Man, this was massively my shit when I was a teenaged kid. My first-ever RTS. It wasn't quite the gameplay that kept me hooked, though I enjoyed it, it wasn't necessarily the world of the game, though it eventually got me into the books, and it wasn't quite the story or the cutscenes, though my man John Rhys Davies made the Atreides as cool as the totally square Atreides could be, and the Ordos were clearly the raddest of all the bunch.

No, it was the map at the beginning of each mission. The map that had all the territories in different colors, and in which as you acquired more territory your color would slowly overtake the others and eventually cover the whole map! It was the map, man! I wanted all those territories to be MY color on the map! It made me realize that I really don't ever get anything worthwhile done unless I have some sort of incentivizing carrot dangling just over my nose. Like, for example, a website in which I can fill with a whole slew of logged games and reviews.

Stars off because eventually I got to proper Blizzard games and I discovered... what? You don't have to drag the box around a whole massive group of tanks? You can assign hotkeys for teams? Hotkeys for your base??!?!? I was scandalized. I wept for my childhood.