I was in the middle of my late teens when a Star Wars game like no other was released, combining a series of films that I liked with a childhood toy it's almost impossible not to like, LEGO. That game was, of course, LEGO Star Wars, a trilogy of tales set in a galaxy far, far away, and mimed by dinky little toy figures.
Not only was it charming, but it was also jam-packed full of stuff to do, ensuring that long after the kids had enjoyed their time with it, the adults could replay levels again and again in an attempt to track down each and every hidden secret.
It's been a long while since I've played a LEGO game. How do they hold up today?
Why do all shooters have to be the same? They don't, right? Surely we can chuck something new into the mix. What about a ghost in a gimp suit? Wait, what?
Killer 7 is unusual, to say the least. An action-adventure to some, an on-rails shooter to others, but a game of its own for certain, and one I've not played. Let's change that, and see what it's all about.
There are games for the masses and there are games for the fans. In recent times, we've seen an example of that in racing, with GT Legends most definitely welcoming fans of the sport more than casual consumers. Now, we see what game accommodates fans of the world of professional wrestling.
We can all name a WWE game, even if we have to think back to our childhoods when it was known as the WWF. Casual games for casual consumers. Nah. If you want to prove you know wrasslin, you list off one of the many games in the Fire Pro Wrestling series. You name something like Fire Pro Wrestling Returns.
The original Gunstar Heroes was a complete unknown to me, but it sure made an entrance with a bang. A lot of bangs, even. More gunfire than a Call of Duty title. Colourful, cartoony and absolutely action-packed, I liked it. And now it gets a sequel for the Game Boy Advance in Gunstar Super Heroes.
History keeps repeating, and when bad guys are bad, good guys need to be heroes. Trigger fingers at the ready - not that you'll need to release them once you start to squeeze...
After playing Frequency, I warned you all that I had no intention of tracking down a plastic guitar for the sake of authenticity when playing future rhythm games. After Amplitude, I questioned just how anybody could enjoy music and rhythm games when their favourite songs get butchered by misplaced inputs and poor timing.
And now we're finally here. Guitar Hero. Where hitting buttons at the right time isn't enough. You've got to stand up and rock as well.
You're only supposed to take the bloody seats out.
My racing simulator knowledge pretty much begins and ends with Gran Turismo, but it certainly isn't the only game in town with realistic racing in mind. The PC is the platform of choice for simulations, and it's home to GT Legends, a celebration of vintage cars, stripped of all comforts and hurled around a track as fast as their ageing engines can manage.
I've been on a bit of a GT binge recently, but in the form of the board game Rallyman: GT. I doubt my skills at rolling dice will transfer to video games, but let's see how well we can race.
Oh boy, do I regret theming these awards around the numbers and 'something to do with gaming, or computers', even vaguely. Ah well, not to worry. The title may be meaningless, but the physically non-existent awards sure aren't... welcome one and all, provided you can connect through the right ports, to The 651/1001 Milestone Awards.
Fifty games. 16 prizes, six of which you don't really want. You're not here for the waffle. You're not even here for the content. You're here accidentally, but while I have your attention, here are some of the highlights of the latest batch of video games from long, long ago, containing whatever appeared on the 1001 list between Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.
Who will win what? What games have cemented their place inside my memory, for the time being at least?
Well, I can tell you that they won't be this lot. The Indifferent 5 are games that you might like, though. They might also be games you might not like. They are just games.
Lists like these generate a lot of discussions. Discussion leads to disagreements, and disagreements lead to wondering What Was That 1 Even Put On The List For? There can only be one this time around. I'm even thinking about renaming the award in its honour. Say it along with me now...
What Was Pikmin 2 Even Put On The List For?
More to the point, why do Nintendo games keep ending up here? Go away. Let the little guys have a chance to shine.
When one is removed, one must be added, and there is a glaring omission from the 1001 list that will fill that hole. Indeed, you might have been caught shouting You Forgot What?! upon learning that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines doesn't feature.
Now, I must stress that I haven't actually played Bloodlines, but I do own it. Not yet installed it, either, but I do own it. Apparently, we must all own, install, and play Bloodlines, because reasons. One day, I'll find out what those reasons are.
So, those are the 6 duff prizes out of the way. Here are the 10 that matter, or the one that matters are nine runners up, at least. These are The Top 10, any one of which I could fire up right now and fill the rest of my afternoon.
Here they are in a very particular order, worst to best.
10: F.E.A.R., Monolith Productions
For the moments when it isn't a generic shooter, but a psychological horror shooter.
9: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Capcom, Flagship
Yeah, it's a little on the childish side, especially compared to F.E.A.R., but I like it.
8: Battlefield 2, Digital Illusions CE
The one that got away? I want a new Battlefield. One that cares about what it means to be Battlefield.
7: Call of Duty 2, Infinity Ward
Despite being more of a Battlefield fan, CoD2 was action-packed from start to finish. All four hours of it. Short but sweet, I suppose.
6: Spider-Man 2, Treyarch
All these sequels... I bet Pikmin 2 is rather angry. Hope so. Not the biggest fan of Spidey, but a game this good might just sway me.
5: Ridge Racer, Namco
Got me to dust off the PSP and take it for a spin - and a powerslide. Simple racing in a great package.
4: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Obsidian Entertainment
I'll admit, this one is high on the list for potential, having not gotten around to it since playing, but this is my list, and I'll do what I want.
3: Fahrenheit, Quantic Dream
It's bonkers. In fact, even though it's number 3, it might be the next game I play.
2: God of War, SCE Santa Monica Studio
Hack and slash and hack and slash and grunt and hack and roar and slash and tits.
What could possibly be better than that? What is the number 1 rated game of this recent crop of contenders? The answer might surprise you because it's Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. I played it all the way through and was disappointed that I didn't have the expansions that I thought I had. That's gotta say something.
But has it said enough of a something to poke its head into The Topper Than That Top 10, and go up against the remaining 350 games on the 1001 list? Not to spoil it, but yes. Yes, it did.
10: Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, Relic Entertainment
It just made it, mind you. Clinging on in there. I don't think it'll last long, but you never know.
1: Metal Gear Solid, Konami Computer Entertainment Japan
Hiding in boxes is the height of cool.
Not much change. That's a bit of a surprise. Maybe we're all waiting for the future. The PS2, GameCube and Xbox are awaiting their successors by this point in time. So am I, to be honest. It's been great going back through this era of gaming, but I am looking forward to putting the PS3 to use after all these years, HD Collections aside.
That wraps this post up. The next chunk of 50 games begins with GT Legends. Can't say I'm familiar with it. You'd have thought I'd look into all the games on the 1001 list at some point in the past five years, but no, sometimes I just don't get around to it.
Not much else to do in lockdown, though. Right, what do I need to install?
After a successful trilogy of titles on the PlayStation 2, where does the Grand Theft Auto series head next? The PlayStation Portable is a thing, and Rockstar does have a studio that specialises in handheld games... How about we roll the clock back a couple of years and revisit Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories?
Can GTA3 be squashed onto a UMD? How will a lack of buttons and sticks affect gameplay? Do I have enough charge in my battery for this mission? Let's find out.
I had absolutely no idea what Meteos was when I read that it was next on the 1001 list. Developed by the folks behind Lumines, though, and also appearing on a handheld in the form of the Nintendo DS, it certainly might have something going for it.
It's another match-three kind of game, but with quite the unexpected added dimension to it.
The white-haired, trenchcoat-wearing devil-killer Dante is back in action in 'please forget about Devil May Cry 2' prequel to Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening.
I am quietly confident that I owned DMC3 way back when but absolutely confident that I didn't do a whole lot with it. I liked the idea of the DMC games more than I liked actually trying to play them. I wasn't very good, and if my recent(ish) time with Devil May Cry has shown me, I sure haven't gotten any better over the years.
As I've not gotten better, and therefore not finished DMC, and as DMC3 is an origin story, of sorts, there's no reason to put off playing this any longer. Let's don the jacket we probably don't deserve to wear and get to sleighing some nasties.
"Of all the games in this book, Garry's Mod is perhaps the one that strains the definition of the word 'game' the most."
That's how the 1001 list opens its blurb on Garry's Mod, and I simply couldn't say it any better. Garry's Mod isn't a game. But it could be. It's not an interactive movie, either. But it could be that too.
If anything, Garry's Mod is a toybox, or perhaps a toolbox for creative types. It's definitely a sandbox of sorts, and sandboxes sure make themselves known on this 1001 list. None of this is really telling us what Garry's Mod even is, though. For that, we've got to dive into it headfirst.
"You there, in the bushes. You have until the count of five to show yourself before I start throwing sharp objects"
Tactical, turn-based video games. I seem to like them. Advance Wars is some kind of phenomenon, though as time has gone on I've mellowed on it a little. The likes of Tactics Ogre appeal, but I'm still yet to dive into them full-time, so to speak. Is there, perhaps, a game that blends the two together? A simple enough system to get my head around, but with a fantasy setting?
It is an understatement to say that Intelligent Systems have been busy working with Nintendo platforms, and now they've gone and answered my pondering in the form of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, a fantasy tactical role-playing game that requires no prior knowledge of any Fire Emblem game.
"Prove your worth in a world where skill decides victory"
Source // MobyGames
All the social interaction we learned from Façade can already be put to use in MMORPG Guild Wars, where players go through a fantasy world, slaying monsters and levelling up and all that cool stuff without endless queues of random strangers with weird names turning in the same quests to the same NPC.
Games can simulate a lot of things. The physics of a race car, the communication between alien species, the horrors that lurk in the night. They're not always perfect simulations, sure, but they don't always need to be.
Case in point, social interaction and awkward conversation simulator, Façade, a three-person one-act play of an evening with Trip and Grace. On the surface, you would be forgiven for passing this one by. A play? Talking? About marital arguments? No, thanks. But this isn't any old game. This is more of an experiment in Artificial Intelligence. One we really need to see first hand.
"If I have mentioned any feature in the past [that], for whatever reason, didn't make it as I described into Fable, I apologise."
Games get hyped. Developers talk big. Some things just don't come to fruition. Such, so I read, was the tale with Fable, an action RPG for the Xbox where everything matters - or so we're lead to believe.
The story is as old as time. A child destined to become a hero. Tragedies are to be overcome, lessons to be learned. But how will it all unfold? I've very little knowledge of the Fable series, so I'm starting where it all began, back at the beginning.
Video games. Interactive Movies. You might know of the arguments that follow on from there. What is a video game? Is a game still a game if we're just interacting with a bunch of cinematics? Are Dragon's Lair or Another World games or movies? Does it matter?
These days, you'll perhaps know of Heavy Rain or Detroit: Become Human, two big titles that raise these kinds of questions. Before both of them, however, there was Fahrenheit, an interactive story of supernatural murder, and the investigations into uncovering just what on Earth is going on.
I've actually watched this, a long time ago, and have thankfully forgotten the story, and can relive it all over again - this time at the controls.
If there's one thing we know about fear, it's that eventually, it'll lead to suffering. If there's one thing I know about F.E.A.R., it's that I've never played it, mostly because I wasn't too interested in the idea of psychological horror creeping into my FPS.
There are genre crossovers that not only work, but perhaps make sense, and horror witnessed through the first-person viewpoint is definitely one of those merges that live long in the mind - providing, I suppose, that the game that comes out of that merger does something worth remembering.
Does F.E.A.R. provide us with something worth remembering other than all the periods in its title?
Golf. Where would we be without Golf? Enjoying the countryside that bloody Golf courses take up, for starters.
I don't like Golf, but video game Golf can at least go wild and wacky and bend physics for the sake of a good time. And if it does try to stick to real-world physics (sadly, most of them do), then at least the courses - real or imagined - take up significantly less space than their real-world counterparts.
Golden Tee Live is the arcade smash hit of the Golden Tee Golf series - I think. It's hard for a non-Arcade Golfer to pull apart which line is which. The 1001 list wants us to play the game that brought the Internet and online leaderboards to Golfing arcade cabinets in airports, released in 2005, if that helps you narrow it down.
The last time I played an Advance Wars entry on the 1001 list, I played for hours. Something about it was addicting. I couldn't put it down. But the Game Boy Advance is already a memory. Technological progress marches onward, and the Nintendo DS needs an entry in the turn-based tactics genre. It's time for Advance Wars: Dual Strike.
Dual Strike. DS. Get it? There's more to the title than that, of course. COs teaming up to pummel dinky little tanks into dust. This should be good.
Games that show off what a brand new console can do, especially in the gimmick department, seem to have a good chance at landing on a 1001 Must Play Video Games list. I suppose it's to be expected, to some degree. A game doesn't have to be phenomenal to warrant playing it, and by most peoples accounts Yoshi Touch & Go sure isn't anything remarkable - but here it is, showing the world what the Nintendo DS can do.
What's this thin, pencil-like stick? What's a 'touch screen'? What are the laws of physics? Let's find out.
Ugh. It's here again. Not only on the 1001 list, but all I'm bloody hearing in 2020 is Animal bloody Crossing. While everyone, apparently, is enjoying New Horizons (sadly not the space probe, but the Nintendo Switch title), I'm here seeing what I've read was the turning point of the Animal Crossing series; the moment of its explosion in popularity, for reasons unknown, though highly likely to be due to the portability of the Nintendo DS.
I am, of course, sadly, talking about Animal Crossings: Wild World.
