Kevin Spacey and Troy Baker – Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Not only Keanu Reeves – movie stars in games

You may not remember those times, but Call of Duty used to be a most popular and esteemed series. That was before the players, tired of futurism in the series, poured a bucket of hate at Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. And before Black Ops 4 turned into a machine for shredding players' wallets. The publishers and developers probably wiped their tears with hundred-dollar bills, but you know – the bad taste lingered.

Still, when the series was in prime, we got a very decent, if slightly crude, Advanced Warfare. What stood out from the rest of the series was its big single-player campaign and incredible cast, the biggest names in small and big roles. There was Kit Harrington, for example, but the demonic Kevin Spacey stole the show, today the actor struggles to regain ground after a sexual abuse scandal, but back then he was a dark idol riding on the wave of popularity of House of Cards (and all previous successes, as, Seven).

In Advanced Warfare, he played Underwood on action steroids. His name was Jonathan Irons (just to confuse us) – a CEO of a large military corporation, Atlas, but this character and the protagonist of the Netflix series were rather similar – power hungry-pragmatists who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. His aide was Jack Mitchell (played by the exceptional Troy Baker), the game's protagonist. An amputee veteran gets a second chance – along with a prosthesis – exactly from Atlas. Most of the time we only listen to Baker's voice, but in the cut-scenes, he really delivered, breathing a little life into the overall generic action figure.

Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones – Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

Conveying a story on an RTS map is quite challenging. Of course, the development of technology has helped in this, but for many years, the creme de la creme of storytelling where the cut-scenes. Those from Warcraft were impressively epic; Starcraft conveyed a dark, space-horror-western style (until it turned into Dragon Ball), and Command & Conquer... well, this series had quite a character. The character of a low-budget, charming sci-fi series.

The sort of sci-fi, where cardboard boxes are a starship, a vacuum cleaner after minor modification becomes a flamethrower, and a space base is created with CGI reminiscent of the clip Dire Straits' Money for Nothing (the first animated music video). Then, there were the actors, parading against backgrounds that were so bad they were good; the celebrities of the geek world.

James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, played James Solomon, the General of the GDI -- a faction that defended itself against the NOD terrorist attack. He performed the character with an exaggerated military drill and zest. The same could be said about larger-than-life Michael McNeill (played by Michael Biehn -- both characters inherited their actors' names). It was from his point of view that we observed the events between missions. With unwavering poise, he throws one-liners and goes head-on into battle.

All this contributed to an atmosphere that was the mainstay of this fascinating story, played out in-between the missions of an otherwise good RTS series.