amok: Do not care about the multiplayer aspects very much, but I lost many hours on this back in the days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPL9wpGQMHw Do you remember that game fondly?
I remember:
A pause timer. For every few seconds of action, you would get one second added to your pause timer. So you could briefly stop the action and give new orders. But this was always too short, and you couldn't sit back and consider what to do. I understand they were attempting to convey a sense of urgency, but it was pretty annoying.
Four of your troopers appeared as thumbnails, one as your main view. The effectiveness of troopers not in your main view was decreased. Guns would jam more often, power gloves would grow in uselessness.
Speaking of jamming, it'd happen all the time. All the damn time. The society is centered around techno priests or whatever, and they can't make a gun that doesn't jam every 12 shots. (8 shots if you're not directly watching that trooper.) That's okay, though, as each grunt had an alternate weapon, typically a power glove, with which they could punch the enemy in the even of a jam. The game should have included an animation of an up-close genestealer laughing at your power glove, as they were completely ineffective.
One level was a single-width corridor 40 squares long. So the front man had to engage everything without support from behind. (One trooper cannot attack through a square occupied by another.) Take a few steps, kill a couple of genestealers, jam, wave your powerglove, die. Second man was right behind him and ready to continue the advance, and soon met the same fate. I remember the probability was low that the fifth man would make it to the objective end of the corridor, but I finally made it. As it turns out, he had to walk backwards down the same corridor to extract whatever item he'd picked up. Ugh. Anyway, this level offered no variation in strategy, but over eighty attempts allowed me to win it simply by battering away at probability.
Soon after completing that level, my brother unknowingly deleted my save game directory to make room for Megarace or whatever. He'd sat next to me for fifteen of the eighty attempts, so he was suitably horrified when I told (shouted at) him what happened. I replayed as far as the ridiculous level, and then surrendered.
It was an unforgiving and awful game. All it had going for it was spacemachismo. For a while, at least, that was enough.
