Abandonware DOS retro gaming spotlight
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Sports: American Football games
13th September 2019sportsAmerican Football is a sport that received much attention from developers in the past decades, expecially from american ones. There are american football games of every kind: realistic sports simulations, management strategic games and of course action games. -
Strategy games: Battle Bugs, Beyond Columns, Roadwar Europa and more
10th September 2019strategyLately I'm taking some time to update the info of some of the less popular games on Abandonware DOS. Here's a few:Beyond ColumnsFalling block puzzle - Released in 1989 for DOS. This blatant Columns clone is not much in terms of graphics, but it fills an empty spot in the ... -
Chris Crawford: game designer
4th September 2019simulation, strategyChris Crawford is a computer game designer known for simulations and strategy games, including the popular Balance of Power. Among developers he became known for his passionate advocacy of game design as an art form, founding both The Journal of Computer Game Design and the Computer Game Developers Conference (now ... -
Action games: Platoon, Moonwalker, TekWar, Strider and more
30th August 2019actionFrom time to time I browse the Abandonware DOS database looking for not very popular games that need an update. Here are some action games (platformers, shooters, sports games) I just updated with new content.Tag Team WrestlingSports / Action - Developed by Technos Japan - Published by Data East in 1996 ... -
Video games can educate people
23rd August 2019adventure, simulationEducational games are a peculiar kind of video games of various genres. Gameplay, graphics and sound are still important aspects of educationals, but the mail goal of the developer is to teach the player something: math, history, ecology, anything! Some educationals are created with a young audience in mind, other ... -
More shoot'em ups from the past
10th August 2019shooterShoot'em ups were one of the most popular video games genre in the 80s and, perhaps, in the 90s. Then, for a number of reasons, shoot'em ups gradually lost their appeal as a genre. Yes, there were exceptions like Geometry Wars and similar games, but the golden age was long ... -
Game Informer Greatest Games
3rd August 2019top games and awardsThe winners of the Game Informer Game of the Year are chosen by Game Informer editors. During their earlier years of publication they would give awards for the best game on each console available at the time, occasionally giving an award to the overall best game of the year.Here's ... -
Play classic arcades in your browser
27th July 2019play onlineInstalling and running old DOS games is never easy. You need a basic knowledge of your system and you need a DOSBOX front-end or a Virtual Machine insalled (which could be a daunting task). That's why I try to make some of the DOS games on Abandonware DOS available to ... -
Cards, tabletop and board games
19th July 2019strategyCard games and board games are not the most popular games available on Abandonware DOS. After all, there are countless versions of Poker, Clue, Scarbble, Monopoly and many other board/card games you can play for free online or buy on Steam or GOG. That's not an excuse for not ... -
CODiE Awards 1992: Lemmings, Civilization, SimAnt
10th July 2019top games and awardsIn 1992 two major hits saw the light: Lemmings and Civilization. Both spawned countless sequels, still published to this day.If you were a fan of combat flight simulations, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (by LucasGames) was the obvious choice.And let's not forget SimAnt, one of the weirdest (in a ... -
The Ultima series: old school RPGs at its finest
6th July 2019RPGUltima is perhaps the most popular old-school RPG series of all time. The whole series was designed by Richard Garriott, head of Origin, who redefined the genre more than one time with moral choices, cutting edge graphics, state of the art interface. It's a shame that Ultima lasted only 9 chapters (... -
Unconventional racing games
16th June 2019racingRacing games is a genre loved by many and ignored by others. Me, I was never a huge fan of racing games. I used to play Super Speed at the arcades long ago, but I never quite grew fond of Formula 1 simulations or Outrun-like games. In time, I completely stopped ... -
Gamespot Greatest PC Games of all Time
8th June 2019the history of video games, top games and awardsGameSpot is a popular website about video games and one of the oldest video gaming sites on the Internet. This chart was published a while ago on an oldest version of the current GameSpot site.The winners of the GameSpot Game of the Year were chosen by GameSpot editors.Here's ... -
Pie in the Sky engine and the Colosso series
3rd June 2019shooterPie in the Sky engine was a game engine developed by Pie in the Sky Software. The Pie in the Sky engine was also used by independent companies to develop their games.The Colosso games (three FPS part of the same series) are quite rare and, surprisingly, the developer liberated ... -
PBEM: Play By E-Mail multiplayer mode
1st June 2019strategyWhat is PBEM? PBEM stands for Play By E-Mail. PBEM games allow a peculiar multiplayer option; players can play turns in an asyncronous way and send the result of their completed turn via e-mail to all opponents. As the Internet evolved, PBEM in recent games ceased to exist and quickly ... -
More adventures: point and click, interactive fiction, etc.
24th May 2019adventureAnother week, another update. This time I added a bunch of adventure games still missing from Abandonware DOS, pretty different one from the other.Hook and Ween: The Prophecy are two fairly well know point and click adventure games; I'm sure you heard about both of them. Arthur, Legend of ... -
Shoot 'em ups: shoot down anything that moves
11th May 2019shooterThe phrase "shoot 'em up" amuses me; it's like... a redneck declaration of violent intent. As a subgenre of shooter video games, it's difficult to define. Shoot' em ups are usually identified with some kind of vehicle shooting down (pew! pew!) aliens, soldiers, planes, etc.With this update, I bring ... -
Sokoban is a puzzle game genre
30th April 2019puzzleWhen I had to add sub-genres to the puzzle games category, I really didn't know how to do it. I consulted Wikipedia, Home of the Underdogs (the original one) and a few other gaming sites. I thought a lot about it and then I came up with the current sub-genres: ... -
An FPS I completely missed: Marathon
25th April 2019shooterI loved Doom (and Wolfenstein 3D before that). I used to play Duke Nukem 3D online with a friend (and I always lost to a cunning use of the Duke hologram). I played quite a few FPSs but I have to admit... I missed the Marathon series completely. To make ... -
More strategy games: Battle Isle, Army Men, etc.
20th April 2019strategyLooking back at the past Abandonware DOS content updates, I noticed a few missing games that deserved to be included in the Abandonware DOS database. Most notably: Army Men, one of the Battle Isle games and a few more I remember from a time when I played them, many years ... -
Space simulations: combat, trading and exploring space
13th April 2019simulationSpace simulation games are part of a niche genre that appeals to specific gamers, not everyone like it. I think we can categorize two main groups of space sims players: the ones who only want to fight in space (no trading, no mining, etc) and the ones who like full ... -
The Underdogs on Abandonware DOS
11th April 2019actionNo, I'm not talking about the long gone site Home of the Underdogs, a milestone in the abandonware website scene, I'm actually talking about games available on Abandonware DOS that almost no one pay attention to (myself included).Download count for these games is low and - for a few ... -
Qix clones and remakes
6th April 2019remakes and sequelsQix is that very old arcade game in which you have to draw rectangles in order to claim portions of the screen. Like other classic arcade games of the time, Qix was later ported on quite a few platforms. A few developers took inspiration from the original Qix and created ... -
Horror-themed games from the past
30th March 2019adventure, RPGSometimes I like to spend quite some time looking at Google Analytics statistics of Abandonware DOS. I'm amused that "horror" (and variants) is a much searched keyword.What is that you like in horror games of the past? Did they scare you? I remember that the game that scared me ... -
Game Critics Awards (E3): 2000
23rd March 2019top games and awardsThe Game Critics Awards is a annual award event that happens just after the very popular E3 video game conference. The Game Critics Awards take place since 1998.In 2000, Black and White won a lot of prizes (good for you Peter Molyneaux). Neverwinter Nights was a personal favourite: it deserved both ... -
More RPGs: Might and Magic, Wizardry, Elder Scrolls
16th March 2019RPGWhile browsing the Abandonware DOS database, I noticed that a few very popular RPGs were missing. How could I forget to include them? I had to add them to the already long list of old school RPGs, even if they are not technically abandoned (and you can't download them for ... -
Wargaming everywhere
23rd February 2019strategyAs I add to Abandonware DOS every game I can think of, week after week, I get increasingly astonished by the sheer number of wargames available back in the day. I had no idea that wargaming was so popular in the 80s and the early 90s.With this update I ... -
First-person shooters: future, present, past
16th February 2019shooterFirst-person shooters is a pretty straightforward subgenre of action games. Gameplay mechanics are simple and straightforward: run away from enemies, shoot them, find items and power ups and go on.What I always liked in FPSs was the variety of theme/setting from game to game. Here's a few examples. ... -
Obscure abandoned DOS RPGs
8th February 2019RPGThere are a lot of role-playing games already on Abandonware DOS: from the Ultima series to Might and Magic, from the Wizardry series to Rogue.I periodically convince myself that I covered every possible RPG published for DOS and periodically I find out that I missed a few ones. The ... -
Flight simulations at dawn
12th January 2019simulationFor a game collector like me, flight simulators are something to look for. The original big boxes of flight sims published a few decades ago included all sort of items: keyboard layouts, maps, huge manuals. I own a few and I plan to buy some more.Anyway... I have to ...