If you haven’t heard of Half-Life by now, clearly you’ve been living in a cave as a hermit for the past year. This is the only game to receive our highest accolade, the Revolutionary Award, this year. Half-Life earned the award by turning the first-person action genre on its head and spawning an entire new generation of games that are swiftly overturning the genres reputation as a brainless blood-and-guts slaughterhouse. The graphics are amazing, the storyline absorbing, the 3D sound simply fantastic. Someday, all games will be made this way. 

Looting cyberpunk imagery with reckless abandon, SIN has it all- the vast, dark, sprawling city, a law enforcement officer with dreadlocks, a biochemist with a bad attitude & a buttock tattoo and of course, the universal bespectacled little hacker sidekick. Drugs, damnation and sudden death beckon to you from this complex, new-generation game, enthralling and exciting. An absolute classic.

Unreal is a genre landmark in its own right. A little powerhungry, true enough, but it could well be viewed as the stormy petrel of the current revolution. If you’re a fan of the genre, you don’t want to have missed this one.