Cont'd:
Incredibly innovative action game. While everyone was making their Doom clones like Corridor 7 or Dark Forces, Origin came out with Crusader No Remorse and went in as different a direction from Doom as nearly possible. Isometric perspective, highly detailed (for the time) graphics, fully destructible environments, deep story, puzzles and traps that go beyond mere key hunts, controllable robots to dish out the carnage for you. This game is incredible. You never feel more uncertain of your morality than when The Silencer is walking the halls blowing up everything in sight, including gutting security guards and setting innocent bystanders aflame. All the while the Silencer shows no emotion, or no remorse if you will. The FMV sequences are pretty funny and definitely take you back to the mid 90's. The controls were extremely awkward at first, but are slowly becoming second nature. Also, the music is amazing.
Like Crusader No Remorse, Total Annihilation decided to turn the strategy genre on its head a little and try something a bit different. Instead of the general resource acquisition you see in pretty much any RTS ever, you merely just build these buildings that constantly acquire the resources for you, the catch being the more you build, the quicker they gather. On paper that doesn't sound a whole lot different, but it really is. TA is also in a sort of pseudo-3D environment so terrain is more important here (for cover or slowed movement speed), and the units while all similarly blocky, are fun to watch get into combat and see explode into hulking wrecks. Definitely a cool change of pace from the typical RTS fare.
Haven't actually played this one yet. I'll probably get around to it this summer when I can sit with it for longer than hour long increments. But I've read about this one for years and it's well regarded. Apparently it's a very dense adventure game set in New Orleans, with all that great voodoo and what all it seems. Very excited to give it a go, I enjoy Sierra quite a bit.
I know even less about this one than Gabriel Knight, but I had read about it several years ago on some list of 'scariest adventure games' and it sounded interesting, a spook adventure game, haven't really played many of those, and it has more of an indie developer vibe and I generally enjoy that. So that should be exciting.