What old game am I thinking of?

November 7, 2005 9:05 AM

I'm trying to remember an old PC game, but the details that I can remember are rather vague.

It was a platform game, I think on DOS rather than windows itself. You controlled a little hero guy who looked a bit like an astronaut (in my memory) because of his helmet thing, but I think he also had a cape or something as well. He was dressed in sort of purple clothes I think.

The object of the game involved exploring some sort of castle, and firing at various monsters. I *think* there were also semi-solid walls that you could fire at to destroy, but I'm not sure. There were a number of levels, and possibly a boss after every 10. I also vaguely remember some kind of success screen involving everything going white.

Any ideas?

Links with screenshots would be most helpful.

posted by Lotto to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

Commander Keen?
posted by Robot Johnny at 9:08 AM on November 7, 2005

Commander Keen?
posted by Galvatron at 9:08 AM on November 7, 2005

Was it "Drol"?
posted by interrobang at 9:08 AM on November 7, 2005

Captain Comic? (downloadable here)
posted by zsazsa at 9:09 AM on November 7, 2005

Was it one of the Commander Keen games? Probably too obvious. Hurm.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:10 AM on November 7, 2005

Response by poster: Nope, none of those. Better graphics than all three.
posted by Lotto at 9:15 AM on November 7, 2005

Alien Carnage? It's also known as Halloween Harry.
posted by teleskiving at 9:36 AM on November 7, 2005

jet set willy? (although i'm not sure the graphics are better).
posted by andrew cooke at 9:36 AM on November 7, 2005

oh, sorry - that appears to not be the game i thought it was!
posted by andrew cooke at 9:38 AM on November 7, 2005

Response by poster: Alien Carnage looks the closest so far, except that the game I remember was somehow less "cool" than that - no flamethrowers, just a single unnamed weapon that was fired using the space bar or whatever.
posted by Lotto at 9:39 AM on November 7, 2005

Best answer: Hocus Pocus, perhaps?
posted by reese at 9:42 AM on November 7, 2005

For what it's worth, the later Keen games had (much) better graphics than the ones shown on those links.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 9:45 AM on November 7, 2005

Response by poster: Yes, Hocus Pocus is it! Excellent, thanks reese.
posted by Lotto at 9:46 AM on November 7, 2005

Response by poster: Hmmm, having downloaded the game (great fun!) I'm now encountering a problem when I quit - rather than exiting to my desktop, it crashes to a blank screen, and my monitor goes into "sleep" mode, and is pretty hard to wake up. Any ideas?
posted by Lotto at 10:52 AM on November 7, 2005

If you're running in XP, Lotto, you might set it to run in Compatibility Mode... try different settings. And setting to 256 colors *might* prevent the monitor freeze.
posted by Malor at 10:54 AM on November 7, 2005

Best answer: Running it in DOSBox will probably help. It's a full emulation of an older computer running DOS, and runs on most platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux...).
posted by zsazsa at 12:00 PM on November 7, 2005

I love Hocus Pocus. Commander Keen was a great series as well.
posted by mr.dan at 12:50 PM on November 7, 2005

Hocus Pocus was a great game! I'm gonna go find out if I can play it now...
posted by SuperNova at 6:51 PM on November 7, 2005