Abandonware DOS retro gaming spotlight

It's winter time! Snow, Santas and trains

Christmas is coming and I decided to add a few games in theme with the holiday season. Winter, Christmas, snow... every ingredient that makes "winter time" is present in the following games. A few of them are special editions of games already published (Skyroads, Jetpack). Transarctica is a peculiar one; ...

Strategy in the far east: Japan, China, the Pacific

I'm a fan of turn-based strategy games, but I have to admit I've never played KOEI games. KOEI was a Japanese company founded in 1978 (!) known for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition series. Romance of the Three Kingdoms wasn't the only game that deserve some praise. With ...

GOG Winter Sale: freebies and games on sale

It's winter and every gamer on Earth is at home, cozy under soft blankets, waiting for the digital father Christmas to bring them toys to play with. GOG is about to slide down the chimney with a bag full of goodies: Full Throttle Remastered for FREE, Fantasy General free after ...

Classic Arcades: clones and remakes

When I talk about abandoned games I usually think about games published at the end of the eighies and through the nineties. There are some "ancient" games that deserve the definition of "classic". Everyone knows them: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender, Donkey Kong.To be honest, I don't think they can ...

Cars: racing and building vehicles on wheels

I just added a bunch of car-racing games, including a couple of top-down fixed-screen ones that I always liked. It seems there were a lot of racing games being published back in the nineties that I couldn't remember, but I've never been interested in cars anyway. Actually, one of them ...

GOG Black Friday sale

Black Friday comes once a year, like Christmas sales, autumn sales, spring sales... ok, ok, there are far too many excuses to buy games. This time it's Black Friday on GOG, and I'm about to get one or two RPGs, or strategy games, or maybe a good old adventure, or... ...

Police Quest: 1, 2, 3 and "4"

Sierra On-Line published lots of games back in the 80s and the 90s and was famous for the various "Quest" series. Think about King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry ("Love Quest"?). I'm sure you remember a few.Police Quest wasn't perhaps one of the most popular ...

Free Games Utopia has been updated

It's been a while since I created and nurtured my other project: Free Games Utopia. What is it? As the name suggests, Free Game Utopia is all about free games: free-to-play, fully free and liberated games.After a couple of years, Free Games Utopia changed, but the purpose of ...

Solving murders and simulating detectives

Pure and simple detective stories are hard to find in video gaming today. Everyone goes for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, but the good old murder to solve is not so popular. Back in the 90s (or the 80s) you could play some adventure games based on a detective story. There was ...

Dizzy, by the Oliver Twins

Every gaming platform has its video game mascotte: Mario, Sonic, etc. Codemasters came up with their own character: an egg shaped... thing... called Dizzy. This strange fellow was the protagonist of a series of action adventure games on Spectrum, C64 and many other systems, PC included. Here are some Dizzy ...

It's GOG.com birthday!

GOG is 10 years old and is giving away Shadow Warrior 2. If you're interested in such things, there's also an history of GOG page. If you're looking for games on discount, there are a few "10 anniversary collections": Shadow Tactics, Theme Hospital, Homeworld Remastered, System Shock 2, Dungeon Keeper 2, Kingdom Come Deliverance, etc.

Pinball: the art of bouncing balls

Pinball is a very specific subgenre of action games that can't be assimilated to other kind of games. It's not a platformer or a shooter, and there were a lot of pinball games in the 80s and the 90s, so I think it's only fair that there's a whole category ...

Text only gaming: it's not always about interactive fiction

Text only games are a curious phenomenon. Unlike other kind of old games, they survived to this day in one form or the other. Maybe that's because it doesn't take a huge team to develop a game completely (or partially) devoid of graphics. When I say text-only games, some of ...

Action and arcades: Comix Zone and other games

I was browsing platform games on Abandonware DOS when I noticed something was missing. I talking about a game I loved and I bet most of you played it at least once: Comix Zone. So... here it is, available with this content update along other action and arcade games. Comix ...

A bunch of games for Windows

The name of the site is Abandonware DOS, but some of the games hosted here are games for Windows. I'm talking about old and abandoned games for Windows, not easy to make them run properly if you're not using a Virtual Machine.I don't usually add many Windows games but ...

Memories from Populous: play god in your browser

I clearly remember the first time I heard about Populous. I was young and still living with my parents. It was a late sunday morning, the sun was high in the sky and the smell of roasted chicken was all around the house: lunch was almost ready, but I was ...

CODiE Awards 1990: SimCity, Carmen Sandiego, Space Quest 3

1990 was a seminal year in videogames. The last decade of the millennium saw the birth of two genres: city building simulations and god games.The first was represented by the first chapter in a long series of sims: SimCity. There are not many well known city building games around ...

Sequels to action games: Gauntlet, Rick Dangerous, Xenon and more

Back in the day, sequels were not always appreciated. That number "2" after the title for many meant lack of ideas. This wasn't just about video games, everything was subject to that kind of treatment "if it's good, why change it?".I don't see this kind of hate anymore. In fact, ...

Manuals, walkthroughs and readme files

Part of the updates to Abandonware DOS consists in adding every kind of document I can get without copyright notices. I already added lots of manuals, walkthroughs (expecially interactive fiction solutions) and a few maps.Recently, I started digging into the zip files of every games in search for useful ...

Comics and superheroes in videogames

When I think about superheroes and supervillains what comes to my mind are comics, big budget movies, cosplayers. And then, and only then, videogames. If you think about it, the superhero theme wasn't that popular in old videogames. Nonetheless, there are a few DOS games about super-men in tights.With ...