An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.

These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)
and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.
They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!
They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
There's also CRUSADE IN SPACE from 1993, which is on the internet archive but doesn't seem to work:
https://t.co/LsXXGlcxTD
There's WORLD WAR II BATTLES: NORMANDY from 1994, (which seems to be lost but I have some leads, so I'll keep looking), and finally LANDS OF SWORDS AND SORCERY, which was in development in 1995 but then halted so it could be revamped for Windows 95 (which never happened)
So those are the six shareware games from Glacier Edge:
Three we have, two missing, one incomplete and never released.
But who was Glacier Edge?
They were basically one person: Eric Dysband, of Glendale, CO. He was a freelance AI consultant working on a bunch of games.
He was a playtester on The Perfect General (1991) by White Wolf Productions.
and the lead developer on Enemy Nations (1996) by Windward Studios.
He programmed The War in Heaven (1999), a Christian FPS from Eternal Warriors/ValuSoft.
He was the AI programmer for NHRA Drag Racing 2 (2000)
His final game was Men of Valor (2004), a Medal of Valor spin-off game.
Sadly, he passed away on April 15, 2004, due to an aneurysm.
He also worked on the AI for Rebel Moon Revolution, which was supposed to be the third game in the Rebel Moon series, which was canceled before release.
There is footage from the demo version, showing the squad-based combat it was going to use.
It turns out the engine for War in Heaven is the same as Rebel Moon Revolution, too.
https://t.co/wbyeSOYZ0j
A correction: I misread what he was saying on Usenet, his games were trying to do AI WITHOUT a neural-network based approach.
He also made some commercial games under the Glacier Edge name:
PARACHUTES AT KANEV (1987) was a DOS wargame based on the Kanev board game, under contract for World Wide Wargames.
He also wrote a series of articles for Gamasutra on AI middleware:
https://t.co/i5lDxELoNb

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Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.

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