Loss and desperation run all the way through the game, and they're made more tangible by their mechanical impact.

If all these words about Homeworld have got you ravenous for more nostalgia, why not read our mammoth history of the strategy game feature, where we go all the way back to the '70s and chart the genre's course. The genre started to evolve rapidly, but in the mid-90s there was no way I could have imagined where things would end up just a few years down the line. It didn't change a whole lot, aside from the setting, but then Westwood responded with Command & Conquer and the competition began. It took three years for it to spawn a challenger, which came in the form of Blizzard's Warcraft. Westwood's Dune 2 was the RTS that really founded the genre, though it wasn't the first one.

Then Homeworld arrived, and it was like staring into the future. There was the rivalry between Westwood and Blizzard pushing things forward, and then around them so many experiments, like the mind-bogglingly massive battles of Total Annihilation and Age of Empire's attempts to make a Civ-scale RTS. With every new game I could get my sweaty little hands on, there were dramatic leaps as some of the best developers of the day conjured up new systems, more elaborate conflicts and started to flex their storytelling muscles. During my formative PC gaming years, the RTS was king.