The game that's aged better than Sade and Tomosaka Rie combined - it's Total Annihilation! With TA: Escalation and the 3.9.0.1 patch, it becomes a glorious golden god of a game that you will sink hours and hours of your life into and regret not a thing. The storyline is just there so it's there, but the game is pretty much a masterpiece. The resource system ensures constant skirmishes rather than hoarding, and the huge variety of hotkeys for unit selection and automation (patrols etc) free you to focus on strategy rather than micro. Four stars because I'm playing the Mac version and there are some problems with setting resolution above 640x480, and the alt key doesn't seem to work, which means I can't select groups. If it scores 4/5 even with those complaints, you just know it's worth checking out. Also, the soundtrack is legendary.
