FreeSpace 2

Easy to get, fun as fuck.

Europa Universalis 3 is a grand strategy game that encompasses the world during the time of colonization. You play as any nation out of hundreds, carefully using diplomacy, trade, and military to support your nation. And the diplomacy is pretty deep. Most strategy games have simple "neutral, ally, enemy" settings for different factions, but here you can guarantee someone against invasion, which isn't an alliance but it means that if France declares war on Spain then Great Britain can come to Spain's aid. Or you can place a country in your sphere of influence and say "You are attacking my neighbor and my borders feel threatened because of that, I intervene!"

Even the war is an extension of diplomacy. When you invade a nation you don't actually own the nation. Instead you occupy, and have to get a peace treaty, and you usually can't demand the entire country even if you wreck them. You'll probably only gain a small portion of their country.

The game is complex, and unfortunately the tutorial is the worst tutorial ever. In fact I had to use a wiki maintained by the dev to learn about things like how different governments do different things and how reputation works (no one likes countries with bad reputation). The game is best described as a political simulator.

It's also got a load of mods that only a few games like Half-Life and Elder Scrolls can outdo. In fact the game's files are set up so that you could mod it yourself with no extra tools besides notepad if you wanted to. Any Total War fan should give this game a look.

Homeworld is a fully 3D RTS set in space. This means that your ships can fly forward, backward, up, down, left and right. It's also unusual in that it's a single player oriented RTS, with a strong story and sense of progression.

The story is about a group of people on a desert world, Kharak, who upon learning some of the sciences realize that they are not related to any of the species on their world. Years later they discover a long lost buried space ship, and from it find a map pointing towards their true Homeworld, and a drive core capable of getting them there. 60 years later, after building the mothership to do it, they test the drive, but this doesn't go unnoticed by the people who drove them to the fringe of the galaxy in the first place...

Because the game is story driven, the game features a persistent fleet. This means that the ships you have at the end of mission 4 are the ships you begin mission 5 with. You must carefully build up a powerful fleet to defend yourself, which means careful use of resources. You'll be proud of your fleet on the last mission, if you don't lose half of them on some mission that is.

Ships have more armor on the front of the ship. This means you get a damage bonus if you attack from the side or behind. You need to use the 3D aspects of the game to pull this off.

The graphics were pretty good for their day, but the art was always the bright spot for the game's look. Also, sound design is one of the dev's specialties, and this game is no exception. The voice acting was done in such a way that minor inflections of voice are supposed to tell what the characters are really thinking, because they are supposed to be professional but still feel for what's going on. Lines like "Kharak is burning" are iconic. The music is great and with the sounds of the ships and excellent voice acting truly give the feel of space opera.

(emulate with PCSX2)

Shadow of the Colossus is a game that pretty much consists of 16 boss battles. There is always one goal: Find all of the weak points and stab them. Which is not as simple as it sounds because, well, they're probably about 50 times as tall as you and not friendly.

To find the weak spot you have to climb up on them and maneuver over to where you think the weak point is. There's always a trick to getting on them, usually by tricking them into thinking they're going to hurt you or otherwise exposing themselves. After that you can climb all over them, walk on their shoulders and all that just like you've always wanted to. Your tools are your sword, bow, and horse.

The camera controls aren't very good, but most of the time the camera is pointing the direction you want it to anyway.

The game is deliciously minimalistic, from the setting to the sound. When the game decides it does want to do something it goes all out. Full scale music, full scale enemy, full scale game. This is one of the most "must play" game on the PS2.

Scratches is a game that preys on a part of your mind that you thought you got over. You remember when you were four and had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night? You ran down the hallway, turned the lights on in the bathroom, and looked around really quick to make sure there were no monsters? And when you got back to your room, you didn't climb into bed, you jumped in case a monster was underneath the bed, and then you got under the covers as fast as you could.

Now, Scratches is a game about a guy stranded in an old house, but it touches that same part of your mind, just in a different way. You will be playing the game for hours, the game will never kill you or hurt you, but will have you convinced that something is about to walk in front of you that's gonna kill you painfully and assuredly.

The game is about a guy that wants to live in an old mansion for a little while, so that he'll get some inspiration to write his next horror novel. The first thing I did was walk into the house and was impressed with the atmosphere. The clock ticked away and felt like that old style of grandfather clock, the architecture looked good, everything felt like a homely place to live. Then I walked into the library, picked up the book in the desk, and read a very well written story about cannibalism that the home's former owner witnessed. I put the book down and the house didn't feel very homely anymore.

The game relies on sounds and it's point and click interface to make you feel a bit trapped at all times. It's very slow. You'll play it for hours before you really feel unhinged, but if you like to just walk around in games, you need to play this.

The Mechwarrior games are combat simulators set about a thousand years in the future, when the galaxy is in a cronic state of warfare. Major but primitive factions struggle for supremacy, while a small but advanced crusader force of humans that have lived outside of the galaxy for centuries pushes inwards towards Earth.

What is really interesting about the game is that it's simulation, which is a genre that normally targets reality. Instead, this game puts that same attention to detail, difficult but fair gameplay, and top notch immersion and puts it a fantasy setting.

Your mech has different sections of his body, each with their own armor and internals (different ways of saying "hitpoints"). You can't change a mech's internal points but can add armor for durability. But if you add armor the mech is heavier. You'll have to remove other equipment to remove weight. But the equipment is your weapons and other important things, etc. There is a great deal of customization.

When in combat you have to manage your heat and allow your mech to cool off before unloading any more weapons, which can leave you exposed. You have to keep your mech in a position where is weapons have the advantage and the enemy's are at a disadvantage.

That game has many more facets, like that. This can really make battles intense. Your computer will scream damage reports while you fight superior numbers and constantly try to figure out the best way to survive as parts of your mech fail one after the other. It's very satisfying in victory.

Company of Heroes is an RTS that focuses on tactical combat, with an emphasis on squads instead of individual soldiers. It's multiplayer oriented.

Squads of infantry use the game's cover system. This is where the infantry will run up to cover and will gain defensive bonuses simply by being near it. Run up to sandbags, watch as the enemy charges across an open field, and you'll murder them. The cover is really dynamic; it can be destroyed, created accidentally (ie explosion causes wreckage, hide behind wreckage), created on purpose, and the game starts out with thousands of different points of cover throughout each map. On some games I've gone from a complex maze of hedgerows, buildings, and defensive nests to ground that could basically be described as "brown and holes", all because of artillery and other devastating attacks. This really affected the gameplay in those matches, too. Tanks were able to roam free with impunity and infantry had to make due with mediocre cover inside old artillery holes because all of the good cover was destroyed.

There are vehicles and tanks which are not part of squads, so protecting them with your mass of slightly expendable infantry is important. Instead you use vehicles as a compliment to your forces most of the time. For instance halftracks can restore squads to full strength. There are exceptions, like Greyhounds, but you need to recognize when danger is afoot and high tail it when using vehicles and no other support.

You have special abilities you can unlock/buy to add to your units, or to your faction as a whole. Knowing when to retreat (and I mean retreat, not pull back 20 paces like in most RTS) and when to push is very important. The end result is a game that has excellent comeback potential. You can be beaten senseless for half an hour and, provided you get your shit together and start pushing hard, you can still win.