---

A Flying Tank and Ten Unproven Promises: PC Gaming World’s 2005 Action-Adventure Ranking Revisited

An old gaming magazine is a machine for preserving confidence. The screenshots never lose their shine. Delays have not happened yet. The unfinished game is still allowed to contain every feature described by its developer, and a famous title can occupy first place before anybody has tested the version being advertised. Forgotten games still look like future classics because history has not yet had the chance to forget them. The page does not know which studios will close, which series will change direction, which technical miracle will look ordinary within five years, or which highly promoted game will enter my life and leave almost nothing behind.

That is the condition in which I found the “Action-adventurespil” list in issue 7 of Dansk PC Gaming World, dated July 2005. The issue’s printed sales period ran from 23 June to 27 July 2005. It cost 69.50 DKK in the shops. A full-year subscription cost 599 DKK for twelve issues plus a special DVD, while a three-month subscription cost 177 DKK for three issues. The arithmetic says something about what a physical gaming magazine represented. Twelve shop-bought issues would have cost 834 DKK, so the annual subscription saved 235 DKK—about 28 percent—and reduced the price to roughly 49.92 DKK per issue before counting the bonus DVD. Three issues at shop price would have cost 208.50 DKK; the short subscription saved 31.50 DKK and brought each issue down to 59 DKK. This was not disposable internet content. Readers paid for a monthly package of screenshots, previews, demos, opinion and access to a future that had not arrived.

The action-adventure page ranked these ten games:

1. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
2. Alan Wake
3. Hitman: Blood Money
4. Prince of Persia 3
5. Tomb Raider: Legend
6. Call of Juarez
7. Condemned
8. Crime Life: Gang Wars
9. Knights of the Temple II
10. Panzer Elite Action

The ranking is close enough to my gaming history to feel familiar, but not close enough to speak for me. I grew up with GTA and Tomb Raider. I knew about Hitman long before I properly connected with one. The original MS-DOS Prince of Persia lived on an old school computer and taught me how merciless a game could be. I later played Call of Juarez. I tried Alan Wake and discovered that a respected game can still be completely wrong for me. The final four entries never became part of my life at all.

That uneven relationship is exactly why I do not want to treat the page as a sacred top ten. It is not a finished-games ranking, and it is definitely not ten reviews. It is a one-page anticipation chart assembled from brand recognition, preview access, screenshots, technical claims, publisher schedules and editorial excitement. None of these ten games received a separate two-page printed feature in this issue. Alan Wake had a preview on the cover DVD, but not a two-page article. That distinction matters. Elsewhere in the same magazine, Age of Empires III received four pages; Company of Heroes, Joint Task Force and Rise of Legends received two-page treatment. The action list got one crowded page and a promise that the DVD contained more about its number-two game.

The printed numbers look decisive. The physical allocation of space tells a different story.

A Category So Broad That It Almost Means Nothing

The first problem appears before any individual game is judged. “Action-adventure” is being used as an editorial storage room. San Andreas is an open-world crime game. Alan Wake became a story-driven psychological action thriller. Blood Money is a social-stealth assassination sandbox. Prince of Persia mixes platforming, combat and environmental puzzles. Tomb Raider combines exploration, traversal, gunplay and puzzles. Call of Juarez is a Western first-person shooter. Condemned is a melee-heavy horror game. Crime Life is a street brawler with free-roaming elements. Knights of the Temple II is a medieval fantasy action RPG. Panzer Elite Action is an arcade-leaning tank combat game.

Putting them into one chart creates the appearance of comparison without a stable basis for comparing them. Is the magazine measuring freedom, story, horror, animation, technical novelty, franchise power, combat, expected sales or the size of the publisher’s promotional campaign? A reader who wants Blood Money’s patient infiltration is not automatically looking for Crime Life’s street fighting. Somebody excited by Tomb Raider’s acrobatics may have no interest in commanding a tank. The category is not entirely meaningless—every title involves direct control of a character or vehicle—but it is too elastic to make first place inherently “better” than tenth.

The chart is therefore best understood as a temperature reading of PC gaming hype in the middle of 2005. GTA was already a cultural event. Remedy had mystery, reputation and a DVD preview. Hitman, Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider were established names promising expensive new instalments. Lower down, less famous games were reduced to technology and premise: Shader Model 3.0, simulated wind, too little ammunition, a branching mission order, tank multiplayer. The higher entries were allowed identities. The lower entries were allowed selling points.

The Release Calendar Was Already Falling Apart

The second problem is time. The magazine listed several games as though they were close, yet many release windows were optimistic, platform-dependent or simply wrong. Even San Andreas exposes the awkward delay between writing, printing and reaching the shops. The issue’s sales period began on 23 June, while the list printed the European PC release date as 10 June and still said that the PC version was “almost finished.” By the time a reader bought the magazine at a shop, number one was no longer a future game at all.

Rank	Game	Magazine’s date or window	What happened
1	GTA: San Andreas	10 June 2005	The European PC version did release on 10 June 2005; the text had simply been written before the issue reached shops.
2	Alan Wake	2006	Released on Xbox 360 in 2010 and on PC in 2012.
3	Hitman: Blood Money	Q3 2005	Released on 26 May 2006.
4	Prince of Persia 3	November 2005	Released as The Two Thrones in December 2005.
5	Tomb Raider: Legend	Q4 2005	Released on 7 April 2006.
6	Call of Juarez	Q1 2006	Released later in 2006.
7	Condemned	Q4 2005	Reached Xbox 360 in late 2005; the Windows version followed in April 2006.
8	Crime Life: Gang Wars	Q2 2005	Released in November 2005.
9	Knights of the Temple II	Q4 2005	Released in late 2005 in Europe.
10	Panzer Elite Action	Q4 2005	Released in 2006.

This does not prove that the magazine was uniquely careless. Preview journalism has always depended upon schedules supplied by publishers, and game dates move. It does prove that the list ranked promises rather than products. Alan Wake was presented as a 2006 game and needed four more years to reach a console and six more to reach PC. Blood Money missed its projected quarter by roughly eight months. Legend moved into the following year. The bottom of the list contained projects that were still changing while the magazine gave them precise positions against games that already had millions of console players.

The question is not whether the editors should have predicted every delay. They could not. The question is how much authority a numbered list deserves when its evidence is that unstable.

1. GTA: San Andreas — When More Became the Definition of Better

The magazine’s first-place paragraph is a compact monument to quantity: “almost unlimited freedom,” an abundance of missions, 85 original songs, vehicles and action. It is an effective advertisement because every noun points outward. More map. More activity. More music. More things to drive. More freedom. The PC version was treated as the obvious winner before the page even had to explain what the other games were.

Historically, that confidence makes sense. San Andreas had already become a phenomenon on PlayStation 2. Its PC conversion was not an unknown new design competing fairly against nine other unknown designs. It was the arrival of a proven console blockbuster. Rockstar’s official description still emphasises three cities, an enormous state and a long journey across San Andreas, exactly the scale that made the game appear unbeatable in 2005 (Rockstar Games). If the chart measured expected attention, first place was the safest choice on the entire page.

It is still not my choice.

I grew up with the original Grand Theft Auto on PlayStation. That top-down game is not an embarrassing primitive stage that I needed the series to escape. It is the centre of what GTA means to me. I remember answering phone boxes for missions. I remember driving a truck under a building so that it could explode. The city was made from small roads and chunky pixels, but it felt immediate. The game gave me a vehicle, a target and a bad idea, then got out of the way.

I also had GTA: London on PlayStation, complete with the absurd disc-changing ritual required to play it. Physical media can be romantic until the machine asks for one disc to verify another disc before allowing you into the game. Even that inconvenience has become part of the memory because it belonged to an era in which expansions, save files, regional releases and console hardware had visible friction.

GTA 2 added colour, gangs and a stronger sandbox feeling. It felt like colour thrown directly into my face and invited more aimless chaos—drive around, burn people, make trouble—but I never liked it as much as the first game. Bigger freedom did not automatically create a stronger attachment. That argument begins with GTA 2 and follows me through the rest of the series.

Then GTA III arrived on PlayStation 2 and looked impossible. I had read about it in a PC magazine and could barely believe a computer was supposed to render a city like that. The jump from an overhead map to a full 3D Liberty City was not a normal sequel upgrade. It felt like the machine had learned a new physical law. It was also gloriously broken. Roads could turn invisible. Cars could fall through them. Ambulances seemed capable of killing more people than they saved. I could hide around the police station and fight law enforcement for what felt like forever, remembering to shoot the helicopter when it arrived. When the army eventually came, the Rhino tank was not merely transportation. Fire its cannon backwards while driving and the recoil interfered with the game’s already questionable relationship with gravity, turning military hardware into an escape aircraft. A flying tank is not elegant design, but it is an unforgettable story.

Vice City occupies a blurrier part of my memory. I mostly remember the lower area of the eastern island, around the beach side of the map, and I probably played it less than later entries. For a while I mixed it together with The Ballad of Gay Tony, which actually belongs to GTA IV. That confusion is not a factual claim about the games; it is evidence of how memory compresses instalments that never became personal landmarks. I played GTA IV more than Vice City, but I still did not finish it. I believe the point that stopped me was the large mid-game bank robbery—almost certainly “Three Leaf Clover,” the Packie mission whose escape turns Liberty City into a running gun battle. Other players remember it as one of the game’s great set pieces. I remember it as the wall I did not get past.

San Andreas sits between the technical shock of GTA III and the more grounded world of GTA IV, yet it never occupied the same place in my life. The scale that critics and players celebrated often felt like labour to me. Cycling is the perfect symbol. Repeatedly working the controls to make CJ pedal faster did not create meaningful immersion; it made travel feel like an obligation. The fitness, food and skill systems made the character more customisable, but they also pushed the series further from the direct simplicity I loved in GTA 1. The magazine saw a “cornucopia” and treated abundance as proof of superiority. I saw a game in which the distance between the parts I liked had grown.

That does not make San Andreas a bad game. Its cultural impact, soundtrack, characters, map variety, customisation and freedom are real. It gave many players their definitive GTA. My objection is narrower and more personal: the qualities that made it a landmark are not automatically the qualities that make me love a game. Scale can become dilution. Systems can become chores. Freedom can become time spent travelling between the things I actually wanted to do.

The same problem reached its extreme in GTA V. I played it on Xbox 360 and completed the story once. I returned several times but never finished it again. Its launch success was never mysterious: by then, the GTA name carried enough cultural momentum to turn a release into an event before anyone had reached the first heist. The single-player campaign helped create that launch, but it does not explain why the game remained visible for more than a decade. GTA Online does. Rockstar itself describes it as an “ever-evolving online universe,” and the years of updates, grinding, purchases, role-play servers, mods and social play gave it an afterlife that the story campaign could never have sustained alone (Rockstar Games). Today, when I see people still living inside GTA V, it is rarely because they are replaying Michael, Franklin and Trevor’s original story for the tenth time.

That long online afterlife has not increased my excitement for GTA VI. It has made me tired of Rockstar. I may eventually buy it, or I may not. The fact that a new GTA no longer guarantees my interest says more about my relationship with the series than any argument over review scores. The magazine’s 2005 first place captured the moment when “more GTA” was treated as an automatic victory. My own history is the story of becoming less convinced each time the formula grew.

2. Alan Wake — A Great Premise Built Around the Mechanic That Lost Me

Second place is stranger. The printed entry says almost nothing about the game itself. It tells readers that a preview can be found on the DVD. That one sentence is the entire justification for ranking Alan Wake above Blood Money, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, Call of Juarez and four other titles. In print, the number is doing work that the text refuses to do.

The excitement was understandable. Remedy had made Max Payne, and Alan Wake promised a writer, a mystery, a dark American town and a story that appeared to be rewriting reality. The final game sends Alan and his wife Alice to Bright Falls, where she disappears, Alan loses a week of memory and manuscript pages begin describing events around him. The concept is strong enough that I still remember it even though the game itself did not keep me. Remedy later described the original release history clearly: Xbox 360 in 2010, followed by PC in 2012—years after the magazine’s confident “2006” (Remedy Entertainment).

I tried it. I remember the beginning, the writer, the house or cabin, the isolation and the suggestion that the fiction was becoming real. The lore is the part I respect. The central combat loop is the part that sends me away. Enemies wrapped in darkness must first be exposed with the flashlight before ordinary weapons can finish them. On paper, light becoming ammunition is thematically elegant. In my hands, it becomes a repeated procedure: aim the beam, burn away the shield, fire, search for batteries, do it again. The mechanic is not badly designed merely because I dislike it. It is simply too dominant for somebody who does not enjoy it.

The graphics never produced the “wow” reaction in me either. The lighting and atmosphere served the darkness, forests and fog far better than the faces and movement sold the drama. A game can have a powerful art direction without every technical element ageing equally well. Alan Wake has mood, identity and a devoted audience. It also has the particular form of combat that ensured I never got far enough to benefit from most of its narrative ambition.

I have never played Alan Wake 2. That means I will not borrow other people’s enthusiasm and pretend it completed some personal journey for me. The first game remains an admired object at a distance: a premise I understand, a world I can see the attraction of, and a flashlight loop I do not want to repeat for ten hours.

As a prediction, number two was dramatically premature. The magazine was right that Remedy was making something distinctive. It was wrong about when players would receive it, and the printed page offered no evidence beyond access to a DVD preview. Alan Wake eventually became important, but not in the year, version or immediate form that this ranking implied.

3. Hitman: Blood Money — The Classic That Was Not My Hitman

The magazine’s Blood Money paragraph is more informative. It mentions the revised Glacier engine, the modern graphical presentation and the money earned from successful missions, which could be reinvested in weapons and equipment. Those details did reach the finished game. IO Interactive’s own history confirms both the 26 May 2006 release and the importance of earning and spending money through contracts (IO Interactive). The preview was late by roughly eight months, but it had correctly identified a real system.

It still missed the reason Blood Money became beloved. The game’s identity was not primarily “better graphics plus upgrades.” It was the murder space: social routines, disguises, accidents, witnesses, suspicion and the pleasure of turning a crowded location into a private mechanism. A chandelier, a loose prop, a poisoned drink or a badly guarded balcony could become part of the plan. The best Hitman missions are not corridors with several doors; they are systems that allow the player to manufacture a story and then leave before the room understands what happened.

I knew about Hitman at the time. It was not an obscure series that only entered my awareness years later. I may have tried one of the older games, but too many years have passed for me to turn that possibility into certainty. My first strong connection came with Hitman: Absolution. Among dedicated fans, that is almost the most suspicious answer possible. Absolution is more linear, more cinematic, more openly dramatic and more willing to push Agent 47 through authored sequences. IO described it as a personal journey with a cinematic presentation when it released in 2012 (IO Interactive). Those are precisely the qualities that made it easier for me to enjoy.

I played later Hitman games, but they did not feel as fun. The modern trilogy eventually became Hitman: World of Assassination, unifying the locations of the three games into a single platform (IO Interactive). It is an extraordinarily generous assassination toolbox for the player who wants to master maps, repeat objectives, complete challenges and discover increasingly elaborate routes. That player is not automatically me. The huge levels and emphasis on replay turn freedom into homework when I do not love the underlying routine. On my machine, performance was also terrible. I cannot say with certainty whether the cause was the game, my hardware, the configuration or my Linux setup, so I will not present one bad installation as a universal benchmark. I can say that the experience performed badly for me and that I disliked the way the whole structure worked.

This is one of the clearest places where my taste opposes the accepted hierarchy. Blood Money is often held up as one of the defining Hitman games. Absolution is often criticised for narrowing the sandbox. I prefer Absolution. That preference does not invalidate the design achievements of Blood Money or World of Assassination. It reveals what I value: momentum, clear progression, a stronger authored line and less pressure to repeat the same space until I have extracted every possibility.

The magazine ranked a future classic third, but its short paragraph described the economy around assassination more clearly than the art of assassination itself. History proved the game deserved attention. My own history proved that “deserved” and “became mine” are not the same judgement.

4. Prince of Persia 3 — From a School Floppy to a Sequel I Barely Wanted

The fourth entry did not yet have its final title. The magazine called it Prince of Persia 3 and offered a producer quotation: the prince was angry, vengeful and unable to accept his fate. That is atmosphere, not analysis. There is no explanation of movement, combat, the Dark Prince, the chain weapon, speed kills or the struggle to complete a trilogy. The page ranks a famous name and supplies a mood.

The game became Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and released in December 2005. Ubisoft describes it as the return to Babylon and the conflict between the prince and his darker self, while its retrospective on the trilogy highlights the wall springboards, chariot races and stealth-oriented “Speed Kills” system (Ubisoft game page; Ubisoft retrospective). The magazine’s November date was close, but its description told readers almost nothing about how the third game would play.

My strongest Prince of Persia memory comes from much earlier. At school in the early 2000s, there was an old computer with the original MS-DOS game, the version I associate with one of those large 5¼-inch floppy disks. It was brutally hard. The movement had weight and commitment. A jump had to be prepared, a ledge had to be caught, spikes punished hesitation and the one-hour rescue limit turned learning into pressure. I do not think I ever got far. That failure is part of the memory rather than a defect I need to hide.

I recognise the cover of The Two Thrones and believe I played it on an original Xbox or through an Xbox 360, but I did not like it. I now own a physical PC copy, which creates a useful warning for any personal collection history: the box on my shelf today proves that I own the game today. It does not prove that I loved it at release, completed it, or even remember the old console session correctly in every detail.

The series changed from precise cinematic platforming into a three-dimensional mixture of wall-running, combat, puzzles and spectacle. Many players see that evolution as the franchise discovering its modern identity. I still respond more strongly to the cruel little DOS room where every jump mattered. The older game gave me frustration sharp enough to survive for decades. The polished sequel left me with a cover and a vague dislike.

5. Tomb Raider: Legend — “Back to the Roots” Meets the Controls I Cannot Go Back To

The magazine’s fifth entry is built around restoration. Toby Gard, one of Lara Croft’s original creators, had returned. The design would return to its origins. The puzzles would improve, and the acrobatics would become more elaborate. After the damage done by The Angel of Darkness, “back to the roots” was not an innocent phrase. It was a promise that Tomb Raider could remember what it was before its technology, schedule and identity collapsed under the weight of the brand.

Legend did become a successful reset. It released on 7 April 2006, with Crystal Dynamics replacing Core Design and modernising Lara’s movement, physics and environments (official Tomb Raider: Legend page; official series retrospective). The magazine was wrong about the quarter but right about the direction. The finished game was shorter and more streamlined than the old adventures, yet it made Lara controllable in a way that no longer required the player to negotiate with the camera before negotiating with the level.

I grew up with the first two Tomb Raider games on PlayStation. They were hard as hell. I was not secretly a child prodigy who completed them and only later became rusty; I never finished them and was not especially good at them. What survived was the shape of the experience: large quiet spaces, dangerous animals, switches, ledges, isolation and the constant possibility that the next jump would fail because I had misunderstood the distance or because the controls had misunderstood me.

The old movement system was built around a grid even when the world looked three-dimensional. Lara had to be aligned, stepped back, run forward, launched and told to grab. The camera could turn a simple traversal problem into an argument. At the time, those controls became a language through repetition. Today they are the reason I struggle to return. I have tried. The mechanics and camera feel too awkward, and nostalgia cannot move Lara across a gap for me.

I also learned the famous Croft Manor cruelty later: players could lure Winston into the walk-in freezer and close the door, trapping the endlessly patient butler behind it. I originally remembered it as locking him in the toilet, but the freezer is the real ritual. That small correction is a good example of how gaming memory works. The emotional image—childhood players tormenting the butler because the game allowed it—survives more reliably than the floor plan.

I cannot confidently say whether I played Legend itself when it was current. I own it on Steam, and I have played later Tomb Raider games. I even streamed Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2024. The modern games are fine. They are polished, playable and easier for me to control, but they have never produced the same strange mixture of awe, loneliness and mechanical intimidation that the early PlayStation games created. They solved problems that needed solving and, in the process, became more conventional action adventures.

That makes number five reasonable but emotionally complicated. Legend was important to the health of the franchise. It brought Lara back from a genuine crisis, and “back to the roots” was not empty marketing. Yet my roots are attached to controls I no longer enjoy. The new version is easier to play; the old version is harder to forget.

6. Call of Juarez — When Shader Model 3.0 Was Apparently a Personality

The sixth entry is pure 2005 PC-magazine language. As the cowboy Billy, the reader is told, we will shoot through the Wild West. The graphics engine supports Shader Model 3.0, and the split physics system can even simulate wind. That is nearly the whole pitch. The game is introduced less as a Western drama than as a graphics card demonstration wearing boots.

Technical details mattered in 2005. Shader support could decide whether a game looked spectacular, ran badly or refused to start. Physics was still marketed as visible proof that a world was becoming more real. A magazine serving PC players had a legitimate reason to discuss those features. The problem is proportion. Wind simulation tells me that cloth, particles or vegetation may move. It tells me almost nothing about whether the gunfights feel good, whether the story has weight or whether I will care about Billy.

The finished Call of Juarez used two protagonists: the fugitive Billy Candle and Reverend Ray McCall, whose heavy weapons and furious certainty offered a different style of play. That contrast—not a shader number—became the game’s identity. Techland records the first Call of Juarez as a 2006 release and an important stage in the development of its proprietary technology (Techland). The magazine was correct that the engine mattered, but its paragraph reduced a Western chase to a feature list that would be obsolete long before the characters were forgotten.

I played the Call of Juarez games years later and now own them on Steam. This was not a launch-era obsession and not a title I was waiting for because PC Gaming World promised realistic wind. It entered my life after the technology had stopped being news. That timing is useful: when the marketing layer has expired, all that remains is the game. The Western setting, the duelling perspectives and the series’ later experiments are more interesting to me than the fact that a 2005 graphics standard once appeared impressive in a preview box.

Sixth place feels plausible, but the paragraph explains the era better than it explains Call of Juarez. PC gaming journalism was fascinated by the machinery of the image. Sometimes the machine deserved attention. Sometimes it stood between the reader and the actual reason a game might matter.

7. Condemned — The Description That Missed the Horror Standing in Front of It

The magazine calls Condemned “the other horror shooter” from Monolith after F.E.A.R. and says the player will face too many enemies with too little ammunition. That description is not completely false. Ammunition is limited, enemies are dangerous and Monolith’s reputation mattered. It is still a poor summary of what made Condemned: Criminal Origins distinctive.

The finished game leaned heavily on brutal first-person melee combat, oppressive sound, decaying urban spaces and forensic investigation. Pipes, boards and other improvised weapons mattered because firearms were not the normal answer. The player inhabited FBI agent Ethan Thomas, moving through a city that felt diseased long before the plot explained anything. It released with the Xbox 360 in late 2005 and reached Windows in April 2006 (release and design overview). Calling it a shooter with ammunition scarcity is like describing Tomb Raider as a game in which pistols occasionally run out. The detail is present, but the identity is elsewhere.

I never played it. I know what it is, and its reputation has reached me, but there is no honest personal anecdote to manufacture. That absence is valuable because it prevents this article from becoming a performance in which every old game somehow shaped my childhood. Some games did. Some arrived later. Some are only names on a page.

From hindsight, seventh place may undervalue Condemned’s impact on first-person horror. The magazine could not review a finished Windows version, but even as a preview it focused on the easiest inherited vocabulary—“shooter,” “enemies,” “ammunition”—instead of the close-range ugliness that would make the game memorable. The prediction was less wrong than unimaginative.

8. Crime Life: Gang Wars — The Street King Who Vanished

The eighth entry is sold with aggression: hand out as many beatings as you want and rise from nobody to king of the street. The phrasing tries to compress the entire fantasy into domination. It also reveals how quickly the success of GTA encouraged publishers to chase criminal open worlds without understanding that freedom, geography, radio, driving, satire, mission structure and systemic accidents were harder to reproduce than the presence of gangs.

Crime Life: Gang Wars combined free-roaming environments with beat-’em-up combat and used members of D12 in its cast and soundtrack. It released in November 2005 and received broadly poor reviews, with criticism aimed at repetition, controls and design (overview and reception). The magazine’s Q2 estimate had already passed before the issue’s printed sales period, another sign that the page’s information was ageing faster than the paper.

I never played it and have no relationship with it. Even the name feels more like a memory of the mid-2000s market than a memory of a game. It belongs to an era when “become king of the streets” could be placed below GTA as though both products occupied the same ladder. They did not. San Andreas was already a giant cultural machine. Crime Life was trying to catch some of the heat coming from it.

Eighth place was less a vote of confidence than a place in the catalogue. The entry contains no reason to believe the combat will remain interesting, no character worth remembering and no system that distinguishes the game beyond the fantasy of climbing a gang hierarchy. Hindsight is harsh, but the paragraph itself did not offer much resistance.

9. Knights of the Temple II — Freedom Compressed Into Three Lines

The ninth entry says that the renewed Templar Paul de Raque again swings his sword against monsters and that the player may freely choose which tasks to complete. That is enough to identify a sequel and advertise non-linearity, but not enough to establish why it belongs beside the chart’s better-known games.

The finished Knights of the Temple II was an open-ended fantasy action adventure with main and side missions, equipment, trading and multiple regions. Its reception was mixed, with reviewers finding interest in its wider structure but frustration in combat, controls and camera behaviour (overview). The magazine’s phrase “choose freely” therefore described a real ambition, but freedom at the mission-selection layer could not repair every weakness in the moment-to-moment action.

I never played it. It is not a lost favourite, an account-locked memory or a disc I remember receiving from a friend. It is simply one of the many PC games that existed alongside my life without entering it. Ninth place feels appropriate to the page’s level of confidence: the editors knew the premise, had a release window and could summarise the feature on the back of a matchbox.

10. Panzer Elite Action — The Simulation Name Attached to an Arcade War

The final entry begins with a warning: it does not have much to do with the game of the same name. As commander of a tank, the player will reduce battlefields to rubble, supported by a promising multiplayer mode. That disclaimer is more perceptive than it appears. The original Panzer Elite was known as a demanding tank simulation. Panzer Elite Action: Fields of Glory moved toward accessible action, campaigns and spectacle. Even its modern store description places “action” and “simulation” beside one another while foregrounding battlefields and campaigns (Steam). It released in Europe in 2006 rather than the magazine’s Q4 2005 window.

I never played it, and there is no personal verdict hiding behind that sentence. The game’s presence does, however, make the category problem impossible to ignore. A tank action game can reasonably contain adventure, but placing it on the same vertical scale as Alan Wake, Hitman and Tomb Raider makes tenth place almost meaningless. It is not losing a fair contest. It is competing in a contest whose rules change every time the reader moves down one line.

The magazine’s short notice at least warned simulation fans that the famous name did not guarantee the old experience. That is useful consumer information. It may be the most practically honest sentence attached to any of the bottom four games.

The Page Count Was a Second Ranking Hidden Behind the First

The action-adventure chart contains one of the issue’s most revealing contradictions. It declares San Andreas the most anticipated game and Alan Wake one of the most exciting new titles, yet none of the ten receives a dedicated two-page printed preview. Alan Wake is sent to the DVD. San Andreas gets a larger screenshot and a paragraph. The remaining games shrink as the page descends until the bottom entries become compact catalogue notices.

At the same time, the magazine spends four pages on Age of Empires III. It gives two pages to Company of Heroes. Joint Task Force shares a two-page comparison with Ghost Wars. Rise of Legends receives a two-page preview and a designer interview. The issue’s editorial centre is strategy, particularly strategy that can be demonstrated through technology, large screenshots and developer access. The action ranking is important enough to decorate, but not important enough to investigate.

Page count is not a secret review score. Layout depends on deadlines, advertising, available assets, interviews and what publishers were ready to show. But space still communicates confidence. Four pages say, “study this.” Two pages say, “this deserves an argument.” A single line says, “remember the title.” The printed list wants its numbers to appear authoritative while the rest of the magazine spends its real attention elsewhere.

This is why I reject the idea that Alan Wake received a two-page review simply because it ranked second. It did not. It received a DVD preview. This is also why the action page should not be retroactively described as ten reviews. The editors were sorting anticipation, not issuing final verdicts. The language, dates and uneven amount of information all prove it.

What the Magazine Predicted, What History Recorded, and What I Actually Lived

The cleanest way to evaluate the page is to separate three measurements that nostalgia often mixes together:

Game	Magazine’s 2005 expectation	Historical outcome	My actual connection
GTA: San Andreas	The obvious number-one blockbuster, sold through scale and abundance.	A landmark open-world game and one of the defining releases of its generation.	Played, but never loved; cycling, chores and scale pushed it away from what I valued in GTA 1.
Alan Wake	Number two on the strength of Remedy, mystery and a DVD preview; expected in 2006.	Distinctive cult hit, but released in 2010 on Xbox 360 and 2012 on PC.	Tried and admired the premise; disliked the flashlight combat and never got far. Never played the sequel.
Hitman: Blood Money	Glacier upgrade, contract money and equipment progression.	Became one of the series’ most respected entries.	Knew the series but did not form a strong connection until Absolution, which I still prefer.
Prince of Persia 3	Famous sequel represented by a dramatic quote.	Released as The Two Thrones and concluded the Sands trilogy.	Stronger bond with the brutally hard DOS original; probably tried the sequel on Xbox hardware and did not like it. Own a PC copy now.
Tomb Raider: Legend	A return to roots under Crystal Dynamics and Toby Gard’s influence.	Successfully restarted the series after Angel of Darkness.	Grew up with the first two PS1 games; never completed them. Later games are fine, but not extraordinary to me.
Call of Juarez	A Wild West showcase for shaders, physics and wind.	Started a recognisable Western series for Techland.	Played the games years later and own them on Steam.
Condemned	A horror shooter defined by too many enemies and too little ammunition.	Remembered for melee combat, atmosphere and first-person horror.	Know of it, never played it.
Crime Life: Gang Wars	A climb from nobody to street king.	Poorly received and largely forgotten.	Never played it.
Knights of the Temple II	Monster combat and freely chosen quests.	A mixed-reception action RPG with broader ambitions than its paragraph showed.	Never played it.
Panzer Elite Action	Accessible tank destruction and multiplayer.	An action-oriented break from the older simulation identity.	Never played it.

This table is not a replacement top ten. It is an argument against pretending that one top ten can measure everything. Historical impact does not equal personal attachment. Critical respect does not guarantee enjoyment. Ownership does not prove launch-era nostalgia. A game can be influential and still irritate me. A game can be weaker by consensus and still fit me better. A game can sit in my Steam library without possessing a single important memory, while an ancient DOS game I never completed can remain permanent.

The Real Ranking Is Hidden in the Memories

If I ranked these entries only by the amount of space they occupy in my life, the titles would break apart from the printed order. San Andreas would still matter, but mainly because it belongs to a longer argument I have been having with Grand Theft Auto since the first PlayStation game. Tomb Raider: Legend would matter because Lara connects back to the first two games, the freezer, impossible jumps and a control system my hands no longer tolerate. Prince of Persia 3 would matter because its name opens the door to an old school PC and a giant floppy disk. Blood Money would matter because it exposes how completely my taste can oppose a franchise consensus: the celebrated sandbox is less attractive to me than the supposedly compromised, cinematic Absolution.

Alan Wake would remain a respected rejection. Call of Juarez would represent a later Steam-era encounter rather than a 2005 expectation. The bottom four would stay at the bottom—not because I have conducted an objective trial and declared them inferior, but because they never entered my gaming history.

That distinction is easy to lose now that my physical collection has expanded through second-hand shops. A disc acquired today can preserve a game, replace a missing copy, satisfy curiosity or simply be cheap enough to rescue. It does not rewrite the year 2005. The fact that I own The Two Thrones now cannot make me love the play session I barely remember. A digital licence can say I possess Tomb Raider: Legend without telling anybody whether I completed it. Seven Hitman titles can sit in a library while Absolution remains the only one I speak about with real warmth.

My gaming life was not organised by magazine categories. It was organised by access, friends, borrowed discs, school computers, PlayStation hardware, second-hand discoveries, broken copies, accounts, curiosity and whatever my patience could survive. That is why the magazine can be both historically fascinating and personally wrong.

Final Verdict: A Confident List Built on Unequal Evidence

As a snapshot of 2005 excitement, the list is excellent. GTA was untouchable. Remedy was mysterious. Hitman, Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider carried recognisable names. Graphics engines, shaders and physics could still sound like a game’s central identity. Publishers were throwing crime, horror, Westerns, medieval fantasy and tanks into the same broad action market. The page preserves that atmosphere with more honesty than a rewritten history ever could.

As a factual prediction, it is mixed. San Andreas deserved to be treated as a major PC event, although it was already released when much of the issue was on sale. Blood Money became a classic, but arrived far later than forecast. Legend successfully revived Lara, but also slipped into 2006. Alan Wake justified the belief that Remedy was making something distinctive, yet its release schedule turned the magazine’s “2006” into fantasy. Condemned mattered for reasons its sentence barely recognised. The final three games did little to justify the cultural company they were placed in.

As criticism, the page is thin. It ranks brands and promises without a shared standard, mistakes technical bullet points for identity, and compresses games into whatever feature can fit beside a screenshot. The entries are not reviews. None received a two-page printed examination. The list can tell us what the editors expected, but it cannot tell us what they knew after playing finished games because those finished games often did not exist.

As my history, it becomes something else entirely: a trail from the phone boxes of GTA 1 to an airborne Rhino tank; from a bank robbery that ended my GTA IV campaign to an Xbox 360 completion of GTA V that I never cared to repeat; from Alan’s excellent premise to the flashlight that drove me away; from the wrong Hitman becoming my favourite; from a merciless DOS prince to an Xbox sequel I barely remember; from Lara’s freezer to a modern trilogy I consider merely fine.

The magazine arranged the future from one to ten. My memory destroyed the order.

That is not a failure of nostalgia. It is the reason old magazines are worth reopening. They preserve the official expectation before real players, delayed releases, broken mechanics, changing tastes and twenty years of life made a mess of it. Dansk PC Gaming World sold that expectation for 69.50 DKK. What I have now is more valuable: the argument between the future it printed and the gaming life that actually happened.

---

Sources and Release Context

• Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas
• Rockstar Games: GTA Online
• Remedy Entertainment: original Alan Wake release history
• IO Interactive: Hitman – Blood Money
• IO Interactive: Hitman – Absolution
• IO Interactive: Hitman becomes World of Assassination
• Ubisoft: Prince of Persia – The Two Thrones
• Ubisoft: Creating the Sands of Time trilogy
• Tomb Raider: Tomb Raider – Legend
• Tomb Raider: the Legend, Anniversary and Underworld era
• Techland: company and game history
• Condemned: Criminal Origins – release and design overview
• Crime Life: Gang Wars – release and reception overview
• Knights of the Temple II – design and reception overview
• Steam: Panzer Elite Action Gold Edition

Magazine source: Dansk PC Gaming World, issue 7, July 2005, “Action-adventurespil” ranking page. Magazine dates, prices, subscription offers, list positions, descriptions and predicted release windows are transcribed or paraphrased from the photographed print issue.