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Evil Genius had a very fun soundtrack. Most of the tracks were really good. I remember looking for the music for the game to listen to outside of the game because of how good it was. It's very "spy movie" (specifically James Bond-ish) and a lot of fun.

It has mouse support too, the interface actually changes if you plug the PSone mouse in.

There was also PC version. The developer released the source to it

http://www.strategyplanet.com/warzone2100/

I've been a long time game geek from the pen and pencil D&D days, what has been most challenging for me is to find games computer and non-computer that I can play with my 12 year old daughter. She is relatively innocent still, so stuff like Doom 3 and Half-Life were relegated to after she went to sleep. I played EQ for four years and finally burnt out on the same old pull-and-kill every night.

So what follows here are the games we've found that I can enjoy with her and are pretty much age appropriate and a lot of fun.

1. Neverwinter Nights - yeah, it's graphics are not state of the art, but what it lacks in graphics it makes up for in replayability, story, game play and ability to customize and create your own adventures. We just finished Hordes of the Underdark and it was a real challenge and a heck of a lot of fun. She loves it. And the ability to play any of the literally 100's of user created modules for free just makes it that much easier on my wallet. She begs me to play most nights and their is a content control to lower the violence level. We both love this one and it doesn't take a massive computer to run. Just be aware that each computer you play on (if doing multiplayer) will require a copy with a license key.

2. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 w/ In The Wake of the Gods free expansion (WOG)

HOMM3 was a great game even before the user created WOG expansion. After 3DO went under, some users out there took the best parts of Heroes 4 and some of their own ideas and created an expansion that gives you a ton of new options and content. If you liked it before, get the WOG download and check out the changes - new monsters, demolish buildings, build new towns, give magic items to your hero's champion, etc. Here's a link to the WOG site - http://www.strategyplanet.com/homm/wog/wog.shtml

3. Magic the Gathering Online (and off)

Again not a great graphics game, but the game play is always awesome and the online version enforces the rules. That eliminates a lot of the quibbling that goes on in real life Magic games. The only drawback here is cost - you have to pay for your online boosters. There is a good aftermarket, however, on Ebay and other sites where you can sell your entire collection or just buy that one card you need to get your deck tuned up. We like playing in real life too as I've been playing 10 years and have lots of cards laying around. Give it a try - free on the demo site. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/magicon line

4. Neopets

She loves the Neopets site and I have to admit that some of the games are fun for a while. It keeps her interested and I would recommend it for any kid. My sister-in-law spends hours on the site. There is a reason that MTV bought it - you don't want to leave because there is so much to do there. Oh, and it's totally free. www.neopets.com

5. MAME

We've got an old 300MHz box setup with an X-Arcade dual joystick. Nothing like firing up a game of Galaga or Black Tiger. My daughter loves discovering those old games and trying to beat them. Dig out that old PC in your basement, what are you waiting for.

Non-Computer Game All Stars

1. Puerto Rico

This board game has great replayability as every game ends up different. It sounds cheesy trying to become the governor of a little island by growing and selling coffee, sugar, indigo and corn, but the game revolves around tough decision making and its weird turn based system is pretty cool once you get used to it. An all-time favorite at our house.

2. Talisman

If you can find it, pick this one up. Games Workshop made this and a number of expansions some years ago and it went out of print for a long time. The originals sell for huge amounts on Ebay, but I found a recent reprint at a local game store a few months ago for $75. Great g

Startopia is a game that follows allong the same lines as Dungeon Keeper, except that you play it in a space station rather than under the earth.

Its quite entertaining, and can be found in the bargain bin in quite a few stores.

Another link

Quake Mods aren't modular, they're monolithic. The level of granularity is so coarse, that designers need to perform a huge amount of tedious work, in order to make a good one. And you can only experience on at a time, so if you have 100 good mods, they don't synergistically add to each other's value.

Sims objects and characters are modular mods, so they plug together into a simulated environment and interact with each other. You can take objects and characters created by many different designers, and compose them together with stuff you created yourself, into your own higher level, monolithic "mod" (a family living in a house).

Sims object and character creators don't have to worry about achieving "balance" -- that's the fun part of the game that the players do for themselves, in Build and Buy mode.

Achieving balance is the hard part of making successful Quake mods. But achieving balance is the fun part of playing The Sims. This approach lifts the burden of achieving balance from the shoulders of mod designers, and repackages it as entertainment for players.

Games that support truly modular mods like Sims objects and characters, enable mod designers to create interesting, expressive, stand-alone objects that players love to plug together (and value enough that they'll pay for downloading), at a more prolific, finer level of granularity than monolithic game mods like Quake.

Modular mods work together at many different levels, and they're open-ended, so there's never any end to what you can do with them.

The Palm House, Kew Gardens is a great example how many different artists, designers, historians and botanists have colaborated together at different levels, to create an accurate representation of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew.

With the permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this theme celebrates the wonders of not only the Palm House, but the Temperate House, Dome and Formal Gardens of Kew in this prestigious time of it gaining World Heritage Status. You can read more about this important event here.

This exemplary historical recreation is not just the end-product of many people's colaboration, but actually a contributing source in a huge distributed feedback loop:

You can download the Royal Botanic Gardens, plug the lot into your game, move your own family in, furnish it however you like, rearrange the landscape and architecture, deconstruct and reassemble it again with your own collection of objects, direct the drama as it unfolds, take pictures with the built-in camera, write stories in your scrapbook, and publish your family and their story on The Sims Exchange, to share with other players, to download and play with all over again.

-Don

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

The Sims "level designer" (i.e. the architectural tools for editing your house, buying and placing objects) are built into the game, which makes it possible for 8-year-old kids to easily "design levels".

But there's a lot more to customizing and creating you own game than "level design". The Sims also lets you design your own characters and objects, plug them together to tell stories, and even publish the stories online.

The Sims' storytelling ability hinges on the player's ability to add their own characters (skins) and scenery (objects) into the set, to illustrate whatever stories they want to tell.

Thanks to player created content, The Sims becomes more like the open-ended Perky Pat layouts in Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic not only make it possible for characters to customize the game to tell their own stories, but also share their creations with other players, and download objects from the web to play in their own games.

High quality subscription web sites like SimFreaks actually pay talented artists to create beautiful sets of themed objects, like the Christmas Gingerbread House set.

Some experienced artists are generous enough to freely teach other Sims players how to create their own objects, by publishing step-by-step tutorials in the principles of object making for the complete novice, at sites like The Bunny Wuffles School of Sims Transmogrification.

The celebrated designers at the Cultural Heritage Foundation have made names for themselves by using Transmogrifier and other tools to create all the necessary scenery to build amazing historical recreations, like The Palm House, Kew Gardens, London England, the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Theme, and the Turkish Baths.

Maxis has created a wide range of objects for The Sims, which are included with the original game, the seven expansion packs, and numerous free downloads. But the player created object outnumber the Maxis created objects by an order of magnitude.

The Sims also opens up opportunities for programmers as well as artists: third party software developers like SimPrograms and SimsTools have created a market for tools that enable players to manage their Sims objects, and artists to make even more of them.

I'm developing some easy-to-use tools that automate the Transmogrification process, and open up Sims object creation to wide range of people. RugOMatic enables anyone, even without artistic talent or technical skills, to quickly create their own rugs for The Sim by dragging and dropping pictures and text.

RugOMatic

Ah, I see. Well, risk-taking games appear once in a blue moon, and they're often cloned to death. The notion that Japanese developers as a whole are more innovative is an unproven illusion.

I play games from Japanese, American, European, Australian, and other companies, and it seems to me that the creativity factor is average across the globe. It is understandable that some people confuse cultural oddity (from their perspective) with innovation, and it is very easy to fall in love with one particular society, but taken too far it will only deprive you of great experiences from elsewhere.

In fact, you've really got to keep your eyes wide open, or else you'll miss some real gems. Stuff like Combat Mission, Moonbase Commander, and Natural Selection, right off the top of my head.

Actually, you could even say that Japan's slow adoption of the PC platform has put them in last place when it comes to innovation, since tons of innovation comes from independent and small-time developers. After all, it takes a huge budget to put a console game on the market, but anyone with a little skill and a dream can make their own PC game and put it out on the Internet. Those three games I listed above would never have seen the light of day on a console, for instance.

Emulation options exist for every platform you mention.

Dear Majesty Fans,

We realize that it's been a long time since we have had any concrete updates on the status of Majesty 2. Most of you have been waiting patiently for the big announcement. While we haven't yet decided on a publisher for Majesty Legends (our working title) we haven't been sitting idle either. The following screenshots show the current state of our work on the sequel.

For the moment we will let the screenshots speak for themselves.

-Jay Adan
Cyberlore Marketing Manager

(This is supposed to be a humorous Kohan reference, in case any moderators think this is offtopic)

Here is a page which lists Gaming Sites and their ratings of Kohan. The Awakening I admit that it is a little behind in release time, but it is a good game. Actually it is my favorite game because it is more a Macro strategy instead of micro strategy that Warcraft 3 encompasses.

Demis Hassabis, who co-created Theme Park and whose company, Elixir Studios, is currently at work on Republic - the Revolution is a strong amateur shogi player. (OK, strong by Western standards.) He won five out of six (even, as opposed to handicapped) games in the British Open Championship the weekend before last and so has qualified to be part of the team to represent the UK in the World Championship later in the year. It's not much of an exaggeration to say Demis is a strong amateur * player - because if he isn't a strong amateur at a game yet, he's proved that he will pick it up frighteningly quickly - though I understand his poker isn't going to be taking him to the World Series in the near future.

Good luck Demis! (...and Stephen and Les...)

My favorite addictive game is Patrician II by Ascaron. Basically you are a merchant located in a town in the 14th century, being member of the hanse. You trade all over the baltic sea and the north sea, you fight pirates, build houses, manufactories, etc. and become mayor of your town... later you can you go on to explore america, etc... :) Check out Patricianworld for more info about Patrican II (no, I am not affiliated with that site). Also, the new add-on for Patrican II allows for internet play and has more cool features.

about this game is not really the graphics (which are outstanding). The AI and the adaptablilty are truly unprecedented. The movie titled Black and White - The E3 Movie located here really tells the whole story. This is a most ambitious game. It will do things like tie in with you IM client and your creature will read your messages to you if you're playing when you're messaged. The creatures dance to your MP3s, and learn to enjoy songs you play over and over. I'm very excited about this game, and am really hopinng they are doing a Mac version. There's a lot more to this game than any sim/rpg/god game we've seen.