Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

"There's a price on your head, young Jedi. There's a blaster bolt with your name on it."

Having been floored by what I saw in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, I am delighted that the 1001 list has seen it fit to also include Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the almost inevitable sequel.

I'm well aware that it was just a few games ago that I moaned at the inclusion of both Pikmin and Pikmin 2 - great games for some, sure, but why do I need to play both? I'm probably going to have to address that point with KotOR II as well. Here goes: I like Star Wars more than I like gardening.

So, with that out of the way, how do you follow up the epic space adventure that was KotOR?

Puyo Pop Fever

Popping Puzzle Fun?

Match three or four puzzles can be found everywhere. Competitive, head to head puzzles less so, but there are flavours of those too, of which we've been pointed towards Puyo Pop Fever.

It's certainly got a bright and bubbly look to go along with its blobby coloured characters - if you can call your pieces 'characters'. Let's see what it's all about.

Pikmin 2

That's unusual product placement...

A while ago, I played Pikmin and wasn't thoroughly impressed. I could see what it was trying to do, I could see how some players would be all over the kind of gameplay it offered, but ultimately, I just wasn't interested enough in playing it myself.

I ended by wondering whether Pikmin 2 would alter my views. And I suppose I also wondered why it, too, was on the 1001 list. Can this gameplay, of ordering sentient seeds to do your bidding, really warrant two entries on the list?

Rome: Total War

I came, I saw, I crumbled.

Medieval: Total War was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I liked the carnage that was taking place on the rolling hills of the English countryside but wished I could control some of it. Or most of it. Well, all of it. The idea is to be in control of your armies, not panic, lose shape, and hope for the best.

Anyway, there were some highlights that a sequel could potentially make brighter and more natural to grasp for my feeble little brain. Enter Rome: Total War.

Set further back in time, Rome: Total War takes us through a campaign to become the Emperor of Rome, fighting out in the fields and seizing territory from our enemies across a mix of turn-based, Civilization-like strategy and real-time battles.

I wasn't too keen on that in Medieval. Will I come around to it in Rome?

Red Dead Revolver

Well, darn tootin'... or something.

Red Dead Redemption was a phenomenal game back in 2010 but wasn't released in time for the first edition of the 1001 list. It grabbed my attention, and I've played it multiple times since. I knew there was an earlier Red Dead title, but heard it was a little weird, a bit iffy, and certainly nothing like Red Dead Redemption. I never tracked it down to see it for myself.

But Red Dead Revolver is on the 1001 list. It's been released in many versions across both PlayStation and Xbox systems. It's not hard to find, so why haven't we bothered? What are we missing? Is it anything like the Red Dead series the vast majority of us know about, or does it just share a name?

Strap on your boots and don your cowboy hat, because it's time to find out.

Ridge Racer

Seriously Sideways

Way back in the mid to late 1990s, when I first got a PlayStation, I owned Ridge Racer, the port of the arcade racer designed to show that the consoles could do just as much as the cabinets could. If you squinted and ignored this or that. It was a great little game, holding plenty of attention until Gran Turismo made itself known, and then never being heard of again.

Ridge Racer Type 4 capped off the console generation with a game arguably better than Gran Turismo, assuming you wanted arcade-style racing. Long before that point, however, the Ridge Racer series was effectively dead to me.

When the PlayStation Portable came to town in 2005 for us Europeans, Ridge Racer was there once more to show off the power of the handheld in a compilation game of sorts, Ridge Racer, or Ridge Racers in its original Japanese.

Yeah, the naming isn't brilliant for this series. Still, I can get behind a game that gathers together the best bits of a series, mainly because I a) only remember a single track from Ridge Racer and b) didn't pick it up for the PSP until a few years ago, second hand. My launch title of choice was Archer Maclean's Mercury if you wanted to know.

Right, let's get these wheels sliding.

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Now there's more of you sneaky little devils?

Better in every way, we're told. You'd hope a sequel would be, I suppose, and the next sequel to get looked at is Sly 2: Band of Thieves.

The gang return. Their cel-shaded style returns. The inspector trying to hunt them down returns. It seems an awful lot of things return, actually, so how is it all going to turn out better than Sly Cooper?

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

I'm definitely getting a sense of deja vu.

In the latter half of 2004, if you wanted a third-person shooter full of psychic abilities on a home console, your choices were pretty much Second Sight or Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.

At the time, these two games were highlighted for their similarities, in the same way that Armageddon and Deep Impact are brought together for being the same film. In a nod to that, I must assume, the 1001 list puts these two titles back to back so that we can see which one pokes their head out just that little bit higher than the other - or else knocks it out of the park.

What conspiracies are we going to uncover in Psi-Ops? Will our brains hurt just as much trying to find out?

Second Sight

Are you getting a sense of deja vu?

The PlayStation 2 had a little bit of everything, and third-person action-adventures were everywhere. But not all of them involved a protagonist with psychic powers to manipulate their surroundings. At least two of them had that, one of which being Second Sight, from the minds behind the TimeSplitters series.

It was an intriguing idea, but despite my gaming life being dominated by the Sony console back then, I didn't ever come across Second Sight, and my interest was only really a passing one. It wasn't on my radar, and it's time to see what we're missing.

We're going to really need our brains for this one.

Daigasso! Band Brothers

Say what?

Launch titles and gimmicks go hand in hand, and it was the case with the dual-screened Nintendo DS and Daigasso! Band Brothers, a rhythm game that has you button-pressing and screen touching in time with a whole load of music, from the classics of the past to the ear-worms of video games present.

That screenshot is from the sequel, as I understand it, and I can't read any of it. This might be a short one...