Abandonware DOS retro gaming news

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 hooked at the TV.I was in my room, watching ...

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 to this day, but the genre is well known by ...

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, fans often demand a sequel, or the sequel to a ...

Jones in the Fast Lane is the kind of game that you don't see often these days. It's a mix between a digital board game and a modern day life simulation. The goal of the game is to live the life of Jones, making choices about school, work, your home, etc. Graphics is a mix of cartonish and digitized characters, ...

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 readme files. Many of you may not know what a ...

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 this update, I'm adding more superhero themed games to the ...

In 1989 Tetris was the single most awarded game. The fact that it was a puzzle game based on a very simple concept and made by a nice russian man has contributed to the Tetris myth. Thank you Alexey Pajitnov.1989 was a very important year in world history. Just think at the fall of the Berlin wall, the eastern Europe revolutions ...

Sports games are not the most sought after on abandonware sites. Nonetheless, a few of them are fondly remembered by fans. I wonder if any of you ever heard, or played, the games I uploaded in this update.Golf, hockey, football (or soccer... whatever) and wrestling; here they are: Tony La Russa Ultimate Baseball sports 1991Tag Team Wrestling sports 1986NHL ...

Caesar 2 can be defined in several ways: a simulation set in ancient roman times, a city builder, a strategy game. Caesar 2 is all of this and more: it's one of the early games developed by Impressions that set the gameplay and quality standards later implemented in both Zeus and Pharaoh.

If you're a managerial simulation fan, you probably know about Transport Tycoon, a sim "tycoon" game where you're tasked with managing a transport company. Transport Tycoon became a cult and a few fans started their own projects to remake it: OpenTTD and Simutrans.

The GOG summer sale goes on and there's another giveaway. The first one was Xenonauts about a week ago. Now GOG is giving away Ziggurat... for free, yes. The GOG Summer Sale ends on June 18 so there's still time to buy games. Here's a few retro titles on sale: Zork, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, Knights of the Old Republic, Close ...

I'm not a big fan of racing games, this one though catched my attention. I owned the original big box game for C64 and to this day I can't remember why I bought it. Anyway, I found Stunt Car Racer very enagaging (and very difficult). The suspended tracks and the feeling of driving a dragster (or something similar...) was palpable. ...

Personally, I never got in flight simulators. I tried everything: combat oriented flight sims, copters, planes, everything, but it's simply not my genre. I knew people who spent a lot of money to buy special joysticks, three monitors and other peripherals just to enjoy piloting a Cessna from one airport to the another. There are already lots of flight ...

This time the GOG weekly sale offers a mix of new old-school games of different genres: Pizza Connection, King of Dragon Pass, Frozen Synapse, River City Ransom, Flatout, Sacred Gold, Darkstar One, Ghost Master, Patrician 3, the Blake Stone series and more...

I bet not many of you remember Utopia. It's a single-player strategy game with strong city building elements set in the future. Utopia: The Creation of a Nation objective is to build and manage a planetary colony in an open-ended gameplay.

The simulations genre (I'm not talking about vehicle simulations) wasn't that popular until SimCity and Populous came along. Both games started two genres: city building and god games.With this update I'm adding a different type of simulation: trading sims. I'm not sure of the appeal of trading in a videogame as a major feature and I don't think these ...

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 to mind when remembering the good old days.I already ...

Wolfenstein 3D made the FPS genre known to the world, Doom raised the quality bar and the popularity of First Person Shooters. Then came Heretic, a fantasy version of Doom with the addition of an inventory. Heretic was one of the few FPS I actually finished (and loved). I never managed to finish Hexen, but I remember it fondly, expecially ...

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 reach the end of each level. A remake of Lost ...

Abandonware DOS already has a "most voted games" page and a lot of other "best games" pages. What was missing was a "most downloaded list". The page title is self explanatory: there are the games that users of Abandonware DOS downloaded the most in a year or so. Keep in mind that, once in a while, I reset the "how ...