Replay Value: Three sides to play and lots of missions!ĭune 2000 is one of several games based on the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert the basis of the story is that the most valuable substance in the galaxy is known as the spice, which can only be found on the planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. But for fans of the original game, or those who like a real-time challenge, Dune 2000 is an instant classic.Įnjoyment: Real-time gaming like it should be played. There are no rivers, no woods, just endless screens of tan-colored sand. Because the battle is on this desert planet, all the missions seem quite similar. Where the game play does suffer is in the setting. Scenes to heighten and embellish the story include performances from live actors like John Rhys Davies and the in-game graphics have been updated and improved while the game should remain true to fans of the series and game genre. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been greatly improved, new units have been added, and the game flows better. In many ways Dune 2000 is more of an update.
The update has also added Command & Conquer style missions including capturing space ports, rescuing captures units, and other extras assignments to keep the game interesting. In each mission, players must build up a base and work to eliminate the other powers. The main objective is harvesting the rare spice and gaining favor with the Emperor while eliminating the other races.ĭune 2000 is an update of one of the original real-time strategy games, Dune 2, and has spawned many a whole genre. Missions can be played from the perspective of three races, the noble Atreides, the insidious Ordos, or the treacherous Harkonnen. Instead of sure death, it is more likely that players will just get addicted to the game. We have seen it," is the prediction that comes from the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood as the game, based on the epic novel, begins. The BBS was started using RBBS software, a single phone line with 2400 baud modem and a shareware CD.Īdditional donations of CD-ROMs have come from Erik Pederson, Peter Simpson, Chuck Gilbert, Koos van den Hout, MCbx, Jason Scott, Tim Hazel, and others."You will die on this planet. The system used a Harris 286 CPU operating at 20MHZ, two 65 Megabit Seagate RLL hard drives and a Dennon CD player that used a "cart" to hold the CD. Eventually, as operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD became more widely available, CDs were perfect distribution mechanisms for the very large libraries and file collections associated with them.Ī number of the initial CD images for this collection came courtesy of the CD BBS of Twin Falls, Idaho, operated by Mark Fugitt (sysop) and Mike Laybourn (remote sysop). Additionally, the advent of an internet open to the general public heralded massive collected sets of files which CD makers happily mirrored and made available to the BBS market. While many of the CDs contain shareware programs, a number branched into music, graphics, animations and movies. For this market, CD makers would declare their CDs "BBS Ready", meaning an easily-readable directory of file descriptions was located on the CDs to be read by the BBS software. Some computer bulletin board services would attach banks of CD-ROM drives to their machines to allow users to access the discs, allowing the system operators (SysOps) to claim the BBS had thousands of files available. As a result, many otherwise-lost pieces of computer history were gathered up in the trawling nets of these individuals and companies and were preserved for future generations. As material "ran out", that is, as sellers of these CDs found they were unable to easily find shareware programs and files, the hunt began to track down every last file and item that could make the quarterly or monthly quota.
Initially containing less than the full capacity of the discs (600mb, later 700mb) these items eventually began brimming with any sort of computer data that could be packaged and sold. One of the most historically important artifacts to come from the home computer telecommunications revolution was shareware CDs, compact discs put out by companies containing hundreds of megabytes of shareware.