The Good Old Days

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Abandoned Places
The Highly Unofficial Abandonware Ring

Plugins
307 Game(s) Found
Page 20 of 31

Noctropolis
Title Screen
Flashpoint Productions / Electronic Arts 1994
Genre: Adventure
Rating: 4/6
Language: English, Deutsch, Castellano
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
Noctropolis - city of darkness. Home of the superhero Darksheer, the archenemy of every villain out there. Peter Grey's favourite place to escape to from his full life as the owner of a less-than-successful book store. You guessed it: Darksheer is a comicbook in the style of the so-called 'golden age' or 'silver age' of comics.

Ökolopoly
Alternate Name(s): "Ecopolicy ", "Ecolopoli"
Title Screen
Frederic Vester 1989
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 2/6
Language: Deutsch
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
Every time I think of this game, I have to giggle. Falling back into childhood mentally like this has a very good reason. When the game first came out, I was still quite young. One guy who went to school with me kept talking about this game, obviously very fond and proud of it. Later, it turned out his enthusiasm was caused by a simple reason: His father had forbidden him to play computer games in general, but he had made an exception for this one - Ökolopoly was the only game he was allowed to play, so he had to pretend it's cool. And now that I've written it down, I can be sure I'll never forget this amusing anecdote myself...

Operation: Inner Space
Title Screen
Software Dynamics 1994
Genre: Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Shareware
System: PC
You might not believe it if you haven't lived through that period yourself, but screen savers were a profitable commercial market for a long time. One of the best-known companies living from this was Software Dynamics, and their prime product was called After Dark - the world's single most popular screen saver. Everybody knew the flying toasters back then.

Outrun
Title Screen
Unlimited Software / Sega 1989
Genre: Sport, Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
Remember those old coin-ops where you sat in a cage that rocked with you as you raced a car? The first one I came across and was immediately fascinated with was called Outrun. You were racing a Ferrari Testarrossa through cities, along beaches and over mountains. The sound, video and chair movement were so realistic that even before I sat in a real car, I knew how to drive (or so I thought). Outrun for PC is the best Sega could do to convert the original game.

Panzer General
Title Screen
SSI 1994
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 6/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
A classic of turn-based strategy games which became the basis for a long series of similar games. But none of them could match the quality of the original.

You can surely question to take World War II as the background for a game but that´s not going to be discussed in this review. Instead let´s move on o the game itself: The player, a high-ranking general, takes control either of the Allied or Axis forces. There are single scenarios and whole campaigns which mostly are based on historical battles.

Parashooter
Title Screen
Peter Leahy 1998
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
Parashooter - one of the two games I never managed to make a screenshot of! Highly promising slogan, eh? Well, it does show some technical sophistication on the programmer's side at least. Or it could be my inability to use Windows where this game runs in...

Paratrooper
Title Screen
Mons & Simen 1984
Genre: Action
Rating: 4/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
Paratrooper is quite an old game (published in the same year as the much better-known Alleycat, 1984) and, as many of those games, graphically none too advanced but quite addictive.

Storyline:

The story, if the lack of one can be named such, is very simple. You command an anti-air battery and the enemy is trying to destroy you. They're trying this in two different ways:

PCKaiser++
Title Screen
Martin Gelter 1992
Genre: Strategy
Rating: 4/6
Language: Deutsch
Licence: Shareware
System: PC
Sometimes, one small idea is enough to make a good game. Kaiser is a great C64 classic many people know. There are also lots of remakes. Only few of those tried to expand the gameplay, though.

Pirates!
Title Screen
Microprose 1987
Genre: Strategy, Action
Rating: 5/6
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
'Pirates!' is surely one of the most well known computer games of all times. Almost every gamer who had a Commodore C64 will sigh when hearing the name. How many time have I spent in front of my home computer playing it? Months, I guess. How many ships have I sunk? Thousands maybe. I could continue this list even further.

Pirates! Gold
Title Screen
Microprose 1993
Genre: Strategy, Action
Rating: 6/6
Language: English, Deutsch, Francais
Licence: Commercial
System: PC
As gameplay is basically the same to the original version of 'Pirates!' I won´t get into detail about that. Have a look at the review of 'Pirates' instead.
So, what has changed since then?