The game Gauntlet should not have been missed by anyone in the 80s, as it was a huge hit in the arcades and was ported to all known home computers. Into the Eagle's Nest is therefore, at first glance, just another clone that wanted to participate in the ongoing success of slaying enemies from a bird's eye perspective, of course. But without the various attempts to surpass the original, the evolution of computer games would not be as diverse as it actually is.
While I watch my character walking slowly towards the sunrise at the end of Valiant Hearts: The Great War, I take a look back at the road that has brought me here. Considering that for the most part it lead through the battlefields of World War I, the journey was surprisingly rich in variety, and it entailed even some nice memories besides all the horror. Yet it has been exactly those contrasts, these emotional ups and downs, which make these sensations so intense. Its beginning seems almost a bit unreal now, but soon the story will come to an end, and I cannot remember when I had such a feeling of accomplishment at the end of a computer game.
Battle Bugs came out at a strange time. Well, now that this game would ever have been considered regular. Bearing a number of similarities with the rising so-called Real Time Strategy genre, it didn't quite fit in even at first glance. And the more you played it, the more apparent it became how this game went its own ways and followed fundamentally different paradigms. Exploring paths which even since then have rarely been explored again. While on the other hand, the footprint it did leave on the later genre shows in many small details nevertheless.
