Planet X3
From
Nkeck72@finalzone.ddns.net to
Local.General_Modern_Gaming on Tuesday, July 28, 2020 07:59:09
So, who would have thought that I'd be posting about a DOS game in General_Modern_Gaming?
Released by David Murray, aka The 8-bit Guy, The iBook Guy, 8-bit Keys, and other such names; Planet X3 is an MS-DOS real time strategy game released in 2019 for any computer with an 8088 and above. The game runs flawlessly on everything I've thrown at it, including DOSBox, a 750 MHz Athlon, and a 166
MHz Pentium - all with no sacrifices in gameplay. Impressive for a game
written entirely in assembly! Even more impressive is the range of hardware
it supports- CGA, EGA, VGA come as your standard options, but it also will
play on Plantronics' Colorplus card, Tandy graphics, and even CGA composite.
It supports PC speaker, Tandy sound, Adlib, and even the OPL2LPT parallel
port Adlib natively.
The game is a blast to play and dangerously addictive. The goal of the game
is to simultaneously defend your base while you try to dominate the rest of
the map, a similar concept to games like 0 A.D., Civilization, Age of
Empires and games like such. It's difficult, but not too much so, and is
almost a perfect balance between fun and strategy. David clearly drew inspiration from RTS games of the 1980s, and he took the best of those ideas and merged them into his game very well. The mapmaking is good, the music is great, and the graphics are impressive.
The program is *not* free, as David spent months making the game, but for a very reasonable price you can get the game's distribution files (for 720k or 360k disks, a nice touch), soundtrack, and manual (PDF) all in a digital download, or you can splurge to get a boxed copy with printed manual and physical disks, if he happens to be making a run of those. I seriously
suggest you give it a try if you like DOS RTS games. It's fun!