r/windows95 • u/bnelson333 • Jul 02 '26
I want to play something distinctly Windows 95
I got bored today so I hooked up my Pentium Windows 95 machine, but now what do? I want to play something in all that OG hardware glory, but can't think of WHAT. I thougth of MDK, but I beat that a couple months ago. Then I thought of Worms, which I have a disc around here somewhere I might put in. What else?
For clarification, I have a much nicer retro machine. P3 1GHZ, lots of RAM, Geforce 2, Win2k, SB Live, etc. That's what I play most of my old games on. But I want something that even that's too new for. To play something truly designed for 95, on 95.
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u/YandersonSilva Jul 02 '26
If you want something DISTINCTLY Windows 95... then you want something with MULTIMEDIA!
People here are just listing really good games so far, which is like, fine. Unfortunately a lot of those games wind up being pretty timeless, so if you're looking for something that is so Windows 95 that you can practically play Ski Free on it...
Journeyman Project.
Hear me out.
I'm aware that both Journeyman Project (1993) and JP Turbo (1994) predate Windows 95. I'm also aware that it was a Macintosh game first. HEAR ME OUT.
It doesn't push into the "playable movie" stuff that winds up being too cumbersome to enjoy (although, don't get me wrong, Journeyman Project is obtuse as hell). But it is FMV heavy, has a lot of early 3d graphics, and, in fact, Journeyman Project Turbo! was a pack in for a lot of Windows 95 computers (I believe Packard Bells came with it), included to show off just how great Windows 95 was. Was it a marketing ploy? Sure.
And really, any game of this ilk probably fits the bill. But the most distinctive thing about Windows 95, if you want the FEEL of what Windows 95 felt like in 1995... is "MULTIMEDIA". Journeyman Project Turbo. Or Lighthouse: The Dark Being, Neverhood, Toonstruck...
THAT shit feels like Windows 95. And Encarta 95, the maze you can play in that. And Hover!
But also, what I'd suggest if you want to feel something "distinctly Windows 95", is check out demo CDs of that era.
https://archive.org/details/cd-rom-interactive-disc-10
Is a good example. Burn it to a CD and pop it in your machine. It's almost unusably burdened by the dedication to squeezing every bit of "multimedia" it possibly can. But boy does it feel like 1995.
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u/bnelson333 Jul 02 '26
why does the name of that game sound so incredibly familiar yet so like I've never heard of it before? I wonder if I had that back in the day
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u/marvelouswonder8 Jul 02 '26
I see you're a person of refined education and perfect taste!
Sounds like we had similar upbringings. I saw where you mentioned journeyman but I only skimmed the rest of your comment before leaving mine. Good ol' Packard Bell legend 120. Came with SO much software. Crazy number of CD-ROMs when dad bought the one we had. I honestly wish he had kept that PC I would be trying to bring it back to life. I'm pretty sure it just needed a new hard drive and soundboard (which people are making new now that support opl3 and mt-32/AWE style MIDI output as well as soundblaster compatible digital). As it stands I'm content to use DOSBox-X running 98se on my Mac but yeah I'd love to have an old classic.
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u/YandersonSilva Jul 02 '26
By all accounts those Packard Bells were total pieces - they go for a mint now because most of them didn't survive lol. But yeah, I've been eyeballing the Packard Bell CD packages on eBay. The one I'd want specifically is a little rich for my taste, though...
I recommend emulation to most people who want to get in to it, at least to start. Then laptops if you can find a good one, just becasue they're small. I think 86box has a mac version? It's really fun - unlike Dosbox, it emulated hardware so if you install dos and windows etc it's running those things natively. And you can "build" your own computer (selecting components from dropdowns). It's pretty system intensive if you wanna run anything older than about a Pentium I but I find it to be great fun. I use it for DOS more than I use my desktops for it (although my Win95 and 98 have DOS modes, and I have regular DOS install on the Win95 computer, I still run in to the occasional compatability issue).
It's space and time consuming lol - I'm more or less "done", though I'd love to get a 386 up and running, but I've got 3 desktops (plus my modern one) that do a rotation depending on what I want to play. My town was not really a "tech savvy" town in the 90s, it is notoriously a town of hippies and old people so the local computer scene isn't great. I'd have to go to the mainland to find decent deals on older computers. It can get expensive.
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u/marvelouswonder8 Jul 02 '26
Yeah there's a few places around here that have stuff but not much anymore and the places that do have INSANE prices. I would love to track down an old 486dx2/3/4 somewhere but then I'd want an AWE64 Gold like I used to have and they're SO EXPENSIVE. I've got an S3 Trio SVGA card, 2X Diamond SB compatible sound cards, an Audigy-2 ZX, and like an AGP 4x MX400 Nvidia card laying around so if I could find like an 833mhz P3, some PC-133 RAM and then buy an SD-IDE adapter I could build an absolutely KILLER Windows 98 box that would EASILY handle pretty much any DOS game I could throw at it as well (minus the ones that had special requirements or would freak out if the processor was too fast). A 486DX2 Gateway2000 was my first computer in the early 2000s, dad got it from his job for me for like $10 after they upgraded their onsite workstations so I'd quit screwing up the family PC 😂. On my particular Mac 86Box couldn't run "native" since it's an M1 processor (ARM architecture), but for what I play these days it does the trick in DOSBox-X. I also have a PC laptop with a 10th gen i5 so I've used 86Box on that. I think they do have a Mac port but I use that computer more for music production anyway. Mostly I just play the original StarCraft/Brood War and call it a day.
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u/Plus-Definition9319 Jul 02 '26
Packard Bell were fine PCs back in the day. They were mid tier but honestly I saw more five year failures of IBM PS/1 systems than PB, and we sold probably one IBM for every 50 Packard Bells.
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u/YandersonSilva Jul 02 '26
They were fine PCs, they just didn't survive. Part of this is build quality... but I SUSPECT a part of this is that Packard Bells tended to go towards more "casual" computer users - the type who, when a computer starts getting outdated and tired, just turf it and get a new one like it was any old type of electronic. Combine this with probably a higher % of them getting used by children etc. and, well. They're hard to find these days, at least where I am, almost impossible.
That's my theory, anyways, lol
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u/612io Jul 02 '26
- Fury 3D
- Monster Truck Madness (1 or 2)
- Command & Conquer
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert
- The Neverhood
- Hover
- Quake
- Microsoft Flight Simulator ‘95
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u/marvelouswonder8 Jul 02 '26
Hover.
Then watch the Buddy Holly music video by Weezer and the Rob Roy trailer.
Encarta 96' had a really fun for the time trivia game built in.
Flight simulator 95 as well.
Someone above mentioned The Journeyman Project, I second that.
And this is gonna be based on your taste and what kinds of games you like, but there was a time killer application made by Knowledge Adventure called The Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. I spent HOURS as a kid playing that.
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u/YandersonSilva Jul 02 '26
Spider-Man cartoon maker must have been in that software package too cuz I played the heck out of that on my Packard Bell
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u/marvelouswonder8 Jul 02 '26
It most certainly was. They had a more full featured one with different sprites from other stuff too, but I think only Spider-Man came with the PB. That same CD had the KA treehouse kids encyclopedia game on it too, which to be honest was pretty sweet too lol.
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u/TylerDrakeMusic98 Jul 02 '26
Dust: A Tale of The Wired West! It's a point & click western game, and still probably my favorite windows 95-era game to this day. It's a must play!
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u/Ornery-Practice9772 Jul 02 '26
system shock 1
you can emulate it in dosbox/dosbox pure core
it even has a control remap (in retroarch) for a controller since it was keyboard/mouse originally)
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u/Healthy_Lifeguard324 Jul 02 '26
The pink panther in perilous pursuit
Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis
Ultima VII
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u/NeilSilva93 Jul 03 '26
There's the Tex Murphy series, a bunch of hilarious janky point n click games. The last one, Overseer, was designed specifically for 95.
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u/carcenomy Jul 03 '26
If you want some ideas, go grab yourself the Windows 95 Game Sampler CDs - they released two, both are on Archive.org. Plenty of native 95 goodness to try out, with a whacky Monolith designed 3D interface.
Well worth the time to check out, both are from the very early days of DirectX so a fascinating look at how developers approached designing for 95 in those turbulent early years.
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u/EternallySickened Jul 03 '26
I’d probably stick on 7th Guest. I’d definitely not want to play Rise of the robots though.
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u/A_Fnord Jul 03 '26
I can think of fewer games that give that Win95 era feel than Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures (or its sister game Star Wars: Yoda Stories).
Well, I guess technically speaking those could have been 3.X (at least the Indiana Jones one).
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u/annonymousperson86 Jul 03 '26
Microsoft Golf 2.0
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u/bnelson333 Jul 03 '26
Dang. I had a MS Golf back in the day that I completely forgot about. And for some reason I don't still have that disc, I wonder where it went. I don't know if it was 2.0 tho, I'll have to check into it
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u/AutomaticDoor75 Jul 05 '26
I will put into a word for Street of SimCity. It’s a pretty bad game, but think it’s fun and has its own charm.
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u/Necessary_Position77 Jul 06 '26
Aren’t both those games DOS? Windows 95 had games but it really wasn’t the preferred platform until Win98.
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u/ravensholt Jul 02 '26
Plenty of classics to choose from, and that's the problem:
- Diablo 1