God Hand

"You can wax on, wax off all you like. I'm still kicking your ass."

I've been playing an awful lot of Yakuza 0 recently, and no matter how many fights you get into, it's always fun to just destroy your opponents. You don't just knock them out, you squash their face into parked cars and smack them around the head with baseball bats. Every hit is felt and they all seem to hurt quite a bit.

Take out all the boring Yakuza plot and you'd have God Hand, a game all about destroying your opponents with equally satisfying and wince-inducing assaults from your fists and feet. The beat 'em up just got brutal...

Gradius V

I see you...

Another shoot 'em up, but this one - this one - is the one you've got to play. You've got to play all the others on this 1001 must-play list, of course, but it's actually Gradius V that you've got to play before all the others.

Said to be playable and enjoyable for both fans of the genre and newcomers alike, Gradius V is another solid 2D shoot 'em up to test your reactions out with. What else does it offer? I've no idea. I suppose I should just play it already.

Final Fantasy X

"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. HA HA HA..."

It suddenly dawned on me, as I opened my CD case to find Final Fantasy X, that I had arrived at the stage of the 1001 list where I'd start to know a lot more games a lot better. The PlayStation 2 wasn't the first console I'd owned, but may well have been the most used. I'm at home when playing on Sony hardware, even when using Microsoft peripherals and community created emulators to play its games.

My first interaction with Final Fantasy X was back when I bought Final Fantasy VI for the PlayStation. Its European release was a year or so into the PS2 era, and it included a demo for FFX - mostly the reason I bought FFVI, to be honest - but I remember absolutely nothing about that demo.

In the years since I've only seen clips of the game. I could tell you what characters belonged to the game based on the art style, I suppose, but that's about it. FFX is uncharted waters for me, like most of the FF series, I guess.

Time to change that, I think.