Elebits

Massage Wand Energized!

I didn't fall for the Nintendo Wii hype. Too gimmicky. Too childish. Too few buttons on the controller (which wasn't even shaped like a controller) and not enough horses under the bonnet to put on a good show, the Wii didn't raise any interest from me, and a great many of its must-play games are unknown to me.

Games like Elebits, a first-person shooter of sorts where you play as young Kai, a kid hunting for Elebits hidden inside cupboards and under desks. Hmm. Not exactly a thrilling description, but it sure fits the family-friendly approach of the console it was developed for.

How good are we at hide and seek? Well, we only need the seek part, really. How good are we are finding stuff? Let's find out.

Eets: Hunger. It's Emotional.

You did it.

What the hell kind of a title is Eets: Hunger. It's Emotional? What does that even mean? I know we're no stranger to weird titles, but this one must take the biscuit. And proceed to eat it, presumably.

The 1001 list has this down as a game for the PlayStation Portable, but not only does Wikipedia beg to differ, it even goes so far as to say that it was pitched as a title for the Nintendo DS and PSP, and failed to land on either.

Promising start, no?

DEFCON

The only winning move is not to play.

Think 2020 is the year of the shit hitting the fan? Believe it or not, it could be worse. Much worse. You could have me in charge of defences in a global thermonuclear war. How do I know not to have me at the helm? Why a game of DEFCON, of course.

Dead Rising

"I don't think they had zombie-infested malls in mind when they wrote those regulations, kid."

Source // Moby Games

I don't really care for zombies. Yes, I've seen a few films and games about the shambling monstrosities, but I don't seek them out above anything else. I'm not drawn towards them in any way like they're drawn towards the living. If a game about zombies wants to get my attention, it needs to be damn special, and probably focus on anything but zombies.

All that means Dead Rising has a bit of work to do...

Yakuza 2

Like a Dragon.

Organized crime makes for quite the engaging story if The Wire has taught me anything. If there's another thing The Wire teaches us, it's that some stories are a slow burn, requiring plenty of investment upfront before a big payoff later on.

Enter Yakuza 2, sure The Wire of video gaming. Loads of characters, buckets of backstory, grand plans for domination of the city seamlessly interweaved with the day-to-day lives of everyone. Going to the shops. Playing some games. Just getting by.

I know very little of the now sprawling Yakuza series. Something about Japanese organized crime gangs. Lots of fighting. Lots of side content. An awful lot of story. I never got into it because I saw it as 'too Japanese', whatever that means, so let's see what epic we've missed out on.

Bully

Canis Canem Edit

Nobody likes a bully. But a fair few people like Bully, the action-adventure title that rips Grand Theft Auto from the city and shoves it into Bullworth Academy, a boarding school full of stereotypes and parodies that you'd expect from a Rockstar game.

Can we survive a day as the new kid, or will we be calling our parents to come back and pick us up?

Company of Heroes

Hell has opened its gates.

I didn't know how much I would like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War going into it. I knew it was one of the highlights in the grand list of Warhammer video games, but I didn't know why. I played it, enjoyed it, played it some more, finished it, eventually got around to getting the expansions and am currently working my way through those too. And that's before any talk of sequels, which is just as exciting.

But the grim dark future isn't everybody's cup of tea. Some folks prefer the grim darkness of the past, and it doesn't get much darker than the Second World War. What if an RTS like Dawn of War was set in 1944, with much-improved graphics and new mechanics? Surely I'd be onto another winner.

What say you, Company of Heroes?

ArmA: Armed Assault

"5, TARGET THAT MAN."

Previously, we failed to work our way through much of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, the military simulation that pulls no punches and demands your attention. I have since opened that boxed version to see what goodies were inside. Nothing, basically. The military isn't about goodies. It's about getting difficult jobs done without getting your colleagues killed.

Breaking away from Codemasters to show they could go it alone, Bohemia Interactive released ArmA: Armed Assault, the next step in their military simulator series. Just as demanding, just as convoluted, just as scary, this is probably going to turn out no different from their earlier game: I'm not going to survive very long.

Prey

"The world is full of stories, and from time to time they permit themselves to be told."

Video games and physics. Some games strive for realism and try their best to keep you grounded. Other games just don't care. Somewhere in the broad middle are games that have consistent, reliable physics, even if they are different from the values we're familiar with outside of video games.

So long as these predictable values stay the same, a game can make use of these 'strange' physics to give us a variety of experiences, from the wacky levels of Psychonauts to the mind-bending, portal-traversing, out-of-body moving Prey, a first-person shooter that will have you questioning what 'first-person' even means.

Tommy is dissatisfied with his life. He wants to venture out into the wider world. Unfortunately for him, higher powers have different plans...

Black

No colours anymore...

Guns. They're seemingly everywhere in video games. Some games do them justice, for want of a better word, depicting them as miniature death-dealing cannons. Other games just don't care. One end goes bright and the enemy looking at it falls over.

After some successful Burnout racing games, Criterion Games got to work on putting as much effort into firearms as they did into fast cars. Or perhaps it's better to say 'as much effort into the effects of firearms on the environment, as they did for the effects of a fast car speeding crashing into oncoming traffic'.

The result is Black. Just simply Black.