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.
"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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You learn an awful lot over the course of playing far too many videogames, and one of those things is that RPGs are just too dang long. Who wants to grind out levels or hunt down unique trinkets over a long afternoon when you can, instead, crank out entire quests in thirty seconds?
That's the thinking behind the PlayStation Portable title Half-Minute Hero - sort of. It's a little more complicated than that but intriguing enough for me to dive right in and waste no more time.
Well now, I think I spy the final stretch. Six years in, and there are just 100 games to go on this 1001 list. Then what will I do? I've got some ideas. Some relate to the list, others don't. I'll have to see what sort of mood I'm in.
What I do know is that the latest batch of fifty video games are hoping I was in a good mood when playing them. From Midnight Club: Los Angeles to Bayonetta, we've seen more games that I'm familiar with, but still many more that I'm not, making for an interesting looking Top Ten in this, The 901/1001 Milestone Awards.
The format hasn't changed. Waffle to fill some space, get the 'meh' games out of the way, moan for a bit, then list some games that objectively don't belong on the same list, but as of this afternoon and according to this guy, find themselves sharing one.
Let's get cracking.
What games were there, good or bad, doing their thing, but not in any particularly special way? That's what The Indifferent Five list represents, and this time out it was a little bit tricky. Usually, several games jump out for their mediocrity, but they weren't jumping so high today, so it's a little more of a list of games that I wasn't too fussed one way or the other. I think. I don't read back what I wrote about them.
Even I didn't think I'd see some of those kinds of games in this part of the post.
There were a couple of games that caused some strong negative reactions this time around, but the answer to the question What Was That 1 Even Put On The List For? came in the form of a game that was supposed to celebrate and enhance a classic, but delivered an experience nobody really wanted - certainly not one I wanted.
But what takes its place on the 1001 list? What omission do we have a chance to correct? What glaring oversight must the selection committee be held accountable for? You Forgot What?!
We can have 2D motorcycle physics platform puzzler Elasto Mania, but there's no room for an extra half a dimension for Trials HD? I didn't even have an Xbox back then to see what all the fuss was about, but even I know there is plenty of fun and frustration to be found in Trials HD.
Madness. But not as mad as The Top Ten, a list so skewed towards my personal tastes that it serves next to no use for anybody else. Sorry, not sorry. A varied selection this time out. Probably just as varied as last time out, but as I say, I don't read things I've written. Makes you wonder just why I decided to blog about 1001 video games, really...
Came out of nowhere, consumed as much as it had to offer because it felt so rewarding. It's just a racer, but I was in the mood for exactly this kind of racer.
What a good thing it was that I actually got around to play this. Tricky, yes, but absolutely lovely to look at.
And so that leaves only one space for only one game, and there can be only one. You might say that this is the nostalgia talking, and it probably is, because the PC controls for the number 1 game, Assassin's Creed II, are pretty awful. The game, thankfully, is not. Is the series as good as it was yet?
Before I even think of finding out, I've got to wrap up this Milestone Awards post with The Topper Than That 10 and see where the games above rank amongst the stalwarts that have been locked into place for a long time now. Can they even make it onto the list, or am I so stubborn about moving anything with MGS or GTA in the title out of the way?
Oh, he's made a fool of himself and is slipping down the rankings. At least he made a pun about it, though. Dunno what it was, but it's something Nate would do.
And here we find it, an excellent game only managing to make it to the 7th spot because there are even more excellent games that are slightly more excellent than it. The more I think about the series, though, the more I want to remind myself of it all over again.
News of a reverse-engineered source code sent a few folks into a flutter, only for the project to stomped upon by lawyers. We could have had an even better Vice City.
No source code for this one, though, but YouTube has been suggesting videos telling me how Big Smoke was always going to betray CJ. If only I saw the signs.
All is silent on the Front Mission front, and I don't like that. Left Alive doesn't count, obviously, but can you imagine if it did? Front Mission by Yoji Shinkawa? Hell fucking yes.
Guess we'll just have to get our Yoji fix from this one. Sad news, though: The board game is no more, or more accurately the publisher no longer has the license. Curse you, Covid. We could have had fun. Fun, I tell you.
And that's that. Only 100 games left to try and kick these games off the list and cement their place in my version of history. As I say, I can finally see the end in sight. I'm looking forward to it if I'm honest, but I'm looking forward even more to see what I've missed. The 1001 list continues to surprise and continues to inspire me to try new series - even if they're now very old.
We keep on rolling with Half-Minute Hero, which by the sounds of it shouldn't take too long at all...
"Do you naughty little angels deserve a good spanking?"
Source // PlayStation
"Can you make a Devil May Cry game with a female lead?"
"Yeah, sure, why not?"
"Can she be an 8-foot tall witch who strikes all the poses, speaks in an almost impossibly English accent, and wears a catsuit made of her own magical hair with guns for shoes?"
"..."
And that's how I'm going to introduce you to Bayonetta, an action title that is all about the action, with an awful lot of it. If you think Devil May Cry got a little silly and over the top, wait until you dive into this one.
I don't have the biggest history with MMORPGs, another genre that I run screaming from, come to think of it. These days though, MMORPGs that have found a spot in the 1001 list have likely been refined to the point where I'm not tearing my hair out trying to play them, and probably have free-to-play entry points for us newcomers to dive into.
Aion: The Tower of Eternity is the next challenger to try and show the world that you don't have to play World of Warcraft like everybody else, and it's still going a decade later, so let's find the download button and get going.
The one video game genre I've avoided the most probably has to be the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. It's not just that I prefer to play single-player games, or shy away from team-based offerings - hundreds of hours spread across a few Battlefield titles will tell you that I'm not averse to this sort of thing at all - but because of the two big MOBA titles being so impossibly big and alien to me that no amount of free-to-play introductions would convince me that it was worth all the effort to learn umpteen characters inside and out just to compete.
I should probably roll the clock back a bit and tell you what a MOBA is, and what better game to do that with than one that's old, has a single-player version to get to grips with, and was hit by so many problems at launch that most people would have been put off from playing it in the first place.
