Anyone who liked Sword of the Samurai has a good chance of liking
Covert Action. They're somewhat similar, both being a sort of collection of subgames of different genres. That and both being from Microprose and released around the same time.
And now for something obscure:
Millennia: Altered Destinies. A game of the now dead Strategy/Adventure genre.
So what's it about? Mostly time travel. Your objective is to populate an empty galaxy with 4 sentient races and track and alter their technological progress through 10000 years. Ultimately, these races will have to face a common alien enemy and it's your job to make sure they're ready for it and that they can eventually supply you with technology for your ship.
Your ship's most prominent feature is the ability to travel through time, at least 100 years at a time. You can also always view the race homeworld timelines, showing you what sort of events will occur in time. And you, of course, are to move back and forth through time and attempt to alter these events so that these races survive and prosper. And they will need help surviving.
The races are sort of anthropomorphic caricatures. There's the war-loving lizards, the fanatically religious polar bears, the hivemind insectoids and the consumerist fishpeople. They're all utterly stupid and are guaranteed to drive themselves (and possibly each other) into extinction without your guidance.
Upon seeding these races, you also sent down immortal variants of them to act as your ambassadors. You'll mostly be interacting with the race through them, via dialogues. They do not, however, consider you God, nor omnipotent. They mostly turn to you when they have problems and it's convenient that you instruct them on what to do and eventually they may resist your advice and face annihilation unless you're persuasive enough. This mostly means having to go through the same dialogue tree till you get it right (you can control time, after all), but some of the dialogues are pretty amusing. And you should throw out all your modern sensibilities out the window when dealing with them. Most races will not prosper under our idea of the ideal political system (democracy), that'll downright lead them to failure. You need to consider their tendencies and make sure your advice doesn't conflict with them, but you cannot let them overdo it (nuclear war is not good, even for the lizard people).
Your own ship doesn't require much. You need only to make fly-bys near gas giants to refuel and repairs are done automatically. You can try to fight the enemy in space, but this just leads to a dull point and click battle and, from my experience, all this does is divert the invasion to a different star system, so your success relies on how the races evolve. Each of the races will eventually be able to supply your ship with some unique technology. The combination of these will allow you to return to your own galaxy (the real ultimate goal). You will also find out that you're not the only one travelling through time.
It's worth noting that this game is hard. I never played it effectively enough to even have a single race become space-faring before the invasion came. And there's no walkthrough out there whatsoever. However, the game is worth checking out if only for the concept of freely travelling through time and altering it to achieve a greater goal.
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Topic: Games for DOS thread!!! (Read 6090 times)