When it comes to FPS games from the era around Y2K, everyone of course remembers Half-Life, but as ground-breaking as that game was in its design and presentation, you have to admit that the actual content was pretty dull, even for the time: An interdimensional portal opens, and then you fight your way through the corridors of giant research complex, shooting aliens and soldiers. Video games, eh?

In No One Lives Forever, you sneak into a stylish sixties nightclub, battle enemies while free-falling out of a plane, try to avoid the ticket inspector on a train ride, fight an obese German opera singer, explore a sunken ship in diving gear, inflitrate a giant office building and pick off enemies with a silent crossbow, drive a snow mobile through the alps, stand up against your sexist superiors in well-written interactive dialog sequences, visit a tropical island and infiltrate a secret base hidden inside an active volcano, pose as a journalist to interview a narcissistic big game hunter, and fly into space to disintegrate evil scientists with a laser gun -- all in one game, within a few hours. Now that's entertainment.

Pirates! is an aimless, repetitive, mini-game-ridden mess that should not work. And yet, it is one of the most loved and enduring computer games of all-time, with dozens of ports and remakes released over the span of nearly two decades. Why? Because it is all so expertly held together by a way-deeper-than-it-has-to-be meta-game that manages to give meaning to the way its gameplay elements come together. The back-and-forth between the wide variety of the player's possible actions and playstyles on one hand and the crunchy reactiveness of its living open world and its well-researched historical background on the other allows the imagination to go wild, resulting in a very personal emergent swashbuckling story full of action, drama, adventure and romance. (Or you could just, you know, trade sugar and stuff, if that's your thing.)