Starcraft

It was one of the mid-era of my traditional strategy game playing. Began with Dune and ended with... Warcraft III: Frozen Throne it seems... Starcraft is truly a classic game with many ground breaking points to mention.

The story, it was the first one where the story in the game was very rich and captivating, not to mention the story continue as you play through three races in the game (which will be mentioning later on). As play you play along you will began to be interested and care about your character and wishes to knew what will become of them later on.

The graphic, it was the first of many that utilize the 2D style graphic which has been use in Diablo, but became a lot more crisp and polish on Starcraft. The audio is great as well, especially the vioce actors who portraits the main characters.

The strongest point of Starcraft, apart from the story, is the fact that there were three completely different races to play with, each with their own playing style. From the space gypsy moveable building of Terran, the rapid spawn insect-like alien Zerg, and the hi-tech & psychic power mix of Protoss. Each race features totally different units, often with no equivalents on the other side, differing construction and repair principles, and even different (though equally effective) interface art.

We will also see what will became the concept of Hero Unit in Warcraft III later on, from the use of main playable characters in Starcraft to narrate the story.

Many people finish the single player campaign and then began to honed their skills online. This is the time when we start using 56K modem in Bangkok so I am not really in to that :P

All in all, This is one of what came later known as 'Blizzard game', the moniker that implied that the game release will be delayed many times but what you will get in the end is a highly polished game with high quality gameplay. Even todays, Blizzard still releasing patch for Starcraft and many still playing Starcraft on battle.net and the game is unusally popular in South Korea as well.

Gabriel Knights: The Beast Within

This is the game that I actually bought the actual imported box with my own money when it first came out :)

The Best FMV adventure game that ever came out. With engaging plots (if you are into this genre), professional actors, great soundtrack including a Wagnerian opera, and deep historic background make this game a masterpiece.

The sequel of the cult hit Gabriel Knights: Sins of the fathers. The story continue after Gabriel relocated to his inherited castle in Germany to continue his writing while Grace manning the bookstore in New Orleans now famous from the release of Gabriel's first novel. A group of villagers comes to the Rittersberg castle asking for the Schattenjäger, 'Shadow Hunter' to help them rid of the werewolf which has kill a young girl in Munich.

The quest will take you, Gabriel and Grace through many parts of Germany, from Munich to Bavaria, visiting the famous Neuschwanstein castle that inspired the Disneyland's castle, the Black Madonna of Altötting and probing into the myths of King Ludwig II. You will also be discovering Wagner lost opera, how important it was to King Ludwig II and the speculation of his death.

Graphic wise this is a FMV: Full Motion Video presentation. At the time this game came out it was already toward the end of FMV era, many games utilized this technology to the point of derogatory and eventually with the arrival of 3D graphic, made FMV obsolete and too expensive. However, this is one of the few games where FMV was done right, with top notch performing by the casts. Most notably the leading actors for Gabriel, Grace and the antagonist, the supporting casts are not too shabby either.

The magnificent soundtrack by Robert Holmes, who even composed an original Wagnerian opera for the story, titled "Der Fluch Des Engelhart" ("The Curse of Engelhart") help added to the dramatic and mysterious atmosphere of the game. This is one of the few game that you will actually like the BGM :).

This is the game you need to have if you considered yourself an Adventure gamer.

Ghost Master

Of all the strategy games that has good side and evil side. 98% of those will have you play the good side, 1% will let you pick side and the other 1% will have you play the evil side :) Not many later developers seem to be interested in letting you play the bad guys after the Dungeon Master series until Sick Puppies Inc. came along with Ghost Master.

In this game you will be playing as a civil servant type in the afterlife in which you have been given a mission to terrorise the populations of Gravenville. You will be commanding a troupe of ghosts or Haunters as they were called in this game to do the frightening tasks. The locations that you will be play in this game included Sorority house (so cliche eh? :p), Frat house, and police stations just to name a few. In each mission, there will be ghosts trapped in the map which will required different methods to free them to become one of your haunters.

The level of difficulty are ranging from medium to downright maddening... Since the faster you can complete the mission, the more gold phalsm you will gain to be use for training your haunters new scare techniques. One of the mission took me about one and a half hours to fulfill the requirement to release one of the ghost (Not Joking)...

The demo is also available at the official sites. So try it if you like to play bad guys for a change :) You might have found your hidden tendencies *evil laugh*