Way back in 1984 Elite gave gamers the Cobra Mark III spacecraft, eight galaxies to traverse, and more than 2,000 planets to visit. Its wireframe graphics rendered perhaps the first truly open-ended, three-dimensional game universe. And it did it with only a few dozen kilobytes.

Coded by college undergrads Ian Bell and David Braben, Elite was a watershed event in computer gaming. It almost single-handedly launched the space sim and helped pioneer the 4X genre, paving the way for everything from Wing Commander to Freespace. Its BBC Micro and Acorn releases were eventually ported to almost every home computer system available. Elite even showed up on the NES.

Elite's floppy disks came packaged with a novella, The Dark Wheel, which provided a rough backstory and introduced players to the Elite universe. The game itself, however, was a plot-free, completely open-ended playground where the player could explore, trade, upgrade their ship, and engage in combat as they saw fit. The only goal it provided was a gradual ranking up, from "Harmless" to "Elite," earned by defeating space pirates, aliens, and bounty hunters.

Elite has long since been released into the wild. You can find emulations at Ian Bell's Elite page, or poke around the Elite Wiki for newer incarnations like Oolite. You can even find a browser-based flash version here. As primitive and awkward as Elite now appears, its brilliance is still apparent. Click "Read more" below to see more screenshots from the original.

Few can argue the impact the Baldur's Gate series had on the PC RPG genre. In a time where the market was suffering from a slump, I first heard of the game shortly after high school. The nerdiest nerd I had ever encountered (last name Wakle, no less) slammed a PC game magazine on my desk and urged me with that high pitched, retainer slurping voice of his to read all about this awesome RPG that was coming. I had dismissed it out of hand at the time, not really wanting to show interest and become a nerd by association. I changed my tune a few months later when he brought the Baldur's Gate game box into class. It was expertly packed and loaded with 5 CDs -- the ultimate measure of quality.

It was the deep, resonant narrator's voice that first led me to believe that I was about to play something special. The town criers in Candlekeep hinted at a world far bigger than my own character and the game didn't waste much time before throwing you into it. The story and world building throughout the series was augmented by the D&D license, rather than limited. Same goes for the character creation and party management that managed to maintain the tactical nature of combat while keeping it manageable and fun. Memorable characters with their own demons like Jahira's mourning, Minsc's madness and Aerie's "Love me or want to beat me to death" fragility. Few games can truly withstand the test of still being fun and relevant a decade later, but the Baldur's Gate series is one of them. This is thanks in part to the excellent 2D artwork that holds up far better than old 3D models ever could.

So here's to the Baldur's Gate series! Special thanks to 'anyone' for posting a link to a mod that allows you to play these games and other Infinity Engine titles in glorious widescreen resolutions. Click "Read More" if you want to peruse a few extra shots of the games.

The original Rainbow Six on the PC was the very first game to get my adrenaline pumping. Not just the usual intensity you might feel when you're close to beating a tough challenge; I mean it made my heart race and my palms sweat. After years of soaking up plasma shots and nailgun fire without breaking stride, the one shot one kill nature of Rainbow Six was a revelation. Multiplayer matches were so tense, I actually fell off my chair once when another player suddenly popped around a corner and put two shots in my chest. I even joined a clan and we had real Navy Seals on our squad!

The single player mode also boasted some surprising features that never survived the transition over to consoles in later years. After the initial mission briefing you were shown an overhead shot of the building or area your team would be assaulting. You could actually have an entire A.I team clearing areas while you lead your own through another zone. You could order them to hold at certain points and wait for your go code before clearing a room from one side while your own team stormed in from the other. Sure, they didn't always survive on their own, but when it worked, it was glorious.

After a few expansions and the Rogue Spear sequel, the Rainbow Six series made its transition to consoles, shedding many of the more difficult and in-depth features of the PC games. Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 hits shelves next week and I'll likely be first in line to buy it, but it's not the series that ushered me into my first online clan experience anymore. Like so many things in the game industry, ease has slowly overtaken priority over depth.

Oh, Everquest, though we have long since separated and your looks have not exactly improved with age, I still think about you when you were young and beautiful, and the long nights we spent together. They say you never really get over your first, and I suppose that's probably why it took so long to finally say goodbye for what now truly seems to have been the last time. How many times did we break up? Six? Seven? I'd always come back to you and time, too much time, would evaporate into lost nights. Eventually I'd grow bored and interested in someone younger, and then you'd go and have some work done, come back with promises of experimentation and I'd fall for you all over again.

I still long for you occasionally, though I know it can never be like it was. You're a hard addiction, strident in your rules and unforgiving in a way that some of the younger ones will never know. Maybe that's part of the appeal, the way you would dominate me again and again, despite my frustration. I wanted to tame you, but you were untamable by all but age. Even your replacement, its plastic facade only a hint at your youthful beauty, can never really match what we had together. Sure, I've found someone stable, reliable, forgiving, caring and less ruthless in World of WarCraft, and she and I are happy together now, but there's always a place in my heart for you Everquest. I'll never kill a rat without thinking of you.

There aren't many games that I remember with such clarity as Everquest. I remember the first rat I killed just outside of Qeynos, and the first time I adventured into Blackburrow, certainly to be killed in the next instant by a train Gnoll Guards. I remember the cackle of the skeletons, the sound of my wizard casting, the glow of the Will O' Wisps, and the feeling of constant peril the first time I traveled across the continent. I remember grouping with friends in the Field of Bone and feeling invincible when a high-level would buff us lowbies before they changed the rules. It was a harder world, but at times a much more rewarding one, and I look back on EQ with almost inexplicable fondness.

I was 13 in 1993 when X-Com was released -- go ahead and take a moment to feel old if you like. I was young, impressionable, and armed with a PC ready to devour an endless stream of game demos. I was playing the field, not really looking for a commitment, and then I found the XCom demo, and suddenly I was no longer a boy. I was a man. With a gun. Fighting aliens.

Every day after school I rushed home to feed the obsession, playing the demo level again and again. Though the layout never changed, somehow the game managed to offer me a new challenge with every play session. This time the floating purple alien would fire at me from a second story window, and the next time he'd lurch out of an alley. It was deliciously unpredictable, and the game was immediately infused with the kind of paranoia that became its defining characteristic, and my love for gaming on the PC was solidified.

With a spooky soundtrack, full research trees, base building, recruiting and turn-based gameplay that holds up even today, X-Com is a classic. Many developers have tried to revisit the formula for fun and profit, yet none have managed the perfect balance achieved by the original.

1982 was not the easiest time to be a geek in rural New England. There was no internet to connect me to the world,to make me feel like the secret masters of the universe I now know myself to be. Usenet was still in it's infancy. If you were sad enough to find yourself without a group of like-minded geek friends, there were no Dungeons & Dragons MeetUps to go to. Worse, I was at that awkward age where I had discovered what girls were, and that acne was Satan's punishment for thinking about them too much.

Steve Jackson stepped in to save me from myself in the winter of 1982, with the publication of the first Fighting Fantasy book, "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain."

Now that winter is settling in around us, it's a great time to look back at Icewind Dale, the Infinity Engine RPG released by Black Isle back in June 20th, 2000. Riding the success of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale snuck onto shelves a few months before the sequel to Bioware's opus was released. Rather than make a carbon copy of Baldur's Gate set in the icy tundra, Icewind Dale shucked some of the heavier story elements and open-ended exploration in favor of more combat. Way more combat. It threw the player on a cold, linear path and demanded challenges be met with magic and steel. Unlike its predecessors, Icewind Dale kept the forward momentum going all the way through, rarely giving the player the luxury of exploring side quests.

It speaks to the Infinity Engine's flexibility that it could support a more tactical, combat-focused game all the way through and still remain fun. I can remember spending hours on some encounters and trying to get through them without losing half my party. It was tough, but usually fair. These days, Icewind Dale, the Heart of Winter expansion and Icewind Dale II can all be found cheap and run great on older systems. The expansion and sequel even support resolutions higher than 640 X 480! Check out the Ultimate Collection if you'd like to nab them all at once.

With those commands, deftly entered on the NES controller with the same quickness today's youth display when sending their wacky text messages, many children of the 80s began their lifelong obsession with action movies and video games. And cheating. Seriously, if you couldn't beat the game without the Konami Code, you're a filthy cheater.

Of course, you practically had to cheat at Contra. It's still a brutal game, as difficult to finish today with less than 30 lives as it was when I was in footie pajamas, requiring memorization of enemy patterns and the patience of someone a lot more patient than me. The weapons were plentiful, the bosses were huge, and the cooperative play was sublime. The newest game in the series, Contra 4, was released this week to reviews praising its old-school sensibilities, but since I spent all my cash on pre-ordering Rock Band I'll have to settle for dying repeatedly in the NES classic.

For making me shout diverse and inappropriate curses at the screen at regular intervals (and for still being fun at the same time), Contra is this week's Classic Game of the Week.

With Super Mario Galaxy dropping next Monday, it's important that we as gamers look back on the legacy of the series, in order to properly evaluate the place of the new game. It's important for, um, historical reasons. And science.

Yeah, okay, it's just a flimsy excuse to play easily the best Mario game ever made once again. And maybe watch The Wizard. Who knew Jenny Lewis would get so hot?

Super Mario Bros. 3 was big news in 1990. Sure, it didn't have soft drinks named after it like Halo 3, but everybody was excited to see the further adventures of a chubby Italian plumber, this time with a raccoon's tale, in a world full of breakable blocks, evil turtle-like creatures, and mushrooms. SMB3 was also a return to the tried and true Mario formula, expanding on the original's level design with eight distinctive worlds and different paths between levels. It set a template that came to define the Mario series for years to come. And if that "historical importance" doesn't do it for you, there's always the fact that SMB3 is crazy amounts of fun, even today on the Virtual Console. Super Mario Bros. 3 is this week's Classic Game of the Week.

Here's an interesting factoid: According to Wikipedia -- where the truth lives -- the developers of Punch-Out!! decided to shrink Little Mac, the player's rookie boxing avatar, to make it easier to see the action on the screen. This also had an effect on scrawny kids like yours truly, who identified with the David and Goliath undertones of boxing against massive, cartoony cronies like Piston Honda and King Hippo. I'd like to think that my subconscious mind viewed each match as a metaphor for man's capacity to overcome any obstacle, no matter how gigantic or crudely-animated.

It's more likely I just enjoyed the look of shock on Bald Bull's face as I sent him down to the mat again.

With it's simple controls and outlandish characters, Punch-Out!! was never meant to accurately represent the "Sweet Science." That didn't stop me from spending hour after hour playing it, memorizing enemy patterns and waiting for the right moment to throw a Star Uppercut. After going back and playing on the Virtual Console, I'm happy to report the game is just as goofy and fun as it was in 1987, maybe even more than deeper simulations like Fight Night. Few things are as satisfying as smacking Soda Popinski around the ring for mocking me before the fight, and for that, Punch-Out!! is this week's Classic Game of the Week.