Alien Legacy

The Good
Despite its many and numerous flaws, Alien Legacy managed to accomplish something that few other games have ever accomplished for me in nearly 20 years of computer gaming. It made me feel like I really was colonizing wildly disparate environments in a solar system light years from Earth. It had an immersiveness for me that no other game in the "colonize remote planets" genre has provided. That alone made it memorable.

The Bad
Sadly, Alien Legacy was rife with bugs. And not just minor bugs, either. We're talking major show-stopping, game-killing bugs. The biggest one of the bunch was the fact that time was supposed to stop during certain phases of the game, but it didn't. This was crucial because the game was essentially an adventure game draped in the garb of a space colonizing sim, and many of the plot devices (how soon the aliens started attacking you, how long you had to peacefully noodle around in space before dropping your first colony, etc) were triggered by the timer. The aliens would always start attacking on day X, your crew would always mutiny on day Y, etc.

This wouldn't have been a problem, except that a lot of the gameplay involved piloting your ship over the surfaces of the planets in your new solar system looking for resources. When you were in this particular phase, the game timer was supposed to stop, so that when you finished flying over the planet, you wouldn't have lost any time in the macro game. But it didn't stop. So while you were flying around the planets looking for resources, the game timer was ticking away, meaning that when certain game plot elements were triggered, you wouldn't be prepared for them.

Damned annoying.

The Bottom Line
It could have been really great, but it wasn't.