Crackdown

"Skills for kills, Agent. Skills for kills."

Source // MobyGames

If Gran Theft Auto Online has taught us anything, it's that sandboxes full of criminals and vigilantes don't need stories to be successful. In fact, all those cutscenes and running to mission start icons and endless conversations with every character under the sun just get in the way.

So Crackdown drops you into a sandbox full of criminals as a super-cop on a mission, but dispenses with basically all the explanation and all of the cutscenes and just tells you "these bad guys need to go, and we don't care how."

And there are a lot of bad guys in town...

X3: Reunion

TRADE FIGHT BUILD THINK

Been a while since you found yourself alone in space? The likes of EVE Online too daunting? Perhaps a single-player offering with a similar scope can get you into spaceshipshape and ready for sci-fi action. Something like X3: Reunion.

The X series has been taking players to space since 1999, and despite continually seeing releases as recently as 2018, I know absolutely nothing about it. I've never come across it, mostly because it doesn't dare venture over to consoles, but in various PC magazines or videos or whatever, I can't even recall it being referenced in passing.

It's lost in space, except to those devoted fans who keep exploring the stars. How soon will I find myself lost in space?

Garry's Mod

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Of all the games in this book, Garry's Mod is perhaps the one that strains the definition of the word 'game' the most."

That's how the 1001 list opens its blurb on Garry's Mod, and I simply couldn't say it any better. Garry's Mod isn't a game. But it could be. It's not an interactive movie, either. But it could be that too.

If anything, Garry's Mod is a toybox, or perhaps a toolbox for creative types. It's definitely a sandbox of sorts, and sandboxes sure make themselves known on this 1001 list. None of this is really telling us what Garry's Mod even is, though. For that, we've got to dive into it headfirst.

Grand Theft Auto III

"Alright, you are listening to Chatterbox, hosted by me, Lazlow, because I got kicked off the rock station."

So here we are. Liberty City. The defining open world experience of the early 2000s. The sandbox everybody wanted to play in. A game so popular that I've even played it in a hairdresser. In fact, I may also have first played it in that hairdressers, all those years ago. Whether I did or not, I have spent hundreds of hours inside Grand Theft Auto III, but not for a long time. Not since it and the PlayStation 2 was taking the world by storm.

Claude Speed, the silent protagonist, finds himself acting as a dirty-job handyman for hire by all the criminal groups of America. Want something stolen? Destroyed? Dealt with? Claude's your man. Across three entire islands inspired by New York, you'll be running, driving, crashing, killing, shooting, smuggling, ferrying, collecting, racing, chasing, and Lord knows what else in an attempt to... make some money? Overthrow organised crime? What's the plot of GTA III? It's been so long I can't remember.

But, armed with fan-made patches and tweaks, I'm more than ready to find out.

Fallout

War. War never changes.

This 1001 list is full of memories, but the memory I have for Fallout is one where I was watching a friend play, and while it looked pretty good, I kinda wished I was playing something else instead. On a console, where games were meant to be played.

Fast forward ten or so years and I'm playing my first Fallout title, Fallout 3, or as many of us knew it, Oblivion With Guns. Bar the annoying bugs and freezes on the PlayStation 3, I enjoyed my time in the wasteland, as well as wherever the DLC would take me, and would go on to play Fallout: New Vegas too, enjoying it even more.

Add another decade and I'm sat here, having skipped over Fallout 4 entirely, ready to play the original Fallout and looking forward to it. How soon will I fall, like the nuclear bombs of the past?

Theme Park

You must be this tall to play

As soon as I saw Theme Park, whenever and wherever it was in my youth, I knew I wanted to play it. You make and manage a theme park of your own creation - why wouldn't that make for a great game? It's like city building on a smaller scale, and yet just as complex.

Nearly twenty years later and I'm finally able to see what all of my fuss was about...

SimCity 2000

The Citizens are Revolting

Source // Wikipedia

Let's just get this clear if I haven't already mentioned it. The idea of SimCity is great. Fantastic. What better way to light up the imagination than allowing gamers to watch their creations get built and develop in front of their eyes?

The top down, circuit board looking SimCity has been redeveloped into the genre-defining SimCity 2000, a game with everything you expect from a city builder of this era, and then some more things you forgot about.

What it does is great, but there's always a 'but'...

Hunter

Ready for action.

Source // Wikipedia

When I first read what Hunter was, I had a very similar reaction to that which I had when first seeing Far Cry 2 or even The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion back in the day: "You can do what? Gaming now has the technology to do all that?!"

Both games can owe a lot to Hunter as it happens, though you'll notice a lot more similarities between Hunter and the Far Cry series. You're a lone operative on a mission in a massive open world where the choices are all yours and are probably made on the fly.

Do you want to complete your mission quietly? You can. Do you want to go in all guns blazing? You can. Do you want to fly a helicopter or drive a tank straight to your target? You can. All on the Amiga or Atari ST.