Before the turn of the millennium, the PC was really the only way to go for in-depth role playing games. Sure, console gamers at the time had a lot Japanese-style, linear, hand-holding RPGs to play, but what few western-style, free-form RPGs were available on consoles weren’t all that comprehensive, to be honest.

Realms of Arkania 3: Shadow Over Riva on the PC is a good example. It’s relatively unknown title based on a similarly-obscure German pen and paper role playing system. Not only does it give players a huge amount of freedom, it’s packed full of unique options and offers a huge world full of interesting quests and unusual characters to meet. It’s not quite as accessible as other PC role playing titles of the same era, like Ultima, The Elder Scrolls or Lands of Lore, and its unique systems require quite a run-up to get acquainted with, but the adventure behind this red tape and fiddly interface is highly engrossing.

The story isn’t all that original: Something is going down in the city of Riva, and only a party of brave heroes with the balls to do anything about it stand a chance to save the day. When the player begins their quest, they are handed a pre-generated party of six members. You can play that way if you want, but it’s far more fun and rewarding to kick them all out and generate six entirely unique characters from scratch. What makes Realms of Arkania 3 unique in this regard is that each character will have not only skills and good points, like swordsmanship, conversation skills and dance abilities (I’m not joking), but also bad points, like a foul temper or cowardice. All of these things have a tangible impact on the game. In addition to improving their laudable aspects as they level up, these characters will also have the responsibility of diminishing their bad points while they’re at it.

Exploration of the city is handled via a very pixelated 3D perspective that looked a little dated for its time, but it serves it purpose. Everything else, from interacting with other characters and merchants to combat instantly boots the player into a different 2D view. Combat is handled in a top down, isometric view where players move their characters on a segmented map. The combat is turn-based, giving players plenty of time to think about their actions, which is good, because it’s really quite complicated, and even the simplest of choices can have far-reaching implications. It’s not unusual to see two or three party members drop dead as the result of a single enemy action, leaving you wondering just what the heck happened before you get the hang of it.

In this case, a recommendation is easy. RoA3:SOR was obviously made only for avid RPG fans who have the patience to adventure for hours and weigh up each choice for ages. If you can see beyond its dated graphics and fiddly controls, there’s plenty of fun to be had.

Welcome to Oddworld, home of the Magog Cartel’s premiere consumer industrial facilities, and SoulStorm Brew™. When RuptureFarms 1029 carelessly exhausts the local population of Meeches, grinding its production of the immensely popular novelty meat snack Meech Munchies™ to an abrupt and potentially commercially devastating halt, CEO Molluck the Glukkon turns a prospective eye to the next readily available source of protein – the Mudokon slaves working his factories. Fortunately for the intended Tasty Treats™, our protagonist overhears the insidious plan, and scurries off to rescue his chums from almost certain extinction, and the howling indignity of being a cheap, low carb entrée.

Representing some of the finest platform-puzzle gaming of its generation (and still largely unsurpassed), Oddworld Inhabitants’ Abe’s Oddysee (1997) and sequel Abe’s Exoddus (1998) saw its titular hero creeping, walking, running, rolling, hoisting, jumping, crouching, and farting his way through a series of daring rescues and unlikely escapes. In real life, nobody would be actually able to outrun a Scrab.

Since Mudokons are routinely blinded by their employers, Abe must make use of simple spoken commands to get stuff done. Nearby Mudokons can be instructed to follow or wait for Abe, as well as manipulate environmental paraphernalia like levers. In Abe’s Exoddus, this feature is expanded to include pre-existing emotional states and physical afflictions. Miserable Mudokons, for example, will remain unresponsive until Abe expresses sympathy for their wretched plight, while sick Mudokons must first be healed with a special chant. All of this is ultimately aimed at cooperatively negotiating the environment and escorting Mudokon slaves to Bird Portals and emancipation. It’s usually harder than it sounds.

Abe is also able to assume control of certain enemies through possession. A possessed Glukkon, for example, can be used to gain entry to otherwise inaccessible locations, or issue orders to nearby Slig guards in much the same way that Abe interacts with fellow Mudokons. Possessed Sligs, in turn, can boss around their not-dogs, Slogs. As an added bonus, both Glukkon and Slig targets are killed (more accurately, they explode) when this telepathic link is terminated. Hotdogs for everyone!

Both games are, however, both extremely challenging and extremely unforgiving, and you’ll watch Abe and his pals die a thousand horrifying, completely preventable deaths because you miscalculated a jump or forgot about the blind guy who walks straight into a meat grinder. While this isn’t of much consequence in the sequel, the lack of a quicksave function in Abe’s Oddysee can make this game a bit frustrating.

Constructor is a DOS-based, tongue-in-cheek management sim that places you in control of a construction company trying to do what construction companies do best. This means, of course, that you’ll spend most of your time building cheap houses, pacifying annoyed tenants, making deals with the mob and completely screwing over any and all rivals.

Before actually describing the game’s mechanics in any detail, one thing needs to be made absolutely clear: its dark humour and overall style may persuade people to liken it to Theme Hospital, but this would most definitely be a mistake. Theme Hospital doesn’t actively display hatred for it players: those who venture anywhere near Constructor, on the other hand, have to be prepared to be mercilessly bludgeoned with a monkey wrench over and over again. Easy mode won’t save you, and the PDF manual merely gloats at your impending doom.

Let’s explain this difficulty with a few of the game’s core concepts:

Yep, you can build your own hippy army.

(1) Constructor has no campaign setting. You select a core mission, a difficulty level and a play area before tackling your work head-on. New players are presented with vast maps to build their structures on, divided into estates which they have to fill by laying down plots for an astounding array of housing, resource buildings and special structures. This means that there’s no gradual introduction of gameplay concepts, and players have to learn the game through trial and error from the deep end of the pool.

(2) You are ultimately building to appease the city council. And the council is rarely — if ever — impressed by your work. Heck, if there’s an easy way to do something in the game, you can be damn sure that the council will somehow manage to get angry about it. Failure to meet their many demands always results in a game over: plain and simple.

The button that every player will eventually learn to hate.

(3) While the council exerts pressure externally, you also have to please your own tenants with the limited resources at your disposal. Tenant complaints can result from quite a few problematic situations: maybe they’re living near a noisy factory, or have to deal with an infestation of some kind. Or maybe a mouse sneezed somwhere. Failing to meet their demands after a certain amount of time will cause them to turn to the council. Refer to point (2) above about not messing with the council.

(4) Finally, you have to deal with rival construction companies, sabotaging their work while they attempt to do the same to you. To put things in perspective: points 1 to 3 above already make for an incredibly challenging game experience, but that’s without considering what an astounding emphasis Constructor puts on playing dirty: you can hire gangs of thieves, thugs and insidious clowns to do your bidding, and an entire tab of the game is dedicated to your dealings with the local mob boss.

This is game attempt number 53. Will it yield victory this time?

How you react to this review is pretty much up to you. If the difficulty level sounds scary and you decide to run in the opposite direction very, very quickly, nobody will judge you for it. If, on the other hand, you’re intrigued by the promise of high complexity, some pretty fine-tuned game balance and all of the fascinating ideas that this title offers … well, Constructor may just be the perfect sim for you. Sure, it’s a punishing experience. And yes, the array of tools you need to use is astounding. But if you’re the sort of person who likes a challenge and gets all twitchy whenever a new management title rears its head, then Constructor really is a must-have. Play it now, and even the council may just show you the slightest glimmer of their approval.

Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is the first in the well-known Legacy of Kain Saga, initially released on the PlayStation in 1996 and ported to the PC in 1997. It has recently been abandoned on PC. If you’re active on the Playstation Network, it can be found there too.

Blood Omen tells the tale of a murdered nobleman who strikes a deal with the necromancer Mortanius, allowing him to walk the living world as a vampire and take vengeance on those who slew him. It quickly becomes apparent that all is not as it seems – the Nine Pillars of Nosgoth have been corrupted and Kain becomes caught up in sweeping events that will force him to save the realm that he cares nothing for. Kain himself is a superb character – sardonic, violent and full of hate for the world. At times he is even poetic in his cynicism.

"Oh please, help me kind sir!"

Gameplay is top-down hack ‘n’ slash, executed in a satisfying fashion. Blood Omen‘s console roots are apparent in control — only the keyboard is used, with the mouse reserved for menu navigation.  Much of the time you will be brutalising your enemies with Kain’s sword accompanied by his derisive laughter, but there are items and spells that permit ranged assaults. Kain has to be cautious in battle — do enough damage, and your foe will be left reeling, allowing you to exsanguinate him as he collapses with a cry of agony. But do too much and he will die outright, robbing you of a health-replenishing meal. Attacks must also be timed lest they be interrupted. You don’t just have to worry about enemies — there are many environmental hazards and traps as well: the purity of running water and rain will cause damage to his corrupt body, and spikes pierce undead flesh just as well as that of the living.

You are not limited to the vampiric shape as you explore Nosgoth. Kain can take several additional forms as the situation demands. The bat allows him to quickly travel between far reaches of the realm, the wolf can leap up ledges and over obstacles while disembowelling foes with powerful claws, a mist which permits him to elude foes, and a nobleman which hides his undead nature when needed.

The game simply oozes ominous character, with excellent atmosphere and many nuances adding to the experience. Every so often you will find a sobbing peasant chained up, begging to be set free, only to have Kain feast upon their lifeblood with enthusiastic slurping noises – this kind of detail makes for a diverse gameplay experience. The story is truly epic and becomes deeper and darker as you play — vengeance, betrayal and redemption make for a compelling tale whilst never feeling contrived. While there are several adult themes threaded throughout the game, at no point do they feel gratuitous.

Graphics are not bad at all once you become accustomed to the low res, and even feature environmental lighting – quite an achievement for its day. Voice acting is top-notch, and you’ll take delight in Kain’s many bitter monologues throughout the game. In many retro titles, music is a weakness, but not so in Blood Omen. On a technical note, running the game on a modern OS poses some problems, but there are solutions out there.

A man with a secret drives himself off the road in a storm, and wakes up in a grotty Gothic asylum. It’s also on fire, because it just wouldn’t be a proper grotty Gothic asylum if it wasn’t on fire. And just to keep things interesting in a Grand Guignol-does-soap opera sort of way, this guy’s got himself a bad case of total amnesia, a face all wrapped up in bandages, and probably an unknown lovechild implausibly conceived while he was temporarily dead two seasons ago. Anyway, after escaping the burning madhouse, the unlucky protagonist-but-maybe-antagonist-in-a-twist-ending finds himself mysteriously transported to the abandoned set of Children of the Corn, now inhabited by a bunch of creepy, disfigured kids even worse than the previous tenants and a sociopathic vegetarian tyrant. And that’s just the first stop on this trip. What’s delusion, what’s real, and what’s what? Time to work this stuff out then.

This is probably the worst combat system in the history of the universe.

Unlike most point and click adventures of its time, Sanitarium uses an isometric perspective that looks rather a lot like Planescape Torment or Fallout. Unlike Planescape Torment or Fallout, however, the character movement and path-finding is clumsy and inefficient, investing the game with some entirely unnecessary frustration. Sure, it’s not so bad when you’re trying to negotiate your way past, say, a bucket or small rock in the scenery, but it escalates to a whole new category of grief when the game’s (equally clumsy and inefficient) combat kicks in. Yes, there are combat encounters in this game, and why the developers decided to shove them in there is a conundrum as tantalising as the one behind the hero’s murky past. Imagine playing something like Diablo with all the controller sophistication of the Magnavox Odyssey, and you’re still way off. I get that the game’s supposed to be a psychological horror and everything, but perhaps DreamForge should’ve rethought their immersion system. Then there’s the dire voice acting, but I’ll just leave it at that. This was 1998, which is forever ago in game time.

Elvis left this building a long time ago.

Those complaints notwithstanding, however, Sanitarium’s actually quite decent, if somewhat on the easy side and occasionally over-reliant on pixel-hunting puzzle solutions. Despite the drab amnesia cliché it starts out with, the plot goes on to intrigue with its constantly shifting and increasingly bizarre scenarios, and carnival roster of weirdo NPCs. In a genre dominated by family friendly themes and fuzzy wuzzy good fun, it’s rather nice to play something a bit disturbing.

Hard-boiled detective work, a badass trenchcoat and post-nuclear dystopia. This is what you get when you slip yourself into the … wait, you know what? We’ve been over this before. The Tex Murphy games are a set of oft-overlooked classics that put you in the shoes of the titular character: everyone’s favourite post-apocalyptic private investigator. While rubbing shoulders with mutants and walking under red skies, Tex lives in his own little Casablancan world, proving that you don’t need to worry about solving the case as long as you’re wearing a really nice hat.

Tex is a damn fine PI. Or a damn lucky one, depending on how you look at it. He does all the investigation work that the regular cops don’t bother with: sneaking aboard spaceships with interplanetary smugglers, breaking into genetic research laboratories and talking with that weirdo who sits in the back alley trash all day.

A fedora wearer and proud of it, thank you very much

Being an oldschool PI in nuked-out San Francisco tends to bring in cool stories by the truckload. Sure, Under a Killing Moon starts off innocently enough: a washed-out and down-on-his-luck Tex is asked to investigate a local robbery and uncover a two-bit crook. But in the process he meets a mutant who’s addicted to chocolate, an underworld agent with a trunk for a nose and a mystically empowered Native American who has some sort of weird agenda that will probably be revealed in an exciting finale later on. Naturally, everything gets blown out of proportion very quickly and he pretty much ends up saving half the world before the week is through. Oh, and chats with James Earl Jones on a few occasions, too.

The Tex Murphy series isn’t a stranger to full motion video, and Under a Killing Moon is the first instalment to seriously adopt the idea of FMV-based gameplay. A maligned genre which has had few true successes, FMV games still bring out the best in Tex — the developers have successfully retained the quality of puzzles and degrees of freedom that many of the game’s contemporaries lacked.

There are 193 objects hidden in this office. Can you find them all?

The game operates through a mixture of point-and-click adventuring, FMV-based cutscenes and real-time 3D navigation. The latter is ugly, but far more practical than sticking with full FMV. Players get a full (and satisfying) adventure game experience combined with the better elements of FMV, some lovingly-crafted dialogue and numerous little quirks that make a Tex Murphy game what it is.

There’s only one real shortcoming in this situation, and that’s a horrible tendency to pull the 3D equivalent of a pixel hunt. Sometimes, if you’re not looking in juuuust the right place, with juuuust the right camera angle, you’re going to lose sight of that all-important flat poly that allows you to progress through the game.

Aside from this annoying point (and the occasional bits of horrible acting), Under a Killing Moon is actually a very engaging and damn clever offering. While time has taken its toll on the graphics, there are comparatively few FMV games in existence, and playing one of the genre’s rare gems is a refreshing experience for any adventure nostalgic.

Get it.

Hard-boiled detective work, a badass trenchcoat, and post-nuclear dystopia. This is what you get when you slip yourself into the gumshoes of Tex Murphy, private investigator of the future. His love for Humphrey Bogart films is rivalled only by his eye for detail and social awkwardness, making him the ideal go-to man for all sorts of strange and bewildering cases.

The Tex Murphy series consists of five games which are notable for their popularisation of FMV and other groundbreaking advancements in audio and visual technology. They’re a bunch of adventure games at heart (“use squeaky mouse on cat”), but earlier titles also flirt with the idea of interactive movies (“watch cat”), dating sims (“charm cat”), action shooters (“get locked in firefight with cat”), and even flight simulators (“take cat for cruise around 3D construction of blasted-out San Francisco”).

This guy's an insurance salesman! Don't trust him.

While not as popular as some of the other games in the series, the first two Tex Murphy titles are an interesting look at this oft-overlooked set of classics. Mean Streets deals with Tex’s first big case: an apparent suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge which (predictably) turns into something a whole lot bigger. Players spend most of their time cruising between locations on the world map and interrogating various suspects using simple text commands, occasionally engaging in side-scrolling firefight scenes. Mixed in with this are the investigation segments, which are more reminiscent of standard adventure gaming and require you to search for various objects and clues.

While gaming, players also need to keep an eye out for new leads and jot down any important info with (gasp!) real pens and paper in a way that actually makes one feel like a proper detective.

"Look! We've colonised Mars! Let's build a casino!"

The second game, Martian Memorandum, still retains some of the original’s experimental flair, but goes down a far more conventional route with a mouse-driven interface and a far heavier emphasis on adventure-standard investigation scenes. It also fleshes out the game world some more, dealing with a conspiracy that started before the Earth was ravaged by nukes, while going into more detail about the power players and politicians of the post-war world.

The Mean Streets cockpit. You'll learn to hate travelling.

Unfortunately, what was originally a brave new experiment in the ’80s translates into a rather shoddy and frustrating game experience today. Players will no longer be wowed by the stunning VGA graphics, the FMV sequences with full digital audio, and Mean Streets‘ high-tech cruises around 3D San Fran – in fact, the latter soon proves itself to be more of a time-wasting eyesore than anything else.

If you’re feeling adventurous or are already a Tex Murphy fan, get this package and at least play through Martian Memorandum. It’s the more conventional game of the two and ends up being pretty worthwhile. Otherwise, look up Overseer (a refined FMV remake of the first game) and Under A Killing Moon (considered the best of the series, which we will review soon) if you want a more accessible first impression.

The Settlers series is a grandaddy that brought aspects of gameplay which still feature in titles to this day, and part 2  (TS2) is arguably the best of the series.

The primary game mode follows a group of Romans who find themselves marooned on an island, and they must establish settlements and explore before discovering a way home. Gameplay is pretty straightforward, revolving around the gathering of wood, stone, food, and various ores, plus the manufacture of goods. Raw and refined resources are the primary focus of TS2, and good management is paramount – especially considering that many types are strictly limited. You can grow and harvest all the trees you please, but when you run out of iron – that’s it. It can be particularly frustrating if you exhaust some vital ore well into a level and are forced to start over.

Buildings of varying sizes and functions can be constructed according to the availability of space. Every structure must be linked to the road system, which allows helpful serfs to fetch and carry goods. Here things can get interesting – each road has flags, with one serf between each flag. More flags, more serfs, and the faster goods get transported – a dense city will have hundreds of peons scurrying around like ants. However, each flag occupies precious construction space, so a balance must be struck. The route and number of roads combined with flags determine efficiency, so layout becomes critical when space is limited.

While TS2 has a strong military element and most levels require the defeat of enemy forces, the implementation is rather simplistic. Soldiers are the only unit type (but can be trained), and combat consists of simply choosing units, then selecting a target and letting the combat play out. Building military structures expands your control zone and permits you to launch attacks into opposing territory.

TS2 can be tricky at times due to the lack of any useful resource requirement indicators. Nowhere are you told what is needed to build or run a particular building, and only by trial and error can you figure things out. You might find yourself scratching your head over a half-constructed building, and only by scrutinizing the various detailed information screens would you discover that workers lack the necessary tools. While modern games allow us to take information exposition for granted, it does provide a barrier to entry for TS2.

The overall pace of gameplay is rather slow. It can take ages for industries to get up and running smoothly – and even longer for their fruits to become available. You will probably spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen, anywhere up to 3 hours per level.

Graphics are simple and colourful, and can go all the way up to 1024 x 768 (which was, like, HUGE in 1996!) with a lot of detail, considering the game’s age. You’ll see sheep and rabbits gambolling about, foxes hunting, and idle serfs reading the newspaper. On a par with many retro titles, music in TS2 is annoying right off the bat and is best left switched off. Decent-quality sounds accompany many occurrences in the game, providing the expected atmosphere. Occasionally, the timing of construction, forge, wood cutting, and other noises will create a cadence not unlike a pseudo-industrial remix, which is good for a chuckle.

The Might and Magic games have always been great. From the glorious World of Xeen back in the golden era of RPG classics, to the incredibly buggy (yet still pretty gosh-darn fun) Dark Messiah, these games have made a long-term impact in an ever-evolving market. For this delightful little review, we’ll turn our discussion to what’s possibly the greatest game ever offered under this umbrella: Heroes of Might and Magic 3.

HoMM is a game series without peer. Sure, certain competitors do exist. There’s Lords of the Realm, Lords of Magic, and some other games which have tried mixing turn-based strategy and empire building with the intense tactical experience of a fully-controlled battlefield (seasoned with just a dash of RPG goodness). HoMM, however, remains the cream of the crop, and its third installment is the finest of the lot.

Pegasus vs. unicorn vs. green dragon. Aaaaaand fight!

HoMM3 takes place in the oh-so-magical and fantastical world of Enroth, where the likes of necromancers and demons are making life difficult in a way that only necromancers and demons can really manage. In response, the Various Nations Of The World are clumping themselves into tight little units led by heroes of varying spellcasting and swordarming capabilities, running around a colourful game world, following giant green arrows for some or other reason, and basically getting into a fight every time their green arrow leads to another tight little unit led by some spellchucking, swordfighting scallywag. Along the way, they have to control resource points, manage town construction, and recruit the biggest, toughest fighting force around.

That describes the overworld bit. The real joy lies in the battle scenes. Every time two armies clash, they’re confronted with a screen that puts both forces on a grid of honour and glory. Sometimes, you’re required to lay siege to a castle. On other occasions, you’ll be fighting on cursed or rocky terrain. The basic goal is to fight your enemy until somebody surrenders or gets annihilated. Units are well varied: some cast spells, others can fly, and others just pepper enemies with projectiles. Standing on the sidelines will be the aforementioned heroes who (in lieu of fighting directly) will contribute to the battle with spells, special abilities, and passive stats.

While the game is quite complex, it’s fun for players of all levels. Beginners can just purchase the basic units, make a beeline for the enemy, and start whacking them really hard with swords and magic arrows, while those who take it seriously will find an astounding level of detail that can help them turn the most seemingly useless spell or trait into something that can actually decide a battle.

The entire game screams two words: "adventurous" and "colourful."

HoMM3 is currently available as a complete set of three games: the original Restoration of Erathia, its prequel (Shadow of Death), and another expansion pack called Armageddon’s Blade. Any one of these alone would stand as an excellent purchase, but having all three together makes this a shoe-in for anybody even remotely interested in this sort of game. I can’t think of a better way to introduce people to the genre, and I’ll eat my hat if anyone ever develops a title that does it better.

Hey, who remembers Atari’s Paperboy? Ah, bland suburban complacency, the muted rustle of newspapers hitting the lawn, and a halcyon age of wide-eyed innocence when videogames were about things like, well, chucking newspapers. Now, Postal – its obvious titular connotations notwithstanding – isn’t quite the same sort of thing. This is the other, grislier sort of postal activity that mostly involves going berserk with guns and hand grenades. It’s arguably more fun, though, especially if you (like everyone else, really) have a few latent sociopathologies brooding beneath your smiling, conformist demeanour. I mean, who hasn’t wanted to shoot their neighbours at some point? They’re obviously plotting to kill you. I’m speaking hypothetically, of course.

So this is where I’d usually put some narrative pretext, but Postal doesn’t have one. Maybe the guys at Running With Scissors left that blank so players could superimpose their own miserable realities onto the game. Oh, but who needs a reason to go on a rampage, anyway? Besides, you can always pull the “Satan made me do it” card when they finally get hold of you.

The gameplay is simple enough. If you’ve ever played the first two GTA games or something like Smash TV, it’s like that. If you haven’t, it’s all mostly isometric running about and murdering stuff with a somewhat unlikely arsenal of weapons (most people don’t just have napalm launchers lying around the house). Clearing a level means murdering a certain percentage of stuff in it. That’s about it.

The controls are pretty abominable. Maybe standards were just different in 1997, but this game plays like… like a brick in hot glue. Or something similarly cumbersome. Hilariously (not hilariously), the game needs a hotfix patch before you can turn left. How that slipped past QA really boggles the brains. Aiming is mostly a sort of imprecise accident, as you whip around at Mach 2 and complete six dizzy revolutions before the input algorithms figure out you’re trying to shoot the cop just next to you. Sure, you can adjust turning sensitivity, but that’s come down with a bad case of hotel shower tap syndrome. And because of this, the game quickly becomes frustrating.

You might have awesome memories of this game, but that’s probably because the recreational slaughter of innocents was really edgy a decade ago and when you were 13, that was all the reason you needed to play and love it. Now it’s just kinda dull.

The short version: Messiah is a game by Shiny Entertainment. That should tell you everything you need to know already. It’s actually quite possible to devise a drinking game that focuses entirely on sitting at the computer, playing through the game, and hunting for as many Shiny characteristics as possible. Take a sip every time you notice something, and by the end of it you’ll have swigged enough booze to make an elephant sick.

Blend in with your enemies...

Messiah is, to say the least, rather weird (sip). It has you playing the role of a cherub named Bob (sip) who God sends to Earth because, well, humanity has screwed up enough to create a classically dystopian and unnecessarily violent (sip) future. Your job is to destroy Father Prime, humanity’s sinister overseer and leader of a powerful police force populated by people who look like they scavenged their armour straight from MDK (sip). They’re pitted against the Chots, an underground resistance force who, despite being the “good guys”, have an unfortunately vicious demeanour and a penchant for cannibalism (sip).

Predictably enough, an oafish, tongue-in-cheek Satan (sip) gets involved at some point and screws everything up even further. Given these somewhat steep odds, Bob needs to possess various creatures (humans, mutants, and even rats) to resolve his problems through a mixture of fighting, puzzle-solving and freakishly jumping into people’s chests (oh, just go ahead and down the bottle already).

...or destroy them in an orgy of violence. Flaming winged baby optional.

The aforementioned possession premise is what differentiates Messiah from an oh-so-typical shooter. The very creatures you fight against become your tools, your weapons, and your means of living. Die, and you’re simply released from your body, ready to chest-leap another unfortunate victim and lead them to victory or doom. This idea of “using” your enemies turns everything on its head during combat and forces the development of an entirely new skill set.

Married to this premise is Messiah‘s flexible play: even in a scenario consisting of just one or two rooms, there are often several routes to take. Do you want to sneak through the police base as a harmless scientist and disable the laser field? Or would you prefer possessing one of the Chot soldiers outside and leading a full-on assault to destroy it? How about taking over a police commander and turning their own gun turrets against them?

The art direction is typical Shiny fare.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few downsides to this game. For a start, Messiah is oldschool in the worst way possible. The default controls are awkward for modern gamers (especially frustrating when you’re in the vulnerable cherub form), the tutorial level is very unhelpful and misleading, AI behaviours are difficult to understand at times, and the game itself really isn’t long enough. But for all its flaws and oversights, Messiah was (and probably still is) a unique and groundbreaking experience.

If you’re easily scared off by intimidating and confusing games, leave this one alone. But if you’d like an oldschool challenge, are open to fascinating new gameplay paradigms, and are a fan of pretty much everything that Shiny stands for, grab this game now.

In the not-too-distant future, the availability of resources becomes critical and mankind succumbs to the inevitability of war. Nuclear weapons are used and civilization disappears in the subsequent storm of atomic fire. A few fortunate people have been locked away in massive underground Vaults, allowing them to survive. You play one of these Vault-dwellers. The water purification chip in your Vault has malfunctioned after many decades of use, and you are selected to leave the safety of your home and venture into the unknown world outside.

Your character has base attributes, diverse skills, and traits which are allocated at creation. Leveling up grants you additional skill points, as well as perks which help round out your character and grant bonuses. Overall there is a huge amount of customizability, allowing you play pretty much any character type you like. The game does permit many varied approaches to problem-solving – so if you’d rather talk your way out of a sticky situation (as opposed to feeding a lead sandwich to everything in sight), you can.

Upon first leaving the Vault, you are greeted with a map presented by your handy-dandy Pip-Boy 2000™. Initially, the world is unknown and uncharted. As you explore, you discover a desolate wasteland – nothing more than blasted desert and ruined cities. But life continues to eke out an existence. Humanity has risen from the ashes and is making an attempt to claw its way back from the brink of extinction. There are small towns scattered around the barren countryside – each of these has a distinct atmosphere and its citizens exhibit their own morality and outlook be they human, mutant, or irradiated ghoul.

The viewpoint in Fallout is fixed isometric, with a bubble of transparency around your character allowing you to see when you’re behind an obstacle. Most modern gamers will want to zoom and rotate the view at first, but once you’ve been sucked into the game (and you will be) this is no longer a concern. Game areas are a little small, which can be a little annoying, but fortunately load times between these are very short and often unnoticeable. The world design deserves special mention: everything has a retro yet futuristic feel – ray guns meet vacuum tubes and 1950s style. Much inspiration has been taken from sci-fi movies of the last few decades, and the game refers to these from time to time.

Exploring local areas is done in real-time, but when things get dangerous the game switches to turn-based combat. While some might find this distances the player from the action, it allows for intensely tactical battles. How you use your limited Action Points each turn is crucial – choosing to fire, reload, heal, or take cover will make the difference between victory and becoming yet another irradiated skeleton in the wasteland.

Humour is a subtle yet important aspect of Fallout, helping to ameliorate the dismay felt at the world’s nuclear fate. While not the driving force behind the game, you will find yourself chuckling regularly. Heck, if your character is lucky enough, you might discover a crashed UFO in the desert, complete with alien clutching a picture of Elvis.

Fallout is pre-patched to 1.2, but there is still the occasional bug. None of these interfere with the completion of the game, but doing tasks or talking to NPCs in the wrong order can lock you out of certain side-quests. While this is no deal-breaker, it can affect your enjoyment of the game – fortunately, there is a fan-made patch to 1.3.4 which addresses most if these issues.

There are two sorts of contract killer. There’s the shady, scarred sort of guy with an eye patch and Eastern European accent who’s only ever glimpsed through a pall of cigarette smoke, hangs out in underworld bars with lighting problems, and has a nickname prefixed with Little or Lucky or The. He’d be prosecuted and sentenced to forever in prison if ever apprehended by the authorities, but that’ll never happen – guys like this guy don’t get nabbed by the rozzers, they go out in a dramatic and usually subtly ironic way that probably involves a helicopter or an empty dam or a grotty, abandoned tenement on the Lower East Side. Then there’s the other sort of of contract killer – that’s the rakish, gum-chewing sort of guy with shaggy blonde hair and perfectly straight teeth, who looks like the sort of guy who has lots of sex with lots of hot women because that’s what he does. Although both sorts kill people for hard cash, only one of these guys works for a Private Military Contractor. That’s all the difference between rotting forgotten in a hole and being totally awesome, boys and girls. If you’re going to kill people for hard cash, always make sure you’re a card-carrying member of a proper killing enterprise – a proper killing enterprise like the Association of International Mercenaries or, conveniently, AIM.

Cut scene to Arulco, a not-Central America now fallen on desperate times. Previously ruled by a democratic monarchy, the country’s former election candidate Enrico Chivaldori has been betrayed by his scheming wife Deidranna (who, perhaps not insignificantly, has an Eastern European accent) and abandoned the country, having faked his own death somehow. Left to her own nefarious devices, Dee Dee has set herself up as resident Queen of Everything and is generally being a huge bitch to everyone. Enrico hires a bunch of people to kill other people for hard cash, so his country can be a nice place again. Paragraphs one and two are, obviously, closely related to one another. ¡Y arriba!

“They don’t make them like they used to,” goes the aphorism, and it’s only too apparent with games like Jagged Alliance 2 over here. This is the kind of game that, if you don’t read the manual, you’ll simply never be able to play it – and nobody makes games like that anymore. No, now it’s all about condescending tutorials and infuriating helpy-helpers who won’t let you doing anything without asking if you’re absolutely sure you want to do what you’re doing, then reminding you that you’re doing what you’re doing before you actually can. But this isn’t SimCity Creator on DS, it’s Jagged Alliance 2 – a sort of X-Com mashed with Fallout Tactics mashed with Risk, and it’s all that sort of massively complicated you haven’t seen around since 2001. Sure, kids today won’t get it at all – but they weren’t there, man. They weren’t there.

Back in the ’90s, Shiny Entertainment was known for its hilarious and slick action games like Earthworm Jim and Wild 9. It placed as much emphasis on trying to make the player laugh as it did on engrossing them in the game, and in 1997 it released MDK, a hit action game that was quite unique for its time.

In MDK, players assume the role of Kurt, an assistant of the eccentric Dr Fluke Hawkins. During a science experiment on a space station, the Doctor noticed that a resource-devouring alien race had made its way to earth, and was harvesting all of our resources with huge, city-sized harvesters. He kits out a reluctant Kurt with a special combat suit and air drops him into each of these harvesters to take them out one at a time.

At the start of each mission, players control Kurt in increasingly difficult “halo jumps”, if you will, where he has to dodge missiles and lasers as he freefalls from beyond Earth’s atmosphere to his mission start point. The aim is to defeat the commander of each of these gigantic harvesters, which sounds simple enough, but it’s really quite an ordeal. Each harvester is structured completely differently to the last. Some have vast, open, military style trenches while others contain weird architecture or even alien theme parks. All of them are crawling with enemies and puzzles however, and these are designed to tax both your brain and your action game skills to the limit. One of my personal favourite bits is a mini-boss encounter, where you fight an alien in a suit similar to yours in a gigantic room full of floating, black, mirror-like platforms, while a huge pendulum swings back and forth in an effort to knock you off. The game is full of interesting and memorable ideas like this right until the end, and just when you’re starting to think you’ve seen it all, something new will pop up.

Luckily, Kurt has a number of tools at his disposal to ease the pain of this endeavour. His arm-mounted machine gun works pretty much like any other, and allows him to strafe around enemies while peppering them with a constant stream of rapid fire. It’s a force to be reckoned with, even though it’s the only basic weapon Kurt will have throughout the entire game. He also has a “sniper helmet”, which allows him to make long-range headshots and launch an assortment of different grenades. It also functions as a puzzle-solving tool. Kurt also has access to a wide variety of different items and powerups, such as the world’s smallest nuke and, my personal favourite, the world’s most interesting bomb – a bomb so enthralling enemies can’t look away, even when it’s about to explode.

This trademark sense of humour, coupled with stunning visuals (for its time) all combined to make MDK an instant and unique classic in a time when FPS games were dominating the market.

There’s an ancient prophecy, of course. This one says that, every hundred years, the seven bits of floating continental stuff that make up the world of Septerra will come apart, exposing some kind of biocomputer at its core. The prophecy also says that if some guy has these two fancy key things, he can use them to claim great and terrible power of some sort. Apparently this is called the Legacy of the Creator. Now, about a thousand years ago, this demon named Gemma tried doing all this, but the gods intervened by dispatching Marduk, who had a massive brawl with Gemma and won. Then some other stuff happened, although that’s all a bit convoluted, but then, this is a game that spells possessive “its” with an apostrophe and uses “your” for “you’re”, so getting a coherent mythology together probably wasn’t really part of the design brief.

I don't know what's actually going on anymore, either.

Anyway, you’re this kid Maya, a junker on World Shell 2. She spends most of her time collecting trash chucked off World Shell 1 and having blue hair. Until she’s all tangled up in a dastardly plot, obviously. Standard cookie cutter Japanese RPG drivel, really, right down to the allegedly adorable but actually really drab and uninspired robot sidekick who’s nothing much more than a cheap damage soak. You can swap him out later in the game, but all the other characters are rather drab and uninspired too.

This guy wouldn't even wait around for a combat sequence to die. He got himself killed during a cutscene instead. That's how bad the combat is.

Septerra Core is also a relentlessly linear

game. It’s so linear, in fact, that the developers dispensed almost entirely with any of the character customisation you’d usually expect in an RPG. When characters level up in this game, they’re just automatically assigned a couple of new stats. It neatly excises some of the otherwise unavoidable RPG “DO I CHOOSE LIGHTNING OR ICE POWERS OMG I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO CHOOSE” bloat, sure, but it also means character progression is about as absorbing as single-ply toilet paper. Presumably this was to maintain focus on the story, but the story’s rubbish. So’s the voice acting.

Not as rubbish as the combat system, however. This is just about the most dreary, tedious, and awful combat in any game ever. It’s an active time system comparable to the Penny Arcade Adventures games, or even Chrono Trigger, except it completely lacks whatever it was that made those systems work. Like succinct action animations, combo manoeuvres, style, and ingenuity. Instead, you just wait around a lot with no option to change turn speed, skip through clumsy animations, or even quit the game.

As a very obviously console-styled RPG, this might’ve been a cool game a decade ago, but now it’s only just barely tolerable. Mostly, it’s boring.

Ultra-high-tech-indestructible-super-space-cyber-suit? Check. Plasma blaster? Check. Cow? Check. Groovy!

Originally released in 1994, Earthworm Jim is a platform shooter that follows the adventures of the eponymous annelid.  Crawling along, eating dirt, Jim was just an average earthworm until the Super Suit fell from the sky and changed everything. Now he must rescue Princess What’s-Her-Name from the clutches of Psy-Crow and the evil Queen Slug-For-A-Butt.

EWJ has a thoroughly twisted sense of humour, which shows itself constantly throughout the game. Action in EWJ is fast paced and smoothly animated, with plenty of bad guys to blast and platforms to leap. Getting around a level is not limited to the usual jumping, though. Jim’s head can be used as a whip, grabbing onto suitable protrusions and swinging great distances (this is useful for attacking enemies too). He can also spin his head as a helicopter blade, allowing him to glide when needed.

Levels are littered with health and weapon powerups (collected with an enthusiastic “Yippee”!), and in true platformer fashion there are many secret areas to discover. You will need all of those items – EWJ comes from an era in gaming where players were a more focused lot and wanted to have their skills tested. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, this game can be frustratingly tricky much of the time.  It is sometimes difficult to know where to go, and it often takes several attempts to successfully complete a level. However, this just gives you an excuse to play more EWJ!

From a scrap heap, to bungee jumping with Major Mucus, to the intestinal tract of some hideous creature, Jim will battle his way through a wide variety of bizarre and challenging stages. At the end of each one you’ll be given a code allowing you to skip ahead in your next session.

Graphics are bright and colourful, and a lot of work has gone into the animation and art. EWJ looks really good, considering its age – overall, it comes across as very polished. There were some minor issues with keyboard jamming (not a good thing when trying to leap over an electric chair while carrying a cow), but nothing too troublesome.

Music and sounds are great fun. Jim’s exclamations of “Way cool!”, “Whee doggie!” and the ever-present “Ouch!” and “Damn!” always elicit a chuckle. Each level has its own (generally kooky) music – eg. synth pop, rock, and banjo country. There is an unfortunate volume discrepancy between sound effects and music , and the latter cannot be switched off and might become annoying after time (GOG are working on this however).

Earthworm Jim 2 (1995) sees our hero set out once more to save Princess What’s-Her-Name (what is it with princesses, huh?), pitting him against foes both new and old (such as Evil The Cat). Gameplay fundamentals are similar, but controlling Jim is slightly different. He now has a backpack full of sentient mucus named Snott (Yum!). Instead of whip-swinging, Snott flings a goo grapnel which clings to a suitable mucus-covered surface, and Jim can also slow a fall by unfurling Snott as a boogerchute.

Gameplay style in the sequel is a good deal more varied – in addition to the platform levels, Jim will float around digestive villi as a blind cave salamander, fly his Pocket rocket while dodging pirate cannonballs, and bounce puppies using a giant marshmallow. There are also some new weapons, including the utterly useless Bubble Gun. Music continues the eclectic style of EWJ1, going so far as to feature Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

In 2008, NATO’s intelligence department learns that the Russians have totally demolished one of their cities, called Gorky 17. The Russians claim the place was deserted, and trashed as part of its post-Cold War clean up operations. According to the game manual NATO official report, however, this city was a replica of an unspecified American city, used by the Russians as a training complex for their spies. If that sounds absurdly improbable, wait – it gets more predictable better. Whether or not this city was employed in spy training, its real purpose was to conceal all sorts of dastardly Russian military experiments, including – but not necessarily limited to – investigation into telekinesis and teleportation. And turning the locals into grotesquely mutated abominations, of course. Back at NATO HQ, the popular theory around the office watercoolers is that the grotesquely mutated abominations had rebelled against their captors, precipitating all that nasty total destruction stuff.

Team Two arrives to clean up Team One's mess. Team One made a huge mess. Look at that mess.

Anyway, fast forward to a bit later, and NATO gets an anonymous tip-off that those dastardly Russians have built another top secret laboratory near the Polish town of Lubin. Team One is promptly dispatched to check it out, and like every other Team One before them, is subsequently stabbed to death by monsters. Team Two is sent in to win the day.

I’ve never played any of the X-Com games myself, but Gorky 17 is apparently somewhat like them. From my personal frame of reference, it’s kind of a bit like Fallout Tactics crossed with chess. You spend your time negotiating a dilapidated series of locations, picking up junk and occasionally getting yourself into brawls with the area’s indigenous wildlife. Combat is turn-based, with different weapons restricted to their own firing patterns – a handgun, for example, can shoot only in straight lines, while the rifle can be shot both straight ahead or diagonally. Moving your dauntless little guys around to maximise this tactically is most of the fun, and an authentically compelling game in itself.

You'd be able to avoid this if medical supplies weren't so brutally scarce too.

Gorky 17 is pretty uncompromising in difficulty, however. Ammo is brutally scarce, and until you’ve managed to get the rechargeable Shocker and/or Flame Thrower, you’re going to find yourself wasting a lot of bullets you’ll never get back. On top of that, any character dying during combat brings the game to an abrupt conclusion, forcing you to restart the entire encounter.

If you’re made of the indomitable sort of stuff that spits in the face of overwhelming adversary, then you’ll probably relish Gorky 17. If you’re not, you won’t.

Technical note: Make sure to disable hardware zoom in the game launcher. It causes graphical glitches and artifacting onscreen. Not sexy.

Waxworks was originally released in 1992 on the Amiga (congrats if you know what that is) and PC, and has been brought back to life by the fine people at Good Old Games. This old-school gem is a horror-themed hybrid that combines elements of action, RPG, and adventure, and laid the path for many future titles.

The story takes place in your uncle’s eldritch waxworks museum, where you attempt to lift a curse that has plagued your family for generations. There are 5 exhibits to explore, each transporting you to a different realm – ancient Egypt, Jack the Ripper’s London, a zombie-infested graveyard, a mine inhabited by hideous mutants, and the Witch’s Lair. Each area is a one-way trip – after entering, you will have to overcome the puzzles and opponents within before you can escape and return to the present. As you progress, you can invoke your uncle’s spirit using a crystal ball. He can provide valuable assistance in the form of advice and limited healing.

The most noticeable aspect of Waxworks is how difficult it can be. Gruesome and often-unexpected death awaits you around every corner. This is not one of today’s auto-aiming hand-holding games – do just one thing wrong, and it can be fatal. This game is unforgiving in the extreme and will challenge you extensively.

The first thing most players will notice is the complete absence of a map – this is exacerbated by the uniformity of corridors and scarcity of landmarks. You’ll have to resort to a piece of graph paper and a pencil if you don’t want to wander around endlessly lost. The puzzle and adventure components are well implemented, and you’ll be searching every dusty corner for potentially useful items.

Combat occurs regularly, and is a fairly unpredictable affair: your attacks miss much of the time, and the damage opponents deal varies considerably. Healing is not the ever-present factor found in modern title – besides the finite help offered by your disembodied uncle, there is almost no way to address your wounds. In one realm, he cannot heal you at all. You do find a med kit, but if you use it more than once the level becomes impossible to complete for various reasons.

This is just one example of numerous instances where a realm can become impassable. Many actions or omissions will effectively lock the level. The game generally doesn’t inform you when this occurs, leaving you to find out the hard way with great frustration further down the line. Unless you save regularly, this means a lot of restarts and wasted time.

Being a retro title, the graphics show their age (as expected), but could not be considered terrible – one acclimatises quickly as gameplay becomes the primary focus. Music is spooky and atmospheric by ’92 standards, but rudimentary to the modern ear – you’ll find yourself quickly disabling it and running Winamp in the background. Similarly, sounds are sparse and functional, simply highlighting a weapon swing or sudden trap.

Hidden within the shadow of more famous contemporaries such as Age of Empires and the Civilization series, the Seven Kingdoms games have eked out a humble existence by straddling the line between combat-based RTS and economy-based management sims. In a nutshell, Seven Kingdoms 2 is the computer game equivalent of an identity crisis — without the annoying teenage angst.

Unlike most strategy games, building your empire here is actually interesting.

SK2 is a strategy-slash-economy-management thingie that has the player striving to rule over everything forever with one of seven historical empires (well, twelve, but one can overlook that small detail). Like its predecessor, it throws away the classic “build lots of units and hit the enemy with them really hard” paradigm of most RTS titles: here, players are offered additional depth in the form of population attitudes, espionage, trade, and diplomacy. Combat units (including, at times, gods and heroes) become a component of your economy and expansion, and often don’t need to be called to battle at all if you can wangle a treaty with your opponents. Independent cities and populations are wooed with money or inspiring leadership, rather than violence.

And yet the game can be very rough-and-tumble, too, particularly if you play against (or for) the clans of mythical monsters known as the Fryhtans. Their proficiencies include looting, pillaging, and being overall rotten diplomats, steering the game inexorably towards conventional, combat-oriented strategy.

This war with the Fryhtans is the premise of the game’s campaign mode, which is a province-based, randomly-generated set of scenarios that focus on providing unique playthroughs rather than a preset story. Players are challenged in a variety of ways: some situations require defending a province from Fryhtan raids using limited troops. Others set you on quests of exploration, or require you to assassinate rival leaders. Some events need you to build and maintain a high economy rating, or train a platoon of skilled soldiers.

Combat isn't as detailed as rival offerings, but it's still satisfying.

This game’s versatility is great, but can also serve as a drawback. While the idea itself is admirable (and pulled off pretty well) some players may be frustrated by the way that the variable playing styles are actually enforced: those who are intrigued by the economic system may find themselves thrust into mad and bloody sorties with Fryhtans far too often, while military buffs will lament scenarios which require peacefully building up and maintaining an empire over the course of several years. Indeed, it often turns out that random scenarios and skirmish modes are far superior to the campaign because they tend to allow players to go through the game in their own style.

Seven Kingdoms is an oft-overlooked gem. It may come across as odd, and may even be frustrating to start with. But if you persevere just a little, you’ll find a rich and versatile strategy experience which has something for everyone, and doesn’t shy away from the concept of being unique and interesting.

This story starts, like most epic stories, with a huge plane crash in the middle of the Australian Outback (‘cept it’s the inevitable dystopian future now, so it’s called “the Gap” instead). This kid called Robert is the sole survivor, but it’s totally his lucky day (sort of), because a bunch of local tribals find him and take him in. The tribals call him Robert Foster, partly because he’s now all fostered and everything, but mostly because they also find a discarded can of Foster’s Lager near the crash site, and naming a kid after beer is always a good idea. Oh, except in some regions where, due to copyright issues, the name “Foster’s” was replaced with other names, and made the whole joke not work. Anyway, Foster scurries off to grow up among the tribals, and learns all sorts of tribal survival stuff like hunting kangaroos and eating dirt and building robots.

It's almost in 3D.

Then one day, all this watercoloured pastoral bliss is rudely interrupted by the arrival of shock troopers, who drag Robert off into their transport, and nuke the tribals. In an eerie reiteration of his childhood, the chopper subsequently comes crashing down in some place called Union City, and Robert negotiates a bold escape into a nearby factory.

WHO IS ROBERT FOSTER REALLY? WHAT DO ALL THESE BAD, BAD MEN WANT WITH HIM? WHY IS THIS GAME SET IN AUSTRALIA, OF ALL PLACES?

So getting started, Beneath a Steel Sky is a simple take on the point and click approach, with interactive items highlighted on mouse-over, and a sort of all purpose do-stuff action assigned to the right button. Move Robert around, click on stuff, and once you’ve moved Robert around enough and clicked on all the right stuff, you win the game. Unlike some of its contemporary titles, however, it’s entirely possible to do something stupid and wind up dead in Beneath a Steel Sky (but, fortunately, entirely impossible to accidentally end up in one of those terminally irritating unwinnable game states), so save frequently.

That's not just any circuit board. That's Joey, your robot chum. He's kind of missing a few parts at the moment, though.

I’ve always loved this game. It’s partly because I’m such a slut for point and click adventure games, but also because I’m such a slut for cyberpunk. In fact, the only thing that could make me sluttier for Beneath a Steel Sky would be if Richard Morgan had written it, and signed a copy for me. As it is, however, much of the story and artwork was penned by Watchmen mastermind Dave Gibbons, who’s obviously not as cool as Richard Morgan but still kinda cool in his own right.

On a scale of King’s Quest 8 to Day of the Tentacle, I’d probably rate this somewhere around Quest for Glory 3.

If you’re a retro game lover, then you’ll be pleased to hear that three of the finest examples of retro gaming have been released recently on the PlayStation Network.

Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein 3D is more what you’d call a historic game than a retro game. It is credited with kick-starting the entire First Person Shooter genre. A lot of people credit Doom with that achievement, but Doom only started the craze – Wolfenstein 3D started it all.

In Wolfenstein 3D, players assume the role of B.J. Blazkowicz, an Allied soldier imprisoned by the Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein. After knifing a guard in the back and stealing his pistol, players are left to shoot their way to freedom. There are six episodes in total, with nine levels and one secret level per episode – all of which are included in the PlayStation Network version. The lineup of enemies is interesting, and players will face Nazi foot soldiers, dogs, SS troopers, and various colourful bosses, including a mad surgeon, and even Hitler himself.

I’m sure there was probably a first person shooter or two around before Wolfenstein 3D that somebody will bring up, so rather than saying it was the first of its kind, we’ll say that it was the first of its kind that was done right. The speed and smoothness of the game as you wandered around the large, maze-like levels, shooting enemies and looking for the exit, was unlike anything gamers had ever seen before.

If you want to add a truly historic game to your collection, then look no further than Wolfenstein 3D. But if you need another incentive, then earning trophies in Wolfenstein 3D unlocks special secrets in the upcoming Wolfenstein game for the PS3 (and PC and 360). How about that, eh?

Gunstar Heroes

If you were ever a fan of platform shooters and you haven’t at least heard of Gunstar Heroes, then you should be ashamed of yourself. Still, that feeling of shame will fade if you hit the PSN and download the version of it available there.

Gunstar Heroes was developed by Treasure, the geniuses responsible for Ikaruga, Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Light Crusader, and Alien Soldier, among other hit titles. Like everything they made, Gunstar Heroes fitted neatly into a specific genre, but rose above it in so many ways.

Gunstar Heroes is possibly one of the craziest shooting games available. At the start, you choose whether you’d like to play with Fixed Shot (where your character stands still while shooting) or Free Shot (where your character can move while shooting.) You then select one of the four different weapon types, Force (rapid fire), Lighting (straight line through multiple enemies), Chaser (homing shot), and Fire (big damage, limited range). During the game, you can combine two of these different weapon types to make all kinds of new, hybrid weapons to suit your tastes.

From the word “go” you are assaulted by an unending stream of enemies who just won’t quit. Your only hope to see the end of each stage is to keep moving and shooting. Don’t stop, don’t think, just shoot and run. It’s this intense, unrelenting action element that made the game so popular when it was released, and it’s still damn good fun to play now – even more so if you play it in two player mode.

Download it right now. You won’t regret it.

Never in my life has a bad game made me feel so conflicted. Simon the Sorcerer 3D peers over the corner of its little basket in the rain, staring at me with moistly blinking puppy eyes – a creature hated for its deformity but pitied for its innocence. I want to give it a good review, but instead a stream of guilty tears pour down my face as I’m compelled to shut it out and force it to endure purgatory instead.

Lots of candy, a huge cauldron and frogs. I wonder who lives here?

This game is a third-person 3D adventure about a pretty typical adolescent: Simon rebels against authority, insults random strangers, grows a ponytail because it’s trendy, and even takes the time to chat up pretty women while gawking at their bits.

From time to time, however, Simon is an unwilling hero in a fantasy world where he becomes a practitioner of magic who has to save the universe from a big bad wizard. Along the way, he solves lots of puzzles and does his best to increase his magical ability beyond the potency of a small rock. A hallmark of the series is that most of Simon’s trials are self-inflicted challenges stemming from various antisocial teenage vices, meaning that he often has to find indirect and ridiculous solutions to otherwise trivial obstacles.

Simon 3D is no exception to the series, but players unfortunately have the added burden of dealing with a game that’s horrifically buggy (expect glitches and crashes often), graphically inferior (even for its time) and incredibly frustrating to control (keyboard at its worst).

Adventure Soft wanted to pounce on every gimmicky extra that early 3D adventures could offer: expansive, awful-looking worlds to explore, clumsy action sequences and grindtastic mini games and side challenges. These were carried out as well as one would expect – which is to say not too gosh-darn well at all. The game also manages to put forward the 3D equivalent of classic point-n-click pixel hunt problems, requiring the player to stand in just the right place at just the right angle to see some objects. It’s frustrating – not least because it often interferes with puzzle-solving.

The graphics aren't great, but they've definitely nailed "frustration". Rather fitting, really.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. In fact, since I first got my hands on the original Simon the Sorcerer, I’ve been thoroughly entranced by the series. King’s Quest is interesting. Monkey Island is funny. But the Simon games have always been filled with the most beautiful mix of satire, geek culture references, fourth wall breakages, black comedy, insults, and adolescent humour that a gamer will ever have the good fortune to come across. And Simon 3D proudly maintains that standard, with some of the best dialogue — and one or two of the most amazing puzzles — that I’ve ever seen in an adventure game.

But for the love of all that is witty, rude and adolescent, don’t play Simon 3D if you want a good impression of the series. Maybe pick it up if you’re already a fan, but otherwise have a look at Simon the Sorcerer 1 and its sequel, instead, for examples of old-school adventure at its finest. They’re fun to play and aren’t crippled by gimmicks or bugs.

During the mid ’90s, following the first-person shooter craze started by Doom and the rise of the multimedia PC, the race was on among developers to produce ever more impressive first-person games. Rise of the Triad: Dark War showed up squarely in the middle of this interesting era, and it stood out for a long time as one of the most unique shooters available.

In those times, the very most important thing about any FPS, to gamers, was its graphics. In that respect, Rise of the Triad was exceptional. The photographic sprites used for the guns and enemies really gave the game a realistic look. You can also look up and down in addition to just turning around – which was only starting to become a common thing at the time the game was released. Of course, visuals like these took their toll on PCs back then, and you needed at least a mid-range 486 to play it properly. In fact, in old FPS games, you could reduce the screen size to make the game run better, and in RotT, if you reduce the screen to the smallest size, you’ll see a little message reading “Buy a 486! ”, which was just one of the many nuggets of humour hidden in the game.

Gameplay-wise, RotT isn’t special so much as unique. You run around the stages, killing enemies and looking for keys to open doors to get to the next stage to do more of the same. At the start of the game, you have only a pistol, but you can find and wield another one, and then eventually a machine gun. The cool thing is that any weapon which requires bullets has infinite ammo. The majority of the other weapons in the game were rocket launchers of various kinds: homing rockets, cluster rockets, firewall rockets, rockets which caused area affect explosions, and so on. There are one or two creative weapons besides rocket launchers, like the monk staff, which fires lightning balls, and the infamous Excalibat, a baseball bat which fires explosive baseballs and can also be used as a melee weapon.

Other oddities in the game include the weird powerups you can find, such as one which turns you into a dog for a brief while, and another which puts your character on a magic mushroom high, unable to walk straight but seeing everything in multi-coloured disco-vision. There is also the gameplay reliance on trampolines. In every stage, you’ll find a plethora of trampolines, some of which were required to get around, but it seems odd that this would be standard equipment in a Triad stronghold. The game also features tons and tons of ankhs, little symbols which you can collect – once you have 100 of them, you receive an extra life. An extra life in a first person shooter?

Rise of the Triad is definitely an interesting FPS, both for its impressive visuals and its oddness. If you fancy playing it again, or giving it a try for the first time, Good Old Games has a great version which installs itself and configures the DOSbox settings automatically. All you have to do is click on the shortcut and enjoy.