CyClones

CyClones launched in 1994 as a sci-fi shooter that tried to offer something its contemporaries lacked: independent hand aiming via the mouse. Where other games had the player turn their whole body while the projectile always flew toward the center of the screen, here movement is handled by the keyboard while the mouse independently moves a crosshair across the screen, letting you shoot sideways, up, or down without changing your walking direction. The story is built around an invasion of cybernetic machines, and the player fights through a series of complexes and bases, eliminating enemies, collecting new weapons and upgrades, and unlocking sealed sections.

Besides the aiming, the handling of equipment is also interesting. Weapons and their upgrades can be combined, and there are also gadgets that change your approach to combat, so the player doesn't just get progressively stronger rifles but also reasons to think about what to carry. Technically, the game combines a textured 3D backdrop with digitized, strikingly rendered enemy characters, whose hits land with satisfying, explicit impact. The setting is industrially cold, full of metal, pipes, and blinking panels, accompanied by grim sound design that underscores the feeling of a lone fight inside an enemy machine.

Contemporary reception was mixed. Reviewers praised the independent aiming as a clever idea, but also criticized it as unintuitive to control and more of a hindrance in fast firefights, so the game stayed in the shadow of the more popular titles of its era. In hindsight, though, it's interesting precisely for how close it came to the solution that would become standard mouse-and-keyboard control just a few years later. Today it's played more as a curiosity for genre-history enthusiasts than as fully rounded entertainment, but that curiosity is worth trying. It's fascinating to see how the developers searched for an answer to the limitations of controls at the time, and how close they got to something that became commonplace within a few years. The studio also used this project to try out ideas it would later put to good use in its much more famous fantasy action games.