Abandonware DOS retro gaming news

Another 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 ...

The 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 ...

Looking 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 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 ...

Sometimes 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 ...

While 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 ...

As 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 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. ...

There 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 ...

For 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 ...

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; ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Xenon was good, Xenon 2 was far better. Compared to today standards Xenon 2 is perhaps a mediocre shoot 'em up, but at the time every shooter fan loved it. Plus, it was developed by Bitmap Brothers (you can recognize the Bitmap Brothers graphics style just looking at the screenshots.