Spelunky

We're going deeper underground.

"Death is fun", says the developer of Spelunky, a freeware Rogue-like platformer where a mysterious cave network constantly shifts beneath your feet, daring you to dive deeper underground in search of treasure, pushing your luck against spike traps, snakes, and many more ways to find yourself lacking any life.

Each time you fail - and you will fail - your entire story is dug out of the Earth, the levels replaced by something just as familiar, just as challenging, but just not the same. Do you have the persistence to learn from your mistakes and make progress into the dark unknown, or are you destined to die in the mines before your adventure really even begins?

I have a hunch on what my answer to that is, but let's find out for sure.

MaBoshi: The Three Shape Arcade

A stick is a shape, huh?

It feels like it has been a while since we've had a quirky little game on the 1001 list, and you can't get much quirkier than motion controls on the Nintendo W-hat's that? This game uses a single button and no Wiimote waggling? It's not quirky then, is it?

MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade is a puzzler with a difference, though, as you attempt to perfect three arcade minigames based on different shapes. That's it, really. A million points seem like a good goal for you?

Left 4 Dead

"Dude, where's my thumb?"

Sometimes it feels like the world may be heading towards a zombie uprising. There are an awful lot of braindead individuals out there, that's for sure. What would it take for them to work together for the greater good? Co-operation, for starters, and an intelligent leader to push and pull everything in the right direction.

Co-operating can be hard for some, however, so we should probably get some practice in playing first-person survival horror shooter Left 4 Dead, where a handful of citizens have to rely on each other to wade through the onslaught that lay between them and their survival.

Can you wade through an onslaught, or do you wade through the blood and guts that come out of that onslaught? I'm not sure. Let's find out.

God of War: Chains of Olympus

"We will meet again, Spartan. The Fates have deemed it. One day, you will regret what you have done here."

Source // PlayStation

This 1001 list has been rather eye-opening, as you would hope. I haven't made a count of how many titles have come out of nowhere to impress me, but there are some series that I hadn't touched at all back in the day, for whatever reason, that I now can't get enough of.

Two notable examples of this happening are the Yakuza series, where I'm finally getting around to Yakuza 2 after going through Yakuza 0 and Yakuza (and can't wait to continue playing 3, 4, and 5 when they get a PC port at the end of the month - by God I hope this PC can run it), and - if it wasn't obvious by now - God of War.

The other thing I've been caught out by is just how good portable consoles were, even back to the Game Boy Advance. Naturally, being firmly found in camp Sony, I had a PlayStation Portable and then PlayStation Vita. I used them. I enjoyed them. But if God of War: Chains of Olympus is anything to go by, I've clearly not used them as intended.

Kratos is back, furious as ever. What's pissed him off this time?

Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse

Remember your rule of thirds now...

I don't appear in a great many photos. I prefer to be captured unexpectedly, in my natural state. Anything posed and co-ordinated is forced, serving more as a piece of evidence that something happened or someone was there. It feels cold and uninspiring, and so I suppose I'd rather be behind the camera taking the kind of photos I want to see. Also, as every cameraman will tell you, you are invincible behind a camera, and nothing can ever hurt you.

That's demonstrably false, but it's the comfort you'll need when playing Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the next survival horror title of the series famed for giving you a magical camera as your one and only defence against ghostly horrors of the past.

Last time out, in Fatal Frame II, I thought it was interesting enough to warrant a look. It was certainly different from anything I was familiar with. What's changed as we move onto the Nintendo Wii?

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Coming back around for more? Alright then...

Tower defence games thus far have been simpler affairs, notably in the graphics department. I don't remember all the tower defence games the 1001 list has put in front of us, but the majority have been Flash-based lunchtime entertainment, not detailed 3D polygon models of animated alien invaders stealing chunks of our blummin' core, as is shown in Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Is a considerable bump in graphics enough to get me to pay more attention to the genre, or does the idea of tower defence just turn me off at its first utterance?

Gears of War 2

"I have a rendezvous with Death"

Source // Xbox

When all you know is war, I guess it's inevitable that the war won't stop. When all you are is an impossibly proportioned man fueled by diesel and wearing parts of a car for protection, you probably don't get up to much else other than shooting things. It's a good job Gears of War 2 exists to keep the guys employed, is what I'm getting at, because I've no idea what they'd do without it.

Marcus Fenix and the gang return in a sequel supposedly bigger and badder than the first outing, the game that effectively unleashed cover-shooters into the world. What form will the chest-high walls take in this game? What horrors will we willingly march into for the sake of mankind's survival? Just how gruff can we shout this line of dialogue?

Let's time our reloads right and kick down the door to find out.

Far Cry 2

"To break a man's will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind."

Source // PlayStation

I liked my time with Far Cry, difficult though it was, but it wasn't my first taste of a Far Cry game. That would be in the form of its sequel, Far Cry 2, developed by a different team entirely and making its way onto the PlayStation 3, where I could actually play an open-world first-person shooter.

Like other titles in the genre before and since I spent a sizeable amount of time roaming a fictional African country consumed in war, and causing just as much - if not more - carnage by my own hands. There must be something about the immersion of a first-player game that hooks me, and if it's the attention paid to the little things, then Far Cry 2 is an example of showing us how it's done.

Grab your bottle of malaria pills and pick the least rusted weapon you can find, because we're about to be thrown into the furnace.

Devil May Cry 4

"Listen to my voice"

Source // MobyGames

It's not the devil that may cry when playing these games, but me. As time goes on and I notice more and more of my skills drip away from wherever I store them, playing a game like Devil May Cry generally results in sadness and disappointment.

Devil May Cry was new and different, and button-mashing wouldn't be anywhere near enough to see me through it. Devil May Cry 3 cranked up the style, and with it the difficulty, but it was technical problems that finally put an end to my (pathetic) run through its early missions. Once more, my skills just weren't up to scratch to make progress, let alone make progress in style.

Now it's time for Devil May Cry 4, a new entry for a new generation of consoles, and I'm playing it with a hand in need of rest for some mysterious (and maybe even wholly psychological) reason. My hand feels... off. A little weaker and a little slower than I know it to be, but it does work. Enough to grasp a PS3 controller and carve up some demons? Let's find out.

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.