Gears of War

Attack of the Chest-High Walls

How many times has this 1001 list proven that games build upon what came before, tweaking and adapting them, taking genres in new directions? It happens an awful lot. Nothing is original, after all, and taking inspiration from Resident Evil 4 and Kill Switch, Gears of War helps demonstrate the point - before every other third-person shooter started acting like Gears of War.

The description is simple enough. Battle-hardened soldiers tackle an invasion coming from beneath their very feet, using chest-high walls for cover to allow them to flank their targets, and chainsaws strapped to their rifles to save on ammunition.

It's a mad world, this, innit?

UNO

UNO!

1971's take that card game UNO sits, at the time of writing, as the 19003rd best game on Board Game Geek, a site created by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts. 19 thousand people have given it a rating of 0-10, with the algorithm to average them all out declaring it's a 5.4/10.

To be fair to UNO, it's more of a family game. BGG ranks them too. UNO is ranked as the 1,950th best family game. Its time has come and gone. You can do far better than UNO if you're looking for a simple card game these days.

But we're here to play video games that you mustn't ignore, and in 2006, UNO hit the Xbox Live Arcade, and apparently blew everybody's minds.

Mother 3

"I wish I could pound fate with this 2x4."

Who said the Game Boy Advance is dead? I'll hear none of it. I may not have used mine to the fullest extent, but it sure was host to a great many must-play titles. Most of which I completely missed out on at the time, and now one of which that damn near everyone outside of Japan missed: Mother 3.

The concluding part of the Mother series, you'll be controlling distinctly pixelly characters as they face off against more weird alien foes in an RPG like no other. If you can read Japanese...

Line Rider

Wheeeeee?

Many games allow players to get creative using inbuilt tools. Maps. Characters. Even whole games, built within other games. But how many of us don't bother? No matter how easy the tools are to use, we know other people have more time, energy, skill, and desire to put us to shame. There is, perhaps, no better demonstration of this than Line Rider.

Armadillo Run

Oh, snap.

You think Half-Life 2 is the only game with physics puzzles? Bah. You've not tried to get an armadillo to roll into an interdimensional portal in Armadillo Run. Also, what the hell have I just written?

X3: Reunion

TRADE FIGHT BUILD THINK

Been a while since you found yourself alone in space? The likes of EVE Online too daunting? Perhaps a single-player offering with a similar scope can get you into spaceshipshape and ready for sci-fi action. Something like X3: Reunion.

The X series has been taking players to space since 1999, and despite continually seeing releases as recently as 2018, I know absolutely nothing about it. I've never come across it, mostly because it doesn't dare venture over to consoles, but in various PC magazines or videos or whatever, I can't even recall it being referenced in passing.

It's lost in space, except to those devoted fans who keep exploring the stars. How soon will I find myself lost in space?

Resident Evil 4

"I knew you'd be fine if you landed on your butt."

If there's one thing I know about the Resident Evil series, it's that Resident Evil 4 marks an incredibly important - indeed pivotal - moment. The switch from fixed cameras to an over the shoulder point of view. Finally, the gaming public would be able to play a survival horror title whose horror wasn't the controls.

This revolution wasn't enough to interest me to play it back in 2005. I had practically zero interest in anything Resident Evil, no matter how you were able to look at it, and in the decade and a half since that view has changed little. Well, no, I take that back, because I have seen some nice Resident Evil stuff thanks to this 1001 list, but I haven't dropped everything to carry on playing like I have with, say, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. Which must tell us something about my gaming tastes...

Leon S Kennedy is a man on a mission in a muddy brown Europe, one that we can see from all kinds of new and exciting angles. Where are the zombie dogs going to jump out at us from this time, eh? Their jobs just got a lot harder, that's for sure.

Ninja Gaiden Black

Slow down there, Ryu.

Source // PlayStation

When the 1001 write up to a game mentions how soul-crushingly hard it is, you can bet that I start to fill with dread. When the first paragraph goes on to say how many players got to the first boss fight and quit, never to return, my memory started to return. I've played Ninja Gaiden Black, haven't I?

I only played a demo of what would have been the PlayStation 3 port, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, where most of these screenshots come from, but a staggeringly tough boss fight at the end of the first level of a ninja game seems awfully familiar.

I've got that PS3 port in hand, however, so let's put my memory to the test.

SWAT 4

Open doors, shout loudly, zip tie everything, be back in time for donuts.

The SWAT team. Though seemingly every police officer looks like they belong to one these days, the highly trained and disciplined unit makes for quite the depiction in film, TV, and video gaming. Specialised team members all reading from the same page, acting as one to strike hard and fast to apprehend a suspect or bring a situation to a close. One part military force, one part psychological chess match, there's a certain appeal about the way they go about things.

In theory, at least. Perhaps. If you ascribe to that way of thinking. What am I trying to say here? That a properly trained SWAT team is an incredible asset, and that SWAT 4 is here to show you how tough they've got it. Yeah, let's go with that.

First-person shooters are usually all about going in guns blazing. SWAT 4 is about never having a reason to shoot. Can you make that switch?

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

"Now that's how you get 'em."

I wasn't - and still aren't - a massive fan of the Oddworld games of old. Yes, they looked weird and disgusting but were humourous and clever too. Not that that helped sell them to me. Just not the kind of thing I want to play.

Despite the title, though, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is rather different. The 2D platform puzzler is gone, as is Abe and the Mudokons. In its place is a third- or first-person bounty hunt set in Oddworld's rendition of the wild west.

I'm much more interested in that than of saving workers from a factory, that's for sure.