1989. The GameBoy is released in North America, and I don't care. I don't care because I own the finest piece of gaming hardware ever made -- the Atari ST computer. Hyperbole? Sure. But in the summer of 1989 I was playing a game unlike anything I'd ever seen. That game was Peter Molyneux's most original game ever: Populous.

1989 was a good year for gamers. It brought us Prince of Persia. It brought us the GameBoy. But more than anything else, it brought us two games that gave us the opportunity to become gods. The first game was SimCity, the second was Populous. Something was clearly in the air that year.

No single game was more addicting and at the same time more consistently infuriating in the history of all my thirty gaming years than Counter-Strike. For all the zen-like mindless joy that a game like World of Warcraft has provided these four past trips around the sun, it is nothing to the virtual epochs I spent in the throes of Counter-Strike's bewitching thrall. This is a game that took years off my life, and one that I hold in a special chamber of my heart to this day. Yet, even as I write of its relative greatness, I wonder whether I am suffering under some long-term form of internet Stockholm syndrome.

The horror of the game sits as squarely in my mind as the joy. Public servers were a mire of the worst in internet culture, a constant assault of obscenity, brutality and chicanery. Wall-hacks and griefers were, and likely remain, as common as AWP whores and errant flashbangs. It should have been such an easy game with which to grow disenchanted, and yet it called me back night after night.

Yet, when it shone, when the game rose above the flaws fundamental to its presentation, no shooter was more thrilling. To recall the occasional moment when I alone succeeded where the rest of my team had failed is to remember the most superior joy of video gaming. Planting that bomb, alone by the crates in Dust 2, and then defending it against the last CTU stragglers could elicit a primal barbarian yawlp. Never was victory sweeter.

CS defined a generation of shooters, and probably has as many people who hate everything the game seems to stand for as those who were held in its unparalleled sway. Yes, it was a fickle bitch, a demanding mistress who would routinely turn on you with all the subtlety and sensitivity of frenzied bear. But when it was good, I daresay it was never better.

The question is not whether Civilization belongs as a Classic Game of the Week. The question is, which one do you put on top?

Channeling my inner Jim Croce, for a moment, if I could put time in a bottle, then I'd need a fully functioning bottling plant to fill the containers that hold hours lost to Civilization in its many forms. No series has more consistently mesmerized me during play sessions into a kind of joyful stupor from which I wandered bleary eyed to bed at Unholy-fifteen-in-the-morning. Sid Meier and increasingly Soren Johnson should hold an annual clinic on delivering constant and consistent reward in video games and attendance should be mandatory and compulsory. Releasing a game without hearing Sid and Soren talk at length should be a penalty punishable by banishment or being shot from a canon into the sun.

I'm almost done! Just as soon as I build the Pyramids -- just as soon as I research writing -- just as soon as I capture Corinth -- just as soon as I build this trebuchet -- just as soon as I convert to Hindu -- just as soon as I get riflemen -- just as soon as I ... Oh My God is it really that late?!

I admit that I think Civilization IV, particularly when combined with the absolutely epic Beyond the Sword expansion, is probably one of the most lovingly crafted and perfect games I've ever played. It's a permanent resident of my hard drive and something I will fire up for years to come. At least until Firaxis decides to go back to the old watering hole and eek out the next iteration in the series, but I think Civization II will always hold the soft spot in my heart. It was one of those games that defined me as a gamer, and that I look back upon with great affection, so I give the nostalgic nod to old school Civ.

But, just for the record, if you don't own Civilization IV, then you have made a tragic error in judgment that should be corrected post haste!

*image credit to Gamespot as you can tell from that little G in the corner

Released in the summer of 1999, Outcast was the pinnacle of the hot new technological trend hoping to render (ha!) video cards obsolete: voxels. We were to be liberated from an ill-conceived 3D arms race in favor of CPU-focused, voxel ray casting engines. The problem was that games like Half-Life had already been released a year before, leaving some of the more impressive graphical feats like snow, rippling water, large rolling hills and shadows playing across character models not quite the industry shaking innovation they would have been a couple years before had the game released on time.

Outcast was more than an attempt at technical trailblazing, though. Fully voice acted and backed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Outcast did a lot to set the stage for the open world games we enjoy so much now. You play as Cutter Slade, a US Navy Seal who finds himself in another dimension and trying to save the earth, all while juggling a population who thinks he’s a God. This is plausible when you consider that it takes place in the far flung future of 2007. In what has now become a mainstay of modern game design, you spend a lot of time navigating the open 3D world, getting into random, real-time shootouts with unfriendly factions and running quests to further the story.

While hybrids are common now, the action/adventure/sandbox blend was pushing all kinds of envelopes in 1999. Outcast had some of the main tenets of story driven, open world exploration games like Fable popularized, all while Peter Molyneux was still mucking about with giant cows in Black and White. The best part is that in the age of dual-core CPUs, everyone can enjoy Outcast at the opulent 512x384 resolution, something few could manage with the hefty Pentium III, 128 MB RAM requirements back in the day. If you're feeling brave you could try the demo, or hope against hope that fans remake the original in a modern engine. We're not likely to ever see a modern sequel, Belgian developer Appeal shut down in the early stages of development with their slick new 3D engine. That's what you get for abandoning voxels.

There are a select few who could survive the transition to video game protagonist. One can’t quite imagine Super Bono RPG, for instance. But Michael Jackson? There was a guy ripe for gamedom.

I first ran across Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker in a run-down mall arcade in Mexico. I had only the vaguest idea of who Jackson was, and absolutely no notion that the game before my grubby hands was based on a film of his. It didn’t really matter, because a sharply-dressed gangster who killed kidnapping robots with magic bursts of energy was, as far as I recall, an untapped niche in the 90s arcade scene. There was also the ability to dance the enemies to death and an out-of-nowhere robot power-up in the form of Bubbles the Chimp, just to reinforce the whole Michael Jackson theme it had going on.

Note to kids: learn how to dance and you can be this cool, too!

Interestingly enough, I never got close to finishing the game. It was always a guilty pleasure I could plunk a few quarters in to pass the time. It didn’t whip me into a spastic frenzy the way that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could, but there was a certain bit of charm to holding the attack button down so Mikey could moonwalk all over the stage. I like to think I walked away from the game feeling just a slight bit cooler. Also of note, the machine stuck around for many, many years. For close to a decade’s worth of sporadic tourism, I saw the cabinet as my relatives took me on the customary mall excursion.

In this odd fashion, Moonwalker became a staple of my childhood, and it’s my choice for our Classic Game of the Week.

No doubt, the immediate future will be filled with all kinds of tributes directed to The Gloved One. To these outpourings of loss and love, I can only offer one comment: He made a damned fun game.

The recent release of Overlord II reminds me how fundamentally I enjoy playing the mirthful villain. A role I can never really take on in a game like KOTOR or Fallout where villainous actions tend to be sadistic or cruel in very concrete terms, the more whimsical and candy-coated my trip to the dark side, the happier I am.

This approach is defined by Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, a classic PC game by any definition. I would have words with anyone who suggests that malevolence with comedic overtones has ever been quite so well explored. Pistols at dawn, I would say, and then in a very Dungeon Keeper fashion I would shoot them in the back, cackeling with glee as I waited for cavorting imps to drag their carcass to the graveyard. Casting the player in the role of an evil disembodied hand taked with creating an impervious and trap laden dungeon was, frankly, a stroke of genius. If I were to chart Peter Molyneaux’s career on graph paper, here is the mountain peak.

What helped to define and separate DK was that it did not put the player into the role of construction worker so much as architect. While creatures were not exactly autonomous, they would carry about their own mischief outside of direct intervention, even at times to the detriment of the player. The strategy of laying out an imposing and sophisticated dungeon became a critical foundation of the game, and one had to make sure that it was appropriately devised to serve many needs. At any moment, one had to manage their finances, make sure enemies were blocked out of sensitive areas, keep fighting minions separated and create easy access to key services. I suppose when you write it out like that, it can be hard to understand precisely why this is fun, but a dungeon shouldn't just be a big haphazard cavern. It should be a home; an evil home.

Embracing the pleasure of evil, and sometimes just taking a minute to slap an imp around for just no good reason at all, was a new and devilishly welcome exploration of gameplay. Though Bullfrog was folded a few years later and much of its staff sent to the pits to work on Harry Potter games (true) before the completion of DK 3, the original still stands apart, and is my Classic Game of the Week.

I realize that many hold in high regard games like Baldur's Gate and the D&D Gold Box games, and with good reason, but when I think about the pinnacle of my CRPG experience one game stands above and alone: Ultima VII - The Black Gate. The introduction to what, I suppose, was the third and final Ultima trilogy and its ultimately misguided arc that would fizzle out with the largely disappointing Ultima IX, The Black Gate was itself an absolute masterpiece from beginning to end. In my mind, the reveal of The Guardian through the static of my computer screen as the opening centerpiece of the game is one of the most iconic beginnings, if only because I associate it in my mind as the prologue of one of the best video game stories told.

The game is almost literary in its structure, set initially in the context of a murder mystery in the town of Trinsic, but eventually stretching into a grand epic across the face of Brittania. The world that you return to after a presumed 200 year absence is both exactly and nothing quite like the one left behind. Aside from the considerable technical improvement in the game's presentation, the presence of The Fellowship which has become the moral leaders of the realm adds a phenomenal layer to the already complex moral landscape of the series.

I'm not sure that a game world ever felt like more of an evolutionary leap from anything I've played before it that Ultima VII. It's certainly true that modern worlds are often more interactive and more complex that that of 1992's Brittania, but for the standards of the time this game's technical achievements are mind bending. For a series that had established itself with games like Exodus, Quest of the Avatar and the criminally underrated The False Prophet -- to say nothing of the Ultima Underworld games -- that it managed to top everything that had come before by an arbitrary factor of ten is proof positive that it is one of the all-time classics.

At one time there was a question, and that question was who will be the Quake Killer. In 1998 the potential answers to that question included Sin, Requiem, Prey, Daikatana, Duke Nukem 4 — yes, it’s been that long — and a relative upstart on the FPS stage, Half Life. To be honest, the idea of a Quake Killer was becoming a little stale, and while first person shooters were the hottest market around, it was pretty obvious that no one was going to do it better than id.

Then, I took a tram ride through Black Mesa Research Facility, and that all changed.

A lot of people liked to imagine that eventually a video game might be able to put forth the kind of cinematic experience that seemed as deep and engaging as a film, but to date that was still something of a pipe dream. There had certainly been games to incorporate full motion video and other gimmicks to create a sense of magnitude, but no one had really done it organically in game until Half Life came along.

It’s a little difficult looking back to see how game-changing Valve’s opening salvo was, because we take for granted now the things that Half Life did with level design, AI and narrative. Even now I look back and am amazed at how seamlessly the apocalypse of Black Mesa took place, and how it slowly changed over the course of the game from teaming with scientists to becoming a war zone. Looking back, I remember iconic moments that include triggering the accident, my first firefight with the military that was supposed to be saving me, scaling a cliff-side while being hunted by an attack helicopter, and of course that opening tram ride.

It was a game for the ages.

Recording this week's podcast we were asked what games first transformed gaming from some simple and silly pasttime into something more powerful and more meaningful. Within a moment my mind's eye was transported into the cockpit of a Rapier blasting the supposedly evil and decidedly feline Kilrathi from the skies around the TCS Tiger's Claw, Meson Blasters and Tachyon Cannons blazing the night.

I describe Wing Commander as my Classic Game of the Week, when in fact what I mean is the series of major PC releases that populated my monitor for nearly a decade. Christopher Blair, the hero of the Terran Confederation time and again, holds a special place in nostalgic corners of my game-brain, both as the later incarnation that bore a striking resemblance to Luke Skywalker as well as the early blue-haired pilot whose hands could actually be seen handling the flight stick if you had sufficient technological capacity.

The series was a sweeping epic of grand proportions for a young industry. It described and executed a possibility for gaming, to be as majestic and affecting as cinema, that many had never dared to suggest was possible. It is a game that unlike almost any other I love as much because of its cutscenes and story as its gunplay. It is also somehow a striking metaphor for the evolution, both good and bad, of the young business of gaming.

With the possible exception of Descent Freespace, this was for me the last, great stand of the joystick. I recall with deep fondness leaning into my Microsoft Sidewinder, thrusters at full, rotating and spinning through the void of space to get in position to lead that perfect shot that dispatched my umpteen-thousandth Dralthi Fighter. I have moved on to tiny nubbins of plastic console controls and mice/keyboard combos, but I have never felt like my games have been as tactile as they were when I held those joysticks of old.

To list out the Wing Commander series of games is to count out some of the greatest games of all time. Not a one of the five major canon releases was a disappointment, each upping the ante to the point where Hollwood level talent breathed powerful life into characters like Maverick, Tolwyn, Paladin & Maniac. Even Wing Commander: Privateer stands in my mind as the father of high-profile, open-world gaming, and while Chris Roberts offered a hint of that genius years later with Freelancer, I'm not sure anyone has ever managed to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Privateer.

I suppose I will always be resentful at the mismanagement of Origin by Electronic Arts, a bungling powerplay that left some of the greatest franchises in PC gaming virtually ruined in its wake. Wing Commander Prophecy, a 1997 reboot of the franchise that seemed poised to bring Wing Commander into the modern era in a meaningful way remains a promise unfulfilled. But I hate to close on a sad note.

Forgetting for the moment some less than stellar console spin-offs and a tragically bad film, Wing Commander on the PC stands as a titan of gaming. I wish so much that I could go back and play them again for the first time.

I wish I could say I discovered Majesty nine years ago when it was released on the Mac and the PC. A mix of Dungeon Keeper and Age of Empires, it takes the standard fantasy RPG trappings and mixes them in with the interface and controls of an RTS. The end result is a blend of real-time base building on an overland map combined with heroes you recruit who level up, buy potions and learn new skills -- all without ever taking a direct order from you. A departure from the god-like power we expect from RTS games, these heroes are completely autonomous. The best you can do is place a bounty on a wandering Medusa and hope someone can be bothered to head over and deal with it.

Rather than micromanage your way to victory, you play the role of gardener trying to create the right conditions for your units to thrive. Drop a library so your mages can learn to spells, a market so your heroes can buy potions and even a blacksmith for them to buy better equipment if they have the coin. You have your own goals going into a given scenario, but often the biggest hurdle is just fighting off the hordes of enemies long enough to give your heroes the time and space they need to gain experience and buy new gear.

The primary joy in playing comes from watching as a given hero ventures out into the world and spends his first few battles running away before finally coming into his own. If you really want to foster some advancement, you can cast spells (with the right research and buildings) like lightening bolts and invisibility to increase their survivability. Of course, casting spells costs money, so building your kingdom and giving your tax collectors plenty to do is essential. Finding the right ecological blend of complimentary units also makes a difference as a cultist hero walks the lands planting poison plants that your rogues can use to make their weapons more deadly.

Majesty holds up surprisingly well considering its age. I’ve been playing on Windows XP and aside from a couple crashes and editing the registry to reduce the scroll speed, it’s been great. The interface is a bit large but it’s intuitive enough and even gives you a small window for tracking heroes while you build your kingdom. The original never got a ton of attention back in the day, but clearly there was enough interest in the brand as 1C Company is working on a sequel scheduled to come out later this year. You can grab the original Majesty along with the expansion from GamersGate for $9.99. Read on for more screenshots!