Low-tech fun

Tony Carnevale Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat

I misjudged the little machine's abilities. Sure, it's slightly lower-tech than a haystack, but Microsoft's burgeoning monopoly at the beginning of the decade ensured that lots and lots of games would be released for it, probably more than have ever been released for all breeds of Macintosh combined. Thanks to the cheap shovelware compilations published by Interplay and other companies, some of these games - mostly computer approximations of pen-and-paper role-playing games - are still available. And although their graphics would make the brats brought up on 3D cards and "Baldur's Gate" squirm in ADD-fueled boredom, I think a lot of them are terribly good. Here are some of the best.

Ultima IV-VI. The Ultima series is fantastic, and Origin reissued the whole thing as "The Ultima Collection" last year. It's out of print now, but if you look hard you still might be able to find it. The first three games are primitive hackfests, and the final two games are too demanding for a 286 to handle. But Ultimas IV, V, and VI will run fine, and they're as rich and deeply textured as computer games ever got. Play them while you're waiting for Ultima IX, which may come out sometime before 2050.

Eye of the Beholder I and II. I'm surprised my computer is able to run these games, but it can. They were heralded as technological marvels at the time of their original release, and they're still kind of nice-looking. They're 3D dungeon-crawl games, and Westwood Studios licensed the Dungeons & Dragons system from TSR to make them. Eye of the Beholder III won't run on a 286, but it was made by a different team and allegedly sucks anyway. Peeve: combat is real-time, and controlling a six-person team with one mouse is physically impossible. Good games, though. Available on Interplay's "Forgotten Realms Archives."

Wasteland. Many hardcore gamers consider the open-ended gameplay and smart interface fantastic enough to keep this game (the inspiration for the modern "Fallout" series) at the top of their lists, even though it could probably run on one of today's fancy graphing calculators. The plot: World War III has made the American Southwest a lot more hot and a lot less American. Guide a group of "Desert Rangers" through the radioactive sands in an effort to dismantle the corrupt powers-that-be and bring order to the wasteland. Interplay published it on their "Ultimate RPG Archives," which is well worth the $20 for this game alone. And that collection also includes...

The Bard's Tale I-III. An order of magnitude better than the series it was based on ("Wizardry"), Bard's Tale is a 3D dungeon crawl like Eye of the Beholder, only with a less grueling combat system and more dated graphics. It brought a lot of color and a bit of humor to the genre, but it hasn't aged as well as the Ultimas or Wasteland. You'll love Bard's Tale or you'll hate it. I love it, but I remember playing it when it was new. If the first computer game you ever played was "Doom," you may be disappointed.