By John Guilfoil

In 1992, Epic MegaGames released this almost forgettable little EGA game called Overkill. You, the pilot, are tasked with destroying all the evil alien forces that captured six otherwise peaceful planets, enslaving the populations along the way. Destroy them.

By John Guilfoil
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Ahh, 1993. The first person shooter was bursting forth in popularity, but how did Blake Stone fare?

By John Guilfoil
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Doomsday and projects like jDoom have kept the game going well into the 21st century, with support for high resolution graphics and textures, OpenGL, new character models, particle effects, high-quality audio and a whole host of hacks, tweaks, mods and fixes for Doom, Doom 2, Final Doom, Hexen and Heretic.
It also brings 16-player multiplayer and [...]

By John Guilfoil

There’s no question that Halo was one of the best action/shooter games ever made. It was a remarkable achievement in gaming and carried the Xbox at launch time. Its multiplayer had that James Bond Goldeneye/N64 feel where you could play it, the same levels, over and over again and love every minute.
I still like to [...]

By John Guilfoil
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In December 2005, Apogee/3D Realms released the classic side-scrolling action game Bio Menace as a freeware “Christmas present” for its customers and loyal fans.
At that time, the game had floundered around incompatibility issues and relative obscurity — DOSBox wasn’t a big deal yet.

The game is built on the Commander Keen 2D engine and designed as [...]

By John Guilfoil
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One of the best computer golf games is still Links LS 98 and subsiquent versions for Windows, released 11 years ago by Access Software.
Access made some very good games in the 80s and 90s, including the Tex Murphy series, before they lost their identity — and eventually their existance.
Links: The Challenge of Golf was released in 1990 [...]

By John Guilfoil
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Released quickly after Doom, using a modified version of the same game engine, Heretic is a fantasy first person shooter designed by Raven Software, published by id Software, and distributed, along with everything else in those days, by GT Interactive in 1994.
Heretic introduced ambient noise — evil laughter and such — that was random, as [...]

By John Guilfoil
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One of my all time favorite PC sports games was High Heat Baseball 1999. It was behind its time and had sub par graphics, but it was a smooth playing game that was insanely customizable. It had replaceable graphics, importable stadiums (real Citgo sign for Fenway) and custom sound effects and player musical anthems you [...]

By John Guilfoil
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There once was a magazine called Launch.
Oh what a magazine it was. Launch was mainly a music publication, which offered a Macromedia-powered CD-ROM magazine in the 90s. It was an early form of convergence journalism, and we pay homage to them and their efforts.
Like just about every other good thing in the tech bubble years, [...]

By John Guilfoil
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Long before Takara developed their 2002 mixed-reviews tank sim, Epic Megagames was distributing Seek and Destroy, a PC action game that combined tank and chopper elements.
I first encountered Seek and Destroy in the July, 1996 issue of Interactive Entertainment (IE), the CD portion of Computer Games Strategy Plus magazine (previously called Strategy Plus, then called [...]

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