Retro games, abandonware, freeware and classic games for PC and Mac
Author: GN Team - Published: 21 July 2022, 8:11 pm
Fire Power is a competitive two-player game created by Silent Software originally for the Amiga and released in 1987 by Microillusions. There were also DOS and Commodore 64 versions, released in 1988 and 1989.
In Firepower, two tanks have to compete on a battlefield and try to destroy the enemy fortress. The game is probably inspired by the 1980 Namco arcade Tank Battalion or the classic Atari game Combat. It belongs to the so-called "combat arena" genre. It's possible to challenge a friend either via modem, null modem, or split screen. Nowadays, you will probably use the split-screen mode unless you plan to install the game on real machines. You can also play against the computer, but it's not the same. Player vs. player is entertaining, while the single-player mode is a bit too hard.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 12 July 2022, 9:23 pm
Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition is an enhanced version of Balance of Power, a strategy game developed by Chris Crawford originally for Macintosh in 1985. The new version was published five years later by Mindscape.
In this game, you have to choose one of the two world superpowers, the USA or the USSR (Cina was not a top player then), and make it the most influential and important on the planet. To do that, you will need to use your economic, military, and political strength as best as you can. You will have to face all sorts of incidents and crises happening around the world, and you will have to respond appropriately. But be careful because there will be a counter-response for each of your responses, and if things go wrong, you can generate a nuclear war. Of course, if somebody presses the "red button", you have lost.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 5 July 2022, 1:13 am
Bill's Tomato Game is a puzzler created by Bill Pullan for the Amiga and published by Psygnosis in 1992.
The game belongs to the so-called Rube Goldberg machine puzzle games, where the player has to arrange several devices to obtain a specific effect. In this case, you have to help Terry the tomato find his fiancé Terry. To do that, he will have to advance through several levels by reaching the conveyor belt set on the right side of the screen. The only way to do it is to place the right gadgets in the right position. The objects that you will have to position include electric fans, trampolines, Jack-In-The-Box, and blocking boxes. To make things worse, time is limited.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 23 June 2022, 1:29 am
Doctor Who: The Adventure Games is a series of graphic adventures in 3D and third-person perspective, based on the famous BBC TV show Doctor Who. The games feature the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith) and his companion Amelia Pond.
The games were developed by Sumo Digital in 2010 and released for free on the BBC website. Later, they were published on Steam, but they are no longer for sale.
The game is structured as a series of episodes called Doctor Who: City of the Daleks, Doctor Who: Blood of the Cybermen, Doctor Who: TARDIS, and Doctor Who: Shadows of the Vashta Nerada. In case you have doubts about the quality of the adventures, know that the titles were co-designed by Charles Cecil, founder of Revolution Software (Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword, and more).
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Author: GN Team - Published: 17 June 2022, 10:05 pm
Xenomorph is a sci-fi RPG set in space, developed by Pandora and published in 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, and - strangely - Commodore 64.
The title is clearly inspired by the movie Alien. In fact, the xenomorph is the race of the famous aliens of the film. Despite the settings, the game is a classic dungeon crawler, very similar to Dungeon Master in terms of gameplay. The perspective is first-person pseudo-3d, with movements to the left and right by 90°. Combat, as well as all the rest of the actions, are in real-time.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 20 May 2022, 8:07 pm
Tau Ceti is a mix of action, adventure, and space simulation initially developed for the ZX Spectrum by Pete Cooke in 1985. The game was also ported to Atari ST, C64, and MS-DOS. An improved version, called Tau Ceti: The Special Edition, was released for the Spectrum 128K and Amstrad CPC in 1987.
Cooke, also the author of Tower of Babel, had the inspiration for the game playing Gyron, another ZX Spectrum hit. Gyron was using some interesting graphics routines, and Cooke studied them in order to replicate them. Soon he was able to create something similar to draw a 3D world with shadows and a day and night cycle. Today it doesn't seem exceptional, but you should not forget it was 1985, and those were 8-bit computers.
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