Even games that had relatively low system requirements often had features cut from their console counterparts, such as SSI’s Pool of Radiance (ported to the NES) and Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (ported to the Genesis), both of which had races and character classes missing.
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In the rare instance a PC game was ported to a console, it was usually heavily dumbed down and paled in comparison visually. The PC excelled at things like flight simulators, strategy and role-playing games, and especially point and click adventures. They offered far more complexity, superior graphics and sound, but they also had their own caveats too. Was all the work worth it? You bet it was! PC games were light years beyond what consoles were capable of in the 80s and 90s. Windows essentially ran on top of DOS, hogging up extra memory, so many games required you to boot directly to DOS to free that up – and don’t even get me started on EMS.
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PCs today are more simplified and intuitive, but back then you had to learn how to use MS-DOS, a simple black screen where you manually typed in commands. Many would run right in Windows with no problems, but others required you to make boot disks to load only the most basic necessities in order to conserve enough memory to run the game. Games needed to be installed, and some of them required elaborate tinkering to get running. Windows 3.1 came with a word processor, a paint program, and a sound recorder. The PC was an entirely different beast from the consoles I was used to.
At the time, PC components were not unified, so I mistakenly bought the wrong RAM chips and had to return them. It originally came with nothing more than the stock PC speaker, but a friend sold me a SoundBlaster clone card for $20, and I later expanded the system with a CD-ROM drive and doubled the RAM. That’s 170 megabytes which, at the time, was pretty big. We bought the machine from CompUSA (remember those?) an IBM 386sx with a clock speed of 25MHz, 3.5” and 5.25” disk drives, 256-color VGA graphics, 2 MB of RAM (yes, MEGAbytes), a 2400 kbps modem, and a whopping 170 MB hard drive. Yes, this was back when IBM themselves made home computers. When I say “IBM PC,” I mean a literal IBM-manufactured machine, not IBM compatible. It wasn’t until the early 90s when we finally took the plunge and bought our first real IBM PC. The Vic-20 served us pretty well, but it was no match for the C64 or even the NES.
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