Abandonware DOS retro gaming news

I remember little of Magic Carpet, but one thing I remember clearly was the plain fun I had flying around casting spells. It was one of the smoothest first-person games around at the time and it gave me a wonderful feeling of flying freedom. Sadly I never got a chance ...

Dehumanizing offices? Check. Depressing environment? Check. No windows in the whole place? Check. Good, I'm ready to exploit my workers and become great enterpreneur. All of this thanks to Free Enterprise, a simulation for Windows by Tsunami Media, published in 1996.

"I can foresee Dungeon Master purists turning their 'oh-so-disdainful' noses up at this apparently inferior attempt. But it's not. The interaction elemant and two-player option add something news to what could become a stale genre. If you can forgive yhe jerky graphics, fairly poor animation, and slightly unwieldly controls, ...

Ultima 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 (...

X-COM is one of my favourite PC games ever. It's no surprise that I loved Jagged Alliance 2 from the first mission. While I managed to beat X-COM, I was never able to play Jagged Alliance 2 from beginning to end. I regret that and now I wish that some developer decides ...

Olympic games were something back in the 80s and the 90s: Winter Games, Summer Games, California Games, anything-you-can-think-of games. Some imaginative developer thought that the world needed a different kind of "multisport" game and came up with he idea behind Knight Games.

"On the gameplay side, Xenon 2 has managed to skirt the trap other shoot 'em ups have falle foul of - that is concentrating too much on difficulty. Xenon 2 is geared mor towards playability. Instead of throwing you back to the beginning of the level on dying, you start from ...

"The look and gameplay of Future Wars owes a lot to the Sierra On-Line style of arcade adventure. But, where the Sierra games are simple and quite accessible, Future Wars is complex and hard to get into. I'd say curiosity is probably the main motivating force when playing this ...

Zork is one of the most popular text-adventures and one of the first interactive fiction games ever created. The first Zork was developed in the seventies (yes, whole decades ago) and ported on various platform in the early 80s. The developer - Infocom - was one of the most prolific ...

"Maniac Mansion is a Lucasfilm game, in the vein of Zak McKracken, and owes a lot to the Sierra On-Line style. But it's a lot better executed than Sierra games, with speedy sprites and good use of your micro's memory to store screens, rather than loading them from disk ...

I clearly remember the first time I played Civilization. It was, perhaps, the first time I played a 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate). It took me a fair amount of time to learn the mechanics, understand the pace of the game, the gameplay and to finally beat the computer ...

Apparently, Hooligans is one of the most controversial games ever made. I say apparently simply because I've never played Hooligans back then. A few weeks ago I spent half an hour playing the tutorial mission and I have to admit that I felt uncomfortable walking around thrashing benches and beating ...

The very first Elite was the kind of game that starts a whole genre. Space sims - I'm talking about the trade-fight-explore kind of sims - started with the creation of David Braben and Ian Bell. Games like Freelancer and EVE Online owe Elite a great deal. The Elite series ...

When 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: ...

I 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 ...

No, 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 ...

"There are countless new features in the sequel, none of them gratuitous, all of them logical and perfect. Civilization 2 is immensely challenging, completely different every time you play and dangerously compulsive. If that sounds like the definition of the perfect computer game than so be it, for more than ...

"GP2 does make compromises. As sophisticated as its' driving model is, mastering it still happens quicker than with Indicar - which may still be regarded as possessing superior dynamics. This will only displease retired racing drivers thought, the game has been geared for demanding gamers and if the upper 1% ...

Master of Magic is a turn based 4x strategy game developed by SimTex and published by Microprose, very similar to Civilization, with a fantasy twist. You play as a wizard and your objective is to evolve your race from a small settlement to a bursting empire. To do so, you ...

After the success of Ultima 6: The False Prophet, Origin decided to "create worlds" not part of the popular Ultima series using the same engine as Ultima 6. They came up with two games: The Savage Empire and Martian Dreams. The Savage Empire is set in a stone-age-like time period and features ...