North & South

• Release Date: 1989
• Platform(s): Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, MSX, NES
• Developer: Infogrames
• Genre: Action / Strategy

The American Civil War was surely not the most pleasant of wars. Wedged uncomfortably close to the nasty delights of industrialization, it was a muddle of shelling and gunpowder, in which people got their faces burned off, or were accidentally run through by their own side's sabres; it was a conflict in which troops were regularly trampled under horses, and that nice Kevin Costner almost had his leg lopped off and went to live with the Native Americans.

North & South tells a slightly cheerier story. A mixture of cold strategy and fast-paced battles, Infrogrames's classic is based on a Belgian comic called Les Tuniques Bleus. This means that verisimilitude was never going to be that high on the agenda. That said, beyond the chummy cartoon faces and quiky animated asides (you can tickle the photographer on the main menu screen by goosing him with your mouse pointer), it's still a smart tactical challenge all the same.

North & South operates in two modes. There's the overworld view, in which you move troops around a map of the United States, staking out territory and pincering your enemy. There's also a battle mode that allows you to race through enough stripped-down skirmishes more personally. pushing around a range of infantry, cavalry, and cannons.

The story moves at a pace while excellent audio and visual presentation give the whole thing a sheen of polish missing from many other games of the era. The ending sequence, in which weary troops march home, the war over, set new standards for animation at the time of its release. Taken as a whole, North & South, while not particularly deep, makes for a pleasant arcade strategy experience even today -- if you can track down an original copy and coax it back to life, that is.

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Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

• Release Date: 2004
• Platform(s): PlayStation 2, PC, Xbox
• Developer: Rockstar
• Genre: Action

With sales of more than 20 million copies since ts launch in 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the biggest-selling PlayStation 2 game of all time, and not without reason. Though initially a game about gang bangers and turf wars in a fictional Los Angeles (Los Santos), channeling scenes from Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, it blossoms into an ode to the entire West Coast. Three whole cities -- the others being San Fierro (San Francisco) and Las Venturas (Las Vegas) -- create a game four times bigger than Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, home to just about every idea from Rockstar's whiteboards. Weight gain, pimping missions, robberies, drive-bys, swimming, clothes shopping, martial arts, casino games, horse racing -- the list goes on and on.

The hero this time is Carl "CJ" Johnson, a Los Santos native who returns for his mother's funeral after five years in Liberty City. Chaos greets him, his neighbourhood falling to gang violence while rivalries and suspicions break up his family. Blackmailed by the crooked Officer Tenpenny (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) and distracted by girlfriends, hippies, and everyone in between, he gradually unearths the secrets behind his mother's murder, following the clues to the far ends of the map.

Just as important as the urban centers of San Andreas are the spaces in between: the rural
retreats and vast open roads that turn the game into a road movie. No Grand Theft Auto before or since has let you point toward a random horizon and just keep on driving, capturing that post-Woodstock spirit of movies like Easy Rider and Vanishing Point. None has featured a more star-studded cast, either, or so many ways of getting from point A to B via X, Y and Z. Though it lacks an occasional dab of polish, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is an embarrassment of riches.

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The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

• Release Date: 2002
• Platform: PC, Xbox
• Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
• Genre: Action/Role-Playing

The Elder Scrolls games are best known for the fourth chapter in the series, Oblivion, released in 2006. In comparison,The Elder Scroll's Morrowind is altogether more of a curate's egg, neither as commercially successful nor critically applauded as it's successor. Perhaps because of that, however, it's also a much more interesting game. This isn't the traditional fantasy of the later version; instead it is a weird blend of traditional fantasy with people and places that are characterized by an almost eerie other-worldliness.

One thing that is true of both games is the unparalleled freedom that their creators have blessed upon the players. More than many other similar games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains entire societies and cultures that are completely convincing (and, by including the Elder Scrolls construction set, even allowed players to create their own).

In one inspired piece of design, the tutorial contains the entire character creation process as part of the narrative, with attributes and skills generated by the choices the player makes while describing their character's background to a prison bureaucrat. In another, character skills advance as players use them. If you want to become good at say, sword-fighting, you simply keep sword-fighting.

For a set of rules designed to let gamers play without worrying about the numbers, the latter system is easy to exploit by anyone who wants to artificially inflate their abilities. In this, however, it is also a well-intentioned, albeit a bit flawed piece of design -- but flawed in such a way that it enriches the experience. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind grants players the freedom to play it as an experience, absorbing the story and forging their own, or as a set of rules, to be ransacked with an obsessive-compulsive eye for exploits in a bid to "beat" the game.

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Grand Theft Auto II

• Release Date: 1999
• Platform: Various
• Developer: DMA Design
• Genre: Action

Grand Theft Auto 2 has been unfairly marginalized by the success of both its predecessor and it's successor. Keeping the top-down view of the first game in the series, it has been judged to be a minor iteration on an old formula, before the series' huge leap to 3D. But the game's innovations are far from insignificant. As with Grand Theft Auto, the game launches the player as a free agent in an open city, full of criminal potential. The sequel breathes life into the game with the addition of pedestrians. They get on buses, call on taxis, and even get in fights with the local gangs.

The gangs, too, present an important step, although not one Grand Theft Auto III would follow entirely. Multiple missions are on offer from the three competing gangs in the area, and each one, when successfully completed, will increase the favour of that gang and decrease that of it's competition. The player must continually juggle the satisfaction of each so as not to get gunned down when entering their territory.

Perhaps the game's greatest mix-up was to set the game not in contemporary America, but in the near-future dystopia, the cyberpunk feel which undoes a lot of the game's effort to build a credible living city. Nonetheless, the game still displays the developer's effort for biting humour, with it's cast of pervert scientists and vengeful Hari Krishnas. 

Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto II are available for download (completely free) directly from RockStar Games, here: http://9.bb/235785/rockstargames

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Diablo

• Release Date: 1997
• Platform: Various
• Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
• Genre: Action/Role-Playing

If it's an online quiz you're working with, clicking on things is quite boring and monotonic. However, if it's Diablo, the simple game mechanic turns into something magical. Enemies explode in bursts of blood or collapse into piles of bone, heroes race across the screen to the indicated spot to await your command.Everything you click on in Diablo rewards you in some form or another.

The game isn't just a good looking isometric dungeon crawler, it is THE best dungeon crawler. A simple - almost brainless trek through caverns and catacombs filled with vile creatures, not to mention all the loot. Blizzard spent a lot of time working on the generation of the game's spaces, making items, enemies, and geography be different every single time you load up the game. The game that results from this is a game that keeps on giving.

By todays standard, Diablo's classes, characters, and piles of rewards are actually rather shallow and inferior, but the game still radiates a wonderful fascination each time you return to it's caverns. It's so simple anyone could  learn the basics, and so rich and vibrant that even the pros will find themselves coming back for more.

The game has spawned countless clones, and to this very day, the skeleton smashing formula has not changed.

Diablo's infamous "Butcher"

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Spy Hunter

• Release Date: 1983
• Platform: Arcade
• Developer: Midway
• Genre: Action

With its smart weapons, awesome cars, Spy Hunter was viewed as a very stylish game back in the arcades on the early 1980s. It was a title that playing into any boy's fantasies- secret agents, nasty weaponry, and a driving lincese. Make no mistake though, it was the action packed gameplay that kept people coming back for more again, again, and again.

In Spy Hunter, you play as a secret agent with a car that shoots bullets from the front grill, and you are tasked with the simple task of mowing down countless amounts of enemies on an endless, linear highway. From stretch cars with side-machine-guns, to buses with spiked wheels, and even the occasional helicopter,  Spy Hunter had a unique and incredible selection of foes to destroy. Even upgrading your ride was cool; driving into the back of passing vans to upgrade your car with smoke-screens and oil slicks every now and again.

All of this was pretty slick, but Spy Hunter's most epic moments comes when the game's incomplete bridges force you to take your ride off-road, where it transforms itself into a boat, and taking the road based battles to the sea.

Fit to the obsessions of the 1980s, having a mixture of espionages and cars, Spy Hunter is a delightful memory for everyone who played it.

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