After 20 years in the desert, Dune 2 is back on PC. Ported from an open-source version of the game, the pioneering RTS – which laid the foundations for games like Starcraft 2 , Total War and Command and Conquer - has been faithfully recreated in HTML 5, so you can play it in your browser without handing over a single grain of spice. Or any real money.
If you fancy a quick blast of nostalgia, or you want a history lesson about the formative years of RTS during your lunch break, the game's right here .
It's a faithful port of the original, so controls are understandably fiddly (using the map to scroll around the screen is a nightmare), and visually my HD pampered eyes found it tough to track the smudgy little Harkonnen soldiers hiding in the sand; but the actual strategy still holds up pretty well.
I haven't played it long enough to tell whether or not the game still cheats by awarding itself extra spice, nor have I had a glimpse of 20 year-old space worm. Nonetheless: the sleeper has awakened!
I tracked down the guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing for over 8,000 hours, and came away convinced he was right
Factorio's expansion is setting record high player counts yet again so I'm expecting the world's IT infrastructure to collapse and innovation to stagnate any day now
