...

Redneck Rampage is a 1997 first-person shooter that takes the genre into deliberately ridiculous rural territory. Players battle through bizarre environments filled with hostile re...

Aka Starglider 2 with an attitude, Revenge of Defender (or Defender of the Crown’s evil twin in name only) is a 3D space shooter where your main enemy is not the aliens&mdash...

Roadwar Europa is a 1987 DOS strategy game that moves the post-apocalyptic road adventure into a devastated European landscape. Players command a convoy through a continent where r...

Rock 'n Roll is a 1989 DOS puzzle game that combines rolling-ball mechanics with increasingly elaborate mazes and obstacles. Players guide a ball through levels filled with hazards...

Sanitarium is a 1998 psychological horror adventure that follows a mysterious protagonist who awakens in an asylum with no memory of how he got there. As the story unfolds, players...

Scorched Earth (1991) was the “mother of all games” long before Doom took the title. Two or more tanks face off on a randomly generated terrain, and your only mission i...

Shadowgate (1988, DOS/Windows 3.x/Mac) is a point-and-click adventure that politely invites you into a castle and then gleefully kills you for touching the wrong thing. Armed with ...

SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony is a wonderfully eccentric 1991 simulation that lets players experience life from the perspective of an ant. Rather than building cities or managi...

SimFarm takes the simulation philosophy of Maxis and moves it away from skyscrapers and into the countryside. Players manage a farm, choosing crops, raising livestock, buying equip...

Snood is a charming puzzle game built around matching colorful creatures and clearing them from the screen before things get out of hand. Released in 1996, it looks deceptively sim...

Star Trek: Birth of the Federation is a turn-based strategy video game set in the Star Trek universe. The game was developed by MicroProse Software and published by Infogrames for ...

Starflight is a 1986 science-fiction role-playing and exploration game that gives players an entire galaxy to investigate. You command a starship, travel between planets, land on a...

Stellar Trader is a space trading simulation that puts the player behind the controls of a starship and asks a deceptively simple question: can you make money without getting yours...

Stormlord is a colorful fantasy platform adventure in which the title character has the rather unpleasant job of rescuing magical creatures and confronting an assortment of hostile...

Strife from 1996 is a first-person shooter game developed by Rogue Entertainment and published by Velocity, based on the Doom engine. It's often remembered for being one of the ear...

Supaplex is a deceptively simple puzzle game that takes the basic idea of moving objects around a maze and turns it into a surprisingly demanding exercise in planning. Inspired by ...

Super Cauldron is a platform adventure with a distinctly magical flavor, sending the player through colorful environments filled with enemies, hazards, and the usual assortment of ...

Superfrog is a cheerful platform adventure starring a frog who has somehow found himself in a world filled with enemies, obstacles, coins, and enough dangerous gaps to make amphibi...

Swap is a puzzle game built around a wonderfully simple idea: rearrange things until the board behaves itself. Released in 1992, it challenges the player with increasingly tricky a...

In Taipan for Windows, you’re not a hero, you’re a 19th-century capitalist trying to get rich trading tea, silk, and the occasional bit of opium in the South China Sea....

Terminal Velocity is all about speed, freedom, and blowing things up while flying at ridiculous velocities. The open environments give a sense of scale rarely seen at the time, and...

The Blues Brothers transforms Jake and Elwood Blues into the stars of a colorful platform adventure. Released in 1991, it sends the duo through a series of stages filled with obsta...

The Fool's Errand is an unusually imaginative puzzle adventure that wraps dozens of logic challenges inside a strange, interconnected storybook world. Instead of simply presenting ...

The Typing of the Dead takes the familiar zombie-shooting formula and replaces the ammunition with something far more terrifying: a keyboard. Instead of aiming weapons, players typ...

Thomas the Tank Engine brings the cheerful little blue locomotive to the computer in a game aimed primarily at younger players. The experience revolves around controlling Thomas an...

Thomas the Tank Engine 2 continues the computer adventures of the famous blue locomotive with another collection of simple activities designed around the world of the television se...

Time Bandit is a sprawling arcade adventure that throws the player into a collection of strange worlds filled with enemies, treasures and secret passages. Its maze-like environment...