Dissidia Final Fantasy

"Destiny is at hand. We might as well enjoy it."

The 1001 write up for Dissidia Final Fantasy does a far better job at introducing it than I ever could.

To paraphrase it, Final Fantasy combat involved characters standing in place, attacking nothing in particular, and watching numbers spring out of their opponent's heads, but Final Fantasy cutscenes or spin-off movies showed incredibly animated, over the top action where characters did the absolute opposite of sitting still.

Dissidia Final Fantasy is an attempt to merge those two things together. To let Final Fantasy characters fight it out in a way the RPG series hasn't seen before, all in a dense package on the PlayStation Portable.

It's one of the few physical PSP games I've got left, and coming to it 12 years late is better than never coming to it at all.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

"Your father looks strong and powerful. You're a bit weedy compared to him."

Even in 2010, remakes of old games for new systems was something for publishers to consider putting some money into, and the 1001 list has thrown up another one from Square, again on the Nintendo DS, but for another RPG series with a great many numbered entries in the series, Dragon Quest.

Originally released in 1992, and having already seen a 3D remake on the PlayStation 2, it is this most recent remake - at the time of the 1001 list - of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride that should grab our attention.

A blend of 3D environments and 2D sprite work, along with a few more additions and enhancements to the game itself, this version of Dragon Quest V should serve fans and newcomers well. Does it?

Eliss

Play with two hands.

Touch-sensitive devices, usually mobile phones, are one thing, but devices capable of accepting and keeping track of multiple touch inputs are another beast entirely. From point and click to drag and drop, and now pinch to zoom and beyond, the multitouch accessibility of iOS devices, and the explosion of mobile gaming on them, lead to quite a few possibilities for developers to explore.

One man took multitouch and ran with it, creating the graphically stylish puzzler known as Eliss, a game that only a mobile device could allow.

Oh...

Death Tank

Down a bit. Bit more. No, go back. Down again...

Source // Microsoft

Is there enough chaos on your couch? Do you even have local multiplayer in the games you're playing? Despite a remake on the Xbox 360 where online multiplayer was in full swing, Death Tank allows you and up to three friends to get your artillery hats on for some chaotic last-man-standing rounds of vehicular warfare - and then allows you to play against another four players online at the same time.

It seems to give you options, but what are you doing in the first place?

DJ Hero

Wikiwiki clack clack!

Source // Giant Bomb

Guitars? Done. Drums? Done. Keyboards? Don't be silly. Band-specific games? Done. What new territory was left for the likes of poor Guitar Hero and Rock Band games to move into? What new peripheral could capture the attention of the masses. What does everybody secretly wish they had the talent for?

Uhh... turntablism? Time for DJ Hero.

Demon's Souls

Cor, you're getting those words quite a lot, eh?

Source // PlayStation

I don't like hard games. There, I said it. Now we can make this post about Demon's Souls go by a whole lot easier. Masochism disguised as an RPG, this game, and more definitively its sequel, brings the brutality of needlessly difficult video games of the past to the graphics of the future, wrapping everything together into a game that will push you to your limits, break you, almost taunt you to try again, over and over until you bloody well get it right, yeah?

But then 'needlessly' is a word that brings quite a lot of debate, as does the game of Demon's Souls itself. Is it needlessly hard, or worryingly realistic? Must it be hard to sell its ideas of overcoming incredible odds and rewarding the patient and the persistent? Is it just trying to do something nobody else seems to have bothered to do, and hope it pays off?

Whatever the reasons behind Demon's Souls, it sure rooted itself into video game history, and won't budge from it, though it is overshadowed by Dark Souls. Let's see what's what - and no, I didn't get very far at all.

Dead Space Extraction

"Oh, I hate spacewalks."

The 1001 write up for Dead Space Extraction hypes it up, as you'd expect, before ending with the line "A shame, then, that it bombed on release."

Was it because the Nintendo Wii wasn't the right fit for a gory first-person trip through Dead Space? The 1001 write up says such a game could only have happened on the Wii, but a few years later it'd be ported to the PlayStation 3 with its Move controllers, though that wasn't known at the time.

Did it bomb for being an on-rails shooter, an oft-ignored genre albeit one that could make use of the limitations the Wii had? Was it just not a good game in the eyes of the masses? Was it on the 'wrong platform'?

Whatever the reasons, the 1001 list is all about highlighting must-play video games, whether they were adored by the masses or not. Have we all missed something special in Extraction?

Colin McRae: DiRT 2

"Has Ken tried to sell you any shoes yet?"

Source // MobyGames

The Colin McRae series of rally games was already changing with the release of DiRT, with Travis Pastrana taking us through all kinds of offroad events, many of them unknown to an audience who thought Colin McRae games were all about point to point racing through a soggy Welsh field.

After his death, the DiRT series took on a form all of its own, and it was at its most extreme in Colin McRae: DiRT 2, where rallying meets the X-Games, and everything is gnarly and neon.

I've played DiRT 2 to completion on my trusty PlayStation 3, and you might want to as well.

Forza Motorsport 3

Where Dreams are Driven

Source // Giant Bomb

I must confess that all these racing games have really started to blur into each other as I jump around history looking for my next fix of rubber-wheeled metal boxes waiting to be hurled around tracks of all kinds, real or imagined.

I've done the DiRT series beginning with 3 and ending with 2, which we'll get to very soon. Once I learned that Race Driver: Grid used that engine, or a version of it, I was absorbed in that. Then I had the great fortune of having bought Grid 2 at some point in the past, so got to enjoy that 2013 game for the first time in 2021. Chuck in the first Project Cars and I honestly couldn't tell you what was actually going on in 2009 when Forza Motorsport 3 was released.

The best comparison I can make is, of course, to Gran Turismo, which at the time was honestly making Gran Turismo 5, no, really, we won't delay it again, here's Gran Turismo on the PSP while you wait. So racing games looked pretty good, okay. That's a start.

As mentioned previously, I've come to the Forza series very late and through board gaming. Spoilers: They're the things that you find on the back of cars. Actual spoilers: I'm probably going to spend the afternoon playing some more Forza Motorsport 3.

Fat Princess

Let them eat cake.

Source // PlayStation

Smaller downloadable titles can give folks the chance to try something that perhaps wouldn't work in a bigger game. They also allow for the adaptation of classic game modes into something more focused or nuanced, fully exploring what it means to capture a flag in a multiplayer team game, for example, like Fat Princess chose to do.

Two teams battle it out in a gory cartoon competition with one goal: rescue their princess from the opposition castle, all while their enemies are making it harder by fattening her up with cake.

Don your caps and grab some cake for what will probably be a silly little game.