Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six®

Before R6 became a console shooter it was a strategic and tactical action game. You plan your attack and squad movements before entering the actual game portion and they hope everything executes to plan (and that your plan of attack worked). I wish more games (or this series) had stuck to the plan first gameplay. You could take part or you could just sit back and command your squad members. It has aged visually, but otherwise is perfect.

This is the first shooter I ever owned. I remember the day I got it too. Grandparents bought it for me on Christmas when I was only ten years old (ESRB? Pfft. They knew I would be fine with it). This game is one of the many fond memories I have with my grandfather, spending hours planning routes and equipping my squad in order to complete the mission. Most of the time, I didn't even do the shooting. I spent most of it giving orders and sending my squadmates along, who were much better shots, to do it for me. Especially later when the stakes got really high to the point where being shot once = instant fatality for that squadmate (much gnashing of teeth was had!). My only gripe with this version is that it was not fixed for multiplayer. See, back in the day there was this awful thing called 'MPlayer' that every game used for WAN multiplayer that cost money every month and barely worked. This died quickly, and left a lot of games with no multiplayer option when it did. Thankfully, MSN Zone (Anyone remember that?) picked up the slack and used a workaround to do network play for Rainbow Six and other games for many years. Unfortunately, MSN Zone is long gone. MPlayer is long gone. Gamespy is long gone. Which means as far as I know, this game has no multiplayer option unless you're willing to host a LAN party or get people together over Hamachi. Maybe someone should set up a service for GoG games? Maybe one exists and I don't know? I hope the good R6 games all come to GoG eventually, which includes Rogue Spear and Raven Shield.

*Or, you know, a thinking woman's shooter. Unlike just about every other shooter series, this one includes female special forces operators from around the world! So basically, you ought to play this for the same reason that you probably ought to read Hamlet. It's a dated story, but it's also an important game that did a lot to push the genre. When R6 came out, pretty much every shooter out there was some variation on Doom or Quake (with a special mention to Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight). This game did something radically different: in lieu of bunny-hopping, it rewarded you for thinking, and it punished the hell out of you for not thinking. It not only spawned the tactical shooter, it defined a lot of what you can and cannot do in other shooters. There's no bunny-hopping in Modern Warfare 2 mainly because Rainbow Six said that's stupid. I want to emphasize for those of you who never played this before, though, that in the early R6 titles, you spent about 70-90% of your time in the planning phase drawing out your assault. Especially because that disappeared completely from the series starting with R6: Vegas, that might come as a shock. A lot of old-timers are going to tell you that planning out each intricate move is a mainstay of the series, and Vegas did violence to Rainbow Six by abandoning it. Truth be told, a significant reason that the planning phase used to be such a huge portion of the game is that the path-finding AI used to be terrible and simply could not be expected to adjust on the fly during the execution phase. That started to change with Raven Shield, which also introduced context-sensitive menus during the execution phase; I'm pretty sure the reason the planning phase disappeared after that game was that future designers realized you could do 80% of what you wanted using only the context menus. SWAT 3 and SWAT 4 also went the same direction. Have fun!

I remember playing this back on PC around 2001 or so and man was it such a great game. Very realistic shooting mechanics as far as bullet spread and if you are moving or not. Weapon selection is awesome and you can choose ammo types too like hollow points or armor piercing. I played rogue spear and I can't recommend it enough. Very unforgiving of mistakes but in a good and realistic way not a frustrating way. Definitely a methodical and tactical and slower and realistic shooter.

Simply put, this is the mother of all tactical gaming. If you are a tactical gamer by heart, then you cannot afford to not have this in your collection. Personally i still have it on disk together with the expansion but i will buy it here regardless, for better optimisation. Play the game that started it all.