Without the visual hooks of Gears of War’s gigantic sassy muscle men and subterranean monsters, it was mostly just grey-brown military generica, and a very short and easy game to boot. This one faded from memory pretty quickly, largely in part because the game was, well, kinda mid. While a little raw and unrefined nowadays, it’s not hard to see Kill.switch’s influence. It introduced blind-firing (not so useful in real life, much more effective with a third-person camera) to the mix, completing the formula as we know it now. Gears of War was the first major hit in the genre, but Namco’s Kill.switch predated it and was the first to really clarify that bombastic military action style. While the cover shooter has fallen out of vogue recently (I’m still waiting for the official announcement of Gears 6), it was one of the dominant forces in videogames for a good long while. What it achieved: It gave us the cover-shooter genre, then kept its head down Given that the fans are operating unlicensed and under the baleful eye of Sauron Hasbro, it’s probably best that I not link to anything until everything is done, dusted and released to the public. There are some fan-made efforts to create an unofficial successor to the Shandalar campaign, but nothing has fully borne fruit yet. The reason it’s obscure now is largely because there’s no legal way to get hold of it beyond trawling Ebay for second-hand copies, and playing it on modern machines is a bit of a struggle. ![]() As a roaming sorcerer, you traveled around a huge map, fighting monsters in dungeons, challenging rival sorcerer-lords and buying and selling cards in towns. Part open world RPG, part Heroes Of Might & Magic, all card battling. Not only was it an excellent adaptation of the ascendant CCG, but it had a mind-bendingly expansive campaign mode named Shandalar, unprecedented for its time. Without so much as a subtitle, the 1997 PC adaptation of Magic: The Gathering was a revelation. There’s dozens of them due out this year alone, but back in 1997, the options were a bit more limited. ![]() What it achieved: It ran before deckbuilders learned to even crawlĭeckbuilding games are truly inescapable these days.
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