Is Goal! a straight-laced football sim or the wobbly back-street cousin who insists every cross should detour like a homing pigeon? (Rhetorical question; self-dragging answer: a bit of both, obviously.) Released in 1993, the year Sensible Software’s stick-men still ruled the terraces and Electronic Arts was busy learning how to pronounce “ma-jell-an” for FIFA International Soccer, Dino Dini’s Goal! marched […]

Is Global Domination the weird uncle of early-1990s strategy games, or just a misunderstood cousin that shows up to the family reunion in a garish Risk-cosplay cape and insists the hors d’oeuvres be color-coded “brown” and “purple”? (Rhetorical question; self-owning answer: yes, to both.) Released in 1993 by Impressions Games, right after they taught us to pave Roman

Picture the great DOS-platform-pantheon of the early ’90s: at the summit perch the immaculate Commander Keen episodes, Apogee’s brash Duke Nukem barreling through soda-spill keyboards, and Epic’s neon-loud Jazz Jackrabbit limbering up for 256-color footraces. Way down on a creaky, half-forgotten step of that temple sits Gateworld: The Home Planet, a side-scrolling shareware curiosity in which Captain Buzz Klondike, yes, an interstellar prospector named like an ice-cream

Step inside the shrine of serious computer wargaming and a grey-bearded acolyte will eventually press a single 3½-inch disk into your palm. Boot it, he whispers, and dare to marshal a million cardboard corps. That disk is Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia, a design so devoted to authenticity it makes you convert Soviet railways one hex

Some protagonists arrive in glossy power-armor, some lug plasma rifles the size of bass guitars, and some, well, some are sentient eggs wearing boxing gloves. That alone might pigeon-hole Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk on the “bizarre” shelf, yet its design soul is as classical as a Greek myth (if Zeus had scrambled offspring). Underrated or overrated? If you