Something has gone terribly wrong at the secretive Black Mesa Research Facility. An experiment in the Anomalous Materials lab, analysing the properties of an alien artifact, has gone awry and opened up some sort of interdimensional rift. Now aliens have taken over the half-destroyed base, and black ops specialists have been called in to, shall we say, neutralise the threat. With extreme prejudice.

You play the new scientist, Dr. Gordon Freeman, originally assigned to work on the doomed project. Now your mission is just to survive, to escape from the facility with your life. This means trekking through (brilliantly scripted) 3D FPS levels, pushing the right buttons when your path becomes blocked. Stopping you are a host of alien beasties and, later, the military's special forces who have no desire to let anyone survive. Your arsenal consists of a large number of realistic weapons ranging from handguns to high explosives and a few special goods plundered from the research labs.

A gold release of Half-Life, featuring the Game Of The Year edition (with extra multiplayer maps and mods), popular terrorist mod Counter Strike and the Opposing Force expansion. A later release of Generation also included the second expansion, Blue Shift.

The first expansion pack for Half-Life, retelling the story from another perspective. This time you play the part of Corporal Shepherd, special ops soldier sent in to clean up Freeman's mess. Things start going wrong before you even arrive, when your transport is shot down by the aliens. Abandoned and left for dead, you regain consciousness in the base and quickly come to the same conclusion as Gordon: you must escape. Your objective, then, is the same as in the original, and as you Know Too Much you are also the target of elimination by the black ops. As you explore the new levels, fighting new monsters with new weapons, you may be lucky enough to encounter references to Gordon's story. An extra level to the proceedings is brought about by your special ops comrades, allowing you on occasion to enlist aid from other stranded soldiers.

After taking off from an aircraft carrier, you have to fly over a horizontally-scrolling island covered in tanks, AA guns, and other installations. Flak and the enemy fighters' missiles must be avoided, but you are armed with your own rockets and bombs to finish them off. Eventually you will reach the city, where your remaining bombs can be used to score major points, and then you have to land back on a carrier. Care must be taken not to run out of fuel before you reach it, though.

It's a Pac Man game, with you playing a gardener picking up the coins dropped in a hedge maze. The ghosts that wander the maze cause instant death, but they can be killed with one of the pickaxe "power pills."

Head and Heels are out to steal each crown on the five worlds that make up the Blacktooth Empire. You play both parts, switching between the two at will. The many rooms are viewed isometrically, and usually feature instant-kill nasties, puzzles, spikes, crumbling bricks, springs, and the like. The characters have different properties and must cooperate to succeed. Head can jump and shoot, while Tails can run and carry objects. Sometimes it is necessary for them to join forces, and other times they will have to go their separate ways.

King Gryphonheart's untimely death (and subsequent resurrection by evil forces) brings his daughter, the new Queen Catherine back to the land of Erathia. On arrival she finds nothing but death and destruction. The once happy kingdom is in ruins, and it becomes her task to put it right. Hence the subtitle, "The Restoration of Erathia."

Graphically more impressive than its predecessor, HoMM3 is nevertheless pretty much the same game. After starting a campaign or single-mission scenario, the general idea is to capture all of the enemy's towns. Play for the most part is on an overhead world map, taking it in turns to move armies around, taking over mines and collecting artefacts for their leader. Cities can be developed up from basic towns, adding creature generators or defensive structures to boost and protect the armies. Combat is resolved in a hex grid face-off between the opposing sides, again turn based, earning experience and abilities for the winning hero.

The demon king Lucifer seeks to destroy the world by constructing the sword known as "Armageddon's Blade." Queen Catherine of Erathia, having restored order in the original game, moves to stop the king and save the world in this expansion pack. As well as a host of new campaigns and scenarios, there's a new town type, the Conflux, with associated creatures and heroes. Also new is a random map generator for creating your own missions.

A "collector's edition" release of Heroes III and its two expansion packs combined in one game.

The powerful lich Sandro is looking for two magical artefacts which, combined, will allow him to take over the land of Antagarich. It is up to four heroes, over seven campaigns, to find the Angelic Alliance sword and put an end to Sandro's plans. This expansion pack also adds new adventure map elements and hero artefacts.