Everything Star Trek: 25th Anniversary edition did is further refined here. You get more of everything, but its all been tweaked ever-so-slightly. If the ship-to-ship battles were too difficult for you, you can skip them in this game. The plot is a much more over-arcing affair this time, with a fan-favorite ToS villain making a return. If you love Star Trek: The Original Series, you owe it to yourself to buy this game and it's prequel.
Along with Judgement Rites, this was by far one of Interplay's finest hours. You get the CD-ROM edition which has the entire cast of the original series, reprising their roles, including some surprise guest stars! This is everything you could want out of a Star Trek game: Exciting ship-to-ship battles, exploring strange planets, solving puzzles, and trying to make sure the red shirts don't die!
Blood has all the makings of the next big franchise: Great weapons, set pieces, well designed levels, a fun protagonist and managed to forge its own identity in a sea of similar games. Blood II took everything that made Blood so memorable and did the opposite. It's about as generic and forgettable as a game can be.
At it's core, Deadly Dozen has more in common with Rainbow Six than Medal of Honor. Missions must be planned out, operatives carefully chosen and equipped, and lots of trigger discipline used if you want to succeed. This makes for a very deep experience. Mechanically the game is very stuff, and the visuals have aged very poorly. This was a budget title back when it was first released. But if you crave a deep, tactical experience, that's equal parts strategy and shooter, then you might get some enjoyment out of this.
While this "collection" is just two titles, one of them, Dungeon Hack happens to be one of my favorite D&D games of that era. You roll a character up, tell the game how difficult you want it to be, even detailing how large an adventure you want to have and how dangerous you want it be with the difficulty and seed generator, then off into the depths you go! Its what the kids today call a "rogue-like", where you get a completely new, randomly generated adventure, each play-through. You fight monsters, find loot, solve puzzles and delve deeper and deeper. Its pure heaven for any D&D fan from the early 1990s.
*Pro-tip: Play software mode to get the in-game Trent Reznor soundtrack to play. Doom was a quantum leap above Wolfenstein 3D. Quake in turn was a quantum leap above Doom. Gone are the well-faked 3D levels, sprite-based enemies and OPL-based Midi music. In their place are fully 3D levels, fully textured polygons and a CD soundtrack crafted by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Being one of the last shareware title iD produced, Quake is episodic, and is divided into different Lovecraftian-style realms filled in a new breed of uglies for you to pump hot lead into. Your arsenal is impressive. A fun little nod to the games audio engineer, the aforementioned Trent Reznor, are the ammo cases for the nail guns, which feature the Nine Inch Nails logo.
Not since "The Terminator: Skynet" which came out in 1996, has there been a Terminator game this good! You'll spend your time scouring the war torn wasteland, looking for weapons and ammo, while finding and helping other humans, eventually hooking back up with Resistance forces. You play as Jacob Rivers, a solder whose entire unit was wiped out by a single infiltrator unit. Game play mainly consists of missions in large, open levels with lots of hidden caches to find. On the harder difficulty settings these are the difference between life and death. There's some light RPG elements such as skill points, and inventory management. You got a well acted story, with multiple endings that are dependent on your actions. Speaking of story, the lore of this game only follows the first two movies of the franchise! The rest are rightfully left out. The biggest surprise about this game is the developer. Teyon is known for making one of the worst movie games of all time 2014's Rambo: The Game. Yet here we are six years later, and they've made one of the very best franchise tie-ins of all time! Talk about a redemption arc!
Mortal Kombat 4 is an interesting game. It takes the series into the third dimension, in both graphics and gameplay, with the introduction of side-stepping. All of the animations in this game were done manually. That's nuts, as they look very smooth. I'm pleased to say that the GOG version works well on Windows 10. As for the game itself, you get a robust roster of classic, and new, characters. Dial-a-Combos and running make their return from MK3, and there's a host of new fatalities and animalities to unleash on your defeated opponent. If you love old school fighting games, get this.
Gauntlet, the grand-daddy of dungeon crawlers will always be a favorite of mine, and this remake really captures the fun and exciting gameplay that long time fans of the franchise know and love.
The Four Fs: Find em, fix em, flank em, finish em! What really set Brothers in Arms apart from the likes of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty was it's tactical approach. You must use planning and squad tactics to overcome the enemy. Running and gunning will only get you and your men shot full of holes, and there is no healing. At all. If you are shot during a mission, there is no replenishing yourself, or your men. You'll be using your head just as much as your trigger finger. The satisfying gameplay isn't the only draw here, Excellent visual presentation for a game released in 2005, combined with a painstaking attention to historic detail. You also get a compelling story, along the lines of HBO's Band of Brothers. Lastly, you get a wealth of historical documentation, photographs and behind the scenes features as unlockables, ensuring you'll want to try and beat the game on the higher difficulties. This and its sister game "Earned in Blood" are must own games!
