When I was growing up, I played all kinds of games on the PC. Many kids may have grown up on Mario Brothers with Nintendo, but my family went from having an Atari 2600 to a Playstation 2; needless to say, we skipped a few years of consoles there. So my main outlet for video game goodness was in DOS and later Windows 95. I was just remembering Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, so I had to look it up on Wikipedia. That led me to remember other games that I’d forgotten, but would love to play again.

• Elfland – I remember the game always loaded with a cheerful, high-pitched voice saying, “elfland!” and then you would hear ‘boink… boink… boink’ and see evil springs bouncing around. Black springs and birds were two of the main enemies, as well as trolls. You played a little blond elf (Elfie or Elfita, depending on male or female) that was supposed to save his land from the invading trolls. You went to visit Gorgimer in his castle and do things for him to get his help. It was a pretty fun little side-scrolling game involving a giant bird you had to lure away from a nest, exploring castle dungeons, and gathering berry juice in the clouds.
• Jazz Jackrabbit and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 – Along with Vinyl Goddess from Mars, this series was a favorite of mine. In the first one, you were a green jackrabbit named Jazz who was trying to save his planet and girlfriend from an evil tortoise. You ran around shooting turtles and surviving off of carrots. Pretty basic gameplay, just a side-scroller, but I loved the bright colors, music, and characters. The second game included updated graphics and a cousin, Spaz Jackrabbit, who I enjoyed more than Jazz because he could jump higher. Lots of new levels came along as well; I particularly enjoyed the Halloween set of levels where you had to watch out for a witch who would turn you into a toad.
• Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure – You played a little green alien named Cosmo who was supposed to be going to Disneyland with his parents. Their spaceship had some issues, though, so they stopped to repair it. Cosmo wandered off and when he came back, his parents were gone. He figured they were kidnapped, so your goal is to wander around the strange alien planet and try to find them. I always found this game to start out easy, with Cosmo bouncing on enemies to kill them and collecting fruit, but it quickly got very hard. The levels where Cosmo is in a haunted forest with ghosts were always impossible for me to beat.
• Lemmings – A classic game, definitely. Each level starts with an obstacle course. Ideally, you pause the timer and observe the level, then when you have the gist of it, start the clock and watch as dozens of little green-haired lemmings fall one at a time into the map. Your goal is to guide these little idiots safely across the map. They walk in the direction they land in, stopping only when they hit a boundary, and will walk over cliffs, into perilous water, into lemming-eating plants, etc. You can assign different roles to each lemming by choosing a role from your toolbox, so make some diggers and others climbers and anything else you need to get the rest across. The main problem I had with Lemmings is that it could be very frustrating, either in complex puzzles or in the need for hair-trigger accuracy. Sometimes it seemed like if you didn’t give a lemming a specific job when he was on just the right pixel, you’d fail the level. Overall, I found Lemmings 2 to be much more enjoyable because it had different types of maps all sorted out by the scene (circus, highland, space…) as well as a kind of testbed area where you could just let them loose almost free of danger. That latter part was my favorite; I enjoyed playing around with them and not worrying about the little fellows dying all the time.
• Vinyl Goddess from Mars – It sounds funny to say it, but I loved this game. It was definitely my favorite, along with Jazz Jackrabbit 2. The premise was silly, of course: some floozy crashed her spaceship on the way to a movie convention, and you have to help her find parts to repair it, but the gameplay was really enjoyable. I enjoyed the level design because a lot of them had you running around outside in the leafy greenery, using your knife or throwing stars to kill eyeballs, skeletons, and other baddies. The music was also very catchy.
• The Incredible Machine – This was a clever little game meant as a learning tool that was actually very fun. You were given an objective, such as getting a basketball into a box, a game board with various obstacles, and several tools to complete your goal. You would pause the simulation, place various things like trampolines, levers, pulleys, platforms, and boxes on the board, and play the simulation, seeing if your construction successfully completed the goal. It was definitely aimed at kids with cute things such as powering gears by a mouse running in a wheel (you had to put cheese within his sight first, though), but both my dad and I enjoyed figuring out the puzzles in this.
• Skyroads – I could only play this one in short bursts because it would get annoying if you got on a losing streak. You piloted a little ship in space that could only fly along roads that were also in space. You could make short jumps from one road to the other, but had to avoid flying off into space, walls, and other obstacles. If I remember correctly, the music was pretty good in this game.