recommend me an offline game please

the-lad

Hi all,
I recently got a new laptop and am looking to get a few games for it. the only pc game i have played and enjoyed in the past is Civilization 2 (mostly consoles I play on). Can you recommend me a few offline games, even older more classic ones like Civilization 2.
cheers

Keedowah

Warcraft 3
Age of Empires

Command & Conquer
Red Alert

theCzar

No brainer surely... Civ4! Fantastic, I love it more and more every minute.

For real time strategy, the Decade C&C collection is great value, all the games, all the addons. Enough to keep you going for another decade.

garrethg

the-lad wrote:

even older more classic ones like Civilization 2.
cheers

Old? Turn-based? 4x? There's plenty of free abandonware here http://www.abandonia.com/genre.php?genre=strategy&page=0, they all predate a new-fangled Windows title like CIV2 though. I recommend Master of Magic and Colonization in particular.

It’s incredibly difficult to (legally) obtain Windows era strategy classics, but some newer turn-based games currently retail available which are worth looking out for:

Galactic Civilisations 2, Space empire 4x, great AI but buggy out of the box.

Space Rangers 2, weird hybrid but incredibly addictive sci-fi trading/rpg/rts/adventure available from online retailers like play.com.

Heroes of Might & Magic 5, it's a resource hog, not as good as 3 but infinitly prettier and well worth playing.

the-lad

thanks one and all

Da Bounca

If you can find it, and can find the program you need to play it,
Master of magic was/is the best turn based strategy game ever. I think it was done by micrpose.
Im not sure of the technical terms, but you need to get a program to allow your pc to run slower, so that the game is playable.

I played it for about 5 hours a day for many many years.
So many different races, buildings, heros, monsters, spells, items, events, and even worlds.
Each game creates an entirely new world, and there are 2 planes of existence. Amazing game.
I heard rumor that there was a multiplayer patch, but could never find it, only referance to it.

garrethg

DosBox runs Master of Magic perfectly on my XP machine and allows altering of CPU cycles on the fly. It's included on PCGamer's DVD every month but it's also a reasonably small download.

I can't understand why there's never been a remake of or follow up to MoM. Stardock (the developers of Galactic Civilisations) were in licence negotiations with Atari about it for a while.

Scruff

Total Annihilation
old but brilliant and still looks good given its age. plenty of mods and new maps out there for it too.
There are also complete engine updates to mak it look even better (see here) that i am just after finding out about myself this minute!!
think i'll start downloading those pronto!!

hairyheretic

garrethg wrote:

Old? Turn-based? 4x? There's plenty of free abandonware here http://www.abandonia.com/genre.php?genre=strategy&page=0, they all predate a new-fangled Windows title like CIV2 though. I recommend Master of Magic and Colonization in particular.

Any idea if the copy of UFO they have there runs on XP or not?

Man, the hours I put into that game back when it first came out ...

Edit - It comes with a patch that lets it run under XP. There goes my free time

Blowfish

Scruff wrote:

Total Annihilation
old but brilliant and still looks good given its age. plenty of mods and new maps out there for it too.
There are also complete engine updates to mak it look even better (see here) that i am just after finding out about myself this minute!!
think i'll start downloading those pronto!!

Brilliant game. I'd also add Alpha Centauri as another that has consumed far too many hours of my life.

garrethg

hairyheretic wrote:

Any idea if the copy of UFO they have there runs on XP or not?

Man, the hours I put into that game back when it first came out ...

Edit - It comes with a patch that lets it run under XP. There goes my free time

So you found the Windows version, time sink isn't it