Retro games, abandonware, freeware and classic games for PC and Mac
Author: Maddie - Published: 15 February 2020, 2:26 pm
One Must Fall: 2097 is a beat 'em up developed by Diversions Entertainment and published by Epic MegaGames in 1994. It is set in the future, where fighting between humans is outlawed. Of course, being who they are, humans need a way to fight each other. What better way to get around the law than linking your brain to a robot and beating the screws out of another human?
One Must Fall: 2097 is the mechanized big robot battle version of another popular fighting game released around the same time: Mortal Kombat. Of course, Mortal Kombat had more blood, gore, and violent finishing moves. However, unlike Mortal Kombat, you get all the robots from the start. You don’t just start with a handful of characters and must fight through the game to unlock new characters. You start off with all the robots available in the game.
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Author: Maddie - Published: 15 February 2020, 2:24 pm
DreamWeb is a cyberpunk adventure developed by Creative Reality and published by Empire Interactive in 1994. The game is drawing heavy influence from the 1986 fantasy-action film, Highlander.
Cyberpunk is not a new concept. People have always wanted to live in a darker dystopian future run by machines in a chaotic future with too little or too much order. Blade Runner and The Matrix popularized a cyberpunk aesthetic, but DreamWeb drew inspiration from the former as the latter was not around when the game was released.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 11 February 2020, 10:38 pm
Rastan is a hack & slash side-scrolling platformer created by Taito and released initially in 1987. The game was designed and directed by Toshiyuki (aka "Nenko") Nishimura.
The hero of this coin-op is the classic barbarian, the one you have seen in the legendary Conan movies of the '80s with Arnold Schwarzenegger. The game is inspired by Conan; you can see it from the iconic position of the hero, who holds the two-handed sword straight behind him, leaning his left shoulder forward.
The plot is pretty dumb: apparently, your final goal is to defeat a dragon, just that. But hey, we are talking about Conan: he doesn't like to save princesses. Anyway, the settings of the game and the choice of monsters are pretty original. Enemies include harpies, gorgons, centaurs, chimeras, and other monsters you usually find in greek mythology but not so often in classic fantasy.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 8 February 2020, 3:50 pm
The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight is the second chapter of the popular RPG series created by Interplay. It was published by Electronic Arts starting in 1985.
The game was designed and programmed by Michael Cranford, who also designed the first game (but not the third one). It was released in 1986 for the Commodore 64, then in 1987 for the Apple II and in 1988 for the Amiga and MS-DOS.
The Bard's Tale, released in 1985, was already a revolutionary game. For the first time, it introduced a massive ecosystem of races and classes, animated monsters and enemies on screen, visible magical effects, and a complex spell system. Interestingly, spells could be used not only for combat but also for solving puzzles. Funnily, you could even import a party of characters for other games such as Ultima III: Exodus or Wizardry. Last but not least, music and bards, generally ignored by computer RPGs, were a fundamental element.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 2 February 2020, 11:42 pm
Gettysburg is a wargame created by Turcan Research and published for Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS in 1990 by Atari.
As you can imagine, it's set during the American Civil War, particularly the battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the entire war. The battle took place from the 1st until the 3rd of June, 1863. You can choose to control either the Union forces or the Confederate forces, led by famous general Robert E. Lee.
The game engine is the same one used in other wargames developed by Peter Turcan, such as Austerlitz and Waterloo. The player gives orders from a top-down 3D view of the battlefield.
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Author: GN Team - Published: 1 February 2020, 6:45 pm
Ghouls 'N Ghosts, aka Daimakaimura (Great Demon World Village), is a famous arcade created by Capcom as a sequel to Ghosts 'N Goblins. It was initially released in 1988.
It was ported to many home platforms, computers, and consoles. The porting to Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, made by Software Creations, was not exactly perfect. Many elements were missing, which could be understandable for the 8-bit versions but not for the others. The Amiga version of Ghosts 'N Goblins made by Elite (strangely published some months after the release of the sequel) is far superior. However, the Commodore 64 and Amiga versions of Ghouls 'N Ghosts deserve to be played at least for one reason: the fantastic soundtrack composed by Tim Follin. The arrangements and new songs written by this legendary musician are considered among the best videogame soundtracks ever created. And, for the C64 version, an outstanding example of the possibilities of the audio chip of this machine (known as SID).
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