Serious Sam

Super serious.

For all my interest in video game stories, sometimes you just want to run around a level with a shotgun despatching foes left, right, and centre. I recently installed Doom (2016) for this very reason, but am currently struggling juuust a little bit with motion sickness. Might have to adjust the blur settings and whatnot. Or move slower. Probably change the settings.

Anyway, back in the early 2000s, there was no Doom (2016) for your shotgun rampages, and Doom and Quake and whatnot were already starting to feel old, even their sequels. Where were you going to get your fix of slick shooters with pointless plots?

Enter Serious Sam, deadliest man on the planet.

Shenmue II

Too bad.

I knew I'd have some problems when going through the 1001 list. Some games would be hard to track down, some games just wouldn't interest me and some, in the case of Shenmue II, would almost certainly require me to have played some earlier game to understand what was going on.

Shenmue II continues the plot of Shenmue, to the point of starting right where the first game left off. While you probably could dive right in, knowing at least a little of the backstory before doing so is recommended; encouraged even - the Xbox release of Shenmue II had a DVD called Shenmue: The Movie, which covers the events of the first game, readying players for the second.

I think, given that I'm unlikely to play through (or even watch) the entirety of Shenmue, that I'm going to need to track down that movie and get settled in. After all, this is the video game story so epic in scope and so loved by its fans that players across the world willingly donate funds to help create its concluding chapter, the upcoming Shenmue III. I need to know what's going on, and an hour and a half of selected cutscenes ought to do just that.

Silent Hill 2

Now with added fog!

The hills are alive with the sound of radio static and the heavy footsteps of James Sunderland, a man with a lot going on in his head right about now. Silent Hill 2 looks, at a glance, to be more of the same. More deserted towns, more nightmarish horrors, and, thanks to the increased power of the PlayStation 2, more fog.

It looks grim, grey and grainy. It frankly looks great. I didn't play anything like this back on the PS2. The games I played looked crisp and saturated, and you could see things further than twenty feet in front of you. But that's not what the Silent Hill series is about, is it?

Halo: Combat Evolved

"Let's give our old friend a warm welcome."

Source // Wikipedia

The 1001 list calls this iconic title 'the Xbox's own Star Wars', and given that it is still going strong despite making poor decisions, it's hard to argue that Halo: Combat Evolved didn't start something rather significant in video games.

A launch title for a video game console has to grab attention, and a launch title for a video game console from a company that has never made one before ought to do a damn good job and showing off what the new technology is capable of, and Halo serves as a textbook example of doing so.

With its blend of first-person shooting and vehicular sections, its military sci-fi setting, and its ridiculous alien foes, Halo ought not to be missed. Which is precisely what I did, because I owned a PlayStation 2 instead.

Let's catch up, shall we?

Max Payne

"He was trying to buy more sand for his hourglass. I wasn't selling any."

I don't count how many times I've said this or that, but if I did, I'd have lost count of how often I said something like "it's a game that really sticks out, and I've wanted to play it, but never have". Slow-mo shooter Max Payne is part of that count.

Max is a New York cop, and New York is a frozen Hell hole full of criminals, and you're going to do something about it. I'm not sure what yet, but the funny faces and the comic strips and the film noir voiceovers will probably point it out in due course.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

"So advanced weapons, rocketry, chemical and biological research... Now the occult."

I had to double check the 1001 list before playing this one. We did play Wolfenstein 3D, didn't we? No? Really? That's not a must-play title, but its 2001 reboot, Return to Castle Wolfenstein is? How does it compare? Should it be compared at all? I have no idea.

I've never been too interested in the Wolfenstein series, mostly because I was a console gamer, but even in recent times because I've not been too keen on the mix of Nazi's and the occult. Alternate histories are all well and good, but there's something about this one that just doesn't do it for me.

Can we shove that to the side and enjoy Return to Castle Wolfenstein regardless?

Grand Theft Auto III

"Alright, you are listening to Chatterbox, hosted by me, Lazlow, because I got kicked off the rock station."

So here we are. Liberty City. The defining open world experience of the early 2000s. The sandbox everybody wanted to play in. A game so popular that I've even played it in a hairdresser. In fact, I may also have first played it in that hairdressers, all those years ago. Whether I did or not, I have spent hundreds of hours inside Grand Theft Auto III, but not for a long time. Not since it and the PlayStation 2 was taking the world by storm.

Claude Speed, the silent protagonist, finds himself acting as a dirty-job handyman for hire by all the criminal groups of America. Want something stolen? Destroyed? Dealt with? Claude's your man. Across three entire islands inspired by New York, you'll be running, driving, crashing, killing, shooting, smuggling, ferrying, collecting, racing, chasing, and Lord knows what else in an attempt to... make some money? Overthrow organised crime? What's the plot of GTA III? It's been so long I can't remember.

But, armed with fan-made patches and tweaks, I'm more than ready to find out.

Gitaroo Man

Push! Push!... Push!

"Another one? So soon?" That was more or less my reaction to seeing Gitaroo Man pop up on this 1001 list. Another rhythm game. Oh, how I adore rhythm games... But this one is different. This one might just have something going for it.

You are U-1, a pathetic kid by day, superhero by night kinda guy. When armed with his Gitaroo, the foes that seek to upset the status quo will have to think twice or rock out twice as hard to defeat the twangs, and the warbles and whatever other sounds come out of guitars these days.

At the very least, I am intrigued to see what this one has to offer.

Mario Kart: Super Circuit

Let's go!

Handhelds and racing games. They're a pretty good combination. I'd certainly not shudder at the thought of playing one, and when the one you need to play is Mario Kart: Super Circuit, and the handheld is the Game Boy Advance, you can expect to have yourself a pretty darn good time.

Merging elements of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 together, Super Circuit is more of the same game that you know and love, squashed into a handheld that you were probably taking everywhere. How does it stack up to those two earlier games?

Stretch Panic

Unusual? Unusual?!

The 1001 book that I'm going through for all these wonderful games doesn't always show any images from those games, and the pictures it does show are often one of the first sights you'll see in the game, as though they've only played a game for twenty minutes. Which is fine, by the way. I don't want spoiler images, do I? But if you're going to use an image, wouldn't you use one that's representative of the game as a whole?

So how do you sum up a weird action-platformer boss-rush about a girl and her manipulative scarf? How do you sum up Stretch Panic in a single image? Even the screenshot above doesn't sum it up. It's going to need some explaining...

Frequency

1, 2, 3, nope, 1, nope, nope, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, nope.

Rhythm. Not my forté. Rhythm video games. Not really concerned with them. We've already seen a couple, including the wackier side of music, from PaRappa the Rapper and Vib-Ribbon, and they weren't titles that I stuck around with for too long.

Enter Frequency, which I may or may not have played on a PS2 demo disc long, long ago. It was something very much like it, perhaps Amplitude. Is Amplitude on the 1001 list? Oh blummin heck, it is. Right. One at a time.