Latest Game Reviews

Total Annihilation

Author: GN Team - Published: 25 February 2026, 2:38 am

Total Annihilation is a real-time strategy game developed by Cavedog Entertainment and published by Humongous Entertainment, released on September 27, 1997, for Windows. It was designed by Chris Taylor, and was Cavedog's first and only game series.

Cavedog Entertainment was founded in 1995 by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day as a sister label to Humongous Entertainment, created specifically to develop more mature titles. Ron Gilbert is best known as the creator of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island — so it's a surprising but fascinating piece of gaming history that the same person who gave us Guybrush Threepwood also co-founded the studio behind one of the most ambitious RTS games ever made. After the release of Total Annihilation's first expansion, Chris Taylor left Cavedog to set up his own company, Gas Powered Games, where he would later revisit the concept with Supreme Commander in 2007.

Author: GN Team - Published: 25 February 2026, 2:38 am

Hexen: Beyond Heretic is a fantasy first-person shooter developed by Raven Software. It was released in 1995 as a sequel to Heretic, which had been published one year before. It is the second chapter of the Serpent Riders series.

Hexen was published by id Software, the creators of Doom, and, like Heretic, it uses an enhanced version of the Doom engine id Software created. The modified version of the Doom engine supports more advanced features, such as 3D environments, multiple character classes, and puzzles.

Author: GN Team - Published: 23 February 2026, 8:21 pm

Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is a real-time strategy game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft in 1999 for Windows and Macintosh. It is the sequel to Age of Empires, one of the most successful strategy games of the 1990s, with an expansion, Rise of Rome, released between the two.

The game was led by Ian Fischer as lead designer, with Bruce Shelley — co-founder of Ensemble Studios and co-designer of Sid Meier's Civilization — contributing to the design and historical research. Stephen Rippy returned as music composer, again researching authentic instruments and musical styles for each civilization in the game.

Author: GN Team - Published: 22 February 2026, 1:21 am

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment — then still known as Silicon & Synapse — released for MS-DOS in 1994. The Macintosh version followed in 1995.

The game is set in the fantasy world of Azeroth, where the human kingdoms face an invasion from a mysterious race of Orcs emerging from a dark portal. You can play as either side, with 12 scenarios per faction, each telling the story from a different perspective. The setting was relatively simple by later Warcraft standards, but it established the lore and the rivalry between Humans and Orcs that would define the franchise for decades.

Author: GN Team - Published: 21 February 2026, 2:43 am

Command & Conquer is a real-time strategy game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive in 1995 for MS-DOS. It was later released for Windows 95 and also came to several consoles.

The game was designed by Brett W. Sperry, Joseph Bostic, and Eydie Laramore. Bostic had also co-designed Dune II with Aaron E. Powell, which makes the lineage between the two games even more direct — this was the same creative mind refining and expanding on the formula he had helped invent. In fact, Command & Conquer was built directly on the foundation laid by Dune II, which Westwood themselves had created just two years earlier and which defined the real-time strategy genre. But where Dune II: The Battle For Arrakis was tied to a licensed universe, C&C introduced an original science-fiction setting: a global conflict between the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the terrorist organization Brotherhood of Nod, fighting over a mysterious alien resource called Tiberium.

Author: GN Team - Published: 15 February 2026, 3:49 pm

Stunt Car Racer for the Atari 8-bit is a port of the original C64 game, released in 2018 by two members of the AtariAge forum community. This version brings Geoff Crammond's legendary 3D stunt racing game to the Atari 130XE, based on the original Commodore 64 code written by Crammond himself, and represents an extraordinary technical achievement for 8-bit hardware.

The original Stunt Car Racer, released in 1989 for platforms like the Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, was groundbreaking—a first-person racing game where you pilot Formula 1-style vehicles across impossible roller coaster tracks suspended in mid-air. The combination of speed, physics, and vertigo-inducing course design created an exhilarating experience unlike anything else. Crammond's genius for physics simulation and track design shone through, making every race a thrilling test of nerve and reflexes.