The game: An ambitious opus of a game, Progress Quest presents itself as the logical alternative to bloated, choice-heavy RPGs both online and single-player. Visionary programmer Eric Fredricksen's game provides a vi💟sion of the evolution of the RPG as we know it. One day, all games will be like Progress Quest.

Above: Progress Quest generates realistic character portraits on the greatest rendering engine of all: your imagination

What could you do? Name your cha꧃racter and choose th♏eir race and class. No other input is demanded of the busy gamer-on-the-go.

Above: Things are heating up!

What did the game do for you? Progress Quest auto♎mates the player's search for battles, removing the tiresome “talking to🌌 villagers about their lives” element everyone pretends to find charming in traditional RPGs. It also automates the battles themselves, because who has time for all that attack-selecting and dice roll-watching? It then automates the leveling-up process, enabling battles with bigger and more exciting monsters… all of which are also automated.

Above: Bask in the glory of Progress well Quested

2. Microcosm

The game: “Is it a movie packed with furiously addictive gameplay, or a game with visuals to match anything Hollywood can produce?” asked the packaging. Creators Psygnosis also billed Microcosm as “the ultimate CD-ROM game,” which would suggest they'd sewn that one uജp fairly quickly. Not so fast, guys. Are you sure we can't call this a movie as well?

Above: Yeah, let's stick with “game”

What could you do? Man the guns on your blood-cell-sized spacecraft, injected into a billion൩aire's bloodstream, charged with eradicating the artificial virus implanted therein by his corporate rivals, all while listening to an original soundtrack by caped prog-rocker Rick Wakeman. Let nobody say Microcosm wasn't high-concept.

What did the game do for you? The manual provided not only a War and Peace-rivaling swath of backstory propelling your craft, but also a working guide to the human body through which you would be moving. Through FMV sequences and CGI overload, the space-shooter play🧜 offered by Microcosm was elevated to epic proportions. S﷽tripped of its fancy trappings, however, you had a game so bereft of choice or user input that you could getwithout looking at the screen.

Above: Look away? And miss these lunch-relinquishing vistas?

Seriously, this is less interactive than… Watching Fantastiꦯc Voyage and Innerspace back to back while playing Galaxian.