Dangerous Dave

[xS]

While most kids were satisfied with their 8 and 16 bit systems, few of them had witnessed the glory of classic DOS gaming. As far as I can remember much of the gaming landscape was made up of click and point adventure games(mainly seirras), and action games were relatively small in number. Anyhow, without further ado... I present the Dangerous Dave series, one of the more important franchises of classic DOS gaming.

Dangerous Dave-1990

A Mario-esque plattformer released by Softdisk Inc. It wasn't a particularly innovative plattformer, but its rock solid design led to decent fun. It's ironic that people would often rag on it for ripping off Mario, when Dave sported a jet pack and a gun 13 years before Mario did.

Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion AKA Dangerous Dave 2-1991

Infinitely supperior to its progenitor, this game reminds me of capcoms GnG series for whatever reason. As far as I can remember this games yeilds a four way shot similar to Metal Slug. It's a really great game which will give you hours of fun 2d action, and purchase it for dirt cheap here.

Dangerous Dave's Risky Rescue-1993
Plays just like DD2, just a bit weaker IMO.


Dave Goes Nutz-1995

I haven't played this one, but it looks like DD2/3 on more powerful hardware.

Useless bit of trivoa: Jhon Romero was behind all of these games.

Any fans of these games?

[Frogacuda]

What's the story behind the latter 2? I've rplayed them, but I'm surprised they would bother making them so late. Who Published them? I know it wasn't Softdisk or Apogee.

EDIT: You might also want to mention Bio Menace, which wasn't made by id but used the Dangerous Dave engine.

[xS]

http://www.mobygames.com/game_group/...meGroupId,208/
All of them were published by Softdisk.

[Despair]

xS is back Welcome home !

[xS]

[NeoZeedeater]

It's a cool series. I liked Haunted Mansion the best.

That 1990 Softdisk PC one wasn't the first Dangerous Dave. The 1988 Apple II original came with a magazine called Uptime.

[thumbnail]http://rome.ro/images/Random_Pic/dangerous_dave_apple2.jpg[/thumbnail]

A graphically enhanced version called Double Dangerous Dave was released for the Apple II and published by Softdisk.

Risky Rescue and Dave Goes Nutz were not made by id. Softdisk hired other people to make these sequels.

Also of note is the Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement in 1990 even though it was never officially released. This was a demo made in a day by John Carmack and Tom Hall that put Dave in the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3. This demo led to the guys talking and founding id Software.

[Spent]

I played one and two all the time on my old computer as a young lad. We used to get a new game sent in the mail every month from some software company. Another I remember was a game where you were a tank in the first person perspective, and the objective was to rescue hostages out of a building. It was the first FPS I think, even predating Wolf 3d. I can't remember the name for the life of me, though.

[Frogacuda]

Originally posted by NeoZeedeater
Risky Rescue and Dave Goes Nutz were not made by id. Softdisk hired other people to make these sequels.

Ah, that explains it. Softdisk did that with Catacomb 3D also. They made the Catacomb Abyss/Apocolypse/Armageddon trilogy, which actually were better than the id original. I really liked them.

Originally posted by Gibbits
I played one and two all the time on my old computer as a young lad. We used to get a new game sent in the mail every month from some software company.

That would be the aforementioned SoftDisk. They had a serial disk publishing thing that had games and articles and utlities. That was how they got started.

Another I remember was a game where you were a tank in the first person perspective, and the objective was to rescue hostages out of a building. It was the first FPS I think, even predating Wolf 3d. I can't remember the name for the life of me, though.

It was called Hovertank 3D (also by id), and was actually released AFTER Wolf 3D, though I beleive it was made mostly before. But Catacomb 3D, another Softdisk/id game, came before either of them.

Anyone remember id/softdisk's Ninja Gaiden clone Shadow Knights? That was a pretty cool game.