Traveling to 1995
wikipedia1995_video_games (thanks Cavalary for placing " in link)

to play three games .... (need few hours to decide :D )

This is so much fun! ^ Thank you Ciemnogrodzianin for the effort!

edit:
some principles,
*I will only play games I haven't played before (longer than an hour)
*Two or three games for any year(month of travel), a week for a game plus a free week
*One or two games from gog.com and one from all devices and systems
*I will try to make an interesting screenshot and find undiscovered detail
*Best time to write few reviews
*Dates of release are different for different platforms

Games to Visit in 1995

1. Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate,
Considering the same game, I played Ultimate on Arcade machines, time to check bare 3.
Arcade: April 15, 1995 ; PC: October 6, 1995 or September 1996 unclear : )
Clear is that the version from here date back to 25th September 1995 (picture attached, game started and confirmed)

2. Worms Played once, time to give it a go! ^
(date of release showed on GOG is possibly the date of release of DLC Worms: Reinforcements or the Worms United version equals Worms+freeDLC) (game installed and confirmed)
PC: 31 October 1995

3. Teenagent is from 1995 and it's Free! :D was curious about this game... time to find out : ) (game installed and confirmed)
PC: 26 February 1995

GOG says: Release date: September 2, 1994

The initial idea was to keep the chronological order – at least for a few first years. If you suggest another approach, I invite you to Time Machine - Departures thread – where we can discuss another options. If most of travellers prefer a different order, I'm fine and I'll go with you whenever we agree :)

In my case it's Tyranny – still want to finish before May, may not be easy... :)
Thanks for the list, I'll add them to OP – I was thinking about querying GOG DB, but on the other hand I'm still not sure how to organize the list too keep it both complete and concise/informative. Perhaps we should mark the most important titles somehow?

Worry not! That's my regular approach to point&click :D, I'm terrible in those abstract puzzles, brute force is the only option for me and I really appreciate making this tactics enjoyable with funny comments in some games ;) In some of them it's even worth dying a few times, just to check that options :D

Console releases are fine. I don't know what's worth mentioning as I don't know that part of history, but I'll put Yoshi's Island on the list as quite important – thanks!

Thanks, welcome on board. I knew we could rely on you - after all, you are a "time tourist" :)
I saw that Wikipedia list – a bit overwhelming, to be honest :D

Unsure about that one, but GOG may have the year right... MobyGames and Wikipedia list 1995, but other sources list June 1994, and there's an one-paragraph PC Gamer review from July 1994 saying it's out.
Oh, that's definitely one not to miss :D ... Though I'm still uncertain which early ones in the series I played, just sure of Armageddon.

Oh, Time Travellers! I am in!

I see you could add

Alone in the Dark 3 ?
Dark Seed II
Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu
The 11th Hour
Torin's Passage
Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer

For 1995 my journey begins with Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within. Crême.

It´s a title gem i always want to play and never found the time.

To the list Disworld i started a lot of times but never finished, and pending too IHNMAIMS and Mission Critical.

1995, i had... ;) the year of Windows 95, the year of Playstation, Sega Saturn, what about Virtua Fighter, i need to review my magazines i keep.


Very funny the idea ciemnogrodzianin,

Good trip to everyone!

I'm in and I will play Anvil of Dawn.

Wanted to give it a try anyway.

I'm participating with Stonekeep.
Safe travel.

Guys, you're amazing :) Thanks for participation and I really hope you'll find a while to jump here to share some thoughts, screenshots, links to "Games Finished" posts etc.

I've updated OP list with mrkgnao titles cleared by Cavalary and a few titles from argamasa (thank you!). It took me a while to make all the links, but thanks to that I've realized we should be quite grateful – because we've got a lot of fantastic games available here, on GOG. Looking at this list we can see nice job GOG has done over all these years.

I always wondered if this was a Polish phenomenon or a global one - that the computer press was initially just like that: imperfect, a bit clumsy, amateur, but with a soul and atmosphere. You read each article cover to cover many times :) As time passed, magazines added more and more "full versions" of games, "more content", better paper, became more professional, but lost most of their charm.

In Poland we had attempts to bring old press titles back to life (some successful, at the moment we've got 2 gaming magazines created mostly by old editors and maintaining some of old traditions) or to create retro-only-focused press title (disappeared after 2 issues).

For a free(now, I mean) game, it is very decent...nice music/locations/characters.

-

If you like funny comments, the game "Ben There Dan That" has a ton of that......most inventory items have unique comments when used on other inventory items and the various things in each location. :)

Good ol' Sierra/etc. ;D

I hear ya

By the way – what was the most popular gaming title in your country in 1995? What did you read? :)

In Poland we now have some fans who maintain websites like this one ("zapach papieru" means "the smell of paper":) – there are even some scans available for download. In Poland 1995 was six years after the fall of communism, capitalism was boiling, a lot of initiatives arose, titles were born and fell.

1995 is the moment that old legendary titles (like "Top Secret" or "Gambler") were still alive and new stars were already born ("Secret Service, "ŚGK") or about to be born ("CDA" in 1996). From this perspective 1995-1997 may be considered some kind of a peak moment for gaming press.

Well I mainly skimmed them(as I do most things slowly....playing games, reading magazines, etc), but PcGamer was pretty nice.....from the amazing cover art/text. to the demo discs, to the articles....and even sometimes the retro ads**. :)

(**Back then the ads were of course trying to sell things, but they seemed to have more soul back then as well...the new ads in gaming mags these days seeming less so)

First mention I can find about it on the Strategy group on Usenet is from March 1995, which also coincides with ads and mentions in contemporary issues of CGW.
If it really was released originally in 1994 it must have been done quietly in Germany or something.
(Since I play games chronologically I tend to research release dates quite thoroughly.)

I'm not in yet but I plan to restart Albion later on, I'm busy with other things now. I was a little bit out of love with new releases in 1995 but I was playing a lot of Doom, Heretic and Magic Carpet, they are older releases so they don't fit here.
The biggest pc (Amiga and DOS) games magazine in Italy was TGM, the Games Machine, which has outlived by many yars the English edition and is still in print. Its strong point was the humour, and between the columns, reader's mail included, and the reviews themselves, it provided a way to have a gaming community to have fun before internet access was common. I still remember a Total Carnage review that gave the game a 47/100. That number in the Italian tradition means "the speaking dead" and the irony of it was worse than giving a serious lower vote. Every page was lighthearted and the reader's mail was a complete delirium full of the weirdest ideas and talks about anything. The ads were cool because you could see full page illustrations from games or know where to mail order games from if you lived in a town without many game stores or any at all - hoping you could still find one of those boxes on sale. And of course we wanted to read the cheats and the walkthroughs.
TGM was the spiritual successor of Zzap!, that dealt with 8bit systems like the C64. K was a generalist (pc and consoles) magazine I used to read a lot too. Newsagents were brimming with those titles. Nowadays many numbers of classic magazines have been scanned and put online and I sometimes indulge in reading those old pages.

[url=http://www.dizionariovideogiochi.it/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=altre:tgm_38.jpg]http://www.dizionariovideogiochi.it/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=altre:tgm_38.jpg[/url]



[url=http://www.dizionariovideogiochi.it/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=altre:tgm_38.jpg]http://www.dizionariovideogiochi.it/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=altre:tgm_38.jpg[/url]

I remember that...I mean when mag reviews gave scores that weren't all 7-10, with the rare 1 every now and then.

(of course now with gaming mags being more and more paid advertisements disguised as review magazines, they obv. can't give the ones giving them stuff/money too low a score lest they get less stuff/money from them in the future, which results in the current mag score system which is more or less meaningless)

(TL;DR: I’ll be playing Tyrian. The re-release -- Tyrian 2000 -- released in 1999, but the base game originally released in 1995.)

Thumbs up! Let's do this!

**Climbs into Delorian**
**Activates Time Circuits**
**Enters Date: December 15, 1995**
**Revs engine... and floors it**
**Reaches speed of: 88 MPH**
**Flux capacitor activates and generates 1.21 Jigawatts (Thinks: "What the hell is a Jigawatt?!?!?")**
**Shouts out: "GREAT SCOTT!!!"... shortly followed by a blinding flash...**

...

1995 was a fantastic year for gaming since it was essentially the pinnacle of the MS-DOS era. The Intel 66MHz 80486DX-2 was the CPU of choice for serious gamers, with Pentium processors also available for high-end enthusiasts. 16-bit sound cards and CD-ROM drives had become standard components in most PCs, providing easy access to multimedia for many PC gamers. MS-DOS games were still dominant throughout the year, but the release of Windows 95 late in the third quarter laid the foundation for DirectX, which resulted in a massive surge in Windows-native games over the following year.

However, PC gaming certainly wasn’t a paradise during this time. Many hardware components – especially sound cards, modems and CD-ROM drives – had to be manually configured by specifying their hardware address, interrupt request channel (IRQ) and direct-memory access channel (DMA). MS-DOS users typically had to manually edit several system configuration files (namely, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT), and tune these files to load various device drivers in the proper order and into the right segments of conventional memory, upper memory and high memory (using either the EMS or XMS specification) to maximize the total amount of free RAM. This often seemed to involve equal parts of computer science and ritual sorcery.

Windows 95 promised to solve many of these configuration struggles through “plug-and-play” hardware – components which could automatically configure themselves and avoid conflicts with other components without any direct user involvement. In practice, early plug-and-play hardware was a bit hit-or-miss. If you bought a brand-new system built entirely with plug-and-play components, everything would “usually” work. But if you added any additional components – especially older parts that weren’t designed to be plug-and-play compatible – system stability and compatibility could very quickly fly off the rails, and you would have to fall back to manually configuring components and resolving hardware conflicts.

Games could also be very finicky during this time, especially if you were trying to run an MS-DOS game within Windows. Some DOS games used their own memory managers or tried to access hardware in a way that was incompatible with Windows’ protected memory architecture. In these cases, you would have to reboot your computer and use a special “boot disk” to load MS-DOS instead of Windows, start your game, then remove the boot disk and reboot your system again when your game was done to reload Windows. If you were a real tech-wizard you could configure your system to ask you each time you booted up whether you wanted to configure it’s memory and device drivers so you could (for example) play Wing Commander, play Star Wars: X-Wing, or load Windows. But you still had to reboot your PC to reconfigure it for each different purpose. It would be a few more years before you could just boot straight into Windows and run any program you wanted.

Even with all the early hardware and software compatibility issues, 1995 was a great year for PC gaming. Sound cards and 3D graphics accelerators were readily available for the average gamer. CD-ROMs allowed games to use significantly more detailed audio and video resources. And Windows 95 finally provided a foundation for hardware and software standards that would (eventually) significantly reduce game compatibility issues.

During my first time-travel jump, I’ll be playing a classic SHUMP: TYRIAN. The original Tyrian was released in 1995. A few years later the game received a re-release/expansion with several content additions and bug fixes called Tyrian 2000. The "2000" version is currently available for free on GOG: https://www.gog.com/game/tyrian_2000

From a quick web search: "A gigawatt is equal to one billion watts, and most of us are familiar with a watt. The light bulbs in our homes are typically between 60 and 100 watts. So 1.21 gigawatts would power more than 10 million light bulbs or one fictional flux capacitor in a time-traveling DeLorean."

I remember doing this....fun times they were....and if the game ran then they were even better. :)

I remember....System Shock, for example, would only run for me in pure dos. I would have to boot into dos to play it, albeit it at first without sound as I couldn't free enough RAM.....then I found a mouse driver/etc that used less RAM and finally got to play the game from then on with full sound. :D

GL fellow time pilot :)
*salutes*