Laser Squad was awesome! I always had C64 and Amiga for the longest time and I was jealous of my friends who all had PCs. The games on PC started to be so awesome after one point, probably around and after when 386 came out.
I actually prefer the 8-bit versions of Laser Squad myself. The PC version doesn't feel right.
One of my fun memories from that game is the first mission where one player controls 5 marines sent to kill a man named Sterner Regnix at his house, and the other player controls Regnix plus four combat drones.
Remember those moments in the X-Com games where you're standing outside a UFO and are about to go in through the doors? How hard it could get at times due to aliens camping the door with reaction fire at the ready? This scenario started that trend, as the house only has two doors and those combat droids
love to camp them.
So for some time this scenario proved to be a tough nut to crack, until someone one day dropped a primed grenade inside the house and blew away many of the inner walls, exposing Regnix. That got people thinking, and 5 minutes later the scenario is restarted and Corporal Jonlan is standing outside with a rocket launcher, while another squaddie stands ready with extra rockets. 2 turns later Regnix becomes a bloody smear on the bathroom wall as a barrage of rockets has torn apart his house, along with two of his combat droids.
Lesson: Destructible terrain and outside-the-box thinking existed as concepts in gaming as far back as 1989.
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I could provide dozens of such memorable gaming moments, but since the thread wanted a
defining one I'm gonna give that instead... except it's not related to any one game in particular.
I started playing games on an Amstrad CPC in 1986 as it was bought as a workstation for the home, and was soon on a path of collecting games for it. One part of gaming that is little talked about these days was the constant rivalry between us kids that had different systems. Most of my friends had C-64s, and no one wanted to admit that they had a Spectrum, and everyone was jealous of people that owned Atari STs or Amigas. Every time a new title came out we'd bicker and argue about which conversion was better and such.
So when the years rolled round and it was time for the "next" generation of computers to roll round, many of us were faced with a choice: What platform to pick and side with? Mostly by luck I ended up siding with the PC, after the family workstation was upgraded to a full-fledged PC in 1988 (with CGA graphics and TWO 5.25" floppy drives!) and I saw that even though it had worse graphics than the Amstrad and used a overambitious smoke detector to play sound, it was a much more powerful machine. I did, however, lament the fact that I couldn't play my Amstrad games on my PC, and as early as that I was wondering what would become of my Amstrad game collection.
After another workstation upgrade in 1991 I was so relieved to learn that the PC games from the older model worked on the new one, and I quickly realized that this seemed to be a thing on the PC: Backwards compatibility. So I made a choice going forward from that moment: I'd stick with the PC. Many of the kids (now teenagers) whom I'd shared rivalries with were uncertain what to pick, but a few did also pick the PCs while many others moved on to Nintendo or Sega consoles. (The fools, they'd end up coming back to the PC later on.)
And here's where the defining moment came for me, the vindication of my choice: In 1997 I heard about a Spectrum emulator, a program that made the PC act like it was a Spectrum, and could load up and play Spectrum games if they were hooked up properly to the machine. I went online and looked around, and discovered that similar things existed for the C-64 and the Amstrad.
That was a defining moment for me in gaming: Knowing that I had picked the right system for the future. I had not only picked the system that took the lead in hardware development and pure processing power, but the system with the greatest versatility of games, programs and utilities. On the Amstrad I could play Amstrad games, on the Spectrum I could play Spectrum games... but on the PC I could play ALL OF THE GAMES.
In all the years since the PC has always been at the top, meaning that the "Glorious PC Master Race"-meme is very real, and has been so for (at least) 20 years... and I've been part of it since the start.