Programmer Dave: All the good ideas have gone, Jim! They’ve been done already!
Programmer Jim: Don’t worry Dave, we’ll do what everyone else does and rehash some of the old ones.

And thus, Just Cause 2 was born. Or something like that.

You see, when I recently played Avalanche Studio’s destroy ‘em up on both my XBox 360 and the OnLive service, I couldn’t shake an eerie sense of deja vu. A strange nagging sensation in the back of my skull was telling me I’d done all this before.

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Tetris for the original Game Boy is one of the video game industry’s most romantic and well told success stories with good reason. It has a touch of the exotic thanks to its Russian setting, it has that James Bond flavour courtesy of the KGB’s involvement, and above all else it has a perfect game released for the perfect console at the perfect time in order to become a sensation.

As is the norm within any organisation in the entertainment industry with a huge hit on it’s hands, sequels were inevitable. Normally, this is not a problem as sequels in video games fare better than their cinematic counterparts; the rule of diminishing returns seems inverted here, just ask Capcom about their sequel to Street Fighter or Activision about making iteratively tedious FPS war games. But Tetris presents an unusual problem: how do you improve on perfection?
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Mum’s new job signalled a turning point for our little family. Not only did it mean financial security for the first time since Dad left, it also ushered in the era of the IBM compatible for the Johnson household.

One of the first and most pressing tasks my mum undertook at her new place of work was updating the archaic administrative system. Out went the creaky Tandy 286 and its anachronistic DOS word processing and spreadsheet software and in came a shiny new Windows 95 machine with Lotus AmiPro and 1-2-3.

Mum’s office was in walking distance from my school, so I’d often spend a couple of hours after school at the office, and the new PC was obviously the main attraction, so one evening after work Mum took me to Electronics Boutique in search of a game to keep me busy. The game I settled on was Command & Conquer and it opened up a unknown world of gaming ripe for exploration. It wasn’t long before Mum’s work responsibilities spilled over into her home life – not great news for her leisure time, but it did mean that the Johnson household was to welcome a Pentium powered beast into its midst. Here’s a look at a few of the games that I held in high esteem during that time of discovery.

Command & Conquer

Baring in mind that this was my first experience of CD-ROM gaming, the opening minutes of Westwood’s seminal real-time strategy game were met with awe and wonder. The live action cut-scenes and their CD quality music and sound were a revelation; it was hard for my fifteen year old brain to believe that this was part of a game I was about to play. At this juncture, the vast majority of my gaming was conducted on a SNES and an Atari ST, so the closest I’d been to full motion video in games was watching some drunkard swearing at Mad Dog McCree in the local Megabowl and balking at the cost of a credit, so I was not in the least bit phased by the U.S. daytime TV quality acting, nor the Neighbours set production values. I was enthralled by Command and Conquer‘s cinematics, but the truth of the matter is that this was all just window dressing; the meat of the game was still to come, and what hunk of prime fillet it was too.

Not only was Command and Conquer my first taste of CD-ROM gaming, it was my first real taste of real-time strategy gaming. Retrospectively, one can label many classic games that I have played and loved as RPS: Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, Populous and Mega-Lo-Mania were all real-time and involved more than a dollop of strategy, but could hardly be called RPS in the way that Dune 2 and Command and Conquer helped to define the genre. What  separated Command and Conquer from those other great titles in my esteem was the combination of freedom and scale. I’ve always enjoyed games that give you the opportunity to solve problems in multiple ways, and the possible solutions in Command and Conquer were seemingly endless. Sure, building as many tanks as you could and throwing them at the enemy with impunity was always the most likely to succeed, but my gaming habits were a lot less cynical in those days, and after all, most of Scribblenauts’ puzzles can be solved with a flamethrower, a dinosaur and a helicopter, but it doesn’t make the developer’s technical accomplishments and vision any less inspiring.

TIE-Fighter/Dark Forces

As I was a bit of a Star Wars fan, it was only a matter of time before I got my hands on a game adaptation of Lucas’s hugely popular money tree. It was a shame, then, that the game was Rebel Assault - an early showcase for the possibilities of CD-ROM technology that featured incredibly impressive interactive recreations of classic vehicular Star Wars moments. The audio visual experience was extremely authentic, but sadly someone neglected to include the fun. No longer starstruck by FMV and CD quality sound, niggles like unpredictable collision detection and poor control response marred my enjoyment of an already fairly uninspired game design – such a disappointment at the time.

I wouldn’t have to wait long for a game to come along to sate my sci-fi fantasy needs. TIE-Fighter was everything Rebel Assault should have been: a detailed back story with attention to detail and a ring of authenticity, an amazing rendition of the John Williams score, great visual design and above all else: Corellian corvettes full of fun. Basically a flight simulator without the boredom, Lucasarts’ second game in the X-Wing series places you in the shiny new boots of a shiny new recruit in a shiny new TIE-Fighter in the shiny new Imperial Navy. The sympathetic tone of the narrative towards the Empire and its exploits makes for a very compelling plot which offers a whole new perspective on the Star Wars universe. Add to this the best dogfighting experience on PC and you have a game that all Star Wars fans need to have played. Better than X-Wing, mainly thanks to a higher resolution and the fact that TIE-Fighters are much more fragile which adds to the tension no end; and better than later games in the series X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, which did have the same enjoyable dogfighting, but didn’t Share TIE-Fighter‘s story’s laser-sharp focus.

Once TIE-Fighter was completed, something needed to fill the gaping Sarlacc pit that was left behind. Mercifully, it wasn’t long before Lucasarts explored the arena of the Doom clone with Dark Forces. Having played Doom and Hexen and enjoyed them immensely, the rational half of my brain knew that Dark Forces wasn’t a patch on those two, but the other half didn’t care a jot. It was too busy humming the theme tune and going “peeuww! peeuuuwww! Take that Imperial gits!” Once again the real key of the game is that it managed to capture the atmosphere of the Star Wars universe almost perfectly.

These two tastes of the extended Star Wars Universe helped to start a love affair with all things Star Wars that would see me devour all the books in the X-Wing series as well as Shadow of the Empire, The Han Solo books and, well, anything I could get my hands on, to be honest: comics, cartoons, conventions, and the collectable card game. This love affair would last until the release of the latest trilogy of films, a sad story shared by many ex-Star Wars fans.

Quake

Going from Doom, Hexen and Dark Forces to Quake was like saying goodbye to monocular vision, being given an extra eyeball and then seeing things that wished you didn’t have that extra eyeball after all. The leap in technology vastly improved the feeling of immersion, and the developers used this newly gained power over us gamers to mess with our heads. Remember this guy?

I read a blog post recently that stated “…even though the graphics are now laughable…”. Laughable? That image still makes me shit a brick. I can hear its demonic growl just by looking at it.

Besides the truly terrifying atmosphere and ruined underwear, I’ll remember Quake for introducing me to the joys of mouse-look. WASD-ing my way around this dark and twisted world made so much more sense now that I had a y-axis to worry about. Falling from a tower, spinning my avatar through 270 degrees at speeds that would have imploded his inner ear to pop off a couple grenades down a death knight’s trousers was thrilling to say the least.

Afterlife

Including LucasArt’s spiritual aside to SimCity in this article was a contentious issue for me. It’s not one of the best PC games by a long chalk, not even one of the best strategy PC games by an extended biro. Nevertheless, I feel it deserves a mention, if only as a great example of the different roles PC and console games have played in my gaming life. Starting with Command & Conquer, my PC gaming on the whole has been a slower, more considered affair. I attribute this to three things: the user interface, where mouse and keyboard lend themselves to strategy and other slower paced genres; the more utilitarian location of the PC, away from the comfort of the sofa and on its own dedicated desk; and the software library which points to a demographic with a similar view of PC gaming.

Another quality sadly in decline in the mainstream console market of the time was also found in this new foray into PC gaming – a quality well represented by Afterlife: kookiness. In a market increasingly saturated by risk-averse publishers churning out clones, me-too licensed product and copycat games, the PC offered a library of games with distinct style, character and atmosphere: something exemplified today on PC by modern independent developers.

Having said that, Afterlife itself is certainly a clone itself; an unabashed reproduction of SimCity‘s core gameplay. Presented with a tiled environment that the player is tasked with populating with zones while balancing a budget, Lucasarts deftly sidestepped Maxis’ copyright lawyers’ flaming banhammer with its afterlife punishment/reward theme. As overlord of the afterlife, your job is not dissimilar to a mayor of a SimCity city. The difference here is that all of your denizens are dead, and rather than cater for their educational, health and employment needs, you must create an afterlife that will cater for their spiritual beliefs and reward or punish them for their living actions by creating a glorious heaven and dismal hell that can process all the souls on Earth who believe in an afterlife, and therefore improve the spirituality and morality of the people on Earth.

Settlers 2

Another great example of a slower paced PC game, Settlers 2 seems to be appropriately described by the storytelling term ‘decompressed’. Rounds of Settlers 2 can take hours and hours, with very slow incremental progress. It is a huge credit to the developers that this snail’s pace is never boring. Quite the opposite, it is incredibly compelling, and a rare example of a video game that can be realistically played alongside another activity like reading or watching TV.

The trick to a successful Settlers 2 session is not military might or even tactical genius, but efficient placement of buildings and roads and the effective distribution of resources with considered prioritisation of each production chain, or in other words, world domination through town planning. The tribe that is most efficiently using the available resources wins, it’s as simple as that. This is far more compelling than it sounds, and Blue Byte Software’s sequel had another powerful draw: after investing hours and hours into your settlement’s expansion and infrastructure, you really cared about what happened to them.

These days I buy fewer and fewer commercial PC games due to the high cost of entry (my humble laptop isn’t capable of playing most of the last five year’s big hitters, and I haven’t the money for a gaming desktop) and the diminishing of the PC as a unique platform (it seems that multi-format games make up the majority of the top sellers). However, digital distributors such as Steam, Good Old Games and the Humble Bundles often tempt me back to PC gaming with their emphatic sales and triple A titles. Recently, I have been enjoying VVVVVV, Voxatron, Torchlight, World of Goo and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri to name but a few. Long may it continue.

Upon booting up Ubisoft’s renaissance stab ‘em up, I was taken aback – the last thing I was expecting was science fiction.

As it turns out, the story is set in the near future and follows the experiences of Desmond Miles, who finds himself at the business end of some spurious experiments regarding his ‘genetic memory’, or in other words, the events of his ancestor’s lives. It turns out that Desmond’s ancestor’s memories can unlock the secret location of several artefacts that will help the modern day Templars continue their behind-the-scenes-conspiracy brand of world domination. So far, so Dan Brown (only without the comedically bad writing).

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I have plenty of experience in the field of enjoying a game whilst in blissful ignorance of a woeful animated series. Having played through four Pokemon games without ever watching a single episode, I was well prepared for Rare’s kid friendly original IP, Viva Piñata.

Now that I think about it, the Viva Pinata and Pokemon business models have so many similarities that it is hard to believe that the brothers Stamper didn’t have half an eye on the huge steaming pile of cash that Nintendo is currently trying to waste developing headache machines for the masses. The main difference is that Rare felt the need to imbue their little paper animals with an odious mid-nineties ‘attitude’ that makes me want to claw out my inner ear and feed it to my rabbit.

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It took me a good few days cold turkey to free myself of the logic puzzler addiction inspired by Slitherlink. However, it seems that Random.org’s number generator is the digital equivalent of your mates constant badgering: “Aah, go on, just one pint won’t kill ya.” I haven’t fallen off the wagon; more like flung from it into the pile of steaming roadside, facebook integrated, Tetris inspired, falling tile filled road-kill that is Drop7. This could get ugly.

Wow, I’m bad at describing these logic puzzles. I have a knack for making the simple arcane. I could make Pong sound complicated. Oh well, here goes. [continue reading]

Forget Sodoku (oh wait, you already have) – this is the only logic based puzzler you need to keep Picross company in your DS game collection.

Like Sudoku and Picross, numbers are the lynchpin of Slitherlink’s puzzles and yet no mathematical ability is required (beyond the ability to count to three). [continue reading]

The first thing that struck me about Namco’s seminal fighting game is its simplicity. Tekken does not allow you to move around your opponent, nor do over the top specials. There are no ring outs nor superfluous game modes, no cut-scenes nor dialogue – no razzmatazz of any sort. There is a distinct lack of command list, no counter moves and only very limited combos.

So, with almost all of the accepted norms of beat ‘em up games stripped away, what are you left with? [continue reading]

The Donkey Kong Country series, like many of its platforming contemporaries, is not shy about its influences. Unlike its contemporaries it actually holds its own under comparative scrutiny with its plumbing progenitor. They share similar ways to dispatch enemies, an over-world that rewards exploration, a wealth of secrets and buckets of charm.

Keza MacDonald wrote:

For a publisher as traditionally conservative as Nintendo was at that time, allowing a British development team to take one of its original icons and give him a three dimensional makeover, an extended family of other Kongs, and a whole new platforming game was a radical move.

Nintendo were right to trust Rare with one of their flagship characters. They used cutting edge technology to wow gamers with visuals not thought possible on a 16-bit console, and not content to rest on these well earned laurels, Rare imbued Mr Kong’s adventures with further aesthetic quality thanks to likable characters and quirky game worlds. [continue reading]

Just before Christmas, Octopus books released a book entitled 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die to generally favourable reviews. Pushing aside the age old “ZOMG where is Super Mario Land it is teh awesomezz!!!!1″ fanboy criticisms for a moment, intelligent gamers had some legitimate concerns. [continue reading]