Your Top 50 Games: 2011 Discussion Thread

[SvennoJ]

#27 Dune 2: battle for Arrakis played on PC, released 1992

The game that laid the foundation for all the RTS games to come. The first Dune game already experimented a bit with RTS at the end of it's excellent adventure. Dune 2 took this element and created the mold for the modern RTS games.

The game itself is very well made with 3 great campaigns to complete. House Artreides, Harkonnen and Ordos fight for control of the spice on planet Dune. Each has their own unique units and special structure. There is only 1 resource to mine, the spice. Be careful while mining, worms may pop up at any time and eat your harvester.

There were no rallying points yet, or grouping units, everything needed to be micro managed. That wasn't a problem since you didn't have very many units to keep track of. The advantage of this was that you really cared about those tanks you just spend so much time to build. No sending of waves as cannon fodder. You needed to carefully take your time to position your different units backing each other up not to loose them to quickly to the enemy defenses.

The game wasn't perfect, the enemy AI became quite predictable after a while. Once you know where they like to attack and focus all your defenses there you are basically invincible (apart from their special attacks). There is of course still the puzzle left how to break down their base before you run out of spice to mine.

There was a remake in 1998, Dune 200. It was still fun to play but other RTS games had advanced much more by then.

I played Dune 2 so much that I decided to build an editor for it. With its graphical interface I could easily alter any of the scenarios and make more challenging maps. Construct deviously difficult enemy bases, put all the spice near the enemy, and give them some advanced units to begin with.
This kept the game fresh for a long time. It was great fun to play with a friend, designing difficult scenarios, then watching the other try to master them.

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