Like even by the standards of 8-Bit games, there's something just boring about 1980s 8-Bit DOS gaming, like I'd argue the NES was the far better gaming device because of the library it had.

Like the only DOS games from back then that I feel were worth playing were the CRPGs like Ultima and Wizardry and the SSI Gold Box games and Adventure Games like King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry and Zork.

I think the reason is because judging from this video that showcases hundreds of DOS games from the 1980s, there's barely any music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7zPRchApHQ

Like a lot the games are just silent. Like Atari 2600 games.

The NES games are iconic because of the game's use of 8-bit music. Super Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, and Final Fantasy has iconic tunes that are born from this era.

In the end, all I can say is that PC gaming got way better by the early 90s. Like once we got games like Wolfenstein 3D and Day of the Tentacle and Wing Commander was when PC Gaming became great.

Worth remembering the size of teams working on a fair chunk of DOS titles when compared to that of your classic NES games

I'm guessing you're too young to have experienced the IBM PC and its clones in the 80s. These machines didn't have the hardware for games (it wasn't their market, is their excuse). CGA, ,EGA, PC speaker "music/sfx", on top of crappy OS. Gaming was better on the C64, which didn't have the benefits of a 16-bit CPU and internal "standard" expansion. This is why on really old games, people usually ask to have the non-IBM-PC version(s) made available as well. It is not a coincidence that around the time you claim games were getting better was also the time when the hardware was becoming almost usable for games.

The reason PC games from the 80s didn't age well is that they were crap, even for their time.

I wasn't even born, but I have been big on retro gaming in awhile. I am more into the classics then what's coming out right now.

But 1980s DOS Gaming even I can tell they just don't feel that well aged compared to its console contemporaries.

There are a lot of very good games in that video (and Tongue of the Fatman), but in most cases the definitive versions would have been on non-DOS PCs. Atari 400/800, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, even Apple II and ZX Spectrum in certain cases. Plus the MSX line, the NEC systems, Mac, etc.

The bulk of my 80's gaming was on a ZX Spectrum, though after receiving my first 286 I had a lot of fun with Prince of Persia (1989), Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego (1985), Where Time Stood Still (1988), Gauntlet, Outrun, and a number of great early point & clicks (Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, Maniac Mansion, Kings / Police / Space Quests, Zac McKraken, Leisure Suit Larry, The Black Cauldron, etc).

Having said that, the gap between, eg, Dangerous Dave (1988) vs Doom (1993) or Zork vs The 7th Guest was utterly huge and had a 100x greater impact on PC gaming in just a few years than the minor gameplay gap between Deus Ex (2000) vs Deus Ex Mankind Divided (2016) in terms of inventing whole new genres / styles of games with "on another level" jumps in depth of story, gameplay and introducing 3D T&L acceleration vs software rendered games.

There's also the issue of bugs that differ between versions. For example, the DOS and Amiga versions of Bard's Tale 3 are so buggy that they're not worth playing (play the Apple 2 or Commodore 64 version instead, or try the remaster which has its quirks but is still worth playing).

it depends, the ancient art of war is still fairly oke, some hex based games such as desert rats the fight for tobruk are oke too though you have to life with the sound

It is a funny thing really; PC's were garbage in the 80's - The Amiga blew it away and even the C64 ran rings around it. It had terrible slow graphics and didn't even do sound, unless you could the bleeper, and cost as much as a car!

Yet somehow, it won - both of those elegant platforms have fallen by the wayside and the PC, with it's stupid processor design and idiotic instruction set, still endures!

To this day I still don't understand how, with all these other superior computer platforms we had, the PC ended up as the dominant survivor!

The world makes no sense but sometimes you just gotta go with it...

You do always tend to have these spicy takes, don't you?

Every platform has crap that hasn't aged well, like Donkey Kong 64, Metroid Fusion, or so on.

Remember that on the PC, anyone could make a game. There wasn't an uncle at Nintendo or Sega requiring you to license the game to them.

Unfortunately, the Amiga wasn't so good for earlier CRPGs, as many of those that got ported have bugs that aren't present in other versions. (Bard's Tale 1 and 2, for example, give the extra attacks meant for the Warrior to the Bard instead, and Bard's Tale 3 has many of the same bugs as the DOS version, making that version not fun to play.)

I could also point out that the 8086 (used in early IBM PCs) has an address space of 1024K (of which 640K are available for user programs, provided that much RAM is installed) while the 6502 used in the Commodore 64 has only 64K of address space (but there's a bank switching mechanism to allow switching between RAM and ROM).

A: The PC wasn't just one brand. It was a massive platform that anyone could make.
B: Commodore famously did stupid things after Jack left to kill Atari. You ever hear of the Plus 4 or how the 128 was a complete duffer? Or the CDTV?
C: The Amiga was ahead for a short time but the arms race was outpacing the Amiga.

Same is true of the MSX.

In fact, the MSX even had Microsoft involved. (It's no coincidence that MSX-DOS is quite similar to MS-DOS.)

I haven't done a spicy take in this forum in years.

And Metroid Fusion hasn't aged well? I will fight you on that.

Yeah, Commodore is often credited as being the architect of its own downfall.

I see a lot of similarities in Commodore and 3Dfx in the sense that they started off strong with killer designs, but stopped innovating and got too comfortable, arrogant and started making stupid decisions that eventually led to their demise.

I didn't just mean these machines tho', we had so many other architectures outside of x86 and 68k - from SGI, DEC, Sun etc., some of them were big enough that even Microsoft made versions of Windows for them, and the work done for those laid the foundations for the WinSxS subsystem that made 64-bit Windows viable and able to run 32-bit softs.

Heck Sun had 64-bit well ahead of x86, and those Sparc CPUs were so nice to code for - Aside from the 64-bit address space, the ISA was a nice well thought out RISC, and it had shitloads of registers, not the ridiculous 4 that x86 had (Thank smeg AMD saw sense when they created their 64-bit x86 spec!)
Doing any kind of assembler code for Sparc was so much nicer than having to constantly push things in and out of the stack like you do on x86. (Well, did; I don't think anyone can code anything complex on x86 assembler nowadays because it's such a mess!)
I must admit I never imagined x86 would ever approach the processing power of Sparc back then, but it's amazing how much various companies have done with x86 despite its many handicaps!

I think it was NexGen who first realised the best way to speed up x86 was to get rid of x86 and made the first chip that used micro-ops instead... but this is getting way off topic even for some misty-eyed cpu architecture nostalgia!