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.

It took me a little while to place the origins of that unease and to realise that Just Cause 2 was basically just a HD remake of Activision’s excellent and oft overlooked Amiga/Atari ST gem Hunter. Let’s take a look at the evidence, shall we?

Just Cause 2 takes place on a cluster of war-torn tropical archipelagos. And while Hunter’s 16-bit primitive, filled-polygon, 3D graphics perhaps do little to reveal their geographical origins, their maps speak voluminously othere similarity:

Snap.

More than any other, the one element that made Hunter strike a chord with me was the feeling of freedom. Post Elite, but long before Grand Theft Auto, Hunter dumped you in a world with a pistol and a dapper green cap and said “Right, off you go then!” With nary a signpost nor held hand. And I lapped it up. Of course, I spent more time titting about attempting to run over rabbits in tanks than actually persuing any of the game’s preset goals, but that’s the beauty of great design: it was just fun being in that world, seeing what you could find and discovering how to use it to kill ducks.

Whilst playing Just Cause 2, I suffer from the exact same affliction: during an typical play session of two hours, I’ll spend the first ten minutes accomplishing a task from the mission map and the following one hour and fifty minutes trying to fly a plane upside down under a suspension bridge. Snap.

Another enjoyable aspect of Hunter was finding new weapons dotted around the game world and finding devious ways to use them to distribute misery amongst your enemies (and wildlife, naturally). From the pistol to the machine gun and bazooka, graduating from grenades to timed mines and discovering vehicles which came preinstalled with their own weaponry, Hunter always kept the experience fresh thanks to the hidden caches of loot discovered, seemingly on every single play-through. Looking at the back of the box, Just Cause 2 clearly pitches tent in the same camp, but lacks the full set of tent pegs. Why is the ammo limited so? Realism? The game does not seem to have such qualms when you are grappling between two aeroplanes in full flight at 3,000 feet, and rightly so. Grappling between planes is fun, so why not let the player do it? But blowing stuff up with rockets is fun too, so why only let me do it twice?

Such quibbles aside, Hunter and Just Cause 2 both leave it to the player to decide which combination of weaponry and vehicle will best accomplish the task at hand, leading to much hilarity during those moments where an enemy is grappled to a launching gas tank (Just Cause 2) or an errant bicycle crashes into a tank, causing both to explode (Hunter). Snap.

Just Cause 2 played by the stupendous JimPlaysGames (subscribe, he’s great).

Hunter 2, courtesy of watchTechNews (is it still courtesy if you steal the video without asking?).

Now do you see? Tell me that Avalanche Studios weren’t playing a bunch of Hunter when they were kiddies and I will call you a fibber. For all their similarities and Just Cause 2′s obvious improvements to the physics engine which opens up countless opportunities for experimentation, Hunter has it trumped in one very important department. Whereas Just Cause 2 is little more than a sandbox built for destroying, garnished with a sprinkling of nonsense plot, within Hunter there is a mission mode that is far more compelling than “just blow some stuff up and see what happens”. It’s ‘hunter’ mode directs you to assassinate the opposing army’s general, but again dumps you into the world with little direction, causing you to cautiously follow up clues as to his whereabouts and sneak behind enemy lines using subterfuge which engenders panic and violence when things inevitably go wrong. It is this mission that ultimately inspires lasting memories of Hunter’s evocative atmosphere, and, in my esteem at least, demote Just Cause 2 to a quick blast of disposable fun in comparison.

Yeah, take that 2010!

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?

The easy (and logical) answer is that you simply can’t – but that didn’t stop developers from trying over and over again. And again. Let’s have a look at the original Game Boy version and dissect the reasons behind the repeated failure of the sequels to capture the green and black magic. By the way, here is not the place to be considering all those titles that just added ‘tris’ to their names in order to attract some more attention (I’m looking at you, Welltris, you hussy).

Looks

This game looks simply beautiful. To say that the Game Boy’s screen was limited is a gross understatement, but Tetris actually looks better in four shades of green. Any attempt to add colour has just made Tetris more gaudy. The blocks don’t need to be different colours to help you differentiate them, so subtle shading differences win as far as I’m concerned. They also remind me of the old paint packages like Degas Elite on the ST and Amiga, so that’s a double win.

Controls

Move a piece, rotate it one of two ways and plonk it down. Two buttons and a d-pad. You need nothing more. Except maybe a pause button if feeding your kids or not getting run over are important to you, but you can certainly keep your touch controls and ‘store a block’ shoulder button.

Portability and Game Modes

Haven’t got time for a full marathon mode slog to level 9? GB Tetrishas got your back. Just switch to mode B and set yourself a challenge of clearing 10 lines of garbage before your train arrives, or see if you can complete a round at full speed using only four line Tetrises (only ninjas need apply). I don’t need battle, Push or One Touch modes and you can stick your Twitter integration where the trends don’t shine #thankyouverymuch.

So what’s the answer, then? Not release a sequel in the first place? That’s a viable option. @Notch certainly won’t be releasing a Minecraft sequel any time soon. Have you seen what he’s working on now? It’s exciting, and if you like Elite and/or 16-bit processor architecture (and who doesn’t?) you need to check that out. Stop reading this piffle and click here. See? That’s hardly Minecraft 2, is it?

Money-grabbing toss-merchants are never going to stop being money-grabbing toss-merchants though, are they? So maybe the best thing to do is ignore all the shiny, ‘upgraded’ Tetris games and dig out the old dirty brick and play the perfect one. I might go and do just that right now.

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.

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).

The first game followed the genetic memories of Altair, an assassin plying his trade during the time of the third crusade, whereas the sequel centres around Ezio Auditore de Firenze, a renaissance would-be playboy whose silver spoon is yanked from his jaws when his father and brothers are hanged for treason. This injustice pushes him into the family trade of assassination and begins a whirlwind plot that involves many famous figures of renaissance Italy.

Though the science fiction elements serve as an interesting frame in which the events of the game proper (ie. Ezio’s exploits) take place, the opening scenes of the game almost put me off playing the game at all. The upset of unexpected science fiction was one thing (soothed by a quick visit to Wikipedia to read up on the original game’s plot) but starting a game famed for the explorative free-running agility of its protagonist with scenes involving neutered control of a clumsy civilian in linear environments, limited interaction and dull button-mashing fights left me reeling and questioning whether there was any point making this section of the game playable at all.

The following scenes do little to soothe my consternation. After Desmond’s escape, he is introduced to the irksome members of some kind of resistance cell that are so irritating it begs questioning whether Desmond is on the right side of this conflict after all. Once again strapped into the Animus (imagine the kind of thing Neo used to jack in to the matrix) Desmond is ready to experience his first genetic memory of Ezio’s life: his birth, bizarrely enough. No human brain retains the memory of its entry into the world, but apparently the DNA does. Hmm. OK, best not start picking apart the science of this particular fiction, or we won’t get very far into the review. Onward.

The birth scene is pretty stirring: Ezio’s grand entrance is met with anxiety by his mother as he lies motionless and silent in the doctors hands. On screen prompts implore you to press buttons that relate to movements of Ezio’s newborn arms, legs and head, introducing you to the games ‘puppeteer’ control system. The problem is that this whole scene seems completely contrived as a novel way to introduce the player to this ‘revolutionary’ control system, a control system which upon further inspection is almost identical to all third person action adventure games, and the scene itself has no story telling or character building merit to justify its inclusion, feeling utterly out of place.

Ezio’s second memory is of a street brawl – more button mashing – and his third is an annoying trial and error, instant fail-festival of restart task were you must beat your sibling in a foot race to the roof of a building. OK, so I only had to restart three times, but it was still tedious and at odds with the fun that was to follow. It was, shockingly, a good ten minutes before the game really opened up and showed me its charms.

And charming it most certainly is. Ezio’s Florence is beautiful, both aesthetically and practically so. It looks superficially accurate, but closer inspection reveals it’s artifice: everything; every rooftop, window sill, pile of leaves, wooden beam or crate is purposefully placed to ensure that the whole of Florence amounts to a grand playground for Ezio to explore at full tilt, and the control mechanisms are perfectly tuned to take advantage of this: the ‘free running’ control aspect does not require a button press to circumnavigate every piece of street furniture, just holding two buttons and a direction on the thumb stick will direct Ezio to leap over obstacles or up onto buildings as he encounters them, freeing up the player to scan the environment ahead and plot the swiftest course to the next objective. The result is a sense of flowing, fluid movement that plays with the open world of Florence to provide an unforgettable feeling of freedom. If you’ve ever seen a gibbon as it swoops, almost flying, through the canopy, you have an impression of how Assassin’s Creed II looks when a player is on song.

Maybe those stilted first ten minutes were deliberately crafted to enhance this feeling once the leash is off. Regardless, the game is ridiculously fun despite those hiccuping opening moments, and I will certainly be playing this more in the coming weeks.

One Game Closer to Death is a feature wherein Marc plays a randomly selected game (thank you random.org – atmospheric noise for the win!) from Octopus Books’ 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die. There are strict rules to follow and a back burner for games not currently accessible. If you own a Playstation 3 or any of the games on the back burner and would like to contribute then drop us a line.

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.

Ignoring the animated series and cut-scenes as much as possible (playing the DS version certainly helps with latter) reveals a game rich in strategy that rewards the OCD tendencies that reside deep within in all gamers. Given a barren plot of land, players are tasked with making it habitable by picking litter, removing rocks, planting flowers and digging ponds. Each pinata have a set of desires that you must fulfil if you want them to visit, move in and then eventually mate in your garden. For example (very early on in the game, spoiler fans) once you have some lovely soft soil, a little Whirlm will appear. Grow some grass and the Whirlm will decide to stick around. Get two Whirlms and task Willy Builder to build you a Whirlm house (not a willy) and avert your eyes for a couple of seconds and congratulations, it’s an annelid!

It sounds very simple, but once your piñata population increases, balancing all their differing requirements, preventing the carnivorous ones from eating the squidgy ones and fending off ruinous ‘sour’ piñatas is very challenging; enticing all the breeds of piñata into your carefully preened and pruned garden is every bit as compelling as completing a pokedex.

To be honest, this game is wasted on children. It’s marketing and colourful sheen scream “If you’re eight, you will love this!” but an eight year old has as much chance of getting the best out of this game as they have of doing the same with SimCity. I hate lazy comparisons in game reviews, but ‘Pokemon meets SimCity‘ is a particularly accurate lazy comparison. If you are the type of gamer that enjoys the OCD of completing a pokedex and the delicate balancing of complex environmental factors, then you need Viva Piñata in your life.

One Game Closer to Death is a feature wherein StickHead plays a randomly selected game (thank you random.org – atmospheric noise for the win!) from Octopus Books’ 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die. There are strict rules to follow and a back burner for games not currently accessible. If you own a Playstation 3 or any of the games on the back burner and would like to contribute then drop us a line.

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. The player is responsible for dropping numbered tiles onto a grid. When the number on the disc is equal to the number of discs in that row or column, that disc disappears. After a set number of discs, the whole grid shifts up and numberless grey discs are placed on the bottom row. These grey discs reveal their numbers only after the elimination of two touching discs, and if any disc is pushed off the top of the grid, it’s game over. Whew, not too bad. Anyone still reading? No? I’ll continue anyway…

These simple mechanics hide deep and subtle nuances (don’t they always?): players must cultivate a grid conducive to survival by managing low numbers to avoid painting themselves into a corner, making sure the discs do not pile too high (unless topped by an appropriate number) and not letting too many grey discs build up while all the time building opportunities for chains – the only way to get to the upper echelons of the Facebook integrated high score table and be the envy of all your friends (maybe).

The place where Drop7 really grabbed me by the danglies was in its ‘Hardcore Mode’, where the game cuts to the chase and ups the difficulty to pant wetting levels right from the off. This keeps each game short and snappy, ideal for a quick game while waiting for Game employees to stop pushing game guides and extended warranty and actually sell you what you want.

Drop7 is beautiful to look at, incredibly accessible and deviously addictive. To top it all off, you can download an ad supported version for no monies whatsoever. You owe it to your iDevice to download this.

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). In order to complete a puzzle, a continuous unbroken loop must be drawn around the playing field that satisfies the requirements of each numbered square. Said squares have a number between zero and three, and the loop must make contact with that number of the square’s edges. That actually sounds a lot more complicated than it needs to be so head here for a better and more visual explanation of what a slitherlink is.

Some links will be completed in a matter of seconds when you are inspired by a zen like ‘feel’ for where the line needs to go, whereas others will take meticulous elimination of all the impossibilities before you weave your way through the grid. When mistakes are made, careful unpicking of the thread will always reveal the error, so frustration is never a contributing factor to Slitherlink’s difficulty.

The only problem with the DS’s implementation of these compelling and devious puzzles is the language barrier. The initial difficulty curve here is steep, as only so much of the tutorial can be understood, leaving the player to figure out many of the quirks and special rules that enable the logical deduction of the loop’s path for themselves. Having said that, it is very rewarding to figure out all of these strategies alone, and after the first few stages taking up to half an hour to complete, I three-starred puzzle five and haven’t looked back since.

That and the typical Nintendo lounge jazz are the only negatives I can bring to bear on this excellent and unique puzzle game.

Slitherlink is unfortunately only available in Japan, so importing is the only option of you want to get hold of this cart. Thank Shigeru for region free handhelds, eh?

One Game Closer to Death is a feature wherein StickHead plays a randomly selected game (thank you random.org – atmospheric noise for the win!) from Octopus Books’ 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die. There are strict rules to follow and a back burner for games not currently accessible. If you own a Playstation 3 or any of the games on the back burner and would like to contribute then drop us a line.

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

Tekken‘s control system was a revolution at the time of release, discarding the norm of having buttons for different attack strengths, instead giving players a button for each of the fighter’s limbs. This results in a very direct system that can be understood within seconds of first playing the game. Add in easily accessible and satisfying throws (Law’s throw remains one of the best in any fighting game) and a roster small enough (eight, with a further ten unlockable) and with few enough moves so that memorising animations and effective blocking patterns to exploit opponents’ weaknesses is feasible and the result is a very accessible fighting game that invites the player to get a feel for its timings and rhythms. It feels almost zen in its lack of clutter.

There are balancing issues: Law seems pretty unstoppable in anyone’s hands, against human or Playstation, and many characters have cheap moves that reward repeated spamming and button mashing. These are the kinds of issues that time has helped the genre to heal, so to hold these against Tekken would be very mean, akin to ribbing Grandad for using a walking stick, forgetting your name and constantly talking about the war.

Tekken is great fun from the first play. You don’t need to flip through an instruction book or look for an online FAQ in order to get the most out of it. The unlockable players will keep me plugging away at the single player game for some time to come, and the simplicity means that friends unfamiliar with the game can pick it up quickly, start kicking my arse and join in with the fun almost immediately. I, for one, miss this sensibility in contemporary fighters.

One Game Closer to Death is a feature wherein StickHead plays a randomly selected game (thank you random.org – atmospheric noise for the win!) from Octopus Books’ 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die. There are strict rules to follow and a back burner for games not currently accessible. If you own a Playstation 3 or any of the games on the back burner and would like to contribute then drop us a line.

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.

The third game in the series is the epitome of the adages ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and ‘evolution, not revolution’; it takes the tried and tested formula and adds more collectables, more levels, more secrets, more bonus levels and more creatures to control.

There is a great variety in the level design – some ask you to charge through them quickly, while others reward a slower, more considered approach. One level may test precision of movement in order to avoid projectiles or indestructible enemies, while the next will be about figuring out how best to use a creature’s ability to progress.

Atmospheric music (especially the jaunty remix of Peggy Lee’s ‘You Give Me Fever’) adds to a great experience that many Super Nintendo owners missed out on thanks to its release late in the console’s life, the attentions of gamers and press wooed by the recently released Nintendo 64.

One Game Closer to Death is a feature wherein Game & Write plays a randomly selected game (thank you random.org – atmospheric noise for the win!) from Octopus Books’ 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die. There are strict rules to follow and a back burner for games not currently accessible. If you own a Playstation 3 or any of the games on the back burner and would like to contribute then drop us a line.

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. The weighting of the book seemed very biased towards more modern games, with over half the book dedicated to the noughties (yes, I hate that word too). It is arguable that people do not really need to play eight iterations of Grand Theft Auto in order to get a good impression of what Rockstar were aiming for, and many gamers felt that independent developers were under-represented, as were hand-held games, 8-bit computer games and DOS classics.

All these criticisms are valid, but even so the book represents collection of great and historically important games written about by talented and passionate games journalists, and once you pick it up it really is very hard to stop reading. Here’s what Kotaku said:

Edited by longtime Edge editor-in-chief Tony Mott and packed with screenshots and reviews, it sounds like the book would make for some excellent bathroom reading, or the inspiration behind a video game playing online journal, in the same vein as that movie about Julia Child.

Now there is a great idea. I’m buggered if I know who Julia Child is or how she is relevant to a blog about playing the 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die, but I have an idea I’m about to start something stupid. Watch this space, I’m off to Google Julia Child.