The next segment of my Games of 2011 list begins with a PSP game: Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. This is one of the few 2011 games that I haven’t yet finished, and will likely continue playing well into 2012. I really like tactical battle RPGs, and this game does it fairly well. Since it’s turn-based, battles can sometimes be very time-consuming, but I grew up playing The Gold Box Games, and those were the slowest-paced strategy RPGs ever. D&D Tactics is fun, if not as full-featured as Temple of Elemental Evil, but it’s a portable game, and so I can forgive. D&D Tactics is also a good bit less buggy than ToEE. I’m not yet finished with the game, but I give it a B.

Fallout:New Vegas didn’t fare as well. I quit the game before I’d gotten very far. After I learned the game’s main plot in New Vegas, I just lost interest. And I was sure that the robot who was following me from the beginning of the game was going to end up being the main bad guy at the game’s conclusion. Meh. The game gets a C.

I’ve never been as huge a fan of the Mass Effect series as everyone else seems to be. The first one was good, but not amazing. Mass Effect 2 was pretty much the same. Good, but not brilliant. I thought the ending was very well done – I liked that part a lot. In the end, I’ll give Mass Effect 2 a B.

25- Braid (Jonathan Blow, PC, 2009)
Braid took the gaming world by storm primarily because of its creativity. The game originally showed up on XBox Live Arcade in 2008, but I didn’t play it until later, when it became available on Steam. Although it’s an excellent 2D sidescroller in its own right, Braid’s greatest achievement are its fiendishly complex puzzles. Although this kind of thing generally drives me insane with frustration, I actually had fun sitting there for 20-30 minutes staring at the same level, trying to figure out exactly what I was missing. If you’re interested, I’ve written up some hints for the Braid game which attempt to nudge you in the direction of the answer without outright giving it away.

24- Plants vs Zombies (Popcap Games, PC, 2009)
My first impression of Plants vs Zombies wasn’t a good one. Made by a company that got famous creating casual browser games, this tower defense title looked shallow and boring. But one day when I was bored, I downloaded the demo and gave it a shot. I was hooked. The lanes, which had originally looked horribly limiting, create their own type of strategy. Unlike many other tower defense games, the creeps can attack and destroy your towers. Certain towers can attack creeps in lanes other than their own. There are slowing attacks and area attacks. And the different environments such as pool and rooftop introduce entirely new gameplay every few levels. Fighting off bungee zombies and zombie bobsled teams has never been so much fun.

23- No More Heroes (Suda51, Wii, 2008)
No More Heroes was a flawed game in so many ways. The open world was a disaster, and the last few fights were far too difficult. But I loved it so much. It was so over-the-top ridiculous, and it took pride in it. How many games force you to save your progress by sitting on a toilet? How many let you kill enemies and have blood and coins fly out of their bodies? Or learn new professional wrestling moves from a drunk Russian guy in a bar who instructs you in “the technique of crazy awesomeness” by beating the living crap out of you? No More Heroes succeeded in being awesome not dispite its absurdity, but because of it. If you’re a fan of RealUltimatePower, you should have an appreciation for the style of humor that makes No More Heroes shine.

22- God of War (David Jaffe, PS2, 2005)
God of war took the 3D beat-em-up genre and brought it to new levels. The refinement that exists in the God of War games is hard to find elsewhere even today. Never have I seen a game with better camera angles, and rarely have I seen such epic scope in a game. God of War uses puzzles, platforming, and hordes of enemies to create wonderful gameplay. It also makes the best use of quicktime events that I’ve seen in a game. The environments where the battles take place are often as much a part of the challenge as the enemies – when you’re battling minotaurs on a conveyor belt, falling to your death is as much a danger as being gored.

21- Fallout (Black Isle Studios, PC, 1997/1999)
I’m including Fallout and Fallout 2 here, as they ran on the same engine and could have been two halves of the same game. Seldom has such a kickass combination of story, gameplay, and humor made an appearance in a game. Fallout was brilliant because it salvaged a good bit of the adult dark humor present in Wasteland and refined it into an isometric post-apocolyptic RPG which in its day was absolutely brilliant. It’s even possible to play through the entire game with a character whose intelligence is so low that he can only speak in grunts. Yeah – it closes off a lot of options, but it’s pretty damn funny.

List analytics aside, let’s look at the next five games.

30 – Dungeon Keeper (Bullfrog Productions, Windows, 1997)
Despite being more than a decade old, Dungeon Keeper is still a lot of fun. The graphics are horribly dated, but the mechanic of digging out an area for your dungeon – creating your own space – is a lot of fun. I’ve never realized it before just now, but Dungeon Keeper really has a lot in common with Desktop Tower Defense. In both, you build a maze to channel creeps through so that you can kill them. In Dungeon Keeper, you’re just building traps and placing creatures instead of building towers and cannons. You’ve also got to mine gold and keep it away from those pesky adventurers. Ah, there’s nothing like laying waste to the kingdom…

29 – Fallout Tactics (Micro Forte, Windows, 2001)
The consensus about Fallout Tactics was that it was a pale shadow of the two main Fallout titles, and I’ll admit that the story and the RPG options present in the original were missing. Fallout Tactics is just a series of missions. But it lets you form a full party and control each of them in combat, which is something I’d wanted badly in the main games. It allows for quite a lot of strategy, and that’s where the game shines.

So you can create a party that consists of a ghoul with a high driving skill behind the wheel of your APC, a sniper who sits up on a fire escape, a sneaky guy who gets close, plants land mines, then waits nearby with a shotgun, and a deathclaw who sneaks in close before attacking. Then, BOOM! Your shotgun guy pops-up at point blank range and cuts two slavers in half with a shotgun blast just as your deathclaw charges in. The other slavers go after the deathclaw but hit landmines. And the ghoul driver comes in and runs down some others with the APC. Meanwhile, your sniper picks off strays. I love it.

28 – Wasteland (Interplay, Commodore 64, 1988)

Wasteland had a release on both the Commodore 64 and DOS platforms, and as such there’s still a version floating around that’s playable on modern computers. Wasteland was a hugely influential game – it ended up inspiring a little title you may have heard of: Fallout.

Wasteland is Fallout, only more so. It’s less tame. Sure, the Fallout games have plenty of blood, but in Wasteland you could do a lot of things that you just don’t see in more modern video games. In Wasteland, you’re attacked by a ten-year-old boy after you kill his dog, and you’re forced to kill the lad. And this is in the first 20 minutes of the game. One of Wasteland’s climactic battles has you battling nuns with assault rifles. And you can sleep with a prostitute and contract wasteland herpes. Good times.

27 – Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance (FASA Interactive, Windows, 2000)

Another reason I loved the old Mechwarrior games was because they were so unlike other mech games. Armored Core and Chromehounds are twitch games. Mechwarrior is not. Even when you’re in battle using jump jets to dodge gunfire, locking on with your missiles, and aiming your PPC shots, it isn’t frantic. The timing feels so much more relaxed – like a real time strategy than a shooter.

26 – Typing of the Dead (Smilebit, Windows, 2000)

Before the Sega Dreamcast version of Typing of the Dead was released in 2001, this was a PC title. It’s now very rare and difficult to obtain, but it’s very much worth it. It’s so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking it up.

Typing of the Dead is a game about which I may never tire of ranting and raving. It’s got a lot of camp value, and to fully enjoy it you need to enjoy the humor of the terrible voice acting and outdated graphics as much as the humor of the ridiculous things you’re typing. I keep Typing of the Dead installed on my PC and play it from time to time when I don’t have any other games lined up. It’s always fun, and since it’s already so old, it never gets old… er.

I came up with three game enemies that have terrified me. Keep in mind that these are not video game chase scenes – that’s a different list entirely.

Fallout 2: The Enclave
Just after you help a bunch of ghouls repair their broken nuclear reactor, you end up in a chat with a member of The Enclave – an organization whose members all wear advanced power armor at a time when you may still be in leather armor. The following video shows the conversation. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem terrifying at all, but at the time when I was playing it, I remember thinking *oh shit* – *oh shit* …and yeah… this video is not safe for work. At all.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: The Cyclops
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, throughout the course of the game, there are a few segments in which you fight a cyclops. They’re big, bad, and ugly. The guy fighting the cyclops here was all about showing how good he is at fighting it, so it never actually picks him up, but when that thing grabbed me, picked me up, and roared in my face, I think I may have screamed back at it in fear.

Resident Evil 2: the T-103
Yes – this is a game moment I’ve written about many many times before. It is simply epic. The following clip doesn’t do it justice, mainly because the guy playing obviously isn’t as scared as I was, and also because he hangs out in the inventory screen long enough to kill the mood. I didn’t stop to shoot at the T-103. I just ran my ass off.

Start watching no later than 7:30. You’ll want to keep watching until at least 9:30 for the good part.

As I continue to play through Borderlands, after having completed the main quest, I notice more and more the external influences that must have affected the game’s design. For example, the pillar of light that appears when you activate quick travel looks very much like the pillar of light coming from City 17’s Citadel in the Half-Life 2 episodes. And the game’s scythids are very much like headcrabs. There are probably many more influences I’m missing.

But by far the thing I’m noticing most about Borderlands is that it’s a heck of a lot like Fallout.

In many ways, Borderlands is more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 than the new 3D Fallout 3 game is. Of course, Borderlands couldn’t use Supermutants and Deathclaws, but there are so many other factors omitted from Fallout 3 that are present in Borderlands.

Aside from the fact that both games take place in a wasteland, the most apparent thing is the music. The ambient drum-heavy music sounds like it could have been taken directly from one of the original Fallout games.

Another thing is the irreverant, often adult humor. In one of the original Fallout games, you could have sex with a girl, after which her father would force you to marry her at shotgun-point. In Borderlands, Scooter calls the Catch-A-Ride “more busted than my momma’s girl parts”. Things like this crack me up.

Both the original two Fallout games and Borderlands have a penchant for Easter Eggs and intertextuality. In Fallout, I stumbled across Dr. Who’s Tardis and found a velvet Elvis. In Borderlands, “Mad Mel” is an obvious combination of Mad Max and Mel Gibson, you can find the leg lamp from A Christmas Story, and when you choose an orange vehicle there’s a “00” painted on the side. Dukes of Hazzard, anyone?

Fallout 3 obviously had more of a plot, whereas Borderlands has multiplayer gameplay, which is one of the main draws of the game. I could go on comparing and contrasting them, but the most interesting comparisons have already been made.

Pool of Radiance (1988)
I originally bought Pool of Radiance for my Commodore 64 because it was a Dungeons and Dragons game. Based on first edition “Advanced” Dungeons and Dragons, it allowed you to create a party of Fighters, Magic-Users, Clerics, and Thieves, and pit them against the kobolds and ogres in the city slums, and the skeletons and ghasts inhabiting Sokol Keep. The game was completely turn-based, and you could position your wall of fighters so as to line up your magic-user’s lightning bolt just right, or maneuver your thief into place for a x5 backstab. If you positioned a fireball just right, you could hit so many enemies that you’d have to sit and watch for nearly 2 minutes while the game reported everyone who was injured or killed. This was the first game I’d ever played that included truly tactical combat.

Wasteland (1988)
I didn’t play Wasteland until much later, but it took the semi-tactical combat of games like Ultima IV and V and combined it with the interface of the Bards Tale games. You got the “good graphics” (for the time) of the Bards Tale games, and at the same time you got the top-down view which allowed you to split up your party and move in your melee characters while keeping your gun-havers at a distance. It may not have been nearly as tactical a game as Pool of Radiance, but it was innovative for the time.

Baldur’s Gate (1998/2000)
Here’s the one that you knew was coming. Baldur’s Gate was the game that introduced the awesome “Infinity Engine”. I recently listened to a podcast interview with the guy from Bioware in which he discussed the origins of Baldur’s Gate. Twas awesome.

Baldur’s Gate originated the idea of creating a pseudo-turn-based game by allowing you to pause the action whenever you wanted. It also used 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, which included a huge number of races, character classes, and spells. This allowed you to create a huge variety of characters and institute tactics that included ranged weapons, backstabs, area effect spells, trap laying, and more.

Fallout Tactics (2001)
I didn’t buy Fallout Tactics right away. As a huge fan of the first two Fallout games, (which were based largely on the above-mentioned Wasteland) I’d heard that the story in Fallout Tactics wasn’t nearly what that of the first two games had been, and that made me sad. This is my sad face. When I finally picked up the game, I found that they’d added a lot of complexity to the actual combat system. Cover and partial cover, the ability to kneel or lie prone, and complex 3d line of sight mechanics were all in place. While you could play the game in real-time, the pseudo-turn-based gameplay is what really made the game great for me. It worked much like Fallout 3, using an action point system. Although the gameplay could be real-time or turn-based, the action points were the main factor in whether or not you could do something.

The environments and maps in the game’s various missions were a big part of what made the game great for me. I was a big fan of the sneak skill, and I’d use it to sneak forward, plant some landmines, and then sneak my sniper up to a really good vantage point where he’d lie prone and wait. Then I’d have a character with a shotgun sneak up as close to the enemies as possible, perhaps just on the other side of a sandbag wall or embankment. Then I’d have a character pop up and throw a grenade, have the shotgun guy pop up and fire point blank, and the sniper would start sniping. Fun!

Temple of Elemental Evil (2003)
Temple of Elemental Evil certainly had its issues. It shipped with a lot of bugs, and many of them were never fixed properly. But the actual combat engine was simply awesome. As a fan well-versed in the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 ruleset, I found the options available for combat to be a playground. I could ready my archer so as to shoot at any enemy if he prepared to cast a spell, I could charge and get double movement for an attack, I could fight defensively for an armor class bonus, even make a five foot adjust so as to retreat without provoking attacks of opportunity. I can certainly see how these rules might take a lot of getting used to for someone who isn’t already familiar, but for me, seeing the rules with which I was already familiar implemented so well in a video game was awesome. The complexity in the rule system for this game probably surpasses any of the others, which is part of what I love about it.

Dragon Age: Origins (2009)

The tactical combat in Dragon Age took some getting used to. I’ve now gotten a better feel for how the game camera zooms and pans – it’s a little odd, but it can be comfortable once you get used to it. I’ve also figured out how to stop my archers and mages from charging. It’s all about the “hold position” button that I didn’t know existed.

I’m having a lot of fun sneaking forward with my rogue to place traps and backstab, positioning fireballs and cones of cold for maximum effect, and looking forward to a point in the game when I’ll be able to use spell combos. Controlling four characters rather than the six you were allowed in Baldur’s Gate is a slight letdown, but overall I’m loving the game.

And these are the games in which I’ve most enjoyed the tactical combat. Next week, I’ll be bringing you the final installment in my Variations on a theme series.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

With all the hype the past year or so surrounding Fallout 3 and its successive add-on content, it seems like people have forgotten the original Fallout games, which in my opinion were superior. Sure, they didn’t have 3D graphics, and of course they look terrible by today’s standards. But the humor was far better and the difficulty of gameplay seemed less random to me.

While many people disliked Fallout: Tactics, since there was less story, the added strategic elements really appealed to me. Being able to control an entire squad allowed for some really cool strategic combat, and the added stand/kneel/crawl mechanic allowed you to take cover against gunfire. Also, stealth became a very valuable option. Sneaking up to a foe and unleashing a point blank automatic shotgun burst was nearly always an instant kill.

I love the Fallout games. I won’t be letting mine go any time soon.

Unfortunately, the last content pack, “Mothership Zeta”, ended all of the content on kind of a ho-hum note.  It wasn’t my favorite pack by far, that honor goes to “Point Lookout” but it was still an enjoyable romp.  Plus, you got to punch an alien while you were in your underwear and that’s cool no matter what.

In the interest of appeasing all of the stat-heads out there, I wrote down all of my statistics to show just what I did in my time in the Wastelands.

• Achievements: 72/72
• Achievement points: 1550/1550
• Number of saves: 663
• Time played: 81:25:10 (this is going to be inflated as I’d often pause the game while writing guides by bringing up the PipBoy rather than pausing the game via the pause button)
• Level: 30
• Alignment: True Mortal (Neutral)
• Strength: 9
• Perception: 10(+)
• Endurance: 9
• Charisma: 9
• Intelligence: 9
• Agility: 9
• Luck: 10(+)
• Hit points: 615
• Action points: 113 (+5 from my Ranger Battle Armor)
• Carrying capacity: 290
• Barter: 55
• Big Guns: 100
• Energy Weapons: 100(+)
• Explosives: 60(+)
• Lockpick: 100(+)
• Medicine: 100
• Melee Weapons: 58
• Repair: 100
• Science: 100
• Small Guns: 100
• Sneak: 100
• Speech: 100
• Unarmed: 38
• Quests Completed: 57
• Locations Discovered: 161
• People Killed: 720
• Creatures Killed: 1184
• Locks Picked: 154
• Computers Hacked: 78
• Stimpaks Taken: 176
• Rad-X Taken: 5
• RadAway Taken: 14
• Chems Taken: 7
• Time Addicted: 0
• Mines Disarmed: 33
• Speech Successes: 97
• Pockets Picked: 5
• Pants Exploded: 7
• Books Read: 44
• Bobbleheads Found: 20
• Weapons Created: 7
• People Mezzed: 1
• Captives Rescued: 4
• Sandman Kills: 21
• Paralyzing Punches: 0
• Robots Disabled: 9
• Contracts Completed: 0
• Corpses Eaten: 0
• Mysterious Stranger Visits: 0

Those last few are perk related which is why I didn’t have any.  I didn’t take whatever perk lets you disable robots until much later in the game, during Broken Steel so there weren’t many robots left to disable.  It was hella useful though, so I wish I had gotten it earlier.  Ditto with upping my repair skill.  Being able to repair your own stuff is a great money saving device.  Then again, the money you save by repairing your own stuff is probably balanced out by keeping weapons rather than selling them so that you have materials for repair.  I would have liked to have picked the Mysterious Stranger perk too just to see what it looked like, but at the same time, I think I did ok without it.  I’m sure I can find something on YouTube to shoe me what it looked like.

In the end, I really enjoyed the game and am sad to see it go.  It will be interesting to see what goes on in New Vegas but at the same time, it’s not the same studio, so I’m thinking that New Vegas: Fallout 3 as Fallout 3: Fallout 1 & 2.  It will still be good, just a different take on Fallout.

For now though, my character is safely at home, ready for whatever else comes his way.  After I returned from Mothership Zeta I headed to Vault 101 to pick up Dogmeat and then we both went back home to Megaton.  I put all of my alien gear and trophies in my locker, put on the armor, Shady Hat and Ghoul Mask I wore for most of the game and equipped the plasma rifle that had gotten me through so many scrapes.  Then I went upstairs and took a seat, dog by my side.  After all of this time in the Wastelands, I think I deserved a little rest.

My first game console was the Atari 2600 my father brought home when I was eight. I spent countless hours playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Demons to Diamonds, and Warlords. I even loved that crappy Raiders of the Lost Ark game. But the one I probably spent the most time with was Video Pinball. Never before and never since have I obsessed so much about a numeric score in a video game. I developed a pattern whereby I could repeatedly nudge the ball – gently, so as to not tilt – and bounce it back and forth, watching the score go up and up.

A few years later, and after a brief stint with a Timex-Sinclair PC and an Atari 800XL PC, my parents bought me a Commodore 64. I do not jest when I say that the Commodore 64 changed my life. It got me interested in programming, which many years later led to a career. But 90% of the time, if I was on the Commodore, I was playing games. Defender of the Crown. Pool of Radiance. Autoduel. Maniac Mansion. The Racing Destruction Set. Wishbringer. Wasteland. Mail Order Monsters. Super Giana Sisters. Forbidden Forest. I could easily write about all of them. I had dozens of 5.25 floppies, and they all saw a lot of use.

I still remember vividly the day I got my copy of Bards’ Tale 2 via UPS. Cash on Delivery. Words cannot express the excitement I had as I broke open the packaging, slid that floppy into my 1541 disk drive, and typed LOAD”*”,8,1 – to this day, when I type that, my fingers try to hit shift-2 to get the quote.

I never did complete Bards’ Tale 2, although I likely spent hundreds of hours in its dungeons. That distinction goes to Ultima V, which was the most epic game I ever played on the Commodore. The NPCs had daily routines – the shopkeepers would close shop for lunch and walk to the bar to eat. I could have conversations with just about anyone in the game and ask them their names and their jobs. I could pilot ships and balloons, learn area effect spells, relocate moongates, and track the movements of the Shadowlords. I had to travel the world to learn the magical entrance words to open various dungeons so that I could travel to the underworld, battling mongbats, sand traps, and gazers along the way. When I finally made my way to the dungeon Doom in the center of the underworld and rescued Lord British, it was such a momentous event in my young life that I wrote it on the calendar and celebrated for a number of years afterwards.

While Ultima V is undoubtedly my most fondly-remembered Commodore 64 game, Wasteland isn’t far behind. It took the top-down style from Ultima, and mixed it with Bards Tale’s battle system to create an awesome mesh of the two. You could split your party during battle to have the melee fighters run up while the gunslingers stayed back. The game’s atmosphere was what later inspired the first Fallout game, but Wasteland was far edgier. The battle descriptions had you exploding foes like a blood sausage and spinning them into a dance of death, and a later mission in the game had you battling nuns with machine guns. You could even hire a hooker and contract Wasteland Herpes. And my favorite part of the game was the over-the-top robots you’d battle at Base Cochise. The robots you’d fight had names like Sonar-targetted Proton Carbine, Life-seeking Flamethrower, and VTOL Auto-fire Robot.

Fast forward to 1996. I’d just broken off an engagement, and I was depressed. I hadn’t played games much in the past few years, and my friend Rich talked me into buying myself a Playstation. One of the first games I played was Resident Evil 2, and it blew me away. To this day, no other game defines survival horror like Resident Evil 2 does. There are moments in Dead Space that come close, but the storyline in Resident Evil 2, while very complex, is the best of any game in the franchise. Also, the T-103 zombie is by far the best Resident Evil villain ever.

After that, I became primarily a PC Gamer, moving on to games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Mechwarrior. But I’ll always have fond memories of that Commodore 64.

Video game reviews are big business now. And while I really didn’t want to get into the games review business when I started Lungfishopolis, I feel a need to bring peoples’ attention to a few games which got a lot of terrible reviews, but which I found to be very good games. I’ve played all but one of them more than once, and I’ll likely go back and play most of them again. I’m silly like that.

Firstly, Enter the Matrix. It got an abysmal Metascore of 58, but I remember liking it. I haven’t replayed it for perspective, and I remember hating many of the driving sequences, but the combat was fun. Running up walls and diving through the air in bullet-time while shooting at enemies, then beating the snot out of them in over-the-top hand to hand is a lot of fun. The hovercraft-piloting segment was just plain stupid and broken, but that was at the very end of the game such that you could completely skip it and miss nothing.

You got to play the role of either Niobe or Ghost, and in a design choice similar to Resident Evil 2, this gave you two separate angles on the same story, adding to replay value. In the car segments, Niobe always drives and Ghost always shoots, so you’re either only shooting or only driving.

By far the best part of the game is the movie footage. They filmed footage for Enter The Matrix at the same time they were filming the second and third Matrix movies, so there’s a ton of movie footage that never appeared in the films. Some of it is pretty damn good. My favorite: the scene where Ballard fights Seraph. It’s great mostly because of the fantastic quote at the end. There was a funny scene where Ghost talks about onanism too.

Another game I really enjoy is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. PC Gamer panned it for being buggy and repetitive, and 1UP made fun of the kick mechanic and character development. But although I’ll agree that the plotline isn’t exactly inspired and the slutty demon chick is annoying, I liked Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It has the best FPS swordplay mechanics I’ve seen – definitely better than Oblivion – and some fairly fun stealth gameplay. I actually really enjoyed the oft-maligned kick mechanic, and thought that the exhaustion meter and the fact that more powerful enemies can block a kick limited the kick enough that it was not overly powerful. The kick simply introduces a way to use the environment to your advantage. If there’s not a ledge to kick an enemy off, there may be a spiked wall or a support beam to kick him into.

I enjoyed Dark Messiah’s environments and level design, and really had a lot of fun sniping enemies from a distance with my bow. And somehow, sneaking up behind an orc and stabbing him in the neck or kicking him off a thousand-foot cliff just never gets old. There were some fairly intense chase sequences early in the game which at first annoyed the crap out of me. Somehow, going back through the game a second time, I’m not finding them nearly as bad.

I started replaying the game not long ago, and although I stopped when I started playing Crysis and Mass Effect, I’ll likely go back to it soon. Warning: I’ve heard that the console version of this game is far worse.

Next up, Fallout Tactics. First off, I’ve got to let it be known that I was huge a fan of the original two Fallout titles. The storyline and the open world were fantastic. The turn-based combat was excellent, and the only thing that (to me) could have made it better is to allow the player to control a party of characters, a la Baldur’s Gate. One of the reasons I loved Baldur’s Gate so much was because of the strategic combat. Fallout Tactics allows me that strategic combat that I crave so much.

Yeah – I’ll totally agree that the storyline isn’t nearly up to the standards of the first two games. But this game was largely about gameplay rather than story. I absolutely loved sneaking four of my men into position, having my shotgun guy lie prone and crawl around a corner into the raiders’ hut and blast him point blank, or positioning the guy with the rocket launcher up on a fire escape. Surrounding the enemy before they know you’re there is a lot of fun. And then kneeling behind a barrel or having a firefight through a window or standing in a trench for cover, trying to take out that Deathclaw before it gets close enough to rip your head off – it’s what makes the whole game fun.

I like being able to control an entire squad, and specialize the different members in different skills. Having one member who can drive the vehicles well and make tight turns, and another who can sneak up right under an enemy’s nose, a lockpicker/safecracker, and maybe a sniper. And having someone who’s good with landmines is always useful.

Temple of Elemental Evil, despite its many flaws, was a really fun game. My biggest complaints about it was that the a huge optional ending segment of the game was so buggy that I could never complete it, and that like Throne of Bhaal, the final boss is nearly unbeatable.The critics’ biggest complaints were the bugs and the complexity. There have since been many patches to fix the bugs and to correct the incorrect implementations of rules detected by a horde of D&D fanatics, but I still don’t think 100% of the bugs are gone.

Like Fallout Tactics, the biggest single thing that I liked about this game was the excellent strategic combat. It used 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, implementing rules that many D&D players may not even have been aware of, thus the complaints about complexity. but I loved it. You could wait to delay your initiative, ready your bow so that as soon as any enemy spellcaster started casting a spell you could shoot them to interrupt it, double move, run, charge, cast a counterspell, and perform many other strategic actions. You can even craft magic items using the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset.

I’ll admit that the coolest-looking fight in the game was one of the first, against the giant frogs. Watching them jump out of the swamp and hop up to your party, then snag your wizard with its tongue and swallow him simultaneously sucked and was awesome. You lose a wizard, but hey – at this point you’re first level and you can go roll up another one. Besides, didn’t that look freaking cool when he got… digested?

Once you’re in the temple, the game lets you pit temple factions against each other and play up the intrigue and politics, but I generally just run through killing everything. And yes, I’ve replayed this game, and added all the Circle of Eight patches. There’s actually a lot of really good user-generated content too. Now that I’ve got a 3.0ghz dual core machine, I’ll probably go back at some point and see if the game plays any better.

The final game on my list is Thief: Deadly Shadows. Although it generally seems to be considered the least of the three Thief titles, it’s the only one I’ve truly loved. I’m playing it now, and loving it.

Amongst stealth games, it’s in my top five, alongside titles like Beyond Good and Evil and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Worth a play if you’ve never tried it.