Is it possible for a first‑person shooter to feel simultaneously like Isaac Newton’s fever dream, a Volkswagen commercial set on the moons of Saturn, and the most elaborate game of capture‑the‑flag ever smuggled onto a LAN‑party hard drive? (Answer: obviously, otherwise I’m wasting a healthy chunk of carpal‑tunnel mileage.) Tribes 2 is that contradictory chimera. Released […]

Is there a stranger cultural chimera than a 1997 PC game that straps bazookas to muscle cars, swaddles every firefight in wah‑wah guitar, and manages, against all odds, to turn disco facial hair into a unifying game‑design motif? (Answer: doubtful, unless you count Daikatana’s ad campaign, and even that lacked the righteous sideburn.) Interstate ’76 is both bizarro and classical: bizarro

Is there anything more deliciously contradictory than a game that lets you micromanage fairway curvature while an 8‑bit kiosk hawks hot dogs with the sonic subtlety of a whoopee‑cushion symphony? (Spoiler: nope.) Sid Meier’s SimGolf might look as stiff as a plaid‑vested club pro on a rainy Tuesday, but behind those chunky sprites lurks a management sim equal parts

What do you get when you trap an entire medieval castle inside a cosmic snow globe, pepper the surrounding void with eight pocket universes, and then hand the player a rune-bag, a broadsword, and an inexplicable craving for roast lizard? (Answer: a 1993 PC game so forward-thinking that modern GPUs still raise an eyebrow.) Ultima Underworld