Twilight: 2000

The Good
Twilight 2000 is one of those rare games that is both amazing fulfilling and amazingly frustrating. Though it of course does not stand the test of time well in many respects, the detail that went into the game at the time was nothing short of amazing. The character creation has so many options you could spend a week just trying to find the right balance of soldiers in your army.

Twilight 2000 also had a fully 3d driving simulator, which for its time was very ambitious. It wasn't entirely successful, particularly the tank combat. But at the time it still was a blast.

The missions were varied and used the different skills set of your soldiers well. It required trial-and-error, but if you were willing to spend the time planning ahead it was certainly possible to beat the game.

The Bad
The game is very difficult, though I did manage to beat it after probably 6-9 months of playing. When I beat it, the ending included a code that you mailed to Paragon to receive a free t-shirt. Alas, they never did send it to me. I guess given this was their last game, they probably had some major financial troubles.

Also, the randomness of some battles made life difficult. A random grenade here or there could wipe your party instantly.

The Bottom Line
Twilight 2000 was a great game for its time. The vast suite of options was borderline overwhelming. It's not a game I could see replaying in 2007, but in 1991 it provided many, many hours of fun.

The Good
My favorite part of this game was "rolling-up" characters and trying all sorts of different backgrounds to create my team. The options during character creation was staggering. You could send them to school, the military, or pretty much any profession. You could choose skills and make many "life decisions" until, at a random point, the war would begin (which is when the actual game begins). Sometimes my characters would go through almost their entire careers before the war would start and they would be like 48 years old. They would have a ton of skills and special knowledge, but their physical stats would decrease. Sometimes the war would start right after one of my character's boot camp and they would be young and stupid.

The fact that you could control tanks and other vehicles was pretty damn cool. While the game had set missions, you were pretty free to explore the huge maps/cities. The graphics during the vehicle mode was 3D (flight-simish) and looked awesome for 1991.

The turn-based "on foot" fighting system was pretty fun. You could really deck out your party with some serious hardware.

The Bad
The interface while controlling your party during the "on foot mode" was sometimes super aggravating. You didn't have a good overhead map feature. I remember just running all over for what seems like forever just trying to find my jeep. The isometric view was very unforgiving. It didn't scroll, so you could be standing 10 feet from something (like your damn jeep!) and not see it and would have to walk to the edge of the screen before the next "area" would appear.

The Bottom Line
It's a pretty cool game that has a lot there, and if you have the patience, you may truly enjoy it. Unique RPG/Tactical Shooter/Tank sim.

The Good
This game is one of my all time favorites, and should appeal to anyone who likes military simulations. I consider it the spiritual predecessor to Operation Flashpoint.

The graphics were excellent for their time. The first game to make all vehicles drivable and all killed enemies guns' available.

The sheer depth of the game is mind-boggling: weapon diversity such as 6 types of sub-machine guns, 7 types of grenade launchers etc etc. You can make many characters with different traits. Combat is fun. And the missions are fun ONCE you learn how to use the map controls right which most people don't. (there's a very useful "center" button which will help you, and a tactical map which can show you where things are).

The sheer size of the map (all of Poland basically) is astounding. And I bet you if you tried to walk the whole map from south to north it would take you like a month.

So the good poinst are a combination of innovation, depth, realism, and ww3 setting. It works really well.

The Bad
Design issues! The game feels like it was very ambitious but then the programmers just gave up.

For example you can spend forever trying to get one character to master, say, disguise, or fixed wing aircraft, and then later find out there are ZERO applications for this and your character becomes totally useless. Now I know there was a readme file which said which traits were useless but