Your Daily World-Conquest Fix

Aevum Obscurum is an online-only multiplayer game of world conquest. Played on a map of Europe (though other maps can be downloaded and used), each player starts with a single province, a small army, and a treasury. Your ultimate goal is to become the dominant power, controlling much of the map.

Online only? Yes; its primarily a multiplayer game, with up to 50 players possible in a single instance. You play your moves, send them to the server--and when all players moves are in (or the deadline hits), the sever resolves players orders. You then view what happened last turn, and plan your moves for the next. Games can be started either in long-term or "blitz" mode; in blitz mode, turns update every few minutes, while in long-term mode, they update every day or so.

Cosmic Encounter!

Cosmic Encounter! For those of us who encountered the game in our youth, the words have something of the ring of "Oklahoma!" The ebullient American spirit! The vast vistas of, um, outer space. The late nights in dorm rooms or at science fiction conventions studying cards and back-stabbing allies... A brilliant game then, and in its Internet version, a brilliant game still.

Elegant Sword-Fighting Game with Outrageous Stunts

While many games indeed contain sword-wielding characters, very few make even a cursory attempt actually to simulate the dynamics of sword-fighting, nor yet to impart a sense of how it actually feels to engage in swordplay.

That's what Determinance does. True, what it simulates is less the reality of fencing that the sort of over-the-top dramatic swordplay you'd expect in Highlander or a Hong Kong action flick, but hey, that's fun. What it does, and elegantly, is allow you to control sword motions, body positions, and arm positions with nothing but the mouse and its buttons.

Victory Through Superior Programming

Once upon a time in the dim mists of history, when geeks wore pocket protectors and shivered in over-cooled machine rooms filled with mainframe computers, running racks of punch cards through readers and poring over accordion-folded printouts, Silas Marner wrote a game for Xerox PARC's PLATO computer system called RobotWar. And it was good.

Your Once-A-Day 4X Fix

Galactic Emperor: Hegemony is a multiplayer "4X" (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game played via a web interface, with one turn update per day. The basic rules behind the game are simple--each player starts with a single star-system surrounded by 'neutral' ones, and the early game is a matter of expansion until you contact your opponents (usually 12 players in a game). Systems produce resources, which you use to build factories (which produce ships), improve your technology, and purchase a few special units. Ultimately, the player who controls the most systems wins.

Real-Time.. Risk? Meets 4X??

Imagine playing Risk in real time, with new armies showing up continually and attacks occurring as fast as you and your opponents can order them. Or imagine a 4X space conquest game stripped down to the barebones essentials. With graphics that look like they come from a minimalist shmup. With games typically taking 5 minutes, and playable online against up to 11 other players...

Sounds wild? It is, and you've just imagined Galcon.

None Dare Call it XCOM

...Because that's a trademark owned by Atari. But Laser Squad Nemesis is the true intellectual and gameplay heir of XCOM: UFO Defense (published in Europe as UFO: Enemy Unknown), the best-selling and best-loved computer game of 1995. No surprise there; Julian and Nick Gollop developed both games. But as is typical in this industry, they signed away all IP to get XCOM published.

Tactics By Email

Naked Wars is an unusual type of game for the PC--but console players who are familiar with games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem will grok the gameplay quickly.

The main difference is that Naked War is played via email; each turn, you plan your move, send it to the server, your opponent does the same--and when both turns are in, the server sends both of you email with the results of the turn. You 'replay' the turn to see what foiled your well-laid plans, and continue with the next. Each turn will take you about five minutes to plan--and depending on how quickly you and your opponent want to play, you can either complete a full game in a couple of hours of quick back-and-forth, or play it out over days, or even weeks.

SiSSYFiGHT 2000 is, like, an intense war between a bunch of girls who are all out to ruin each other's popularity and self-esteem. The object is to physically attack and majorly dis your enemies until they are totally mortified beyond belief. You'll never come out on top without making the right friends, so be careful who you're nice to. Because in the end, only the shrewdest will survive with their social status intact!

A Little History

SpiritWars premiered in 1998 on WON.net, Sierra's now defunct online game service, and when WON was purchased by the Flipside network and was merged into their casual game service, Randy Chase, the developer, decided to keep it going, running it himself. The game's enthusiastic fans followed him off the service, and have kept it going ever since. Now in version 3.0, it's been iterartively developed over the years until it now contains a veritable wealth of different 'spirits' and maps, and has become a highly polished, smooth-playing game. This is, of course, one of the advantages of this kind of online game; it gets better with age and polish.