Abandonware DOS retro gaming news

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 ...

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 Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, House of the Dead&...

No, I'm not talking about the actual place where you can play coin-ops, and I don't even know if such places still exist. I'm talking about very old games that can be defined as "arcades".Jumpman Lives! is a classic and need no presentation. Pango is a rip-off (homage?) to the better known Pengo. Volfied takes me back when I ...

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is a fantasy RPG published in 1993, very similar to other dungeon crawlers like EotB or Dungeon Master. Lands of Lore was developed by Westwood Studios who wanted to start a new franchise after the success of the Eye of the Beholder series.

I learned programming at school back in the 90s. I began with Borland Turbo Pascal and C. After that, the Internet exploded and I learned to program in classic ASP, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. Trying to use these applications now takes some effort, but they made history. Go on, try to make them run and write a few lines: ...

If you're into roguelikes, you already know what Rogue is. To put it plainly: it's the father of every roguelike that came after. If you don't know what a roguelike is, well, it's an RPG where you die a lot, but every time you start, everything is different (in two words: procedural generation).

Pew pew! Boom! Pew pew pew! Crash! I have to admit... I really don't know what to write about shoot'em ups. Well, let's try.Here's a bunch of (mostly) vertical scrolling shoot'em ups: shoot enemies, avoid more enemies, reach the end of each level, meet the boss.There's really not much else to say. Just get them: Flying Tigers, Ikari ...

I added every possible Sierra Online adventure to the Abandonware DOS database... and then I found out that I missed something: EcoQuest. I never liked the EcoQuest series, I never even really played them much, but they deserve a place on Abandonware DOS.  I also missed Last Half of Darkness and L.A. Crackdown, which I added now. As ...

Lots of games on sale as usual. This time you can also buy Leprechaut Hats (!). Every hat is a mystery game: you don't know what you're buying. Last time I bought something like that I got a game for children. Should I try again?

In 1988 I was a proud owner of a Commodore 64. A couple of years later I bought an Amiga, but 1988 I was still playing Ultima 5 on 5 1/4 disks. I didn't know a thing about PCs, even less about PC gaming. Older people I knew at the time used PCs to work on spreadsheets or word processors (WordStar!) and not one of them ...