Starcraft (1998)

Has to be mentioned. In my opinion, Blizzard Entertainment is king of real-time strategy games. They began with Warcraft, which was awesome by itself (and was built upon with Warcraft II, III, and is now having its name bespoiled by World of Warcraft). However, in 1998, Blizzard released Starcraft, a futuristic RTS featuring humans ("Terrans"), and the Zerg and Protoss alien races, each with different units and playing styles.

The Protoss attack a Zerg base.

Plot synopsis: Remember how Australia was formed? England sent its criminals to colonize it to free up the jails? Yeah, basically this, on an interstellar scale, but things go wrong and the criminals end up on all sorts of different planets and lose all contact with Earth. They rebuild civilization from scratch, and form differnt planetary nations. Little do they know, though, that they are being observed. Just as theyare going through a wrecking civil war, however, a fringe planet falls under attack to the Zerg, mysterious, ravenous monsters that kill without asking a question. They all obey the will of a central Overmind, which telepathically micromanages all their actions. Hilarity ensues when another alien race, the Protoss, appears on the scene and a fleet of theirs burns the planet attacked by the Zerg to a crisp without provocation. The Protoss, however, are very technologically advanced, but also highly religious - some to the point of zealotry.

Left to right: Zerg, Protoss, and Terran.

As a game, it manages to not only be very balanced between the powers, but also highly varied. Makes for great multiplayer games, and is the national sport of South Korea. Plot is awesome and fun, but plain single player matches can be hard for beginners and easy for experienced players, but equally frustrating for both when the AI can micromanage units better than you can.

How to get it: buy it! It's still for sale in many real-life game stores, and in nearly all online game stores. You can also get the Brood War expansion, though I prefer to not play with it.

That's the last you'll see of common games though. Especially when I'm following Starcraft up with...

Volfied (1989)

One of the most fun games I've ever played, though I suck at it, and have given up lately. The concept is simple: each level is a rectangule filled with enemies. If they touch or shoot you, you die. However, you are invincible while on the border of the rectangle. The objective? You have no guns (without a special time-limited powerup). You have to leave the border of the rectangle, and draw a path with your movements before returning to the border. The area now drawn gets filled in the same as the "outside" of the rectangle (now polygon), and any enemies trapped there are killed. The objective in each level is to secure 80% of its area.

The challenge? Beat tens of progressively harder levels with progressively smarter enemies. With 3 lives. And no "save game" option. A fast-paced, but super fun game.

How to get it: This is abandonware - its creator is either bankrupt, or has given up making any more profits from it. That means it is free for download! (another great thing about playing old games)

For those up for more action, you should look into...

One Must Fall 2097 (1994)

If you liked Mortal Kombat or any of its spawn, but your mother always complained about how violent it is, you could play this instead. Wikipedia calls it a "fighting game" but that's a little vague, so I'll try to put it in as few words as possible: "huge freaking robots beating the crap out of each other".

A Nova beating the crap out of a Shredder. Or head, I guess.

Prrretty much. The robots are as tall as small buildings, if I gather correctly, and are remote-controlled by humans who connect their nerves to the robots. That's why the robots are called HAR's - Human Assisted Robots. The corporation which manages these matches is called WAR (HAR HAR! I see what you did there!), and the single player plot is something about its head making a bid for world domination or something, though it's not very clear, nor is the main point of the game. Whether against AI or other human players, the fun part is the variation available in the robots, and in strategies.

Each character has 3 attributes: power, agility, and endurance, each doing fairly straightforward stuff. Additionally, in tournament mode, each HAR has upgradeable arm power and speed, leg/chain/flamethrower power and speed, armor, and stun resistance. On top of that, the HARs themselves have great variety.

The two players there are Jaguar and a Shadow. The Jaguar is a "classic", acrobatic fighter, allowing for stuff like roundhouse kicks, "jaguar" leaps, in-air throwing, but also features some nifty concussion cannons in its eyes. The Shadow has the feature of being able to make temporary duplicates of itself. It's not an uncommon sight to see a player being held still by a copy, while a copy punches the player, and the real Shadow is charging in to do more damage itself. Other notable robots are the Pyros, which hovers a little above the ground, and the leg keys are mapped to a set of two flamethrowers at its side to complement its hulking fists, and the Katana (my favorite) which has two giant blades instead of hands.

The downside: some robots just suck against the AI. If you can do well against harder AI in a Thorn, give me a call. Other than that, this game is great great fun.

How to get it: Abandonware again! Find it free here.

For something that requires a bit more than twitch-reflexes, try...

The Lost Vikings (1993)

A sinister alien has kidnapped a trio of three Viking friends for an evil game of his, putting them through a variety of different puzzling levels. Help Eric The Swift, Baelog, and Olaf get to the end of each level alive to let them escape!

So, remember sidescrollers like Mario? You're playing 3 of them at once. Each Viking has different abilities: Eric can run fast and jump, Baelog has a sword and bow, and Olaf has a near-impenetrable shield and surprising strength. Together they must traverse a series of different levels, through jungles, industrial areas, and Egyptian tombs. The challenge? You can only control one of them at any one time, and they each have individual inventories.

Olaf holds off a dinosaur with his shield while the others stand there looking stupid. Pretty much how teamwork works.

The graphics are beautiful, the character development is awesome (via in-game conversations between the characters), and the difficulty starts off comfortably easy and ends up mindbendingly difficult.

How to get it: Yayy, abandonware!

So far as neuron-frying games go, you could look into:

X-COM: Enemy Unknown (1994)

... or X-COM: UFO Defense, as called in some countries. Short for "eXtraterrestrial COMbat unit", it is a turn-based strategy game centered upon defending earth from the unexplained increased alien sightings. You play as the leader of X-COM, and its field commander. The game has two switching phases for your modes of operation: the Geoscape and Battlescape.

In the geoscape you can manage multiple bases, hire soldiers, enginners, and scientists, manage your ships, and buy equipment. Time passes at at least a 5:1 ratio (and can be set to much faster) in this view, just because it can be incredibly boring waiting for a UFO to appear.

This is where the real fun happens. You arrive at the scene of a landing/crash landing/terror site/alien base and shoot some guns. The play is grid and turn based, and every soldier has stats for agility, health, psi power, and size of balls (figuratively). They each also carry equipment packs, and can use up to two weapons at one time, one in each hand (dual pistols yeeeeeeeeah!).

It is an awesomely fun game, and really deep so far as what you can do. It gets super-difficult towards the end, though, when capture, not kill, becomes the main objective. The only one time I actually won was by mind-controlling an enemy unit, tossing him a bomb launcher, and-- but I won't ruin that for you.

How to get it: It is still for sale places. Can't say where, and you can't have my copy. It does have issues running on Windows Vista and Windows 7, though, and my "collector's edition" is not DOS, so I can't use DOSBox, so I'm trying to install a Windows 98 Virtual machine for the sole purpose of this game. Because it's awesome!

Note: For those of you who have played my "Final War" game in 9th grade and thought it was awesome, its play was a shameless ripoff and modification of the Battlescape. So imagine how great actual X-COM is!

And last but not least, for those favoring less "action" and more plot, check out:

The Legend of Kyrandia

Kyrandia is a magical place, the home of a kingdom that gets along well with nature. Until the court jester turns out to be evil and knows magic and usurps the throne, that is! You play as Brandon, the... random guy, really. Who gets a lot of responsibility on his shoulders suddenly just for being "the one". Just kidding, you are actually the secret heir and need to go reclaim the throne.

Okay, so you are also a little thick in the head, but that's allright. The game is a "point-and-click" adventure, something we really haven't seen in a while, what with all these newfangled "3D" technologies. The story is linear, but riddled with puzzles, often even nested in each other, and yes, there are ways to die. Painfully. The scenery is beautiful, and the music likewise. Not much else to say about it, just an all around awesome game. Only good for one play-through, though...

How to get it: Three cheers for abandonware!

Also check out the LoK 2 and LoK 3 If you like this type of games, also check out Loom, though you may suck at it if you don't have a musical ear, and also Pepper's Adventures In Time if you want to see Hippie Ben Franklin (yes, I said it).

Other games also deserve mention:

• Alone in the Dark - Can actually still be scary if you get over the low polygon counts and crappy texturing.
• Commander Keen - Cool sidescroller of (I think) a kid's hyperactive imagination
• Descent 1 and 2 - May do a separate blog post on these. First person shooters, but you're in a ship, and there is no gravity. Nausea factor is half the fun. The other half is lots of explosions.
• Doom 1 and 2 - 99% of gamers will agree these defined the first person shooter genre. The other 1% are people who don't know anything other than Halo exists.
• Prince of Persia - Prince has to rescue his kingdom and loved one from evil wizard (where have we heard this before, Aladdin?)
• Frogger - Hey-o, who remembers this one!
• Grand Theft Auto - The original game in the "let's be a criminal" series. Bird's eye game.
• Ignition - Weird racing game between all kinds of vehicles. Ever raced a school bus against a monster truck?
• The Incredible Machine 3 - Solve puzzles using Rube Goldberg machines! Ever used bombs, bowling balls, and balloons to blow up a blimp? (Bonus for beautiful alliteration)
• Jazz Jackrabbit - Side scroller featuring a rabbit with an oddly phallic gun who shoots turtles in order to rescue his girl.
• Jetpack - Puzzle-ish game in which you play Santa and have to gather all the presents from amongst evil robots and then get to the exit. The robots' presence is never explained.
• Lemmings - Keep your dumb lemmings from falling off cliffs and get them to where they're supposed to be!
• Nethack - If there were a byte to fun ratio, this game would win immediately. Hard to explain shortly what it is, so JFGI.
• Pac-man - Hey-o!
• Pandemonium - Interesting platformer regarding a jester and random enemies so far as I can recall. One of the most "recent" games on this list.
• Red Baron - Surprisingly fun flight simulator, despite the "AUGH THE PIXELS!" feeling. More recently, Red Baron Pizza grabbed the title and made a crappy game out of it. No joke.
• SkiFree - Um. You ski. With the arrow keys. And get chased down by yeti. That's about it. But it's a classic. Everyone should have played this at any one time.
• Skyroads - on the addictiveness scale close to Flash games like Tower Defense, this is a 3D platformer in the sense that you have to not fall off the platforms or crash into anything by the time you get to the end of the level.
• Space Invaders - Lol.
• Tetris - Heh.
• Warcraft - Okay, I had to mention it. The original was awesome. Then they went and complicated it.

Sooo that's it. Have a fun trip down memory lane!

Note: Some of these games require DOSBox or some older version of Windows. Look up specific instructions online.