Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
Rise of Nations. It’s like Civilization but as a real-time strategy game and I really enjoy it. Microsoft actually released an updated edition in 2014 which was good of them but I basically never hear anyone actually talk about it which sucks because it’s such a cool game. The single-player Conquer the World campaigns are also cool, and have some elements reminiscent of the classic Risk board game.
There’s also Star Trek: Bridge Commander, which is often mentioned in discussions of “what Star Trek games were good?” but not much outside of that context. It strikes a perfect balance between having starship combat that really feels like you’re commanding a ship with a lot of mass behind it and actually being fun and easy for an average person to pick up and play (which is where stuff like the X Universe games fall down). There are tons of “space fighter” games out there but I’ve never really seen anything that captures space capital ship combat as well as Bridge Commander.
God, I loved RoN! It was like a better version of Empire Earth which, to me, was already like a better version of Age of Empires.
I mostly enjoyed the era changing, my favourite being the Napoleonic era. And I remember it having a good choice of campaigns/scenarios to play.
I thought RoN would spawn a series of titles but I think they just had Rise of Legends which was interesting but definitely not the same.
I was a Bridge Commander fanatic, picked it up at launch, played way too much of it, modded til it broke dozens of times, participated in the forums, even wrote a GeoCities page where I put out tips for the more challenging campaign missions and did write-ups on every playable ship in the game. Good times.
RoN is also awesome, and is on sale on Steam! Purchased!
Bridge Commander’s modding scene is something else. So many cool ships, graphics overhauls, and even mods that added new mechanics like saucer/multi-vector separation. Truly amazing how much you can mod that game, even if it does get pretty unstable.
And glad you could take advantage of the Steam sale to pick up Rise of Nations: Extended Edition!
I saw an ad video for bridge commander on my armada 2 cd, I wanted to play that game so badly, but by the time sales had stopped.
Years later I “found” it online and had a blast playing it.
Is it available anywhere now?
https://www.gog.com/en/game/star_trek_bridge_commander
They should have Armada as well.
