Alien Zombie Death

Pew pew pew, just like the good old days.

The 1001 list is a mostly chronological trip through video gaming. While it appears here and there to lump together similar games, more often than not it's a case of highlighting notable titles as and when they get released, allowing us to follow along with the developments and look back at where we've come from.

That basically means that we're not going to end on a carefully selected bang - not unless you're the type of person who loves the PlayStation Portable and the teeny tiny downloadable titles you could find for it, titles like Alien Zombie Death.

The controls are simple. The graphics are appropriate for the file size. The gameplay evokes titles from a long time ago. But I've come so far in this 1001 list that it'd be silly to end it like that. Let's fire it up and see what it's made of. Maybe we'll end with a bang after all.

Mass Effect 2

"Just once I'd like to ask someone for help and hear them say, 'Sure. Let's go. Right now. No strings attached.'"

I do try to show off a game in its opening image, but I must admit that this isn't exactly the best depiction of BioWare's stellar space RPG sequel, Mass Effect 2, and there's a good reason for it - I'm still yet to play through Mass Effect.

Gutting what didn't work from the first game and cramming the space left over with hours and hours more dialogue between you and the many characters you'll meet across the galaxy, Mass Effect 2 is introduced to us in the 1001 list as the streamlined, story-lead game of science fiction adventuring.

Is streamlining an epic RPG possible? Have we lost anything in the decision to focus on what's important? Is there enough room in the galaxy for all of these characters to coexist? Let's get stuck in already.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Blink and you'll miss it.

The Nintendo Wii was not a powerhouse compared to the bigger home consoles, but as sales figures have proven, the average consumer doesn't care about the raw numbers under the hood. They want a damn good time, and for many, that meant waggling a Wiimote controller.

You'd think that having players waggling a Wiimote in the same way as they'd waggle a sword would make for some great gameplay, but the developers behind Muramasa: The Demon Blade knew better than to churn out a crappy waggler. There are basically only two buttons in this game, and just look at what you can do with them.

Look. Up there.

There's a lot to look at.

Torchlight

Dog! To the shops!

Loot. Everyone loves loot, right? Ever since Diablo, crawling through a dungeon to shove everything that isn't nailed to the floor into your inventory is pretty cool.

I didn't have particularly good experiences with Diablo itself but casting my mind back to any of The Elder Scrolls games, I'll have memories of not being able to move because of being weighed down by loot. Remembering Borderlands, I'll be reminded of how difficult it can be to drop one weapon for another, even if, strictly speaking, the numbers are better on this new one.

But these games aren't pure dungeon crawlers, are they? Not like Diablo, and not like spiritual Diablo sequel, Torchlight.

One down. One very big dungeon. Are you ready to push deeper into it?

Trine

Working together to solve a common problem? What a novel idea.

Side-scrolling adventures with ultra-high production values were a rarity in 2009, says the 1001 list as it introduces us to side-scrolling action-platformer physics-puzzler Trine.

I don't know where I picked Trine up, and definitely don't know why Trine 3 is in my Steam library either, because I haven't got a clue what this game is about, and the title isn't spilling any secrets either. It looks like the kind of game you'd only know existed if you were the exact target audience it was aiming for.

If that's the case, I don't think I'm that target audience...

Scribblenauts

Write Anything, Solve Everything.

Source // Nintendo

They always say the pen is mightier than the sword, don't they? How can we best put that to the test? Pen vs Sword fight? Probably not that. What about the Nintendo DS game, Scribblenauts?

Maxwell's a clever chap with an out-of-the-box imagination - or he could have, depending on who is playing - and armed with a notebook that can summon anything into existence to help solve his problems, just like that.

That's quite a powerful pen to wield. I suppose it could even create a sword out of thin air, too. Can a sword do that?

Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout...

Source // MobyGames

A long, long time ago, in the arcades of the early 1980s, was a puzzler by the name of Qix. You had to draw lines to create boxes, sectioning off the screen from the enemies buzzing about and ruining your chances of filling up your level quota. Carve out 75% of the play area and the level is yours. Rinse and repeat as enemies moved faster and there were more of them.

It was addictive, it was tricky, but it was ultimately short lived. But what if it was given a complete makeover? What if it could be thematic, rather than abstract? What if it could have a story, a point to doing it all?

Strictly speaking, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor isn't Qix remade, but it's a good place to start thinking about it.

Resident Evil 5

"More and more I find myself wondering if it's all worth fighting for. Maybe one day, I'll find out."

An awful lot of games can trace back some of their DNA to Resident Evil 4, the third-person, over-the-shoulder survival horror that managed to merge the old with the new. Despite not quite liking how it feels to play and still stumbling to get to grips with it, I can see how it shines to many people.

But how do you follow RE4? Do you lean into that new control scheme, even if it means pushing the gameplay towards the action genre, potentially bringing you a new audience, but perhaps irking some of your old fans? Do you play it safe and stick with what works, tweaking what needs tweaking to keep everything up to date?

Resident Evil 5 had some big footsteps to follow, and from what I can tell, for every player that thought it succeeded, there's another player who thought it didn't. Maybe they should buddy up and work things out together in the scorching heat of a bio-terrorized Africa.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

"The darkness, for me, is where I shine."

The world can't get enough of Richard B. Riddick if anyone associated with the Riddick series is anything to go by. Films, animations, video games and now a sequel to the surprisingly good Escape from Butcher Bay in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

Straight after the events of the first game, still before the events of the first film, Riddick continues to be the killer that lurks in the shadows, so efficient in his craft that some of these mercenaries really ought to know better by now.

It started life as an expansion to Butcher Bay, but things happened and now here we are, a full sequel to enjoy, much the same as the first game. And to prove that point, here, we've bundled the first game in here too...

Dissidia Final Fantasy

"Destiny is at hand. We might as well enjoy it."

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.

Demon's Souls

Cor, you're getting those words quite a lot, eh?

Source // PlayStation

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.

Fat Princess

Let them eat cake.

Source // PlayStation

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.

Half-Minute Hero

Time goes by, so quickly.

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.

Bayonetta

"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.

Borderlands

Pre-WUB WUB

Players love getting rewarded with new loot. Whether it is heaps of cash or experience to splurge out in shops or level-up screens, or new weapons and equipment to push your characters towards their strengths and personalities, getting more, better stuff, again and again, keeps us engaged.

So open-world first-person action-RPG shooter Borderlands gives its players lots of stuff. Like, more than a bucketload of it. Think three and a half million different weapons alone. I hope you like gathering loot. Or maybe 'swimming in loot' would be a better phrase.

Mega Man 9

"Be careful out there! You haven't done this in a while."

Source // MobyGames

Mega Man. You'd have thought that at least one of his six NES games would have made it to the 1001 list, but no, apparently not. It must be tougher to get into this highly acclaimed selection of games than we initially believed.

Mega Man 7 on the SNES wasn't good enough to make it. Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation wasn't good enough. It took until Mega Man 9 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii before a main game in the series was deemed good enough to make it to this 1001 list.

Why? As you can tell, it wasn't because of the graphical power (two of) these consoles had. No, it made it to the list because of nostalgia for the Mega Man games that didn't make it to the list. Let's explain that a little more.

Reset Generation

"Hey Hedgehog! Your groin is nice and soft, for kicking!"

Source // MobyGames

You have to wonder just how this 1001 list was created sometimes. One of the arguments against it was that it neglected handhelds, but I'm not so sure about that. I mean, here's a handheld title that also made it as a browser-based game, Reset Generation, an action-puzzler for your... Nokia N-Gage. Huh. Well, that's going to be a pain in the arse to find, isn't it?

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite

In the world of Monster Hunter you're never alone.

Source // PlayStation

I won't argue with the idea that monster hunting would make a good game. Giving players the tools and the freedom to roam the lands in search of gargantuan beasts to carve up and turn into armour and weaponry sounds pretty cool, and making it a co-operative experience is just a no-brainer.

But I have always been put off by the presentation of the series that does this kind of thing, Monster Hunter. It has always been too convoluted for my tastes, seeming like too much work for too little gain. Will portable offering Monster Hunter Freedom Unite give me a bite-sized starting point to dive into?

Bangai-O Spirits

The name still means nothing.

The 1001 list deems Bangai-O Spirits "a game that defies description", a shooter merged with a puzzler with levels inspired by other video games. Wikipedia just goes with "action" because you do things, I guess.

The name rang a bell, but I think I was confusing it with something like Boktai for the Game boy Advance. Playing the original Bangai-O for this 1001 list a few years back clearly didn't leave me with a lasting impression...

What, then, does this handheld sequel that diverges quite a bit from the first game have to offer us? Some kind of chocolate firework? I think the 1001 list needs to go and lie down for a little bit.

Fallout 3

Oblivion. Oblivion has changed.

Source // MobyGames

"I don't want to set the world on fire." Where were you when that Fallout 3 trailer landed? Alright, as far as monumental occasions go, the trailer for Fallout 3 isn't exactly earth-shattering, but this would be the first Fallout title in a long while, and not only was it coming to consoles, but it was coming from the folks behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I could not be more interested. Oblivion With Guns was coming.

My literal first encounter with the series was an afternoon at a friends house, watching him on his computer, but I consider Fallout 3 to be my introduction to the Fallout universe. For those familiar with the isometric RPGs of the past, the drastic switch to a first/third-person perspective would be controversial, among many other topics for discussion, but for me, this was simply kinda cool. I played the hell out of Oblivion and wanted to play the hell out of Fallout 3 as well.

And so I did. Bugs and glitches and all.