Ninja Gaiden II

Slow down there, Ryu. You'll cut someone's arm off.

Source // Moby Games

When I said that Ninja Gaiden Black killed ninja games for me (what a bastard), I didn't think it would literally kill ninja games for me, but it did. Sat next to it in the DVD case was Ninja Gaiden II for the Xbox 360, the new and improved (again?) sequel to Ninja Gaiden. Not a v1.5, but a v2.0.

With poor Internet, playing games offline has been basically all I can do, so it's a good job I've got hundreds ready to go, physically, digitally, even those made of cardboard. I am all set for having no Internet and playing Ninja Gaiden II.

But it has been killed before it even left that DVD case...

LostWinds

Yes, even the space between those two words is lost.

We've been having a torrid time with the Internet this month, though "without the Internet" is probably a better choice of words. Do you know what you can't do without the Internet? Download video games. Do you know what you definitely can't do, even with the Internet? Download WiiWare platformer LostWinds, an artsy little game about the wind, I imagine.

Luckily, it's been ported to the PC in the decade since that original release, and it's small enough to not require hours and hours of a stable Internet connection to download. Oh, what I'd give for a stable Internet connection...

Until then, let's see if we can chill out in this game I know nothing about.

LocoRoco 2

Required listening: https://youtu.be/n2nvk9c1AyU

Back when we played Patapon, I mentioned that the PlayStation Portable had two cutesy and musical platformers and that it was the other of the two that I was more familiar with, LocoRoco. A couple of years later, the bouncy yellow blobs were back for LocoRoco 2.

While I played more LocoRoco than Patapon, I've played little of either - another error to correct at some nebulous point in the future. I get the impression the storyline won't be the important part of LocoRoco 2, though. Who needs a story when everything looks so damn adorable?

Let's get rolling and bouncing through what must be the happiest game on the PSP.

Tetris Party

Are Solo games better with more people?

Source // Nintendo

How can you tweak a classic like Tetris? Different shaped blocks? A landscape-oriented grid to fill? Special abilities and power-ups? These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, and all of them cause a little shudder because they all seem a bit naff when compared to the pure Tetris experience.

And yet developers have still tried to make some Tetris-y spin-offs work, and may well have succeeded in Tetris Party, a collection of different Tetris-based modes for a gathering of Tetris fans.

Are any of the games in here good enough to replace the O.G. itself, or is this just a neat little compilation of something to do with your mates?

Let's Tap

Let's not?

Source // Nintendo Life

"Wii" and "Gimmick". Two words that are often found together, but whether that's for a good or bad reason largely depends on who you ask.

Having not owned a Nintendo Wii in its prime, and finding no major reason to keep the batteries in the Wiimote in 2021, if you ask me, the two words have a slightly negative lean to them. A Nintendo Wii game has to be really rather special to overcome that feeling, preferably making use of the controller in a way that no other console can do.

Let's Tap goes a step further, and gets players to use the Wiimote in a way no Nintendo Wii game ever did: by not even touching the fancy motion-sensing controller at all.

Bold move? Must have worked at least well enough to warrant a look in by those who follow a 1001 must-play video games list for fun...

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2

Retro Evolved Harder?

Source // Microsoft

I played Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved and had a mix of ups and downs before concluding that it was entertaining for the short while I spent playing it, but had no real intentions of ever putting more time or effort into it. For what reward? A higher score? More colours?

I didn't see the point, but would a more colourful sequel in the form of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 make me think again?

Guitar Hero World Tour

When will the noise end?!

Source // Nintendo

So, Harmonix made a few Guitar Hero games, unleashing the plastic plague upon second-hand electronics stores the world over, before they swapped bands for whatever reasons and played for Rock Band, which introduced more plastic peripherals into households that really didn't need them, proving that there was - somehow - a market for this tat.

Not wishing the up-and-coming competitor to have all the fun, whoever was left in the original Guitar Hero band thought they too could pull off a microphone and drum kit and here we are: Guitar Hero World Tour.

Yes, it's got one fewer drum, but it has two more cymbals, so ner. Is that enough to get me to play it? You know the answer to that.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Wanna go bowling?

What can be said about Grand Theft Auto IV that hasn't already been said about Grand Theft Auto IV? It was the next big GTA title, the first for four years, here to show off the next generation of consoles. Everyone wanted to see what it was capable of. Could the leap from San Andreas to IV be as big as the leap from GTA2 to GTA III? Would it live up to the hype? Was the push for realism going to make or break it?

When we look back on the GTA series, it often feels like GTA IV is a bit of a forgotten child. It's grey and miserable, the streets of Liberty City grubby and soulless. Wouldn't you rather be on the sun-soaked sandy beaches of Vice City? Wouldn't the countryside of San Andreas provide a better time? Well, yes, I think I would rather spend my time in any of those settings, but if you asked me what actual GTA game I wanted to play the most, I might be tempted to say GTA IV and mean it.

I've played through the PlayStation 3 version a couple of times, but at some point in 2017, I decided that it was time to play the PC version. I grabbed some screenshots that I guess made much more sense in the moment than they do now...

Let's see what I can remember first, and then we'll have another crack at it.

Age of Empires: Mythologies

What's next? Age of Mythology: Empire?

When it came time for me to play Age of Mythology, an Age of Empires game where the stories and legends of the ancient world form the basis of inspiration for the units and gameplay, rather than the actual history of the period, I would ultimately conclude that the game was alright. Worth a play, but it was largely interchangeable with any other Age of Empires I had played before it.

But now there's another one, this time Age of Empires: Mythologies, on the Nintendo DS. Is this an Age of Empires game or an Age of Mythologies title? Is this a merging of the two? How would that even work? And on a handheld? You must be mad.

Well, I'm mad enough to take on a 1001 games list just to see if I could, and now that the Internet is finally stable enough to write something about these games, it's time to find out what on Earth is going on here.

Spelunky

We're going deeper underground.

"Death is fun", says the developer of Spelunky, a freeware Rogue-like platformer where a mysterious cave network constantly shifts beneath your feet, daring you to dive deeper underground in search of treasure, pushing your luck against spike traps, snakes, and many more ways to find yourself lacking any life.

Each time you fail - and you will fail - your entire story is dug out of the Earth, the levels replaced by something just as familiar, just as challenging, but just not the same. Do you have the persistence to learn from your mistakes and make progress into the dark unknown, or are you destined to die in the mines before your adventure really even begins?

I have a hunch on what my answer to that is, but let's find out for sure.

MaBoshi: The Three Shape Arcade

A stick is a shape, huh?

It feels like it has been a while since we've had a quirky little game on the 1001 list, and you can't get much quirkier than motion controls on the Nintendo W-hat's that? This game uses a single button and no Wiimote waggling? It's not quirky then, is it?

MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade is a puzzler with a difference, though, as you attempt to perfect three arcade minigames based on different shapes. That's it, really. A million points seem like a good goal for you?

Left 4 Dead

"Dude, where's my thumb?"

Sometimes it feels like the world may be heading towards a zombie uprising. There are an awful lot of braindead individuals out there, that's for sure. What would it take for them to work together for the greater good? Co-operation, for starters, and an intelligent leader to push and pull everything in the right direction.

Co-operating can be hard for some, however, so we should probably get some practice in playing first-person survival horror shooter Left 4 Dead, where a handful of citizens have to rely on each other to wade through the onslaught that lay between them and their survival.

Can you wade through an onslaught, or do you wade through the blood and guts that come out of that onslaught? I'm not sure. Let's find out.

God of War: Chains of Olympus

"We will meet again, Spartan. The Fates have deemed it. One day, you will regret what you have done here."

Source // PlayStation

This 1001 list has been rather eye-opening, as you would hope. I haven't made a count of how many titles have come out of nowhere to impress me, but there are some series that I hadn't touched at all back in the day, for whatever reason, that I now can't get enough of.

Two notable examples of this happening are the Yakuza series, where I'm finally getting around to Yakuza 2 after going through Yakuza 0 and Yakuza (and can't wait to continue playing 3, 4, and 5 when they get a PC port at the end of the month - by God I hope this PC can run it), and - if it wasn't obvious by now - God of War.

The other thing I've been caught out by is just how good portable consoles were, even back to the Game Boy Advance. Naturally, being firmly found in camp Sony, I had a PlayStation Portable and then PlayStation Vita. I used them. I enjoyed them. But if God of War: Chains of Olympus is anything to go by, I've clearly not used them as intended.

Kratos is back, furious as ever. What's pissed him off this time?

Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse

Remember your rule of thirds now...

I don't appear in a great many photos. I prefer to be captured unexpectedly, in my natural state. Anything posed and co-ordinated is forced, serving more as a piece of evidence that something happened or someone was there. It feels cold and uninspiring, and so I suppose I'd rather be behind the camera taking the kind of photos I want to see. Also, as every cameraman will tell you, you are invincible behind a camera, and nothing can ever hurt you.

That's demonstrably false, but it's the comfort you'll need when playing Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the next survival horror title of the series famed for giving you a magical camera as your one and only defence against ghostly horrors of the past.

Last time out, in Fatal Frame II, I thought it was interesting enough to warrant a look. It was certainly different from anything I was familiar with. What's changed as we move onto the Nintendo Wii?