Stargunner

Apogee always released good flying shooter types. This one follows in the wake of Major Stryker, Raptor, and Zone 66. On the market in 1996, it features fast-paced action, good replayability and good graphics, all with an unrelenting difficulty that's sure to have you cursing your way through the first episode on the easiest difficulty. Tip: When you're at the buy screens, press F2 to save your game. Make a save for each level so that you can come back if you mess something up. You'll be glad you did.

 

Gameplay: 7/10

Fly your ship through a 2D plane of explosions, spaceships, and extra explosions collecting powerups, credits and points. Unique, no, simple, yes, but it does feature a buy screen where you can purchase upgrades to your ship and get it working the way you want. You can stack two extra guns of your choice, two orbiting moons that do various things, and install engines to keep your speed up. All of these features become apparently necessary, as you're not going to get anywhere without upgrading. Once you beat the stage, you face a boss, which is usually just some unimaginative spaceship with some weak points you've gotta hit.

 

Graphics: 9/10

 They're real good and they work very fast. Everything flying around you gives a great feeling of chaos and it takes a fine-tuned player to get used to its insanity. The enemies look good, the levels are okay, and your ship changes as you upgrade it. Cool. The enemies and bosses could have been cooler though, minus a point.

Sound: 8/10

There's some rockin' digitized music, entertaining digitized speech, and a punch of pew-pews. It does add a lot to the overall experience. Repetitive after a while, so I'm dockin' 2 points.

 

Overall: 8/10

It's an awesome addition to your freeware collection. You'll be playing it again and again as you discover the best weapon combinations for your play style. The story doesn't exactly keep you feeling gripped, but it does give you some sort of premise as to what the hell you're doing on this planet. Apogee went and gave the game away for free starting in 2005, which is quite generous of them, considering how great the game is. Check out the link below for some more information on a great game that time forgot!

http://www.3drealms.com/stargunner/

Command and Conquer: Red Alert

 Real-time strategy games are some of my favorite on the list, and this game is probably the first one I played. It came out in 1996, paving the way for an awesome game series that rocks worlds to this day. In C&C, your most basic objective is to construct a base, train an army, and whoop your opponents sorry Soviet ass. It also features an intriguing solo campaign as either Soviets or Allies, requiring you to complete various missions. Personally, I just play the skirmish modes against a bunch of AIs, and even to this day, it's a great RTS game.

 Gameplay: 8/10

It's simple, really. Drag and click to select a bunch of units and send them over to your opponent. On the right is the construction bar, which you'll be scrolling through a lot. You need to build power plants so you can harvest this stuff that you'll turn in to money so you can purchase tanks and stuff. It seems to lack certain functions that would have been nice, such as waypoints or group formations. -2 pointaroos.

 Graphics: 7/10

Although everything is small and underdetailed, you'll end up being wowed at the amount of units, explosions and gunfire. The maps are good, but the cutscenes look pretty weird. It's a little easy to lose your units sometimes thanks to them being so small, -3 points for that and the fact that it's hard to distinguish units, sometimes.

 Sound: 7/10

In these games, sound is very important, as it alerts you to if something is happening on the map that you're not currently viewing. You can tell a lot of work went into the sounds in this game, and they did a really great job. It does get a little repetitive, you're going to hear "training training training unable to comply, building in progress training training" -3 points for ouchies on the ears.

Overall: 8.5/10

It's an awesomely entertaining RTS, with a strong focus on action and speed of gameplay. 12 solid years after its release, Electronic Arts purchased the rights to the game and graciously made it freeware. So get your war on, this is one of the best free games in history.

http://download.cnet.com/Command-Conquer-Red-Alert/3000-7483_4-10017271.html

Shareware Saturday: The Hugo Series

At the time, these games were the staple of family-friendly gaming, and to this day, everybody knows of them. We're talking Hugo and his stupid little house of horrors, which had four games altogether; Hugo's House of Horrors, Hugo 2: Whodunit?, Hugo III: Jungle of Doom, and the ever-fabled Nitemare 3D. The first three are graphical text adventures, you walk around typing stuff like "open door" or "take candle". It's not exactly that easy, though, as the games force you to do stuff like "give steak to dog" or whatever. Nitemare though, it's in a whole different element, in the exact same story line. It's a first-person shooter/puzzle sort of thing similar to Wolfenstein 3D or Ken's Labyrinth. Let's get down to business. 

Hugo's House of Horrors
This game features Hugo, but it's not really his house. You see, his girlfriend got jacked, so he's going to inspect every freaking corner of this haunted-ass house to find her. While inside, he gets experimented on by a mad scientist with a retarded monster assistant, interrupts a dinner between vampires, mummies, and werewolves, and steals everything in sight. The puzzles in this game are pretty stiff and sometimes random, so a walkthrough is essential, unless you like grinding your gearbox brain sitting at 256 colors with some beeps emitting from your PC every now and then. Hugo has a tendency to walk in the same direction, so you have to get used to that. You can't always rely on the graphics to tell you what to do, you'll have to use "look around" quite often to discover clues. The game itself is fairly small, which means you'll end up in the same area often, trying to figure out what in the hell you're supposed to be doing. That's the game. Never got very far.


Hugo II: Whodunit?
In this one, Hugo and his girlfriend are staying at a relatives house, whereupon Hugo discovers a secret door and disappears. Then, Penelope (Hugo's woman) sees her uncle get murdered. You control Penelope, since Hugo got his dumb ass stolen, and you have to wander around this place and figure stuff out. It's basically the same thing as the first game, only more frustrating, because it's more spread out. Some of the best parts of these games are getting instantly killed, a lot. You're forced to really do things right, or else it's going to have some dire consequences. Nobody wants to have to restart the game, so make sure you're saving before you do practically everything. There's some pretty good graphical scenes in this game, and some others that look like a child drew them. Either or, it didn't spark my attention enough, so I gave the hell up.

Hugo III: Jungle of Doom
While Penelope and Hugo were flying over a jungle, they crashed their plane and somehow avoided dying, even though everything else in the world kills them. When they go look for assistance, Penelope gets bitten by a poisonous spider, which causes her to be paralyzed until Hugo can get some antidote. Commence Hugo's adventure in the Jungle of Doom. Seemingly crawling through the jungle, Hugo meets a ghost, an elephant, and a bunch of black people that probably want to cook and eat his ass.
This game seems to have more death traps than the others, making it both fun and extremely frustrating. On top of that, everything is boards apart, and Hugo's got a lot of trecking to do. This game has nice graphics and everything is pretty easy to understand, just avoid this dickass witch doctor, he's going to lock you up in a cage and experiment on you. I know, it seems to be some strange fantasies within the creator of this game, but lets not get in to that. David P. Gray also released a first person shooter version of these games.


Nitemare 3-D
First person shooters can be a blast, if they're done right. When they're done wrong, however, you wind up grinding your teeth for an hour as you try to redeye your way through a game like this. Nitemare 3-D is indeed, a nightmare of a game. First thing you do is grab a gun and wander your way through what looks like a movie theater, only funeral tunes are playing. Mummies and zombies and shit will grunt at you from around corners, or skeletons and bats will come and take you out. Oh, wait, what's the backstory to this game? After going in to the menu to answer my own question, I discovered that Penelope was jacked and Hugo needs to save her. Again. I think Hugo needs to get a new woman that's going to stop running around on him, giving him a bad groove and shit. This game was entirely too tedious for me and I stopped playing within 10 minutes. There's lots of secret areas I found out, but what I didn't discover is what anything did, or where the hell I was going.


What is boils down to is this; These games are still shareware, meaning you're going to need to pay for the full versions. The final game was released in 1994, and it's still being sold to this moment by the author, Dave Gray. After all of the wonderful free games I've posted, the ones with the least sentimental value and charm continue to be the absolute worst games on the list. David P. Gray, you should consider going freeware so everyone can experience the magic that is Hugo. Let's not forget to mention that he calls these games "for the whole family", and the second one features Uncle getting killed. Thanks. It's also going to cost you $22 if you want to play the full version of these games. Not like it matters, nobody is going to play it if it's free or not.
http://www.dgray.com/retro.htm