Abandonware DOS retro gaming spotlight

Pipe Mania: a liquid puzzle game

Pipe Mania (also known as Pipe Dream is a tile-matching (sort of) puzzle game about flowing liquids developed by The Assembly Line in 1989. You must build a path made of pipe pieces to let a green liquid (sewer goo?) flow. It's simple, original and addicting, that's why Pipe Mania was ...

Gobliiins: half adventure, half puzzle game

Gobliiins is a peculiar adventure game designed by Pierre Gilhodes, developed by French company Coktel Vision and released by Sierra On-Line in 1991 for DOS, Mac, Amiga and Atari ST. In Gobliiins, you control multiple goblins and you must find a way to progress to the next area by solving typical ...

A game to play on Christmas day: Holiday Lemmings

Lemmings was one of the most iconic puzzle games ever made. It was also one of the most inventive. The idea behind those tiny furred punk suicidal rodents is truly a stroke of genius. Not surprisingly, after the huge success of the first game a lot of sequels followed. Holiday ...

Retro game spotlight: The Lost Vikings

I'm not a fan of platformers. I love RPGs, I enjoyed many point & click adventures, I like most strategy games, but I never got excited while playing a platform game. Lost Viking is different. I LOVED the concept of controlling three different vikings in order to solve riddles and ...

Bomb Jack: an arcade classic

Bomb Jack is a classic arcade platform game developed and published by Tecmo in 1984. The goal of the game is to collect bombs while avoiding enemies; the whole game takes place in a fixed screen. Bomb Jack for DOS is a conversion from the arcade original version. The arcade and ...

Play Qix online on Abandonware DOS

Qix is a classic arcade games that every vintage game conoisseur should know. The original version hit the arcades in 1981 and was an instant success. The gameplay is really simple: draw squares and rectangles to captures areas of the screen without dyiing. When you manage to claim the majority of ...

Wizball in a world without colors

Wizball is an abandoned shoot'em up created by Jon Hare and Chris Yates, the guys behind Sensible Software. Wizball was published for PC by Ocean Software in 1987. The premise of Wizball is quite odd: the realm of Wizworld was deprived by all colors by an evil guy. You, as the ...

1998 in PC gaming: Dune 2000, Axis and Allies, Railroad Tycoon 2

20 years ago PC gaming was thriving. Half-Life re-defined the game design of FPSs. Baldur's Gate and Fallout 2 gave hope to gamers who were waiting for the next generation of RPGs. Adventure gamers enjoyed Grim Fandango immensely. Real-time strategy fans spent countless hours playing StarCraft. And let's not forget&...

Puzzle games based on TV game shows

Games based on TV game shows were popular in the early days of DOS video gaming on older PCs. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that every major game show of the eighties was translated into a video game: Family Feud, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and more.Here's ...

Minesweeping at the office

The Microsoft Windows 3.x family of operating environment wasn't known for games, but it popularized the Windows software pretty much everywhere. One of the best known Windows 3.x games was Minesweeper.Minesweeper was a simple puzzle game that required the player to clear a field full of mines and numbers ...

Sokoban is a puzzle game genre

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: ...

Puzzles: word games, sokoban, action puzzles

The puzzle genre for PCs did not leave lots of memories of the past. I mean, if you exclude Tetris and Lemmings, it's not that easy to remember REALLY good puzzle games for DOS or even Windows. Sure, there's The Incredible Machine, Atomix, Logical, but none of them comes immediatly ...

Sentinel Returns is online!

Hookstone developed Sentinel Returns in 1998 for Windows; Psygnosis published it. Sentinel Returns is the follow up to one of the most popular puzzle games ever: The Sentinel (A.K.A. The Sentry).