Well, now. Would you look at that? That's different, isn't it? That's Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a Nintendo DS point and click detective mystery about a magic hotel room, starring hand-drawn rotoscoped characters with a hint of anime about them. Well, more than a hint, but not full-on. Well, not much. I'm waffling.
I've never seen nor heard of Hotel Dusk in my life until the time came for me to play it here, and like hotel owner Dunning Smith says, it has certainly caught my interest.
It may look like a music video, but how does it play?
What do you do when the creator of Tetris has a new game? You put it on the hard drive of every Xbox 360 in the land. What do you do when there's a sequel? You slap it on Xbox Live with multiplayer support, because if there's anything that puzzle gamers like, it's competitive puzzling.
I've never heard of Hexic 2. I've rarely ventured onto Xbox Live. But there's a demo of Hexic 2 and it needs to be played, if only to show me what on Earth it is.
"There's something about that man I don't entirely trust."
Source // PlayStation
Are you a fan of God of War? Would you prefer Kratos to be a slim woman, with lots more hair? Are you desperate for a motion-controlled game of twing-twang?
No, I don't know what that is either, but I know all this can be found in Heavenly Sword, the action-adventure hack and slash title for the PlayStation 3 that showed what a mix of Hollywood and video games could result in - mixed reactions, obviously.
Clear your afternoon, because Nariko is about the clean house.
"Looking forward to getting my hands on that trophy," says the passenger...
Source // MobyGames
It has been too long since this 1001 list has had an entry for rallying, but is there any better series to pick or games to start with than Colin McRae: DiRT?
Thanks to the board game Rallyman, and its upcoming DIRT remake, I've been hot on rallying. I guess I was lukewarm on it before - always enjoyed it, but not enough to follow along. Now, though? Hot.
Over the years, through bundles and deals, my Steam library has welcomed some of the later entries in this DiRT series. I started with DiRT3 and loved it. I went to DiRT: Showdown and hated it. I dove into DiRT Rally and DiRT Rally 2.0, but really wasn't any good at actual simulated rally racing, preferring the more arcadey side of things, so bought DiRT4 on the cheap and thoroughly enjoyed that too.
I don't think this PC meets the minimum specs for DIRT5 (now with a capital 'I') sadly, so what better time to go back to the PlayStation 3 for the DiRT that kicked all this off?
Have you ever thought that what the Real-Time Strategy genre needed most was magical anime girls commanding elves and faeries through the corridors of an ancient castle that's also a magic school, with controls that, due to the nature of the PlayStation 2, result in stripping the 'real-time' part away?
If the answer is yes, I don't know what lead you to want that specifically, but I do know that you can find it in GrimGrimoire. New student Lillet Blan is about to find herself repeating a week of magical battles to uncover the truth about something or other. Probably something important to her, I guess?
I don't really know. I should just hop in and find out.
"If all of Olympus will deny me my vengeance, then all of Olympus will die."
Source // PlayStation
After playing it earlier on the 1001 list, I came to the obvious conclusion that I missed out on God of War - all of it. PlayStation 2 titles, PlayStation portable spin-offs, PlayStation 3 sequels... you name it, if it had God of War in the title, I glossed over it, and that was mighty silly of me.
God of War II comes at the end of the PlayStation 2's life, but like the first game, it makes sure to pack in more action than you think would be possible, merging Devil May Cry with the Gods of Ancient Greece into a blockbuster of a title that cranks everything up to 11.
To say I'm looking forward to this one is obvious.
The space choir are back, chanting their lungs out to conclude the Halo trilogy with Halo 3, the first-person shooter that all the others would look up to and try to replicate.
'Why?', I never quite understood. Whenever I saw Halo I was bemused at how anyone could get so hyped about a silly-looking super-soldier with bright pink weaponry stolen from comedy space turtles. How was this series so popular? Did Xbox players have nothing else?
What they did have was online connectivity and plenty of multiplayer lobbies to mess around with, literally forging a game they want to play with the tools available to them. Halo multiplayer was the draw, Halo 3 was simply the next version of it.
But I'm here for the plot. I've still not finished the first two games, so whatever plot I pick up probably won't make much sense in the grand scheme of things. Can Halo 3 deliver to someone diving right in?
Get your motor running... Head out on the test track...
Source // MobyGames
The 1001 list is taking us from one console-exclusive racer to another next, as we wash away the mud and get out the turtle wax for the Xbox's competitor to Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport 2.
As you might imagine, being locked to the PlayStation - through choice, might I add - I was very much on Team Turismo, and it'd be a long time before I was even in a position to see first hand what the Forza series offered players. Quite a lot is the answer, and often before Gran Turismo offered the same things.
Thanks to board gaming, of all things, I've been getting more familiar with the Forza Motorsport series, and this first release on the Xbox 360 is where we're kicking off, described as 'more of the first game, but better'. Excellent.
"But tonight, on this small planet, we're going to rock civilization."
Source // MobyGames
Monument Valley. Iconic sandstone buttes towering above dusty, sun-soaked plains. Don't you just want to hold an over-the-top motorsport music festival right there, with loosely defined tracks around - and on top, and through - the mesas, designed for spectacle, rather than safety?
If the answer is yes - and the answer really ought to be yes - then the PlayStation 3 has you covered with MotorStorm, a chaotic, muddy thrill ride that tears through the landscape to the sounds of rock, metal, and metal colliding with rocks.
It was thoroughly enjoyable back in 2007. What about now?
I guess you could say it was... riffing on the genre... Hmm?
It's hard to find a more colourful shoot 'em up than Every Extend Extra Extreme, but it's easy to find one with a more pleasing soundtrack. How about electric guitar riffs that you can enhance and build upon with the actions you take while you're moving and shooting in Everyday Shooter?
And it's not just alien ships with guitars, but starkly coloured geometric patterns covered with chunky robots and explosive cubes and then the entire second level changes practically everything, rendering this description utterly useless.
The tower defence genre is a simple one to describe. A wave of enemies will swarm in from a set direction, charging towards a given objective. You've got the resources to build a manage a bunch of turrets that will automatically track, fire, and hopefully kill the enemy before they reach their destination. The more enemies there are, the more towers you'll need to defend against them, or the better those towers will have to be.
You can already see the gameplay. Slow-moving but powerful towers, quick but weak-hitting towers, towers with magical abilities or towers that specifically target a certain enemy. Of course! Multiple enemy types. Slow-moving drones, zippy little pests, flyers and bosses.
There are so many possibilities, but one developer wondered why no tower defence game had really allowed players to create mazes that enemies were forced to navigate through. Most had shown players a route and tasked them with placing towers to the sides. Desktop Tower Defense didn't.
We've gone through so many Final Fantasy titles in this 1001 list that keeping track of what came out when is getting a little tricky. Luckily, the 1001 list is fairly chronological, so after FFXII we're obviously going to be playing Final Fantasy IV.
Shouldn't there be an X in that?
No, my eyes aren't fooling me. The 1001 wants us to play Final Fantasy IV, but specifically its 2007 remake that brought it onto the Nintendo DS and into the third dimension. What carries over from the 1991 Super NES original? The plot, I assume, but what about the mechanics? How much has been borrowed from the last two decades of RPG innovation? Anything? Nothing? Let's find out.
The puzzle shooter, as a genre, is a peculiar one. Not only do you require quick reactions to bob and weave through obstructions to get to where you need to be, but you think to think just as fast to take in everything important, process it, work out what it all means, and act upon it with those aforementioned quick reactions.
Every Extend Extra Extreme, or E4 for brevity, has both a peculiar premise and a peculiar name. In it, you are piloting a ship through a 2D space with one goal: To blow up. Again and again, triggering chain reactions amongst your foes to rack up high scores and task the Xbox 360 with rendering every single colour it's capable of.
It's not a game it's a dance, says the 1001 write up for Flywrench, an arty little addiction that has you flap a space ship through the solar system in incresingly more difficult challenges designed to test both skill and patience.
It doesn't look like much, but you don't need it to. You'll be too focused to care about flashy graphics with this one...
Even as a console gamer, it was hard not to know what "But can it run Crysis meant" in the latter half of the noughties. An absusrd graphical spectacle ahead of its time, catering to such a small sliver of the PC gaming population that you had to wonder just what the point of releasing a game nobody could play in all it's glory was.
When it came time to build this rig in 2015, I knew Crysis was on the 1001 list, but absoltely didn't bother to find out if my chosen parts were capable of playing it. Even eight years after its release, it's a demanding game, and here I am, finally getting around to playing it another five years after that.
Let's get the question out of the way then. Can this PC run Crysis?
Physics engines and chaos go hand in hand. Everything dissolves into chaos, so why not just factor chaos into your game in the first place? Burnout games involve lots of crashes and collisions that absolutely batter your car, but what if your car was already a beaten up wreck to begin with? Then we can just immediately get to the smashing and be done with it.
Such is the philosophy of FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage, an Xbox 360 remaster of sorts of Xbox title FlatOut 2, or Burnout meets banger racing.
Purchase a heap of junk, race it through all the debris, and work your way up to better cars to crash in a whole load of environments. Sounds good to me.
Another one, whey! It feels like these recaps come around much more quickly, the older you get. Seeing as these are The 751/1001 Milestone Awards, we're three-quarters of the way through this undertaking, and still discovering new old things. Did you know the Telescore 751 was a video game thing? I bet you didn't.
Fifty more video games going head to head in ways they never would have expected, for a prize that definitely isn't worth slapping all over the box art, Batman-style. From Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis to Free Running, these titles have been quite different from the previous couple of batches. I wonder what stood out the most.
But before that, we get to find out what merely stood. The Indifferent 5 are games that are. That's all. On a good day, they're alright, on a bad day they're there if you've got nothing else. They can elicit a strong reaction, but not often. In the order I wrote them down in, they are:
The next award is always a favourite, and to cut straight to the point, it asks What Was That 1 Even Put On The List For? There were two or three in the running for this one. One was I game I liked, two were games I definitely didn't, but one of those two had such a poor showing that it may forever dominate my opinion of it and anything that comes from the same series.
Ugh, just appalling. If it had a half-way decent PC port instead of an utterly garbage one, then Gunpey or Lumines Live! was up for this award: Gunpey for not being able to see it, and Lumines Live! for already having seen it, a.k.a the unwritten 'Pikmin 2 rule' about identical entries.
Right, enough of exposing how the panel voted for these awards, let's find a replacement to answer the question You Forgot What?!
I had a quick skim through some notable games from 2006 for this, and a few made it to the shortlist. There's no Dynasty Warriors, what's that about? Overlooking Killzone: Liberation? Shame. But one title rocketed above all the others.
Video games cover many genres and portray many characters overcoming difficult circumstances. They have stories that resonnate and lead to memories that last a lifetime. But not all memories are good. Not all video games care about their story, or characters, or social issues, or depictions of women... What I'm trying to get at here is that, for some context about what video games actually do, you should all play Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.
No, I mean it. This 1001 list is about learning, is it not? And there's much that can be learned from the DoA Xtreme series. If you want to champion how great video games are, you need to be prepared to explain stuff like this (which is far, far better than Rayman Raving Rabbids).
Moving on. The Top Ten. The best of the rest. As I said, it's a strange batch this time out. Not so many titles that I'm familiar with, and a fair few surprises. Sitting back and looking at this list, it looks like it makes little sense. There's no logic to it at all, and how I arrived at the final form I don't really know, but here they are:
Have I been swayed by the 2020 release? Has 2020 itself made me desperate to get back on a plane for some sense of normalcy, even though I only ever travelled by plane once (well, twice, there and back) a year anyway? Do I just like looking out the window, regardless of what I see? No idea.
What on Earth have I got a pinball simulator on this list for? Have I gone mad, or do I just appreciate the dedication in bringing these tables to new players?
Get closer! Get real! Get these Ferrari's and Porsches out and mod something decent in there instead. Still no good at it, of course, but this isn't a top ten of what games I'm good at, it's what games I enjoy.
As crazy as this list is, it would be certifiably stupid to not have this feature on it somewhere.
Because I only bothered with the single player side of CoD4, I can only rank it at number 2. The number 1 title of this batch has to go to a game I spent tens of hours with, if not more. You will never emerge from the sewers for the very first time again in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. But you can still have a good time, all these years later.
Is it a good enough time to crack into The Topper Than That Top Ten though? It's getting harder and harder to do so. Of all the 751 games we've looked at so far, what are the best of the best?
I've just been reminded of that really high def video of the final fight, teasing an insane remaster, only to instead be the promotion for a pachinko machine. Well done, Konami...
Board game status: Delayed playtesting, pending difficulty adjustment. Video game status: Absolute classic, cannot be bettered.
There you have it. Very little chance, but then a very unusual top ten this time out. The 1001 list is getting smaller and smaller. What 'modern' classics are going to muscle in on the golden oldies? We'll begin looking at the next lot of contenders with FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage. It probably won't get into the topper ten, but will it entertain at all? We'll find out soon enough.
In the early 2000s, Channel 4 hyped up a documentary about athletes practising a new way of moving through their environment with grace and fluidity. You will know what Jump London introduced by one of two names, Parkour or Free Running, and if you were of a certain age back then, you'll know someone who tried it out.
Why walk the long way when you can hop a fence or bounce over a planter? Why go to the effort of learning how to skateboard when everyone, everywhere, already knows how to run and jump? Why be boring, when you can head to the rooftops and partake in parkour? Parkour!
Game developers everywhere had their minds blown, Ubisoft especially, who would put parkour front and centre in the likes of Prince of Persia and Assassins Creed. But where was the game that was solely about free running? Where was the Tony Hawk game of the sport?
Follow up documentary sequel Jump Britain would tease the development of Free Running, a PlayStation 2 title that would be the safer, more ridiculous alternative to doing it all for real. And then everybody forgot about its existence and the PlayStation 3 came out...
"An experience so classic it's practically coin-operated."
That's not a quote from a reviewer up there. That's how Contra 4 welcomes you into the tough-as-nails side-scrolling shooter that is the first portable Contra for more than a decade. It's back with a bang on the Nintendo DS, kicking pushing to the floor and kicking them while they're down - unless you're good enough to actually make it through, of course...
Do golfers find it concerning that the 1001 list has recommended cartoony iterations of the sport over realistic ones? It pointed us towards Golden Tee Live, yes, but also Mario Golf and even Wii Sports. It seems golf games are better when they're not so serious, as wonderfully demonstrated by Everybody's Golf 5: World Tour.
Chunky little cartoon bobbleheads, rainbow-coloured ball trails, even video footage of swimming dolphins.
If Gran Theft Auto Online has taught us anything, it's that sandboxes full of criminals and vigilantes don't need stories to be successful. In fact, all those cutscenes and running to mission start icons and endless conversations with every character under the sun just get in the way.
So Crackdown drops you into a sandbox full of criminals as a super-cop on a mission, but dispenses with basically all the explanation and all of the cutscenes and just tells you "these bad guys need to go, and we don't care how."
"Since when did we become friends and how soon can we stop?"
The tactical role-playing game returns once more, as does Final Fantasy Tactics, in Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, which I had discovered is a sequel, but not to the Final Fantasy Tactics that I played for this 1001 list years ago.
There, it was a PlayStation title that I found interesting but problematic, though a PlayStation Portable remake did ease some woes. Here, it's a Nintendo DS title that doesn't have a stylus gimmick.
I have never played a game from the Anno series of real-time strategy city-builders, but I do know one thing about them: They're really not suited for the Nintendo DS, right? I mean... you could squash an isometric city-builder into a DS cartridge, but would you really want to? Should you?
The only Anno game the 1001 list wants us to look at is a spin-off for the Nintendo DS, Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery, claimed to be a simpler, more streamlined version, perfect for pockets.
I can't even say that it sounds like a good place to start. Surely we'll be missing out on something. Surely.
"Nothing is life is so exhilarating as to achieve a CoD multiplayer killstreak" - Winston Churchill. Probably.
Who remembers Call of Duty 3? I sure don't. And it's not because I'm not a massive CoD fan, though that has to play a significant part. No, we don't remember CoD3 because it was rubbish and the shot in the arm that the series would need to recover would be the one and only Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Second World War? That's so old, you know? What the kids want these days is military equipment they can really identify with, yeah? The M1 Garand ping is great, yes, but we don't have to rely on it.
And so, with one eye firmly fixed on Hollywood, Modern Warfare brought the first person shooter into, well, the modern day. Ignore SWAT 4, or Battlefield 2, or any other rubbish that was set in the modern day that doesn't have Call of Duty in front of its name, because they're garbage, and this is CoD4: MW.
I was, again, very late to the party, but with the aide of 5-year-old, out-of-context screenshots, we'll relive the good old days of gaming. Again. That's all this blog does, really.
In the late 2000s, I found myself playing a fair few first-person titles on the PlayStation 3. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, Battlefield 3, Borderlands, and many more I'm sure. But not BioShock. I never played BioShock.
A spiritual successor of sorts to System Shock, BioShock sees you explore the underwater utopia of Rapture, an art deco inspired city created for dreamers, by dreamers. You'd have to be to build a city underwater.
Obviously, it doesn't stay a utopia for very long, descending into chaos and turning into a place you'd rather not end up, say, if your plane happened to crash into the mid-Atlantic. Whoops.
With three BioShock titles that I've yet to play, I might as well start at the beginning and see what all the fuss is about.
The 1001 write up for the PlayStation Portable's puzzle-platformer Crush makes absolutely sure that this is a hidden gem, overlooked by seemingly everyone, and that because nobody bothered with it, its interesting mechanics haven't been hoovered up and used by other, prettier games.
Whoever wrote the blurb must really like Crush, a game where you guide sleep-deprived (indeed, insomniac) Danny through his own mind to stamp out his problems from within, changing perspectives by crushing the level from 3D to 2D and back.
Never mind Danny - have I got my own head screwed on straight for this?
From one flight sim to another, rather different one. Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation is the sixth mainline entry to the Ace Combat series, a series I first encountered way back on the PlayStation in the mid-90s.
This Xbox 360 exclusive entry... wait a minute... Isn't Ace Combat all about the PlayStation? I mean, I've not touched the series since the first game, but I thought it stayed faithful to the Sony line of consoles. Huh. I guess they all branch out at some point.
Console exclusivity. Who needs it? Who wants it? You want it? Really?
When will you learn, Arthur? Wear more clothes and you'll stand a better chance...
The most difficult game ever released comes back after two decades for another shot? Can it hang in the modern climate of HD graphics and portable gaming experiences? Does Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins have what it takes to survive 2006, and do I have what it takes to survive Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins?
Simulation fans can be hiding anywhere. My old barber had a flight sim rig, for goodness sake. The closest I've ever come is a cheap flight stick for use once in a blue moon. And would you look at that? A blue moon!
Microsoft Flight Simulator X is the tenth flight sim of the historic Microsoft Flight Simulator series, a run of titles that stretch back to the early 1980s, and, after a bit of a death following this game, continues into the future with 2020's Microsoft Flight Simulator.
But we're not in the future. Not yet. Let's fly all the way back to 2006 and see how skilled we really are.
A long, long time ago, I had to be content with whatever I could get hold of for the PlayStation. Before it had a lot of classics, you would have to enjoy the not so stellar offerings. I had Rayman, a cartoony 2D platformer that I absolutely couldn't make progress through, and ever since then, I've ignored the character and the games he stars in.
Some of the more recent titles, like Rayman Origins, look fantastic, don't get me wrong, but my view of the series has been tainted by bad gaming experiences in my formative years, and that's hard to get past.
It's also been sullied a little by the stars of the next must-play game, Rayman Raving Rabbids, huge, dopey, Minions-like rabbits who ceaselessly serve as the butt of each and every joke. If you dislike Minions, the mute Rabbids might be a more palatable alternative, but they are basically the same thing, and here, they're challenging you to a whole bunch of absurd mini-games.
"They haven't beheaded her yet. I think. Can they reattach your head after cutting it off?"
The point and click adventure. According to the 1001 list, it was a genre that went out on a high with The Longest Journey, a game that I thought wasn't bad at the time - certainly not my usual type of gaming experience. It was waffly and new agey, but it had something going for it. Not sure what, because I've not gone back to it since, but there we go. Point and click adventures can still be good. As of 1999.
Seven years later, there's a sequel trying to prove that the genre didn't go out on a high note. It didn't go out at all. The point and click adventure is still here, even if it has to be tweaked and mixed with third-person combat and other mechanics more casual players enjoy. That sequel is Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and I've absolutely no idea how it connects to the first game.
Truth be told, The Longest Journey was out of my mind for so long that I didn't connect the two until reading this Wikipedia entry...
Wii Sports. Wii. Sports. In late, late 2006, it must have felt like this was the only game that existed, as families - not just gamers, families - across the world played sports with the motion controls of the Nintendo Wii, the console for everybody, and the one with the gimmicks the others didn't have.
I was never interested in the Wii. I didn't care that I was 'missing out' on anything. I was having my own good time with the PS3, thank you very much. If I wanted a party game, I'd know where to go, but I never wanted a party game either. And so, basically, I'm playing Wii Sports for the very first time in 2020.
At least, I can't remember a single instance of me playing at any point before now. Did I have one incredibly quick game at some point? I don't think I did, you know. 2020 then. What better year to play sports indoors, on a TV?
I'm not a fan of tennis. I've already said that in the previous tennis games we've played on this 1001 list, going all the way back to Super Tennis on the SNES. It's just not a sport that excites me, and so any video game adaptation has a hard time to win me over - with the exception of silly tennis games, I guess. Mario Power Tennis, perhaps.
The next game to try is Virtua Tennis 3. From the looks of it, there's not a lot of silly happening here.
Some 500 games ago, I played Virtua Fighter (or tried to - I played a remake in the end), the origin of fighting in the third dimension. The characters were blocky and laughable, but the series continued in the arcades for a long time to come, culminating in Virtua Fighter 5, a game that doesn't do the flashy of Tekken or the over-the-top of Street Fighter. Instead, it offers solid, hard-hitting fighting where every move matters.
Everyone who is a fan of the Tony Hawk skater games knows how the series took such a nosedive in its later years that it is frankly a miracle that there's an actual quality remake of the first two games, THPS2 of course making it onto this 1001 list because it's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.
While everyone is playing that 2020 remake, I'm sitting here with Tony Hawk's Project 8, the eighth title of the series (bit of luck, that). I never played it back in 2006. I'd moved on. Skateboarding games just weren't doing anything for me any more.
Did I miss out on something worth my time? According to the 1001 list, yes, yes I did. But what did I actually miss out on?
Don't you be thinking you've caught them all just yet...
A year ago now, I played Pokémon Sapphire for the first time and then spent a good few more hours playing it. It was like being a kid again, I said, as my Poké-party grew into a team very much in training, but with high hopes of big things.
That was on the almighty Game Boy Advance, but when Nintendo moved onto the DS, it wouldn't be long before the Pokémon series would as well, and the double release this time around is Pokémon Diamond Version and Pokémon Pearl Version.
If you've played any Pokémon title before, you'll know the deal: Get reminded that the little critters are everything in this world, get told to hunt them down while helping to stop criminals (probably) from doing something evil (probably) involving legendary Pokémon. Probably.
It's not going to be a tough plot to follow, nor a radical departure from an established RPG formula is what I'm saying.
Do you like Rogue but want more? NetHack not enough for you? Do you want all the empty, black spaces on your terminal screen to be full - absolutely crammed full - of characters you didn't even know were in the ASCII standard? And do you then want that fantasy world to be staggeringly huge, span a good few hundred years of simulated history, and be incomprehensible, nonsensical, yet insanely detailed, all at the same time?
Then you might - might, mind - be looking for Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, or Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress, or better yet, Dwarf Fortress, the game that is almost literally like no other.
There are games you dread to start up, games you fear setting eyes upon, and then there is Dwarf Fortress, as impenetrable to new players as a good fortress should be. This post is going to be something, alright, but I know for sure it won't be useful.
