MS-DOS 5 (included games)

## Description

_MS-DOS 5_ was a major update for Microsoft’s command-line operating system.
Among other changes was a new BASIC variant — gone were the days of the
bundled BASICA, GW-BASIC or QuickBasic interpreters. Now users had QBasic to
play with. In addition to two utilities ( _RemLine_ and _Money Manager_ ), it
included two sample games: _QBasic Nibbles_ and _QBasic Gorillas_.

_Nibbles_ first: in short, it’s Microsoft’s version of the classic “snake”
game. The player navigates their snake so that it can eat up the random
numbers appearing on the screen. After consuming a number, the snake grows
longer. It dies if it runs into the walls or into its own tail, which grows
pretty long after several helpings of numbers. The higher levels feature more
walls, therefore, navigating them is more difficult. The game has a two-player
mode as well as the standard single-player.

All objects in this game, including the snakes and the walls, are represented
by simple ASCII characters in textmode.

…

Then, there is _Gorillas_. This is what happens when one takes the classic
ballistic artillery game (perhaps the first major application for computers,
and a field whose advancement was arguably single-handedly responsible for
numerous categories of mathematical development in the West), replace the
cannons and cannonballs with gorillas and bananas, place them, like King Kong
or George from Rampage, atop buildings of varying heights instead of in the
bowls, on the slopes and peaks of hills and valleys, and package it with the
QuickBasic interpreter included with MS-DOS 5.0.

The game play is a dense inter-tangling of mathematical formulae that Donkey
Kong can only scratch his lousy head enviously at while trying to count on his
great monkey paws and do long division in his simian cranium. Players must
account for the wind’s variable direction and speed as well as a constant
gravitational pull in order to attempt to lob banana bombs on an angle and
with launch power permitting a trajectory such that it will clear the tops of
intervening buildings and land on or near the opposing ape, exploding
violently and giving us an unprecedented demonstration of guerrilla warfare.
If successful, the top banana does the Donkey Kong (a _very_ brief disco dance
sensation); in the event of failure, the human opponent gets an opportunity to
plug in some numbers and attempt to do unto others as was done to him, until
one of the two is reduced to banana-ape-gunpowder gumbo. In the meantime, the
urban landscape is reduced to a wasteland pocked with the craters of near
misses — a wry turning of the tables only too rarely possible among
endangered species.

MS-DOS 5 (included games)