ISSUE: 89Content
Cover Story:
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The 50 Best Games of All Time: It's been two years since PC Gamer pissed off every reader by compiling a list like this. Therefore, it's time to do it again. Did your game make the list? Here's how it all broke down in 2001, highest to lowest:
- Half-Life
- Civilization II
- X-Com: UFO Defense
- Fallout / Fallout 2
- Dark Forces series
- StarCraft
- Diablo series
- Mechwarrior 2
- Rainbow Six series
- Deus Ex
- The Sims
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Baldur's Gate series
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert series
- Doom / Doom 2
- X-Wing series
- Quake series
- Black & White
- Wing Commander series
- Everquest
- Ultima - Ultima VII
- WarCraft series
- System Shock series
- Age of Empires II
- SimCity series
- Tomb Raider
- NHL 2001
- Panzer General
- Heroes of Might and Magic series
- Ultima Underworld series
- Master of Orion
- Gabriel Knight series
- Need for Speed series
- Star Control 2
- 1942: Pacific Air War
- Monkey Island series
- Unreal series
- Lords of the Realm II
- Total Annihilation
- Roller Coaster Tycoon
- Populous
- Bard's Tale
- High Heat Baseball series
- No One Lives Forever
- Worms series
- Homeworld
- Sam & Max Hit the Road
- Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity
- Tribes, Tribes 2
- Combat Mission
Departments:
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The CD: 649 Serious Megabytes, including numerous patches, EarthLink ISP software, and demos for:
- MechCommander
- Aliens vs. Predator 2
- Throne of Darkness
- The Corporate Machine
- Anachronox
- Half-Life Day of Defeat 1.3
- Letters: You write them, we read them, sometimes there are answers, sometimes we just roll our eyes.
- Eyewitness (News/Behind-the-Scenes reports): The Pentium III chip is being integrated into a US Army project called 'Land Warrior', you can win a copy of Max Payne in this month's contest, two new MMOs are on the way (Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot), Quake IV is coming, a PVP comic strip, and more tidbits than you can shake a monitor at!
- Extended Play (Add-ons, scenario discs, upgrades, patches, mods, and conversions): Daniel Morris looks at the Poseidon add-on for Zeus, and the Sudden Strike Forever add-on for Sudden Strike.
- The Point After (All your sporting opinions): Rob Smolka interviews Shaun Sullivan, the lone wolf developer of PureSim Baseball.
- Killing Box (3D action games, mods, deathmatching, clans, trends, etc...): Colin Williamson says sayonara to his regular opinion column, because the FPS genre has gotten boring.
- Sim Column (Driving, flying, building, military sims, community news): Andy Mahood got to drive a real race car, now he knows how racing games should feel, and he's taking publishers to task for skimping on the details.
- Alternate Lives (Adventure and roleplaying games, online RPGs, news, etc...): Michael Wolf is likewise bidding farewell to his beloved column after seven years.
- Desktop General (Wargames, history military simulations, tactical combat): William Trotter had to turn a fake contest about re-naming grognards into a real one after two months' worth of email convinced him that readers didn't get the joke.
- Backspace (The last word of the issue): Things you really should know before creating your own online clan.
Scoops (aka Previews):
- Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
- Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge
- The Thing
- Project Eden
- Command & Conquer: Renegade
- Zoo Tycoon
Reviews:
- MechCommander 2 (80%)
- Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates (78%)
- Anarchy Online (72%)
- Max Payne (90%; Editors' Choice)
- Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (65%)
- Atari Anniversary Edition (83%)
- Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (90%; Editors' Choice)
- Road Wars (57%)
- The Sting (64%)
- Sega GT (20%)
- Diablo II: Lord of Destruction (75%)
- Desperados (81%)
- 911 Fire Rescue (52%)
- Arthur's Knights (15%)
The Hard Stuff (hardware reviews, plus tech Q&A):
- GMachine Omega gaming PC (84%)
- Massworks ID-75 touch-screen controller (75%)
- Hercules Fortissimo II sound card (95%)
- Belkin Nostromo n45 game pad (80%)
Strategy:
- MechCommander 2 strategy guide
- Dominion Wars strategy guide
- Max Payne strategy guide
- Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare cheats
- Anachronox cheats
- Desperados cheats
- Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal cheats
- Max Payne cheats
Ads (in order of appearence):
- Conquest: Frontier Wars
- Far Gate
- Sid Meier's Civilization III
- Real War
- World War III: Black Gold
- Aquanox
- Game Commander 2
- i-Cybie proto-robo dog
- Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis
- Tom Clancy's Rainbox Six: Rogue Spear - Black Thorn
- F/A-18: Precision Strike Fighter
- Stronghold
- Project Eden
- Klipsch Promedia 5.1 surround system
- Command & Conquer Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge
- Red Faction
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- EarthLink DSL Internet Service Provider
- EBGames.com
- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
- Redmoon
- Battle Realms
- S.W.I.N.E.
- Ultimate Ride
- Voodoo brand PCs
- Commandos 2: Men of Courage
- Ballistics
- Dark Age of Camelot
- Mech Commander 2
- ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card
- PC Gamer subscription cards
- Myth III: The Wolf Age
- Wolop.com gaming systems
- XDream Machines PC hardware
- Command & Conquer: Renegade
- Magic & Mayhem: The Art of Magic
- Official Xbox Magazine special advertising section
- Car Tycoon
- Zax: The Alien Hunter
- Rails Across America
- Conflict Zone
- SmartDisk MVP
- Thrustmaster joysticks and controllers
- Hercules audio and video cards
- Alienware gaming PCs
- Patrician II: Quest For Power
- The Mystery of the Druids
- Sudden Strike Forever
- Disciples II: Dark Prophecy
- Dell laptops and desktop computers
Notable Stuff:
- The price for the Solo Version of this issue (no demo disc) is $4.99 US / $6.99 CAN.
- The Letters column this issue features a letter from a 50-hour-a-week Everquest gamer who cut the cord and got his life back on track. Good for him!
- Troma, the ultra-low-budget film studio, worked with development house Nekrosoft to create Toxic Mayhem: The Troma Project, a real-time strategy game based in the Troma universe, which came out in 2003. What's more, the same studio released a new version of the game, simply entitled The Troma Project, in 2015. What?!
- The Red Faction ad featured in this issue is a small, four-page tear-out booket designed like an information brochure.
- At the time this magazine went to the printers, the top five best-selling PC titles were Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, The Sims, The Sims: House Party, Diablo II, and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Five years earlier, the five best-selling PC titles were Duke Nukem 3D, WarCraft II, Civilization II, Return of Arcade, and Final Doom. What a difference five years makes, eh?
- The ATI Radeon 8500 ad borrows a little too heavily from the ad for Um Jammer Lammy in my opinion.
- Nominating multiple games, or an entire series, as single entries on your "Top 50" countdown doesn't seem quite fair. Man up and pick one!
- The only adventure game to make the Top 50 list is Beavis and Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity. No Myst, no Riven, nothing from Infocom.
- The Xbox Magazine ad section is sixteen pages. That seems like an awful lot of real-estate to devote to a console in a PC gaming magazine.
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Brian Dull won first place in William Trotter's contest to rename 'grognard' to 'COBS', an acronym for "Cranky Old Bastards". But I have to say I'm more a fan of Geoff's entry, which acronym-ized 'grognard' to 'GROGNARD', short for "Guy, Really Overweight, Goes Nuts About Rolling Dice".
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