I picked this one on a whim last year while it was still in beta, and it hooked me for a solid couple of weeks. It is a very entertaining and quite playable mash-up of tower defense strategy and role-playing - with a believable rationale to explain the combination. The customized leveling-up of characters as you play means that, over time, your different units of the same 'class' have quite different abilities. However, you are limited in your energy to summon them and 'power them up' to their full potential on the battlefield. So you can't get away with just summoning your most powerful party members and leave it at that. And of course, there's a storyline to follow, plenty of loot and artifacts to equip your characters with, and a couple of different endings... Good RPG fare. If you are a tower defense fan - especially one who enjoys RPGs - or an RPG fan who also enjoys strategy games - this is a must for your library. If you are more of an action-RPG gamer, then your mileage may vary, but it's worth checking out.
Until its "spiritual sequel," ARMA, this game (then called "Operation Flashpoint") had a permanent place on my hard drive for years. I played it multiplayer. I played it single-player. I made missions. I downloaded missions. I would say things like, "Battlefield What?" It's (somewhat) realistic, unlike a lot of other first-person warfare games. A single well-placed (or highly explosive) shot can kill you instantly. While it's possible (in the right scenarios) to brute force / Rambo your way through, the game generally requires careful tactics, keeping your eyes open, and coordinating with your team (human or AI). And knowing when to duck, find cover, and run.
The original campaign for Neverwinter Nights was decent, but was really not much more than a giant demo for the toolset. The expansions included with this pack were far better. Standing on it's own, single-player, it's a pretty decent game, and a great value at the price. But the real winner is all the fan-made content still available for the game. No, most of it isn't going to win any awards for awesomeness. But there are some great ones, and tons of it. If you can find others who still want to play, the multiplayer in this game - particular the Dungeon Master mode - remains the best part. But if nothing else - this games opens up a ton of available content, and hundreds of hours of play, if you are willing to look a little beyond the download alone.
I don't think it's possible for me to write an unbiased review of these games. For one lonely summer working in an unfamiliar town, Wing Commander was my primary source of entertainment - and sanity. I memorized ship specs and played through the campaigns many, many times. These were the games that changed the face of PC gaming - in some ways, for the worse, with the spiraling blockbuster budgets that persist to this day. They combined the popularity (at the time) of flight simulators and mission-based gameplay with Star Wars fantasies and with interesting stories and characters. While today, these kinds of combos are the norm, but at the time, it was pretty amazing. The other trick (following Lawrence Holland's use of it in LucasArts' Their Finest Hour) was to use graphically lush bitmaps for spacecraft & other objects rather than the far more limited flat-shaded polygonal objects of most flight sims at the time. This made dogfights a little trickier, as it was harder to determine the true direction of movement of the enemy ships, but it made for some incredible screenshots and a more believable cinematic experience. Other efforts made to improve the immersive quality of the game included the visual appearance of damage inside the cockpit, and the virtual hand of your pilot on the joystick as you flew. Once you get used to the lower resolution (and dig up a joystick if you don't have one already), you'll find the games quite fun and playable today. They still hold up.
