Rusty, Marble Cooking, Season of the Sakura, Three Sisters' Story, Mad Paradox, Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, Emanuelle, Sex Vixens From Space,
Sexy Fighter, Blue Angel 69, Bei Lian Hu Sha Ren Shi Jian, Planet of Lust, Rise of the Dragon, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender,
Centerfold Squares, Dan Dolme, Dime City, Runaway City, Princess Maker II, Knights of Xentar, Cobra Mission
and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. These have -err- beautiful landscapes.

Edit: Edited.

Nice stuff, thx Jo22 !!

Winnie the Pooh is clearly the winner here.

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-08-05, 14:42:

Winnie the Pooh is clearly the winner here.

Haha, thanks! I hoped so. 😉

PLEASE POST MACHINES ON WHICH "JIM-POWER" RUNS WITHOUT ANY ISSUES!
(*no emulators*)
Thx Doc!

I have tested my P100 CL54xx AWE64 Gold against it...sound seems to be OK,
demo hangs up after a short time, sound/music still plays fine (freezing image on monitor),
playing chapter one seems to be OK though...

Tricky title, but fantastic gfx/sound and gameplay...

To add to others' replies:
Crusader: No Remorse
MDK
Mechwarrior 2 (I remember taking screenshots of the changing sky gradients reflecting on my cockpit)

Some games just had a timeless & pleasant art style, which although not beautiful in the sense that you would pause the game to admire them or take screenshots ... etc., just never gets old and won't look good in high-res or HD or filters e.g.: Doom-1, X-Com 1, Descent 1, Star Control 2, Fade to Black (nice animated textures in this one).

Yeah, Mech2 can get new appreciation for the earlier untextured gradient looks with heavy palette bias (for atmosphere!) thanks to minimalist art games like Journey, etc... it's more gracefully aging than the early texturemapped 3d stuff that needed to affine it up for the CPUs of the day (Jane's USNF, despite being a texturemapped 3d in 1024x768 flight sim ahead of the time for 1994 technologically, is slow and ugly)

Links386 Pro, Ultima VII, Underworld I and II. I guess LinksLS would run on a 486 with very slow screen drawing and it was one of the most amazing graphical experiences ever in DOS.

leileilol wrote on 2020-08-11, 00:30:

Yeah, Mech2 can get new appreciation for the earlier untextured gradient looks with heavy palette bias (for atmosphere!) thanks to minimalist art games like Journey, etc... it's more gracefully aging than the early texturemapped 3d stuff that needed to affine it up for the CPUs of the day (Jane's USNF, despite being a texturemapped 3d in 1024x768 flight sim ahead of the time for 1994 technologically, is slow and ugly)

Same with Strike Commander which looked amazing back then..

That reminds me of my old flight sim, that I used to play.. MIG29.
The graphics aren't exactly the best, but they are soothing. Kind of.
The AI is also interesting. It's not very aggressive, but fascinating to watch.
- The game has different camera perspectives/angles, so you can see the plane from outside, from tower etc.
It also allows watching the view from the enemy (plane, missiles, tower), so you can see what it is "thinking".
https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/simis-mig-29-series

I486......my favorite era, I have THREE (technically 4 now)....long list ahead....

AD&D Dungeon Hack
Arkanoid 1&2
Blockout
Car&Driver
Chex
Duke Nukem 3D
Doom/II/Ultimate
Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
Grand Theft Auto + London (yes, it is for DOS)
Hoyle Card Games
Lemmings
Leisure Suit Larry 1-6
Majongg 3.0
Maniac Mansion 1&2
Monkey Island 1&2
Microsoft Flight Sim 4.0
MicroLink Yahtzee
Retro City Rampage DX
Sim City
Sim City 2000
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Star Wars: X-Wing
Star Wars: Tie Fighter
Scorched Earth
Super Angelo
Tank Wars
Test Drive III
The Incredible Machine 1&2
Ultima IV-VII part II
Wacky Wheels

leileilol wrote on 2020-08-01, 00:21:

simcopter is infamous for its speed issues (it needs to run slowly to be playable)

Never heard of that. AFAIK it mostly runs as intended on my system, maybe a few little sprite cycles are super fast but other than that. Of course, no one ever accused it of being beautiful. And yeah it's Windows 95.

I'd like to bring up these games in particular:

Rusty
Princess Maker
Genocide 2 (Mantra)

These are ports from old obscure Japanese computers (PC-9801 and X68000 respectively) that somehow made their way to MSDOS, but look really solid and play really solid too.

Allways had a soft spot for the visual style of games you'd get on these Japanese computers.

Here's a YT video of some German guy playing Links LS 97. I've tried this on my DX2/66 and it definitely works, though the screen redraws are a bit slow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2yPBkOCY7o
IMO the best graphics I've ever seen in DOS. The game will play at up to 1600x1200 if you have enough graphics memory and a monitor that will support that resolution.

That's what I liked about the PC/DOS platform.
Whereas Amiga/Atari/Mac etc were stuck with 320x200 to ~640x400 pels,
sophisticated DOS applications (Autosketch, Autodesk Animator Pro) and games (adventures, simulations)
of the same time could use 800x600 and higher resolutions no problem.
Even if the average user got capable hardware not until many years later.

Edit: Mac is a special case. It started out with 512x384 pels, but games running
In a window may only used low-res graphics if they were ported over from other platforms.

I rally like the looks and feels (and sounds) of the RPG Albion from Blue Byte. A Sci-Fi RPG with Fantasy elements, where it actually looks and sounds alien.

Other candidates are games like Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld (I love it's UI) and even Ultima 8. Adventure games are also often looking good and there I really fell in love with Kyrandia 1, back in the day before I owned my first PC and Kyrandia 2 also looks nice. Sadly with 3 they used ugly render graphics. The looks and feels of games like Ultima 7, Underworld and Kyrandia were the reason for going PC instead of Amiga.

Hand of Fate (Kyrandia 2) is an absolutely stunning PC game..

Terracresta wrote on 2020-08-27, 13:37:

I rally like the looks and feels (and sounds) of the RPG Albion from Blue Byte. A Sci-Fi RPG with Fantasy elements, where it actually looks and sounds alien.

Other candidates are games like Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld (I love it's UI) and even Ultima 8. Adventure games are also often looking good and there I really fell in love with Kyrandia 1, back in the day before I owned my first PC and Kyrandia 2 also looks nice. Sadly with 3 they used ugly render graphics. The looks and feels of games like Ultima 7, Underworld and Kyrandia were the reason for going PC instead of Amiga.

Agree with everything you said. I really wanted to like Albion and I played it for about 10 hrs but there were UI issues that made it too hard to continue, so I retired from it. 🙁

clueless1 wrote on 2020-08-27, 17:08:

Agree with everything you said. I really wanted to like Albion and I played it for about 10 hrs but there were UI issues that made it too hard to continue, so I retired from it. 🙁

What UI issues do you have? I find that the game is quite hard at the beginning with limited healing items, combat being hard if you don't use the heavily limited gun ammo and armour breaking quite often, adding repair cost. It's been a while since I played through it. The "while" being the mid 90s. xD

Btw, Albion Big Boxes seem to be very hard find. I destroyed my PC game boxes at the end of the 90s because I was running out of space and so far saw the proper Albion box (not some rerelease like Blue Byte Classics) only once in the last two years I was looking for it.

Terracresta wrote on 2020-08-27, 17:11:

clueless1 wrote on 2020-08-27, 17:08:

Agree with everything you said. I really wanted to like Albion and I played it for about 10 hrs but there were UI issues that made it too hard to continue, so I retired from it. 🙁

What UI issues do you have? I find that the game is quite hard at the beginning with limited healing items, combat being hard if you don't use the heavily limited gun ammo and armour breaking quite often, adding repair cost.

The main one was movement. There was not a suitable keyboard equivalent to the mouse movement and the mouse movement (constantly holding the left button to walk) caused pain in my hand. You could move up, down, left, right with arrows, but not diagonally and no ability to customize the movement keys. Also, when it went into first person view, they did a poor job of portraying depth. Nowhere near as good as Ultima Underworld. I constantly found myself overturning corners and accidentally walking into walls or turning 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees.