Motorcycle gang adventure Full Throttle was chock full of 1995-era firsts: it was LucasArt’s first game for Windows, its first game published exclusively on CD, and one of the first games to feature big-name actors for voice acting. Side-scrolling adventure games were everywhere, and LucasArts was the master them. The 1990s were a different time, and I’m not just talking about parachute pants. It’s too bad, because the only time I get rewarded for not killing people nowadays is when I play Agent 47, a dude who is literally paid to kill people. SWAT 3 and other Sierra games have made their way online, but something is causing a snag to hold up SWAT 4. In the most difficult settings, a single dead bad guy would cause a mission failure. Cops in SWAT 4 worked with tools like cameras, tasers, and stun grenades to solve situations without calling the coroners and asking them to bring the big bus around. This idea stuck out in 2005, and it would only be more conspicuous now. In SWAT 4, huge pains were taken to arrest and disarm bad guys instead of blowing them away with shotguns.
The biggest difference is one of philosophy: SWAT 4 remembers that players are supposed to be police officers, not commandos.
For my money, the best police game around is 2005’s SWAT 4. But is Siege a great police game? Maybe not. Rainbow Six: Siege is great fun, a welcome reinvention of the Rainbow Six formula that had gotten a bit rote in recent years. If there is any real effort or desire to bring the game back up for sale, it may have to wait while the lawyers stomp around and sort it out. The issue is most likely in the hand-off between publishers Activision and Bethesda.
Since the second and third entrees in this new series are so good, it’s a shame that the 2009 version silently disappeared from Steam. Machine Games and Bethesda picked it up and ran with it for two more games, The New Order and The Old Blood-two fantastic shooters we adore. Activision laid off employees at Raven and everyone was very sad. We thought it was great, but Wolfenstein 2009 got pretty average reviews and didn’t sell well. In 2009, the series was officially rebooted by Raven and Activision. After helping to start the first-person shooter genre itself in 1992, BJ Blazkowicz and his battle against occult Nazi forces trailed off a bit after 2002’s excellent Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The last 25-odd years have been a rough ride for Wolfenstein fans. Until then, here are some of our favorite games that primarily live on in used game bins, online resellers, and attic CD-ROM collections. Others sit and wait because there’s just no interest today in a minor success from 1993.Ībandonware can still be acquired, obviously, but we’re hopeful that our favorites will eventually be better preserved, updated to run on modern PCs, and made widely available for future generations. These situations lead to cases where one publisher owns the rights to the game’s name, another publisher owns the rights to the game’s sequels, and no one at all owns the rights to publish a game digitally. In many cases, these games are left to collect dust because of a snare of legal issues caused by bankruptcies, lawsuits, layoffs, and mergers. Re-releases of old games and DRM-free resurrections of bygone-era classics have become more and more common, but there’s still a lot of important gaming history that just can’t be bought digitally today.