Recently with how shitty things have been getting I've stopped hate playing modern day titles to understand normies and gone back to my happy place of enjoying classics or even trying out classics I never got to when I was younger.
It makes you realise when you take off the rose tinted glasses especially if you put the old programmer brain on you realise how some titles, yes some, even though they were fun generally made some horrible decisions regarding balance and general design. One game that everybody loves to rave on about including me is Rome Total War and let's be honest, the squalor and distance to capital mechanics completely break that game, it's awful.
No matter what you do you'll always be facing rebellions and riots if you start expanding your empire properly as the game seems to want you to do so it's easy to see why they got rid of that crap in later versions of the game. Even with C&C and Starcraft they all do some atrocious cheating behaviour with the AI which can make the game completely unplayable if you don't micro-manage the fuck out of everything. I also hate how early Total War games would frequently spawn tiny armies that are almost impossible to get rid of owing to the fact they can retreat 3 - 4 times at a maximum even if you have the largest army around.
What other titles can you think of that while yes are fun generally made some pretty awful design choices even for back in the day? I'm thinking of Fallout 1 and 2's RNG mechanics as another example.
On the flip side, you have Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which lets me do shit that I've never seen replicated in any other game, ever, and I can control completely just using my keyboard.
Early games are all over the place, and I can forgive them for that.
I need to play Alpha Centauri I think that will be what I load up next, maybe Civ 2 as well because I've got a strategy game craving thanks to how shit modern gaming is at the moment.
If you're willing to give up several hundred hours worth to a game that likely ran in a dos prompt at one point, all I can say is... the Drones need you. They look up to you.
Also, don't get the expansion pack with the new factions. It's not really needed.
Alien Crossfire. Yeah, just plain Alpha Centauri is better.