Windows 3.1 games

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Hi I got Windows 3.1 working on Pcem and I was testing old games on it. I don't know too many Windows 3.1 games. Do you have any ideas or recommendations?

Timelapse (1996)

A spiritual successor to Myst that is considerably more difficult. You play as an archaeologist who discovers a gateway to an alien world whilst exploring Easter Island's cave system. Very atmospheric. Now available through GOG and Steam, thankfully.



Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail (1996)

Yes, they actually made a game of the movie. (They also made one of Meaning of Life, as well as Complete Waste of Time which is more or less a continuation of Flying Circus.) All of the cast members (sans Graham Chapman) returned to expand upon the film with many great new gags, such as setting fire to the Black Knight's tent (preferably after reading his personal diary) and playing Tetris with plague victims.



The Dark Eye (1995)

An interactive adventure through several of Edgar Allen Poe's works, with William S. Burroughs providing narration and voice acting. This game has a very creepy, phantasmagorical art style. Additionally, it lets you play each story not only from the perspective of the killer but from the victim's perspective as well. I struggle to think of any other game similar to this one.

Get the Windows Entertainment Packs. They're simply awesome. They contain classics like JezzBall, Tetris, Skifree, Pipe Dream, and Chip's Challenge, just to name some of the more well-known games.

Good old SkiFree...

Sim Tower was the only game i really played on Win 3.1.

Btw: there are some 3.1 games online at Archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_win3

There are few games that run on Windows 3.1 that Windows 95 wouldn't run better.

But anyway look at this, great old game actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(video_game_series)

Runs better on Windows 95 but runs on Windows 3.1 alright.

There's a pretty good Risk game for Windows 3.1
https://archive.org/details/win3_winrisk

I remember watching my uncle play this game a long time ago when I was a kid. https://archive.org/details/WOWSpill_1020 He played it on Windows 95, but it's a 16-bit Windows 3.1 game. It's a basic water pipe game, but it's pretty fun.

One game I played the most on Windows 3.1 was Commander Keen Episode 1.

AFAIK it was released for DOS and not Win3.x, but I wouldn't be surprised if it runs acceptably under Win3.x. Conventional wisdom back in the day suggested that DOS games shouldn't be run while in Windows, but I've had semi-decent luck with it.

Anyway, I can't remember where I found it, but there's a version of 3D Space Cadet Pinball that works on Windows 3.1 with Win32S. It's the pinball game that most notably came preinstalled with Windows XP. I think it's kind of funny that a game that was already somewhat old at the time recieved such a huge boost of popularity thanks to that. Keep in mind, being a late-ish Win3.x game, the hardware requirements are gonna be kinda high. I played it on a 66MHz 486DX2 with a decent video card, but sometimes sound effects would be choppy. I'd probably suggest emulating a Pentium if I were playing on real hardware.

Another somewhat surprising Win3.x game is Spectre VR, which came bundled alongside the DOS version of the same game. The Windows version runs at a higher resolution and has digitized soundbites, but I could never get music to work. Conversely, the DOS version runs at only 320x200 and seems to lack digitized sounds for the most part, but it runs smoother and has decent Adlib music.

Civilization II also runs under Windows 3.1 surprisingly, but IMO it really seems more like something that should be run under Win95 or later. I'm pretty sure I had trouble making this playable on my old 486, same with Simcity 2000 on another 486. Speaking of which, a bunch of the old Maxis games (like SimLife and SimAnt) had Win3.x versions, and I enjoyed playing those as a kid.

For big name commercial titles, DOS certainly ruled the roost in the early 90s, but Windows 3.x did have a small number of notable commercial games, as well as a whole crapload of little shareware titles.

Most of the graphically intense games like first person shooters ran under DOS rather than Windows. With DOS, your program is the only thing running on the computer, and you have full, direct access to the hardware to manipulate it in any way you see fit. It was the only way you could take advantage of every MHz of the CPU. With Windows 95 and later, that changed, since hardware became more powerful, and you had access to APIs like OpenGL and DirectX, which allow you to use hardware-accelerated graphics in a device-independent manner (although if you had a 3dfx card, you could use the Glide API in DOS). In the 2000s, NT-based versions of Windows became the norm for consumers, and DOS programs run poorly on Windows NT (and not at all on 64-bit Windows), so people stopped programming for DOS.

That didn't stop Bad Toys from being made.

Bad toys is dope

I wrote out a reply earlier but I can't remember if I posted it or not, maybe it got deleted, I can't remember if I mentioned piracy or some stupid crap that might piss someone off or something like that. Still I had an emergency at my place and I think it was around the time I wrote this post so it may have never got posted.

Anyway I am not typing it out again so I'll give the short version. Basically I said that I thought that compatibility was less of an issue running games on Windows at the time and more or a performance issue. I think stuff ran fine on Windows 3.1 but a lot times I don't think that systems at the time could handle it.

This is perhaps my most favorite Win 3.1/95 era game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivers_(video_game)