Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.
]]>Strategy games is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.
]]>On the occasion of the new Dune movie being delayed by almost a year, RPS asks: who would you want to make a Dune video game? Frank Herbert's sci-fantasy novel about spacelords, spacedrugs, spaceprophecy, and giant murderworms has been the subject of several games, the best-known being the RTS precursor to Command & Conquer from Westwood Studios. But as the films (and attempted films, lookin' at you Jodorowsky's Dune) have shown, Dune can become all sorts of things in different hands. So what would you like to see, reader dear?
]]>The summer of 1991 was all about ants. I was seven years old, and I spent the entire school holiday camped in the garden, gently catching winged queens and housing them in shitty coke bottle formicariums. There I would watch them lay eggs and create workers, who would dig tunnels, search about the place, and scurry in lines with grains of food in their jaws. I was captivated by my bottled nests, by their self-organising complexity, and although I had no idea at the time, I think that those ants might have been my first defining games experience.
]]>Frank Herbert's sci-fi world of vast sand worms and magical spacedrugs and political intrigue and swordfights and Kyle MacLachlan with a pet spacepug and Sting posing in his pants is being digitised again. Funcom, the Norwegian crew behind Conan Exiles and The Secret World, today announced that they're planning to make several video games based on Dune. We best know Dune round these parts for Dune II, Westwood's seminal 1992 real-time strategy game which set the blueprint for Command & Conquer and Warcraft and so on. Funcom's first Dune game is due to be some sort of "open world multiplayer" game, so perhaps another sandbox survival sorta thing?
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
2001's Battle For Dune was the first time I remember being consciously nostalgic about games.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I spent a few hours playing Dune Legacy, a fan-made remake - well, more modernisation than remake - in work time a while back, couldn't think of a great excuse to write about it then felt horribly guilty. Now I have an excuse! If you've long wished to revisit Dune II: Battle For Arrakis, the beloved grandparent of the RTS as we know it, but feared its archaic nature and appearance would break your heart, Dune Legacy is the answer.
]]>Raised By Screens is probably the closest I’ll ever get to a memoir – glancing back at the games I played as a child in the order in which I remember playing them, and focusing on how I remember them rather than what they truly were. There will be errors and there will be interpretations that are simply wrong, because that’s how memory works.
The golden years began. The PC's imperial period in the early 1990s was not coincidentally the time in which I changed from a boy who sometimes played games into a boy for whom games were his major interest.
]]>When in company I want to impress, I'll always reach for X-COM as the definitive game that made me. When I'm feeling a little less self-conscious, I'll admit that really it's the less celebral but no less landmark proto-C&C Dune II: The Battle For Arrakis. (I'm told it was called Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty in the US. I just can't tell you how outlandishly wrong that sounds. Dynasty? Who cares about my legacy and offspring - I just want the Spice). I played each of its three campaigns multiple times, I drew ornithopters everywhere, I told my confused parents wild stories about sandworms and Fremen over dinner. No-one cared. I was alone in it. If only Dune Legacy had been around then - a fan remake/makeover of the seminal RTS, which has just added LAN and online multiplayer. Ooh, fancy a bit of that.
]]>One of my quiet gaming obsessions is the concept of missing links. We all know the mainstream history of gaming (You know - the first RTS being Dune 2). Many of us will know the critical consensus-history of gaming (You know - the first RTS being the Megadrive's Herzog Zwei). What interests me is the stuff both of those history leaves out - you know, what they're forgetting about in order to make a simplified neater history. In that case, I dare say you can trace the RTS further back than Herzog Zwei if you like. At the least, you need to bring - say - Populous into the consideration. Sure, it doesn't play in a way akin to how the genre gentrified... but neither, really, does Herzog Zwei.
Not in a trainspottery High-Fidelity-records-collector way. Well... at least not MOSTLY like that. But in a interest in how gloriously tangled the rainforest floor of gaming is.
Anyway - enough set up. On with 1991's proto-First-person shooter Robocop 3's awesome ED-209s!
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