Although every year sees the release of tons of games, none of them were made in a vacuum, the one thing nature truly abhors. As we are given new vistas and new exciting cinematic trailers for top-shelf games and creative revamps of classics, it’s not a bad idea to take a look at the classics themselves.
With that in mind we’ve assembled a list of a few classic PC games from the 90s and early 2000s which are still playable, still fun, and still worth checking out, because they don’t make them like they used to anymore. The graphics may have gotten old, and the interfaces might be unwieldy, but there is greatness which inspired many successors.
Any game that’s 20 years old or even older qualifies, so we want to apologize in advance to everybody who feels ancient because of games which have aged enough to appear on the list..
| Game | Release | Genre | Developer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Master Collection | 2006-01-01 | Strategy | Relic Entertainment |
 | Sacred Gold | 2006-08-14 | RPG | Ascaron |
 | Fallout Classic Collection | 1997-11-01 | Adventure | Interplay Inc. |
 | Fable Anniversary | 2014-09-12 | RPG | Lionhead Studios |
 | Homeworld Remastered Collection | 2015-02-25 | Adventure | Gearbox Software |
 | Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines | 2004-11-16 | Adventure | Troika Games |
 | The Longest Journey | 2000-11-17 | RPG | Funcom |
 | System Shock 2 | 1999-08-11 | RPG | Irrational Games |
 | STAR WARS: Knights of the Old Republic | 2003-11-19 | RPG | BioWare |
 | Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos | 2002-07-03 | Strategy | Blizzard Entertainment |
 | Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast | 2003-09-16 | Adventure | Vicarious Visions |
 | The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY | 2002-04-29 | RPG | Bethesda Game Studios |
 | Worms Armageddon | 1999-05-31 | Action & Shooter | Infogrames |
 | Max Payne 3 | 2012-05-31 | Adventure | Rockstar Vancouver |
 | RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack | 2002-10-15 | Strategy | Chris Sawyer Productions |
 | Grand Theft Auto III | 2002-05-21 | Adventure | DMA Design |
 | Theme Hospital | 1997-03-28 | Simulation | Bullfrog |
 | Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition | 2017-04-11 | Strategy | Beamdog |
 | The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition | 2009-07-15 | Adventure | LucasArts |
 | Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura | 2001-08-22 | RPG | Troika Games |
 | Grim Fandango Remastered | 2015-01-26 | Adventure | Double Fine Productions |
 | Day of the Tentacle Remastered | 2016-03-21 | Adventure | Double Fine Productions |
 | Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition | 2013-01-16 | RPG | Overhaul Games |
 | CHRONO TRIGGER | 1995-03-11 | RPG | Square |
 | Deus Ex: GOTY | 2000-06-22 | RPG | Ion Storm |
 | Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction | 2001-06-27 | RPG | Blizzard Entertainment |
 | Disciples II: Gallean's Return | 2006-07-06 | Strategy | Strategy First |
 | Fallout 2 | 1998-12-01 | Adventure | Black Isle Studios |
 | Thief | 2014-02-27 | Action | Eidos Montréal |
 | X-COM: UFO Defense | 1993-12-31 | Strategy | Mythos Games |
 | Heroes of Might & Magic 3: Complete | 1999-03-03 | Strategy | New World Computing |
| | System Shock 2 | 1999-08-11 | RPG | Irrational Games |
 | Stronghold Crusader HD | 2002-07-31 | Simulation | FireFly Studios |
 | Doom Classic Complete | 1995-04-30 | Action & Shooter | |
 | Return to Castle Wolfenstein | 2001-11-20 | Horror | Gray Matter Interactive |
 | Turok 2: Seeds of Evil | 1998-12-10 | Action & Shooter | Iguana Entertainment |
 | RollerCoaster Tycoon: Deluxe | 1999-03-31 | Economy | Chris Sawyer |
 | Commandos Pack | 2002-08-30 | Strategy | Pyro Studios |
 | QUAKE II | 1997-11-11 | Action & Shooter | id Software |
 | STAR WARS Galactic Battlegrounds | 2001-11-09 | Strategy | LucasArts |
Dawn of War
| Release date: | 2006-01-01 |
| Genre: | Strategy |
| Developer: | Relic Entertainment |
Dawn of War 1 launched towards the end of real-time strategies’ glory days, but it proved the genre still has a lot to offer.
It also did a great job adapting the famous Warhammer 40k universe to RTS mechanics, resulting in a fantastic and satisfying gameplay. It emphasized claiming rare control points on the map, which provided generalized resources for construction and thus: unit recruitment.
DoW was so good that it spawned several impressive follow-up ups, including Dark Crusade with its multifactional strategy layer, and Winter Assault, which focused on the Imperial Guard specifically. Despite its age and outdated graphics, DoW is still a great RTS, which perhaps won’t excite fans of turtling, but might strike a chord with fans of Relic’s other series, Company of Heroes.
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Sacred
| Release date: | 2006-08-14 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Ascaron |
As there is usually a lengthy waiting time between Diablo instalments, it’s a great time for other games in the genre to have their time in the spotlight.
In 2004 it was time for Sacred, a fantasy hack’n’slash from Ascaron. It had all the best stuff: isometric camera, manageable yet exciting hordes of enemies, several distinct classes, and plenty of loot, including handy ability runes.
It even had a powerful combo system, allowing you to create devastating combinations of your Combat Arts deployed in quick succession, like a customizable ultimate ability. It also had a pretty large map with several biomes and satisfying enemy diversity. Sacred was fantastic back in the day, and even now, twenty years later, it’s still satisfying.
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Fable
| Release date: | 2014-09-12 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Lionhead Studios |
Fable wasn’t quite what it promised before the release, but despite this it was still a really good action RPG in its own right.
It took you on a heroic journey from a child orphaned in a bandit attack to a hero who would save the land… or a villain, who would drive it deeper into darkness. One of Fable’s coolest features was that your character’s appearance would gradually change with stat increases.
As your magical abilities grew, you’d get shimmering mana veins showing on your skin, while investing in strength would give you a muscular, athletic figure. There was also a combo-oriented combat system, fun-to-use magic, a smallish, and a good sense of humor. The map wasn’t huge, but it was filled with puzzles and secrets, so exploration was still worthwhile.
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Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines
| Release date: | 2004-11-16 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Troika Games |
We can guarantee that there are people in the world who decided to reinstall this game in the time between reading the title above and reading this paragraph.
Such is the power of VtM: Bloodlines, a game about becoming a newly embraced vampire who has to figure how to survive in Los Angeles divided by agendas and ambition of conflicting vampiric factions.
While it’s presented via a third-/-first-person perspective, it’s an RPG through and through, with complex webs of choices resulting in potentially wildly different playthroughs each time. It for the twenty years of its existence it’s also had a healthy modding community bringing to light cut material, patching bugs, and keeping the game alive. It is an excellent, weird, and often dark game.
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Scrapland
| Release date: | 2024 / 2021-03-03 (remastered) |
| Genre: | Action-adventure |
| Developer: | SpiffyBit |
Scrapland is one of these games that went forgotten for years only to get an pleasant, if unexpected, remastered edition a few years ago. Which is great, because Scrapland is good fun.
It’s set on a planet populated completely by robots, and puts you in the shoes in a literally self-made-man, a humanoid robot named D-Tritus Debris, a newcomer to the planet who gets tangled up in a nefarious plot.
Despite the central murder plot, Scrapland is nowhere close to serious. It’s full of cheesy humor, exaggerated animations, and a cartoonish art style which wouldn’t be out of place in an afternoon cartoon. But is also has great exploration with tons of secrets, cool ideas such as possessing other robots to get into places unopposed, and even modular ship-building.
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Freelancer
| Release date: | 03-04-2003 |
| Genre: | Combat simulator |
| Developer: | Digital Anvil |
Being on your own in the uncaring vastness of space isn’t easy, but for Freelancer’s protagonist Edison Trent it’s just Tuesday.
You have your customizable ship, a never-ending array of various jobs to do, and woven between them, also a plot which can provide you with a sense of momentum when you get slightly tired of collecting funds for a new ship or a better cannon for your vessel.
Freelancer isn’t as expansive as Elite Dangerous, nor as deeply detailed as Star Citizen, but if you want a fun, engaging space sim with big battles, pesky bandits, and a pleasant catalog of customizable ships, you could do a whole lot worse this this game. These days it can be a bit difficult to get a copy, but if you’d like an old-school space sim, you should definitely get searching.
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Homeworld 2
| Release date: | 2015-02-25 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Gearbox Software |
Homeworld 2 might well e one of the most beloved real-time strategies in genre history. It certainly has great ideas, and even today it’s rare to have a truly 3D space strategy.
In addition to that, the weight of your tactical choices can be felt across missions, as the forces you have at the end of one mission are also the forces you have ready to go at the beginning of the next one.
Homeworld 2 is also very accessible as a product thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection, which includes Homeworld 1 and 2 in both classic and refreshed versions. In the long years since its release, the series has also lived to see a prequel. Deserts of Kharak, and a sequel, Homeworld 3 which has spent a long time in development before its 2024 release.
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The Longest Journey
| Release date: | 2000-11-17 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Funcom |
The Longest Journey is a story-driven point-and-click adventure game released in 1999.
It puts you in the shoes of one April Ryan, a young woman from a heavily industrialized world of Stark. One fateful night she learned, in a rather dramatic fashion, that she can travel between her native reality and a magical world called Arcadia, an ability crucial to save the balance between them.
The plot of The Longest Journey is complex, engaging, and steeped in magic realism, as April interacts with both the mundane and the fantastical. Before you see the ending to this story, you’ll have to solve many increasingly complicated puzzles, and you’ll get to hold many conversations with people in both worlds, some crucial to the game, some providing some amazing flavor.
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System Shock 2
| Release date: | 1999-08-11 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Irrational Games |
Although the original System Shock remains a classic (and has recently received a remake), System Shock 2 is one of the most influential games of all time, one of the original immersive sims.
As a soldier awakened on a spaceship infested by psychic parasites which turned much of the crew into dangerous mutants, you’ll have to form an uneasy alliance with a scheming AI to survive.
System Shock 2 is a first-person perspective mix of a survival horror, shooter, and action role-playing, which sounds clumsy, but work extremely well. Your character starts with a preset skills depending on chosen class, but you’re free to ignore that and develop in any direction you see fit. You also get to install cybernetic augmentations which drastically expand your toolset.
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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
| Release date: | 2003-11-19 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | BioWare |
Although Jedi Survivor is still fresh and going strong, let’s go twenty years back, to a game by many still held as the best SW game of all time.
Knights of the Old Republic was developed by BioWare, at the time already established as excellent cRPG developers, and rather than throwing us at the Trilogies or whatever happened after Episode 6, it took us 4000 years back.
With a customizable character powered by an adaptation of the D20 TTRPG system, we’ll take on the Sith, recover our memories, and decide the fate of the Old Republic. Along the way we’ll meet amazing companions, do tons of quests, and explore several planets in search of plot-fueling artifacts. In other words: do all the things great cRPGs have been doing for decades, but with lightsabers.
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Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
| Release date: | 03-07-2002 |
| Genre: | Strategy |
| Developer: | Blizzard Entertainment |
The first two Warcraft games were great in their own right, but it’s Warcraft III that made the biggest splash.
The epic-scale, dramatic plot, the distinctive aesthetic, the multiplayer and moddability which led to the creation of a completely new game genre. There’s a lot going on for WC3 on its own without even talking about World of Warcraft, its never-ending sequel.
But epic stories and vibrant characters aside, Warcraft III is first and foremost an excellent real-time strategy with distinct factions, satisfying progression, and awesome maps to fight over against foes put before you by the plot or matchmaking. If you want to get the original experience, look for Warcraft 3 Gold, but there’s also a somewhat contentious remake, named Reforged.
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Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
| Release date: | 2003-09-16 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Vicarious Visions |
Coming back to the Galaxy Far Away, let’s talk about the time when Raven Software made one of the best FPP/TPP Star Wars games ever.
Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast II is set eight years after the defeat of the Empire, and stars a mercenary with complicated past, Kyle Katarn who discovers remnants of the Empire while investigating a remote outpost. Things quickly start getting complicated.
It doesn’t take long before the excellent shooter turns into an excellent hack and slash, because Kyle isn’t just a mercenary: he’s also a former Jedi, and the game quickly gives him back the access to Force powers and a lightsaber, and Raven-made gameplay makes the world’s famous flashlight feel incredible and lethal. The sequel, Jedi Academy was great, but Jedi Outcast II is a real gem.
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The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
| Release date: | 2002-04-29 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Bethesda Game Studios |
The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind is one of the most fondly remembered games of its time, and it remains very playable today, especially if you slap some mods onto it.
One of the best features of the game is the freedom is gives to the player. You’re not bound to any class, and while you can follow the main quest and seek your destiny, you can absolutely say “no” to that and brew potions instead.
Or you could become a vampire, join a fighters’ guild, and try to invent a spell that makes Cliff Racers avoid you. Once you get used to unconventional dialogue system you’ll also bite deep into the story, which is as weird as The Elder Scrolls get, but also fascinating, complex and featuring multiple endings. There’s also a hefty, wintry expansion Bloodmoon, which allows you to become a werewolf.
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Pharaoh
| Release date: | 1999-10-31 |
| Genre: | Simulation |
| Developer: | Impressions Games, BreakAway Games |
A successor to the Caesar trilogy, Pharaoh takes your city-building endeavors from ancient Rome to an even more ancient Egypt.
While it might not have the graphical pizzaz of modern city-builders, it is a very satisfying, and often rather challenging simulation of running an ancient Egyptian settlement, expanding it from a few rickety huts to a sprawling metropolis with gleaming monuments.
You’ll be in control of pretty much every high-level aspect of the city. You’ll trace streets, lay out foundations for houses, build farms, set trade policies, and have a few soldiers on stand-by to fend off aggressive hippos. The Nile, true to form, tends to flood, creating extra-fertile fields. You’ll also have to deal with fires, diseases, and other factors affecting the happiness of your citizens.
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Planescape: Torment
| Release date: | 2017-04-11 |
| Genre: | Strategy |
| Developer: | Beamdog |
Planescape: Torment is often brought up on lists of the best role-playing games of all time, and it’s not hard to see why.
Where Baldur’s Gate balances storytelling with dungeons and combat, P:T goes all in on storytelling, pushing combat almost completely off to the side. You’re playing as a seemingly immortal man who woke up in a mortuary, surrounded by servitor zombies.
What follows is a fascinating journey through a weird universe where belief and conviction have power easily comparable to any spell and blade. There are hundreds of pages of conversations and narrative text. Some of the most poignant moments are presented through text. If you dislike reading a lot, it might not be a game for you, otherwise: get the Enhanced Edition and jump in.
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The Monkey Island series
| Release date: | 1990 (The Secret of Monkey Island) |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | LucasArts (1990–2010) |
If you aren’t opposed to comedy, cartoonish style, and combining things that probably should be combines, the Monkey Island series can be right up your alley.
Created originally between 1990 and 2000 these are the absolute classics of the adventure genre. Not action-adventure. Just adventure. You know, walking around, clicking on things, solving puzzles, and enjoying jokes both clever and silly.
There are four classic entries created by LucasArts, and two of them, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Monkey Island 2 were remade in 2010 to lower the barrier of entry, both visual and technological. That said, the originals still look great, if you can get past low resolution. Either way, if you’d like to immerse yourself in a world of silly pirates where wit is mightier than a sword, check this series out.
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Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
| Release date: | 2001-08-22 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Troika Games |
Although it’s been a bit forgotten in the flurry of Baldur’s Gate’s spiritual successors.
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick obscura remains a fascinating, excellent role-playing game which celebrated its 20th birthday in August of 2021. While it can be a bit tricky to make it run on modern systems, if you do you’ll be thrown into a steampunk world where magic and technology are in conflict.
Quite literally, too. If you decide to specialise towards one, the other’s effects will be diminished. If you stay neutral…you’ll miss out on advanced stuff. Of course, the quests allow you to solve them both through combat (turn-based or real-time, your choice), or peacefully — through conversation skills and making clever choices. It’s a really underappreciated, unsung RPG worth giving a shot.
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Grim Fandango
| Release date: | 2015-01-26 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Double Fine Productions |
Grim Fandango, another of LucasArts’ classic adventure games, is a noir story taking place in the Land of the Dead.
As a grim reaper travel agent Manny Calavera you’ll uncover a nefarious plot robbing souls of the afterlife they deserve. The game is heavily, and very obviously inspired by the Mexican culture, especially the calaca figurines which serve as the basis for the characters’ appearances.
It’s not hard to see why Grim Fandango is one of the legends: a game with an interesting premise, an easily identifiable aesthetic, and a stylish, interesting story. As a result, like the Monkey Island, Grim Fandango enjoys a remastered version released in 2015 for several platforms. Old school adventure games don’t get much better than this and if they do, they likely came from LucasArts as well.
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Half Life
| Release date: | 1998-11-08 |
| Genre: | Action & Shooter |
| Developer: | Valve |
These days it’s in the shadow of its successor, Half-Life 2, but there’s no denying that Half-Life made an impact on the industry, and while very old-school by shooter standards.
It remains a great science-fiction adventure in the shoes of Morgan Freeman, a physicist who happened to witness an alien invasion and had to deal with the aftermath, usually with a gun and a crowbar.
With a great level design and a story more interesting than you’d see in most shooters from 1998, Half-Life is still a worthy pick for any fan of older games. And if you’re somehow determined not to play a 1998 shooter, and still enjoy the story and the level design: there’s a way out. You could check out Black Mesa, a fan remake which received the blessing of Valve and launched in 2019.
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Day of the Tentacle Remastered
| Release date: | 2016-03-21 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Double Fine Productions |
Another classic LucasArts adventure game on the list. It turns out they’ve made plenty of classics of the genre.
Day of the Tentacle tells the story of Bernard Bernoulli and friends trying to thwart the evil plans of Purple Tentacle, who is exactly what the name suggests. What follows is a time travelling adventure and a lot of silly sense of humor.
It’s very obviously an old-school point-and-click adventure game with a list of verb commands as well as the inventory you’ll be trying to apply to the environment in various interesting and/or funny ways. Since the game focuses so heavily on time travel, you can also expect some changes to the past affecting the future, which plays into many puzzles. It also got remastered in 2016, by the way.
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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
| Release date: | 2002-10-29 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Rockstar North |
Coming up right after grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City was a trip to the mid-1980s.
Taking place in the titular city, heavily inspired by Miami, GTA:VC has disco, rock, colorful shirts, crime families, and tributes to classics like Scarface and Miami Vice. Although after twenty years the luster is a bit faded, the game still oozes personality and the style popularly associated with the period in question.
The story’s protagonist is Tommy Vercetti, an ex-con who screwed up a major deal by little fault of his own and has a debt to work off. The story is engaging, dramatic, and a great excuse to explore the city’s every nook and cranny. Even outside of the story you can spend time on various side activities, which include driving people around in a taxi and delivering pizza for an extra buck.
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Baldur’s Gate II
| Release date: | 2013-11-15 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Overhaul Games |
The Baldur’s Gate series, particularly BG2: Shadows of Amn is one of the all-time classics, a series which defined the course of video game RPGs for years to come.
Both of BioWare Baldur’s Gate games use an isometric camera giving players a good view of detailed, pre-generated maps on which your party of intrepid adventurers move and confront their enemies. And then there’s the story itself!
The games tell the story of a character known as Gorion’s Ward, whose unpleasant heritage plays a key role in the story of both BG games. In BGII it also draws the attention of powerful Jon Irenicus, who has his own plans and ambitions. It’s a great D&D adventure full of fantastical creatures, epic battles, and a few appearances from characters from deeper Dungeons & Dragons lore.
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CHRONO TRIGGER
| Release date: | 2018-02-27 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | SQUARE ENIX |
Chrono Trigger is one of the jRPG classics, with some world-famous talent behind it, such as Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, or Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy.
The result is a game which remains playable in the cool future we live in despite being made back in the ancient past of 1995. It has complex mechanics, many endings, and a score co-written by Nobuo Uematsu.
Chrono Trigger’s story relies heavily on time travel, which will take you on a journey through different eras of the game’s world, including even the prehistory. All of that is supported by animated cutscenes from Toei animation. The Steam version comes with a slew of upgrades to graphics, and even new bits of content, to make the already playable classic even more enticing.
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Deus Ex
| Release date: | 2017-01-06 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | SQUARE ENIX |
Deus Ex is one of the all-time great games. It’s set in a cyberpunk dystopian world, ruled by corporations and hiding numerous grand conspiracies such as the Majestic 12.
You’re playing as J.C. Denton, an operative of an agency called UNATCO, whose nanotechnological augmentations give him abilities beyond those of regular humans. He’s going to need every upgrade he can find to survive.
Deus Ex gave a lof of freedom to the players in the way they can approach any given problem. Stealth was just as valid and going in guns blazing, or using technology to dispose of obstacles. There are skills, unlocked with dynamically assigned experience, and augmentations found in the world, to help with any playstyle. Despite the years gone by, it’s still an immersive and interesting game to try out.
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Diablo 2 & Lord of Destruction (DLC)
| Release date: | 2001 |
| Genre: | RPG |
| Developer: | Blizzard North |
Diablo II, more than the first game in the series, became a codifier of what a good hack’n’slash should be like.
There are five character classes in the base game and two more which arrived with the Lord of Destruction expansion, and each not only plays in a unique manner, but can also be customised within their skillsets thanks to ability trees and bonuses from loot you discover.
There’s still a lot to enjoy about Diablo II. It has dark, crisp aesthetic, and the locations provide a great backdrop for all the monster-slaying you’re going to be doing. The game is also great in multiplayer, capable of handling up to eight players online or over LAN, which makes for a powerful adventuring party and paves the way for more challenging encounters as the game adjusts.
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Disciples 2: Gallean's Return
| Release date: | 2006-07-06 |
| Genre: | Strategy |
| Developer: | Strategy First |
Disciples 2 didn’t reach the fame of Heroes of Might and Magic, but it should have, because it’s a great turn-based strategy game with RPG elements.
The campaign, no matter which faction you pick, is a series of scenarios in which you usually need to expand from your single city by claiming resources and capturing castles from opposing factions through turn-based battles.
Each faction is very different, such as the Legions of the Damned and their massive units, or the resilient Mountain Clans and their powerful support spells. Battles are static in style, waged between two teams, each with six slots worth of units (large units take two spots), taking turns to act based on their initiative. There’s also map editor, individual scenarios, and multiplayer!
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Fallout 2
| Release date: | 1998-12-01 |
| Genre: | Adventure |
| Developer: | Black Isle Studios |
Fallout 2 is a very successful sequel to Fallout 1, itself a spiritual successor to Wasteland.
Fallout 2 expanded on the original in every manner, adding more settlements, more stories, more freedom. Taking place eighty years after FO1 it follows a Chosen One, picked to find the Garden of Eden Creation Kit in order to save their village from drought. But the journey goes to weirder places…
Once your character leaves their village, technically there is nothing to stop them from going almost anywhere, and do whatever they want, like becoming a boxing star who cheats by using plated gloves. The clock to deliver G.E.C.K. is ticking, however, and if you stall to much, your village WILL die. It’s just one of the arcs you can pursue, however, and doesn’t mean a Game Over at all.
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QUAKE III Arena
| Release date: | 1999-12-05 |
| Genre: | Fighting |
| Developer: | id Software |
Quake III Arena stands in the annals of FPS history alongside games like Tribe and Unreal Tournament as a legendary multiplayer first-person shooter.
Q3A multilayer is all shades of PvP playing out in the stone corridors and rooms of a space-age Gothic castles, with a gallery of weird individuals serving as player avatars. The flipside is that there’s no singleplayer story campaign, it’s all multiplayer.
Even if you play by yourself, the only singleplayer content is fighting on MP maps with bots. In either case, you’ll find deadly, often explosive, weapons, power-ups, and various ways to outmaneuver your enemies and get a good shot in. The multiplayer can handle up to 16 players in deathmatch, which results in a fantastic chaos of weirdos, bullets and rockets going every which way. It’s glorious.
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Starcraft
| Release date: | 2017-08-14 |
| Genre: | RTS |
| Developer: | Blizzard Entertainment |
StarCraft hardly needs introducing. It effectively became a new definition of how a real-time strategy should work when it launched, and it’s overwhelming popularity among Korean gamers is now stuff of legends. There’s no denying that the science fiction counterpart to Warcraft is an important game. And, especially thanks to the 2017 Remastered version, it remains very much playable even today.
The game depicts a conflict between Terrans (humans) with their technological focus, insectoid Zerg working as a hivemind, and psionically gifted Protoss. True to the best RTS ideas, each faction plays differently, and the storyline of their conflict is quite interesting, and later expanded very well in StarCraft 2 and it’s several expansions. The original SC is still a fantastic, crunchy must-play RTS.
Starcraft 1 is free to play game
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X-COM: UFO Defense/UFO: Enemy Unknown
| Release date: | 1993-12-31 |
| Genre: | Strategy |
| Developer: | Mythos Games |
The original X-COM, an ancestor of Firaxis’ 2012 reboot, and one of the oldest games on the list.
X-COM Enemy Unknown puts you in control of a paramilitary organisation devoted to defending Earth from invading aliens. The game, like its spiritual successors operates on two levels: the strategic view of the world, and the tactical, turn-based missions taking place in discrete locations.
Between mission you will assign research goals, buy and distribute equipment, manage military and civilian staff. You will also have to decide where to send your forces, and where to establish bases. During mission you’ll be managing your soldiers as they go about eliminating the alien threat. It’s quite a complex game, and scoring a perfect deployment is very satisfying.
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Old, but gold
That’s just a few of worthwhile classic PC games worth playing, but there are scores of them out there from many genres. Classic first-person shooters that new FPSs want to emulate, even older dungeon crawling RPGs which inspired Legend of Grimrock, and real-time strategies which acted on ideas of Dune II.
Some of them you might be nostalgic for, having played them on your first computer, others might have flown under your radar. Either way, you can make up for the lost time now.