Infinite Space is typically very story driven and will be of particular interest to anime fans. You play a young space captain called Yuri as he travels the galaxy alongside his companion Nia. The story is presented in a graphic novel-esque way via talking heads. Although you never control Yuri directly, by the end of the 60-70 hour journey, you’ll be pretty attached to him and the 150 other cast members. Yes I did say 60-70 hours, Infinite Space fits a hell of a lot into the small DS cartridge and there’s an awful lot of content here.

During your time exploring the galaxy there are plenty of opportunities to confront enemy pirates, complete missions and eventually save your young sister Chelsea (there had to be a typical RPG element after all). There’s a lot of variation on offer here with a wide range of different choices that can affect the storyline as well as which crew members you meet with amongst other things. It’s annoying then that some dialogue is a little cheesy and predictable as the underlying story is much stronger than that.

Yes I did say 60-70 hours, Infinite Space fits a hell of a lot into the small DS cartridge

You start out with just one ship to navigate with the eventual ability to control up to five ships at a time – and acquire over 100 others. That’s not forgetting the 200 or so parts that you can customise your ship with. While this might not be infinite, it’s as in-depth as anyone could ask for.

Actually building a new ship does get rather complicated considering the need for ship schematics and the addition of various modules to affect everything from weapon types to armour, attack range and accuracy. Just fiddling around with these options could take up many, many hours without any difficulty.

There’s also the need to build rooms inside your ship which, annoyingly, is rather awkward. It’s a bit like playing a non-moving game of Tetris as you try to slot in various room shapes into your ship. It works but it’s not exactly intuitive and I’d have liked to let the game automatically sort it out for me. Most frustratingly there’s seemingly no way of working out exactly how each module will help you without referring to the manual. This seemed to be a familiar tale for far too many aspects of this already complex title.

Of course the galaxy isn’t very safe with plenty of enemies out to destroy you, so it’s fortunate that the combat system works fairly well. As a battle gauge fills, attacks become available. The longer you wait, the more types of attacks are opened up. There are three levels in all: dodge, fire and barrage with the latter being the strongest but not necessarily the most appropriate at all times. It ends up feeling a bit like paper, scissors, stone which becomes kind of flaky. It’s wonderfully satisfying when an attack pays off but with such a simplistic system, it’s all too easy to lose through one mistake. The lack of options also contrasts oddly with the array of different choices available throughout the rest of the game. Oh and did I mention that some of the space battles I faced took upwards of 45 minutes? Infinite Space truly is epic in every sense of the word, sometimes to its detriment.

The lack of options within the combat oddly contrasts when compared to the rest of the game

The more I write about Infinite Space, the more I realise it would be all too easy to spend countless hours describing just what the game offers. I haven’t even explained the crew member system whereby you have 35 ship positions to fill via finding appropriate people as you play through the game, nor the seemingly infinite number of different ports that can be visited.

Infinite Space oozes depth and ambition, but it’s to its detriment in far too many ways. There’s simply so much to do that it’s both brilliant yet overwhelming, especially in a portable game. Unforgivingly, it doesn’t even have the decency to offer a captain’s log so if you make the crucial mistake of quitting the game mid mission and returning, you have to rely on your memory to remember just what you were doing previously. Its steep learning curve is quite unnerving for a console that normally offers such accessible games to its players. The fact that you’ll be spending your entire time gaming via menu systems is certainly going to be off putting to many. I know I missed being able to ‘properly’ interact with my crew members in the way that Mass Effect offers for example. Then again, just the fact that I can genuinely compare its experience to Mass Effect – albeit with a large dose of Elite thrown in – shows just how grand Infinite Space really is.

Infinite Space is flawed thanks to its clunky interface but you still can’t help but respect its ambition, even if perhaps the developer should have cut back on some of its ideas and focused on the smaller things. It’s never going to rival the likes of Pokémon HeartGold – coincidently released on the same day – or other similarly accessible titles, but that’s not its intention in the first place. So is it good, you ask. It is, but I also hate it with equal measure. Infinite Space seems all too good at offering great features while then missing the obvious ones such as a mission log or even a simple to use interface. Flawed yet good it is then.

Halo 3

I’m going to start off with the most obvious choice, and that’s the game that has destroyed so many hours of my life, bringing moments of pure joy and moments of pure white anger. But would I ever stop playing it? Maybe when Reach comes out, although I know I’ll still drop back to play it.

Why Halo 3 though? Well it just got the online perfect with both brilliant matchmaking and online co-op. I know no matter how long I’m stuck on this god forbidden island there will always be 13 year olds to kill (read: get embarrassingly killed by). You can always improve your BR, you can always play different gametypes, and most importantly, you can relive them over and over with theatre mode.

The campaign is great fun and with four player online co-op it offers lots of online fun. I’ve had so many great moments from this flawed little campaign; getting stuck in a large bin and betraying my friends out of it, much to their hilarity; trying to complete the last level on ghosts to unlock the mighty Recon armour permutation.

Then, besides all of this time consuming fun, there is forge mode, something that I have barely touched, yet offers countless possibilities to create new and exciting levels that can be played online. I could even create a desert island level and invite friends to make me less lonely…

Skate 2

When I’m sick of shooting guns at laggy enemies, the perfect cure awaits me on the streets of San Van. What makes Skate so good, besides everything else of course, is the fact that no matter how good you are there is always something new to master. That could be a trick, a variation of that trick, or trying to fit the perfect set to tricks into a complex line.

This freedom of expression encourages you to experiment, and with the option of creating your own spots to skate and share online, enhanced by dragging items littered around San Van, the possibilities are impressively endless. So the single player should keep me amused on my little island, but what about the multiplayer?

Ranked, unranked, freeskate, all filled with challenges and game modes, most if them great, one of them rubbish (S.K.A.T.E.). I have put hundreds of hours into the online, racking up 70,000 EXP with an average of 19 per game, so that’s a lot of games, right? If I was stuck on the island then I’m sure I could add another digit on my EXP and start to push into the top 200, maybe one day hitting number one, a great way to keep me happy and stave off loneliness.

GTA: San Andreas

I was stuck between this and SSX Tricky, both I own and played last week, but Rockstar’s behemoth of a sandbox just stole it. This game is huge, an instant plus for desert island amusement, but it also boasts some of the best fun I have had in a single player game. The story is long and does feature some boring drive-me-there-drive-me-here missions, but it also contains bags of humour and some great set-pieces – the Terminator 2 truck chase homage is one of the best missions I have played in any game, ever.

Once you complete the story, unlocking all the weapons, vehicles and islands, the fun really begins, most of it coming from the vehicles themselves; planes, trains, helicopters, BMX’s, cars, trucks, you name it, you can drive it. The hours I have spent messing around are embarrassingly high, flipping mountain bikes of the top of sky scrapers, driving minivans up Mount Chiliad only to throw them off the top again. I even saw a friend land a jumbo-jet on the mountain, a feat that has never, to this day, been bested.

Let us not forget the collectibles, of which there are many different variations, some of which I managed to find while others remain a task to be beaten – an excellent way to while away the weeks. But what GTA does best is carnage, and with one of the biggest cheat lists I have ever seen there is enough to keep it fresh – one of my favourites: spawn a hot-ring racer, stick on the ‘cars can fly’ cheat and viola, instant entertainment. I wish I knew how many hours I have lost to this game, through numerous consoles and play-throughs, but that is the reason it works as a desert island game: no matter what I do, no matter how many times I play it, it always draws me back.

Check back next Tuesday for another three picks from another writer… In the meantime tell us what you would take in the comments below or check out previous entries.

Yakuza 3, and presumably the first two as well, aren’t Japanese versions of Grand Theft Auto. They’re actually far from Rockstar’s well-loved franchise. Nope, Yakuza games are good old-fashioned JRPG games within an urban setting. The problem is that they’re probably a bit too old-fashioned by today’s standards.

We rejoin Yakuza’s lead, Kazuma Kiryu, on the lush sands of Sunshine Beach as our now ex-Yakuza is running the Morning Glory Orphanage, filled with a dozen surprisingly self-reliant kids. This leaves Kazuma to go off gallivanting around the expansive streets of Okinawa performing deeds and helping out his newly adopted kids.

Naturally this time living clean isn’t long-lived and soon Kazuma is off chasing the deed to the orphanage, that has carelessly fallen into the wrong hands. It’s safe to say that Yakuza 3’s story is as sophisticated as a 1990s action film by forcing Kazuma to save the futures of children, the only way he knows how. Sheesh.

It’s safe to say that Yakuza 3’s story is as sophisticated as a 1990s action film

Let’s just say, when the writing and story are the most important parts of a game you better get it right. It tries to get you to care about the characters, namely the children, but the way in which it’s done undermines what it’s trying to do. With this being a port on a budget, voice-overs are strictly for cutscenes and but they’re still in Japanese.

That’s not the problem – in actuality the cutscenes are, for the most part, great and the language keeps it authentic – the problem is overly long and drawn out text conversations. Characters slog along at a snails pace trying to build tension and depth but instead build the mundane and fatigued.

Not that I’m against lines of text delivered dialogue in games, if it’s done right, it’s just that surely we must have found better ways to present narrative in the last twenty or so years. The budget was against them, understandable. JRPGs are normally told in this way, sure if you say so.

That still doesn’t change the fact that when a conversation is made up of great cutscene that’s concise, awkward pause, mundane text chat that repeats everything and back again, it becomes a little tiresome and, well, strange.

You’ll really want to crank up the difficulty as combat just becomes a formality on the easier settings

Tiresome and strange definitely becomes a mantra for the whole game. A majority of the combat is within a traditional beat ‘em up format albeit with full 360° of movement. You’ll really want to crank up the difficulty here, as it just becomes a formality on the easier settings.

Meanwhile the breath of activities on offer will impress you but it’s nothing that you haven’t seen done better elsewhere. Going golfing will bring a smile to your face as a muscle-bound, back-tattooed, ex-Yakuza boss puts his 9 wood through the ball but most of the games are way too forgiving, allowing you infinite attempts to get it right, giving an almost 100% chance of success to the persistent.

The actual world is a stunningly detailed and expansive affair with tons of hidden secrets scattered about. Bustling streets of Toyko lit up with a neon glow are a massive shift from the peaceful beaches of Owinawa and the cultural change, even within this foreign land, is brought to life. It is, however, hard to fully appreciate the visual side of the game because Yakuza 3 was actually released over a year ago and it shows.

In fact a lot of Yakuza 3 does feel really dated and isn’t too far from Ryo’s adventures in Shenmue, a game that came out ten years ago. This is where the real problem stems from. Shenmue, although excellent for its time, was hideously flawed and Yakuza 3 hasn’t learnt from the mistakes of that Dreamcast classic. When you compare that to the narrative telling of today, it’s a no-contest.

I rarely found anything really worth the dedication that Yakuza 3 demands but maybe that’s just an ignorant Westerners opinion on it

Yakuza 3 is a quintessentially Japanese and epically long tale that is let down by sub-par mini-games and a dated combat system. After that, the game just becomes walking from point-A to point-B triggering decent cutscenes and mundanely long conversations. It would be made more bearable if the way in which it told the story was sophisticated and engaging but, quite frankly, it isn’t.

If you’re instep with the quirky ways of an JRPG you’ll probably learn to forgive its shortcomings and really enjoy what Yakuza 3 offers. However, personally I appreciated its Japanese aesthetics and unrestricted environments but rarely found anything else worth the dedication that Yakuza 3 demands. But hey, maybe that’s just an ignorant Westerners opinion on it.

But that’s what Lips is all about, it’s a game especially for social occasions, not for playing on your own. Obviously you can play it on your own, but Party Classics doesn’t really have the setlist for it. With the likes of YMCA, Cameo, Right Said Fred and Chumbawumba, it’s much more suited for a laugh filled night with friends and few drinks. It also has such sing-along classics as American Pie, These Boots Are Made for Walking and My Sharona; songs that could be filed under everyone thinks they know them but they only really know the chorus category of karaoke classics which tends to result in a lot of hilarious mumbling.

This was my first experience with a Lips game and I have to say that I’m impressed. Even though you may struggle through songs, like the ones I just mentioned, it’s no detriment to your progress. This is different to the likes of Rockband where you get booed off stage for failing a song… in German… that you’ve never heard before. But there is a degree of skill here as your score tallies up with multipliers and medals, showing your final score in both global and friends leaderboard at the end, which will draw some people back for more.

The biggest update of the game, and of the extensive Lips series, is the ability to use USB microphones. The Rock Band microphone that I used worked well, and is definitely better than using your headset, but it does come with a few problems: you cannot use the microphone to activate hit gestures and noise makers; star stream is automatically activated, meaning you don’t get to do the oh-so-cool gesture, some achievements and awards can’t be unlocked and some modes can only be played with limited features. All of these are displayed upon booting up the game and to be fair, they are on the box as well, but it does feel a little cheap – if I can use this microphone as a tambourine in Rock Band then why not here?

Problems not mentioned on the box include a sore lip, as you have to place the mic very close to your mouth for it to pick up the change in pitch. Also, when using the apparently enhanced recording function, I could barely hear my singing through the TV; which ultimately may be a good thing.

However, the oddest problem of the lot was a slight latency issue with the videos. Which to be honest was more than a slight problem as it made me miss vocals and lose points. Frankly it left me confused, why would they lag? Why would there be framerate issue in Lips? It really doesn’t make sense, surely the 360 could handle some streaming video while monitoring my pitch.

As an add-on to the series, it does bring some good tracks, but does it bring enough to warrant a purchase? I doubt I would go back and sing half the tracks, instead only singing a few less kitsch ones, and that’s a problem – if I was at a family party, however, then maybe the cheesy songs would be getting more plays. While Party Classics brings some good tracks it is far from being a classic itself, instead bolstering the catalogue of songs and adding some much needed, yet not perfect, USB functionality.

You still have achievements to aim for, there’s still a worldwide leaderboard and there’s plenty of avatar awards to unlock too. So if nothing has changed then what’s the point? Well, as with the last two releases, I love the 80’s is really just a glorified song pack. One has to wonder if many players – read singers, will want to spend the money on a disc rather than have this delivered via the Lips online store. One bonus of course is that these songs won’t take up any space; the other is that this add on specifically is a great addition to the series.

The unique selling point of these games is getting together with friends and belting out as many cheesy songs as possible and what decade is better for cheesy anthems than the 1980’s? Grabbing the microphone and taking your singing stance as Gold by Spandau Ballet loads up is an experience in itself as all of the nostalgic memories flow back.

Some of the best 80’s tracks are included and each one will bring back visions of eyeliner, big hair and shoulder pads – and that was just the men. This pack is great for parties, but let’s make one thing clear, this game is great for parties of people who can remember the 80’s. It’s unlikely that many younger gamers will want to sing songs like Rio, Vienna or Walking on Sunshine; this makes this new version of Lips relatively niche.

If you were an 80’s child and have pictures of your Mum with an enormous perm and photos of your Dad with a moustache that Ron Jeremy would be jealous of, then this is a karaoke game you must try. Call your friends, watch Footloose and then boot up Lips: I love the 80’s and annoy your neighbours with the genius that is Kool and the Gang, Celebration.

Prison Break: The Game follows alongside the first season of the show as our main character must spy on Michael and the rest of the cons to uncover the breakout attempt and stop it. It’s a very loose attempt to interweave the two entities and while it works on paper, in practice it feels too forced to really flow alongside nicely.

As a big fan of the show I was hoping to be sucked in by the story here as I once was by the show, this was not to be. Even appearances from my favourite characters left me feeling cold as the poor graphics failed to capture their true likeness. The visuals as a whole leave a lot to the imagination, there are few moments of greatness to be seen. Lighting effects are generally good, as are the particle effects of dust floating through the air, but on the whole it’s all very basic.

The character models themselves look as if they’re meant to be kitted out in full body casts, as they walk woodenly from place to place turning to look at you by shifting their entire body, all the while staring at you with emotionless features that convey nothing more than a vapid persona.

It’s a very loose attempt to interweave the two entities and while it works on paper, in practice it feels too forced

It may seem like I’m being harsh with my critique but this is a game that on the surface should work incredibly well, but fails on almost every level. The dialogue is boring and only comes to life when littered with prison slang, the QTEs that seem to appear at random are irritating and cause nothing more than frustration and the game overall lacks any of the drama that made the franchise so popular.

The crux of the game is based on stealth and fighting, exactly what you want from a game like this. In your mind you can picture all of the immense fight scenes from the show and the tension as Michael and his crew hide things from the guards and move around behind the scenes. You can forget most of that, though. Fighting in this game is limited to a couple of punches and blocking, the latter of which is rarely needed even on harder difficulties. Most fights are just two men standing in front of each other trading blows; it’s more like rock ‘em sock ‘em robots than a Prison rumble.

The stealth mechanics start off very well as you edge past guards and use shadows to your advantage, but the problems soon rear their head again. The actual AI of the guards is atrocious as you sneak pretty much under their nose as they stand there absently minded. They have no cone of vision to be dodged and they have to pretty much fall over you to notice you’re there. Another issue for the stealth seems to be the camera control, there’s no dynamic camera that pulls out and gives you a good view, so if you /do/ get caught it’s likely because the camera didn’t show you a guard turning around suddenly.

Prison Break: The Game feels half made in many ways. There are weights to pump and heavy bags to punch which make you a better fighter, although there’s little to no change in your fighting style and no extra moves are learnt. The stealth moments are plagued by such stupid AI that you can literally run through sections, which is meant to raise alarm for the guards, it never does.

It’s all very lacklustre, Prison life rarely feels gritty except for the racist lines of speech or the constant threat of being shanked. I searched high and low for redeeming features, ramping up the difficulty didn’t really change anything at all and the story progression is dull and lifeless. As a fan of the show I feel disappointed to bring such a harsh critique of the game, it’s very reminiscent of Lost: Via Domus. Another disappointing TV tie in that genuinely saddened me. This is a show that could have spawned a great game based on intrigue, stealth and grit, it falls very short indeed.

Final Fantasy X

I realise that I’m the second person to pick Final Fantasy X for this feature, but frankly imagination stands for diddly squat on these hypothetical shores. Sure, I could pick something like Too Human and pat myself on the back for being so unusual, but in the monotony of those long and lonely winter nights, as my mind furiously strains against the limits of its precinct, the originality of that Cybernordic twaddle isn’t going to do much to stop me from biting the inside of my mouth off.

Why would I pick Too Human anyway when no-one’s picked World of Warcraft yet, when clearly the world’s most popular MMORPG is a far more sensible choice? I don’t even much like Too Human.

So as you can see, Too Human is a ridiculous choice.

Final Fantasy X is the video game equivalent of my childhood teddy bear, of my snuggest pair of boxers, of a crunchy peanut butter sandwich sitting next to a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch. I know that, for all its grand and overblown dialogue, it hardly has much to say on the human condition. I know that, for all its depth as a story-driven RPG, it is a limited experience and doesn’t exactly improve on repeated plays, or even hold up that well in the light of modern day.

But just to set foot within the exotic futurism of Spira, to watch Tidus and Yuna have their first kiss in the sapphire glow of that moonlit lake, to try and dissect the exact physics of Wakka’s hair – it would all be of immense comfort, a warm and welcome reminder of happier, nay happiest times.

Whereas Too Human would just remind me of how that Denis Dyack is a pompous arse.

Everybody’s Golf 2

So, I have my favourite story to relive over and over. Now I need games to become obsessive about, the focus-defining equivalents of Chuck’s sail in Cast Away, but not quite as useful.

As much as I’ll want to escape the grimness of my reality – what’s new? – I won’t be playing games at every single opportunity on this island. That would drive me insane. So, instead, I’ll sometimes be going on a jaunt around the island, maybe visiting that part with the rocks and the big ol’ tree, or possibly exploring the mound just north of the rocks where I think I saw that bird once.

So I’ll need one of these games to be on a portable console, able to provide a brief pick-up-and-play experience should I get the hankering on the go. It should be quick, simple, and highly addictive.

Enter Everybody’s Golf 2. I lost the summer of 2008 to Everybody’s Golf: World Tour on the PS3, its cutesy visuals and simplistic controls belying a game alarmingly full of depth. Hours upon hours were lost to working out its intricacies, fine-tuning my approaches, and bettering my scores repeatedly. There’s power, wind, aim, slope, terrain, ball type, club type, special abilities, trick shots, shortcuts, advantageous miss-hits, and a whole wealth of stats to think about – that’s all just for one shot.

Everybody’s Golf 2 is its bite size equivalent on the PSP, yet without any loss of depth. Also, you can dress up your golfer like Santa if you want. How could that ever get old?

Football Manager 2010

The only game on this list that I’m yet to play. I thought about going with Championship Manager 97/98, but I’ve mined that game into oblivion. I know every good player there is to find, every facet of every tactic, every stat of every player. Well, OK, I don’t know it that well, but in any case it’s just not as good as the latest Football Manager games, no matter how rose-tinted my spectacles are.

So, Everybody’s Golf 2 provides the less addictive, more quick fix experience to get obsessive about. It’s more like that model airplane you’ve been working on for the last four years; you’re not spending your every waking moment on it, but it still matters to you far more than it should.

In contrast, Football Manager 2010 has the potential to consume my life, to take ownership of my soul, to actually lull me into believing I’m on the touchline at the Emirates, gesticulating wildly at my players and throwing tantrums at the fourth official, rather than gesticulating wildly at a crab limping clumsily along the shoreline or throwing a tantrum at the coconut I can’t seem to open.

It is also, most pertinently, endless – both as a single campaign and in terms of replay value. If I feel like I’ve exhausted all there is to be and achieve as manager of Arsenal, I can just start a new game playing as Halifax Town and make it my new life ambition to get Wayne Rooney to play at The Shay. Or maybe I’ll take a trip across to Brazil and make Flamengo the best team the world has ever seen. Or maybe I’ll try to amass the entire Brazil Team to play for Reading. Or maybe try to replicate Alex Fergusons’ career game for game, except in the Australian league for a laugh.

And because I’m quite crap at football management games, I’ll never achieve half that stuff anyway, so there will always be something to aim for. It is the game that never stops giving, especially if you’re crap at it.

Check back next Tuesday for another three picks from another writer… In the meantime tell us what you would take in the comments below or check out previous entries.

In a manner akin to Brain Training, Music from Nobilis teaches the player everything from how to detect different pitch heights, what each note sounds like and even how to play music through its performance mode. It’s a clever piece of software that really does make learning music theory fun. Much like Brain Training it keeps track of what exercises you’ve completed each day adding a bit of a competitive element to proceedings. Keeping the calendar full of complete excerises is an excellent incentive, if it only showed how hard I was trying.

I’ve always admired those who can read and play music as it looks like such a useful skill to have. The problem with me is that I’ve always loved games too much and no doubt if I’d put as much time into piano playing as I did completing Sonic 2, my life would be quite different. So even though my days of really making something of myself in the music world are long gone, I still loved the fact that Music taught me something while combining my love of games.

If I’d put as much time into piano playing as I did completing Sonic 2, my life would be quite different.

Music’s Lesson mode offers 21 lessons which teach a wide variety of different, but essential, parts of music theory. Starting out with simple things such as appreciating different levels of pitch swiftly makes way for more complicated lessons such as learning about treble clefs, tempo marks and all sorts of other things that made no sense to me whatsoever only a little while ago. Each lesson is backed up with a test to ensure that the player (or should I say pupil) fully understands what they’re doing through practical means.

Once you’ve started working your way through the lessons and everything makes a bit more sense, you can move onto the Performance mode which allows players to play a number of different musical pieces through the use of the DS stylus. With 65 tracks in all, it’s a pretty eclectic mix with the fairly simple Twinkle Twinkle leading to more impressive numbers such as Jupiter from Holst’s The Planets and more modern numbers such as Burn Baby Burn. Although you might feel a little self conscious playing in public, it’s immensely satisfying playing a piece accurately and it really does feel great to have succeeded in something. The more pieces you complete, the more new tracks you can unlock adding an extra reason to keep playing.

It’s not all deadly serious though with Enjoy mode on hand to lighten things up. Admittedly it might not be the most educational tool for players my age but it’s certainly handy if you’re trying to get younger children involved. Balloon Pop for example teaches you to clap your hands in rhythm to the music while Mistaken Intervals requires you to determine which bird is out of tune compared to the others. Conveyor Belt is another rhythm based game while Quick Note ID tests your ‘Do Re Mi’ knowledge.

Enjoy mode is the type of mode that I can imagine being particularly useful for parents with an older child who can use the full spectrum of Music while also having a younger child who might prefer to learn in a less structured fashion.

It would be silly to say that Music can replace an instrument or lessons, but as a supplement to such a service, it’s brilliant.

I’m no music teacher and I’d certainly describe my knowledge of music terminology as lacking, however I had a hell of a lot of fun with Music. I felt as if I was learning plenty while still consistently enjoying everything that it had to offer. It would be silly to say that Music can replace a musical instrument or professional music lessons, it quite clearly can’t. However as a supplement to such a service, it’s brilliant.

Not only will it enthuse those using it but it educates without them even realising what it’s doing. If like me you missed the boat on learning music, this is well worth a look as I do now feel a bit more confident about my abilities. It also reminded me how my brief foray into keyboard playing was immense fun and I’m rather tempted to go back to it. For parents who want to encourage their kids into playing an instrument, this is ideal and an essential purchase. If only all educational games could be this well made.

Supreme Commander has been nipped and tucked in a few areas. The big new difference is that Gas Powered Games have cut down on a lot of the original’s complicated economy and base management features: faster automated engineers build structures to suck Mass and Energy out of the ground and effortlessly progress onto massing production facilities. Most levels now have a unit cap of 500 and if hearing that makes you come over in hives then you’ll probably be better off digging out your old copy of Total Annihilation. Artisan players of the original may be perturbed, but ones who can stifle their immediate displeasure will likely find themselves entertained by this pared-back sequel.

After getting your Energy and Mass requirements sorted it’s onto worrying about Research Points, which effectively handle all your tech and upgrades and are accrued by plopping down any number of research stations, with more stations equating to more research. While it’s generally agreed that a few are vital if you want to take a game into the mid or long haul there is always the option to forego them entirely and focus on pumping out an armada of basic tanks.

Whether you’re playing with Research Points or not, a game of Supreme Commander 2 hits the ground running, which makes devastating rush tactics a very real possibility provided the host allows it. Most don’t, however, instead setting the game options so players are gated into their own spawn zone for 5 or 10 minutes before being allowed free reign across the map. That’ll still give you more than enough time to notch up a nasty group of mechanical killers, mind.

…a game of Supreme Commander 2 hits the ground running, which makes devastating rush tactics a very real possibility provided the host allows it.

There are plenty of other approaches to take. Some players like to guard themselves behind rows of stationary artillery and focus on building nukes, for instance. This is a genuinely valid tactic and unlike, say, Command & Conquer, a nuke in Supreme Commander, provided your enemy lets you build one, knows how to properly obliterate half the map. Which is handy.

By far the most popular strategy is air, so with an average game one of my first steps is to properly insulate my base and units from predictable swarms of Proto-Brains and Gunships. The general rock-paper-scissors approach of the RTS genre is cranked to the very maximum here, so successful prediction and cheeky scouting is an imperative part of securing victory – though Supreme Commander 2 also does away with dedicated scouting units, meaning you’ve got to work that little bit harder to get your eyes over an enemy base. Or just assume they’re going air, which usually works.

There’s a genuine sense of creativity across the three races and in the community. While other games tend to whittle their core down to optimum armies and all-too-recognisable build orders, Supreme Commander 2 gives players the flexibility and tools set to tinker around and build an outstanding variety of offensive forces.

Part of this is down to the sheer scale of the maps themselves: when it takes a few minutes to travel from one end to the other, you’ll often find yourself exercising a little bit of caution before committing three-hundred units to the trek. It also means you’ll always be trying to think of a Plan-B, wondering what do you do if the enemy attacks your base and your squad is away – do you risk bolstering your ranks or focus your resources on researching experimental units? It’s a game that ensures you’re always kept on your toes.

Supreme Commander 2 gives players the flexibility and tools set to tinker around and build an outstanding variety of offensive forces

But this only applies to the online multiplayer modes. Supreme Commander 2’s campaign manages to achieve the unlikely and actually produce a worse single-player experience than the original. It’s a dire exploration of the view-from-the-little-men in the conflict, told with absolutely no dramatic urgency, dated FMV and the most uninteresting series of plot twists of recent memory. Even the considerable voice talent of Nolan North sounds like it’s being phoned in. Worse still is a series of humdrum levels that purposefully cripple your tactical options and force you down prescribed paths of units and structures. It tells you what you can build and attack, then rounds off the agony by throwing in the odd level where you have to defend a target. Horrible.

Skirmish AI doesn’t hold up much either, which means if you’re not looking to play competitively online you should definitely just save yourself the money. Those who do fancy testing themselves against the grey matter of fellow human beings will find an interesting, multi-faceted game backed up by an ingenious (albeit quite small) community of players. Supreme Commander 2 might not be trying to overhaul the genre, but invest a little of your time and you’ll be getting a well-built game of suitably gigantic proportions.

The Top Ten With A Twist articles were amongst my favourite on the old site and we all thought they deserved another run and that’s exactly what we’re doing. For the three remaining Fridays in March we’re republishing these excellent pieces. This week ten separate writers tell us of their favourite baddies or bosses. - Sam Morris

Psychonauts

Christos Reid of For The Gamer Good

When calling into question the various reasons I’d choose Psychonauts as my personal platforming masterpiece, you may think me slightly psychologically unhinged. The prospect of delving into the various aspects of a person’s subconscious, represented aesthetically as a rather neon-filled platforming arena, isn’t so much a visual representation of the Jungian “shadow-subconscious” as a mess filled with bright lights and even prettier bright lights.

But we’re forgetting one vital organ in this body of work – Tim Schafer. Time and time again, the man has proven that storytelling is key in helping the player to overcome the loss of realism they encounter on a second-by-second basis inside the game world. In the case of Psychonauts, we follow Raz, a psychically gifted young individual who sneaks into a summer camp for children with other brain-boosted abilities of varying degrees. Simple enough, but when their tasks involve solving the inner hurt inside each other by slapping a small door on their target’s head and jumping in, it begins to fall down the rabbit hole so very enjoyably.

And it’s down this rabbit-warren of a game that Psychonauts shines – the boss characters can be anything from a suppressed memory of an abusive parent, grown monstrous in size due to the infantile concept of the parent allowed free reign in terms of evolution and growth, to censorship itself. That’s right. Censor representatives are the meat you’ll grind inside the subconscious, attempting to both boot you out of the subconscious you’re so happily jumping around and punching things in, and sealing away the more hideous, real problems that really do need to be dealt with.

Don’t think of yourself as a player, think of yourself as a therapist. You have the ability to save these people, and if you can’t, well, things are going to go sour pretty quickly. Some are heartbroken, and some are mentally scarred – The Milkman in particular is an interesting example, his subconscious a suburban neighbourhood infested with intelligence agents disguised as residents, a visual representation of the conspiracy theorems and paranoia that have driven him into a single-minded, boring profession, delivering milk that no one ever drinks to an insane asylum.

Your abilities rely largely on Raz’s uncanny evolution above the other camp-fiends – he takes the best aspects from the various X-men cookie-cutter stereotypes around him and turns them into weapons, defences and boosts to his own puny physical abilities. Telekinesis, pyrokinisis and more, all blended into the body of our saviour, “the boy who dreamt.” The only thing you are barred from doing is reading the minds of others, and why? Because you’d know the bad guy in the first half an hour, and hiding him is the very reason you stumble around the repressed urges and scars that comprise the platformer’s landscape.

This is beyond a game that simply requires the collection of coins and saving a princess; this is a masterpiece of Schafer’s, the devotion to the suggestion that, through exploration of the psyche we can finally explain all the military stereotypes, the derogatorily oversexed female icons, and of course, ourselves.

Sonic The Hedgehog

Matt “SnakeLinkSonic” Armstrong of Misanthropic Gamer

Through design, Sonic the Hedgehog has always been served to me as a rowdy, impatient, and delinquent little mascot. It’s a common understanding these days that those of us who grew up with a Sonic preference (as opposed to a certain Italian plumber) have dwindled to nothing more than an abused bunch of fanboys. From what I’ve been able to conclude however, the most responsible catalyst for this abuse was not so much Sonic’s shift to 3D (that was just an after-effect), but the fans/developers ineptitude to recognize the problems he had in a 2D plane to begin with. That’s not really such a bad thing though, considering we were all young at the time and were absolved of trying to pick games apart to the degree that we often tend to now.

One thing of interest though is how the young mascot fares today, within wavering titles of varying enjoyment. Despite problems that have even been recognized by Sega themselves, Sonic still sells. This could easily be seen as the problem I skated around above simply repeating itself. Children and young adults have now been presented with problematically designed 3D games that will continue to move forward without evolving, which is exactly what the 2D games did in the first place.

A lot of people have either simply given up on the franchise or are content enough with it to keep buying into it as a game without serious fault. Spoiled and neglected at the same time, the games will continue to travel down a slippery slope until somebody decides to catch it (or at least attempt to do so). I personally find the whole process fascinating because as a platformer, Sonic has always been an explosive experience; far off kilter from what his once-rival Mario always seemed to offer in a far more well-rounded package.

A perpetual problem for Sonic has also been centered on developers somehow raising his game’s design to match our hyper-acuity for what we don’t like. Unfortunately, there has been little discipline to fundamentally re-establish his stance in the ‘big picture’ because there are multiple parties contributing to his overexerted legacy:

1. New fans, which are primarily children that are repeating the same mistakes that many of us made when we were young.
2. Old fans that refuse to admit that there may not be a problem with the games.
3. Those of us who grew up and have resorted to calling foul on every single thing that the titles don’t absolutely nail.
4. Developers that continue to pedal the games to groups 1 & 2, while condescendingly (albeit silently) ignoring the third group.
5. The marketing folk that are amusingly distorting his image slightly askew since they know that group #1 are what still put meals on their tables.
6. Did I miss anyone?

I love Sonic because he and his games have baggage in the truest sense. That’s something I can’t get with any other platformer, so I stand behind it finding some sense of solace in design, appearance, and reception…someday…maybe?

~sLs~

Tomb Raider

Lauren Wainwright of Viera.nu

In 1996, a game called Tomb Raider was released to an audience of salivating males and impressionable girls. Its lead, a large breasted-British-brunette, not only managed to conquer the hearts of millions with blend of witty charm, and sexy looks but also became the most successful video game media darling of all time.

It’s 2009 now and Joe publics’ excitement for Lara and her dramatic archaeological discoveries has dwindled. She’s now played by more female gamers than ever before and her breasts are getting marginally smaller by the year.

Time warp back to 1996, I was 10 or 11 and life was pretty simple. All I had my video games, family life and an awkward school life to deal with. Suddenly, Lara Croft becomes an important icon in my life, and even as I hit my 23rd birthday, I still get as excited about a new Tomb Raider game as I did back then.

What was so special about Tomb Raider anyway? First of all, I had never really sunk my teeth into a decent action adventure title for quite as many hours as I did with the original TR. I really felt I have full control over Lara, even if she was dubbed as a tank. I spent hours playing around in her newly moved in mansion, the reception filled with giant brown crates to climb over. The glorified swimming pool where I developed severe Aqua Phobia, watching as Lara twitches to death and float lifelessly in the pool.

Even small touches like holding the R1 button (PlayStation version) when Lara hulks herself up on a surface to pull off a rather pointless, but at the time highly amusing, handstand. Tomb Raider just blew me away!

The main reason Tomb Raider really captured my heart was that I really felt I was there with Lara, exploring these long forgotten tombs. Everything felt so unique and real and it really brought out the collector in me, spending hours swimming in small pools looking for secrets and medipacks.

I jumped when wolves and tigers appeared out of nowhere, when those bloody bats hit me just when I was about to take that jump over the pit, resulting in a frustrating death. Sat mouth wide open and marvelled at the intricate level design, and sheer size of environments.

Oh and remember that MASSIVE T-REX!? That thing was going to eat me and I was having none of it! Running backwards, occasionally jumping, all while pummelling lead from my trusty dual pistols until it finally dropped dead. Now I look back and laugh a little, the T-REX is quite cute now.

It really depresses me that the Tomb Raider machine has lost a lot of its public momentum. I can honestly say, bar 1 or 2 titles, the series has been fantastic so far. The latest game, TR: Underworld is probably one of the most beautifully designed adventure titles I have played in the last 2 years, and even though it reviewed well it still has sold less than the first Tomb Raider.

And you know what? I really miss walking to the edge, jumping back and taking a run up. Those were the days!

Rainbow Islands

Sinan Kubba of You Have Lost! and TheGameReviews

There may well be 2D platformers better than Rainbow Islands. It lacks the accommodating difficulty curve of Super Mario World, instead opting for an intimidating surge of impossibiltiy in its final quarter. Rather than featuring Bionic Commando’s array of stirring 8-bit beats, it settles for something repulsively bubbly and then sets it to loop. But when it comes to individuality, sheer eccentricity, and clandestine depth, nothing beats Taito’s 1987 arcade classic, even to this day.

What was most distinctive about Rainbow Islands was its base mechanic, namely the player’s ability to shoot rainbows. These were used to defeat enemies and as the platforms for moving up – yes, up – through the game’s levels. This unusual form of both movement and ability gave Rainbow Islands an edge over the wealth of competing platformers that were aligning themselves with the successful Mario template at the time. As the sequel to Bubble Bobble, it’s unsurprising that Rainbow Islands replicated that game’s unusual platforming elements.

And just like its predecessor, Rainbow Islands was nauseatingly cute, right down to the cutesy enemy critters that moved around with the trademark bobbing eyes and shuffling feet. But, as someone who played Bubble Bobble, I knew that Taito didn’t specialize in simplistic, childish platformers. Like Bubble Bobble, Rainbow Islands betrayed its charming visage with depth, vigour and mystery. In those regards, however, Rainbow Islands made Bubble Bobble look like childsplay. For me, it remains the most intricate, secretive platformer ever made.

Its bottomless depth lied primarily in its power-ups. On my first play through Rainbow Islands, it felt like it was handing out its items randomly. But every third item that appeared was tied in to the player’s actions. If you killed a certain number of enemies, you’d get a certain item. If you walked a certain number of steps, if you’d jumped a certain number of jumps, if you’d collected a certain number of a certain item – you get the idea. For a game made in 1987, the code within Rainbow Islands must have been disturbingly complicated. To this day there remains speculation on the requirements on some of its vast array of power-ups. And as for the power-ups themselves, they were simply awesome. The game became transformed by the ability to shoot lighting bolts across the screen, having a potent pixie bodyguard, or even being able to fly right to the top.

Then there’s the game’s wealth of secrets, way too many to go into here. If you thought Super Mario 3 had lots of secrets, then you simply haven’t played Rainbow Islands, and only the very skilled were able to unlock the Narnia held within the secret doors of each Rainbow Islands world. But for me, just completing the game was an achievement. The final two worlds represent some of the most challenging gaming to be found. I’ve only ever completed the game once, and I never will again. But I’ll keep on playing Rainbow Islands regardless, because every time I do I can’t help but let out a knowing smile. Maybe the best summary of the game’s eccentricity is its sixth world, entirely an homage to the classic game Arkanoid, and its boss is a giant Tron-esque, computerized head that shoots blocks at you. Like I said, there may be better games than Rainbow Islands, but when it comes to personality it’s right up there with the best.

Super Mario World

John Cranston of Johnus Maximus

I won’t lie to you, in my early gaming days I was a complete Sega (ergo Sonic) fanboy, swearing that anything to do with moustachioed plumbers, mushrooms and princesses was nothing but utter tat. All that changed when I played Super Mario World.

In the halcyon days of the early 90’s, before Britpop and girl power, there used to be an exciting TV show for gamers – Gamesmaster. It was on that show that I remember watching clips of SMW with envy, thinking how it amazing it looked and wondering how many paper rounds would I have to do to get my hands on a Super Nintendo.

In the summer of 94, I was finally able to come to mutual understanding with a playground friend that allowed me use of a SNES for two weeks during the school holidays, and so was finally able to play what I now consider one of the most timelessly exciting and fun platform games in the history of video gaming.

I remember fondly that whimsical introduction music and a few lines of text to set the scene – Mario is in Dinosaur Land and wouldn’t you believe, that crafty rascal Bowser has kidnapped Mario’s favourite female friend. Okay, so no points for originality in the plot (boy meets girl, boy loses girl to giant dinosaur, boy goes on quest to get girl back), but it was the many other aspects of the game that just blew me away.

The environment art, the sprites and the animation were so beautifully vivid and really brought each stage to life, from the Donut Plains to Chocolate Island. Accompanied by Kōji Kondō’s enchanting soundtrack this was a revelation in 16-bit gaming. The sheer volume of missions, side quests, bosses and unlockable secrets was enough to keep you busy for hours on end (thank the gods for the robust save-game system).

There were Ghost Houses with creepy music and terrifying Boo’s, Switch Palaces to make previously unattainable paths possible, hidden exits which led to Star World and Special World that upon completion altered the game in many strange ways, yellow capes to let Mario fly and glide round the stages, challenging boss castles with plenty of traps and home to the Koopalings, the dastardly Reznor and of course Bowser in his clown-like flying machine.

But let’s get on to the best bit – the unsurpassed enjoyment of riding Mario’s epic mount Yoshi. During the second stage you are greeted with the site of an egg cracking open and a small green dinosaur appearing. Similarly aggrieved by Bowser they form an alliance, allowing Yoshi to eat Mario’s enemies to gain special powers and letting Mario stomp on enemies that would previously have killed him.

To say that this game changed my life is an understatement; it changed my fanboy ways forever and opened my eyes to loving all games, no matter the system. Thanks to Shigeru Miyamoto and the fifteen other people that worked on it, I will cherish its memory always.

Knytt Stories

Scott Munro of Kilted Moose

From the subterranean treasure collecting of Manic Miner on the humble ZX Spectrum, to the crayon-daubed beauty of the Super Nintendo’s Yoshi’s Island, I’ve spent the past 25 years indulging my passion for platform games.

However, it’s Nicklas Nygren’s magnificent Knytt Stories on PC which holds a special place in my heart.

Nifflas – as he’s better known – has produced several wonderful games, such as Within A Deep Forest, but it’s Knytt Stories which transcends the others with its simple play mechanics, attention to detail and spellbinding atmosphere.

To merely call the game a platformer would be doing Knytt Stories a great disservice, however. While it is true your character performs standard platform moves and learns new abilities as progress is made, Knytt Stories is there to be savoured, not rushed through.

You see, the real draw of the game is in the remarkable and beautiful atmosphere it evokes. Exploration is part of the fun, and you will want to explore every nook and crannie in the hope of finding a new shiny bauble to enhance your character’s abilities.

Visually, the game is simple, but full of charm. Cheery villages and verdant forests give way to dank passageways and cavernous chambers, while soothing acoustic strings, chilled-out electronic soundscapes and the gentle sound of falling rain wash over the player, bringing to life the stylised visuals.

While the game won’t last long, dozens of new player-created levels are available to download to extend the experience, each one bringing a new take of Nifflas’s vision.

It may not be one of the most recognisable platformers ever made, indeed, many will never have had the joy of experiencing Nifflas’s masterpiece.

However, it’s free to download, so there’s really no excuse not to give it a go. It even manages to eclipse the darling of the indie scene, the mighty Cave Story.

In a console generation where smaller developers are being encouraged to show off their wares via downloadable services, wouldn’t it be nice if either Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo were to take a chance on this wonderful title, thus bringing it to a new, larger market.

We can but dream.

Braid

Lewis Denby of Resolution Magazine

Braid is wonderful.

It’s wonderful for a whole host of reasons. There’s the much-touted – and baited – depth to its story, which is probably one of the most obvious things about it. It’s a game about a man searching for his lost love. It’s a game about the atomic bomb. It’s a game about the videogame itself. But none of it is ever too mysterious. Leaving the big reveal to the end works wonders. It’s like a modern day fable. You don’t learn the moral until the end, and when you do, it has all the more effect for your wait.

It also ties its story so wonderfully into your actions within the game that I almost want it to go even further. I don’t know how that would be possible, but there are a couple of occasions where the link’s… well, not /breaking/, but straining a little. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s a game about regret, and wanting to change the past and shape the future. What better method through which to tell such a story than evolutionary time-shifting mechanics? That’s a slice of genius in itself.

It’s wonderful because of how utterly beautiful it looks and sounds. Its distinctive, hand-painted style always did strike a real chord with me, and the music flows beautifully with the theme of each individual area. When time first reversed, and the music did too, I think I let out a little squee. It’s that sort of attention to aesthetic detail that lifts Braid up even higher.

It’s superlative as a platformer because, well, it’s not really a platformer. I mean, it is – in one sense, it’s totally a platformer, riffing entirely off Mario and assorted others and providing a clever spin. But really, instead of just running and jumping, it’s about careful planning, about lateral thinking and environmental observations. It’s about learning to work within the template provided; about understanding your limits and how to play within them. That in itself is a brave move in a genre so commonly associated with carefree gaming.

Honestly, though? The real reason Braid is so wonderful is just the default on. As in, there’s nothing actually wrong with it.

Oh, a couple of the puzzles grate a bit compared to others. And yeah, it’s quite short. Some might say it’s pretentious, but they’d be being the worst people in the world (“pretentious” is an ugly, cowardly word, in its most common usage). But if you really take the time to think about things that are actually /wrong/ with Braid, as opposed to just things you didn’t like about it… well, I’d be really interested to hear what people would come up with. I don’t think I could name one actual problem.

It’s a masterfully crafted game, one that knows exactly what it’s set about to achieve. It understands the genre it’s evolving. It fully comprehends the effect it’s having. Every single element of Braid is in place for a carefully considered reason, one that contributes towards its ultimate messages – be they about love, regret, obsession, evil or the nature of the medium within which this glorious work has been created.

Braid is wonderful. If I didn’t need some sleep, I’d totally be heading off to play it right now.

Super Mario Bros 2

Daniel Lipscombe of Nidzumi & Resolution Magazine

If anyone said to me, hypothetically of course, that they want me to choose ONE Mario game for them to play it would be a tough choice. In terms of adventure and game mechanics I’d have to side with Mario 3. In terms of breaking barriers and marketing Mario to a wide audience whilst delivering superb platforming, Super Mario World would be the one. So why oh why would I want to say Mario Bros 2 for the NES?

As a child I spent a lot of time playing Mario 2, I’d loved the original side scrolling platformer and Mario was becoming a favourite of mine. However the second game in the series would defy all logic and flip the series on its head. Changing the standard jump on a head to pop the baddie to picking them up and throwing them around. We were given new characters to play with, namely Toad and Princess Toadstool, each of the characters had a graphics overhaul and featured great detail.

It was in these new characters where the game mechanic of jumping on enemies changed, each character had different play styles. Mario was an all rounder, Luigi could jump the highest, Toad was the fastest and Princess would float through the air. Princess was my favourite as a child, mainly because she made the game slightly easier for my little hands. But it wasn’t just the characters that changed the game so to say.

We still had themed levels but now they had plants to pull up and use as projectiles, 1up blocks from the first Mario Bros reappeared to shake the ground of enemies and all drainpipes were removed in favour of tall vases. Of course you also had the shadow world in which you entered via magic potions smashed on the floor, in this world you would collect your coins (gambled in slot machines at the end of each level) and use mushrooms to gain sections on your energy bar.

All of this of course is drastically different to the first NES game. I think this is why it appeals to me so much, it’s the black sheep of the family, the bastard child that should be standing in the corner but instead stands proud. With a radical art style and bosses that seem to have walked in from the end boss reject society, it’s a wonder anybody likes this iteration of Mario. – But there is a reason.

Charm, you have no choice but to smile coyly at the mention of Super Mario Bros 2. It dared to be different; Nintendo slapped your face and pulled the rug from under you. It’s all so pleasant and lovely, a wonderland of bizarre creatures, a true adventure. So if that person ever asks, to hell with convention, I’d say Super Mario Bros 2.

PixelJunk Eden

Sam Morris of Nidzumi

In Modern times the Garden of Eden is looked upon either as a metaphor that symbolises God’s love or an idealistic view of Paradise. This game wasn’t brought to you by Criterion though, rather a smaller bunch of developers known as Q-Games. The didn’t conjure up this masterpiece within seven days but they’ve definitely created something that could be likened to the work of… Actually let’s cut the biblical references and hyperbole. Pixeljunk Eden is just a brilliant experience.

One second within a level though and you’ll realise you aren’t playing a game you are having an experience. Mainly one brought about by Baiyon who designed the visuals and especially the audio for Eden.

Well-sustained calming synths play over a calm menu that mimics the in-level experience its self. Don’t get too comfortable though. The soft appeasing sounds are suddenly broken when you enter a level. It starts with kick drum and then soon the initially simplistic audio builds along with the volume, stage and challenge.

That’s kind of a mantra that the whole game follows, evolution.

The levels start off simple, almost barren, until you sprout the first seed. Soon you are climbing up and growing more platforms until you reach your goal. These aren’t just throwaway rectangular platforms however, as from each seed grows an underwater-plant inspired ladder that realistically sways and moves as it reacts to the wind and your movement.

You would be forgiven for feeling underwhelmed after the first few stages as they strictly stick to these basics. They are simplistic, calming, learning areas, tutorials if you will. They let you feel comfortable with the controls and the swing mechanic without beating you over the head with pop up messages and childishly voiced training exercises. The reason they don’t need to do this because Eden is so instinctive and rewarding for curious minds that it doesn’t have to. Either that or they thought maybe we should actually treat people as an adult playing a platformer for the first time since… well ever.

Once you’ve gotten to grips with the basic premise of collecting pollen to fill seeds, which allow you to collect the seldom seen Spectra, you are ready to evolve. Or at least the game is ready to evolve with you. Moving platforms, transporting holes, switches, wind, gravity and anti-gravity make up just a few of the game changing alterations you’ll encounter. It keeps the game moving and gives each stage it’s own unique premise that you’ll want to rush ahead to experience.

Experience along with evolution must have been the first two words on the white board for this one. The truth is that they’ve nailed both of them to a tee.

You simply won’t play a platformer like Pixeljunk Eden for a long time. One that treats you as an adult, one that let’s you learn in your own time, one that evolves in new and interesting ways. But more importantly, Pixeljunk is one platformer that indulges you with a unique experience built upon instinctive familiarity.

That’s why I love Pixeljunk Eden. And I didn’t say audiovisual once…

Bionic Commando Rearmed

Barry White of Creeds Blog

People complain that this game is too hard. Rubbish. It only appears hard to anyone not lucky enough to have played the original Bionic Commando on the NES back in the day. Now there was a hard game – ruthless, unforgiving and at times totally unintelligible. I owned it and I hated it. Compared to Super Mario Bros., which was about the only other game I had, it was a horrible trial and error mess where the slightest mistake would see you dead and your progress reset. It frustrated me for months. The game would kill you without hesitation and it acted like it didn’t ever want to see you to succeed. Rearmed has no truck with than attitude, managing to be one hundred percent less horrible than its predecessor.

As a nostalgia piece, it’s impeccably put together. Your magic extend-o-arm is still your weapon of choice, able to take out enemies and grab power ups as well as fling you about levels. The wonderfully muddled communiques are still present, as are the tactical map progression and (still) slightly pointless ground engagements mid-transit. The new tweaks like puzzle-based hacking slot seamlessly in, giving the whole package a much needed modern twist. It’s still big and bold and unashamedly silly mind, and it’s an excellent blueprint to follow for any modern adaptation of an older game – the important bits are preserved and polish, the rest ripped out and replaced with buckets of HD sheen and a thumping modern soundtrack. It was a joy to play and I still rave about it to anyone who gives me a chance.

But I love it for the co-op. In one fantastic weekend the girlfriend and I sat down and absolutely blitzed through BC:R with callous disregard for anything else that might have been going on. I’d always struggled to find games that we could play together, and had great success with Team Fortress 2, but when it came to games that we could both enjoy while sitting on the couch together there were precious few options at the time. Rearmed was the perfect solution: once you got past the characterful idiosyncracies (no jump button, for a start, which inexplicably infuriates some people), it was extremely easy to pick up and play. And it really let you work co-operatively too, with certain enemies and bosses much easier to take on when you worked together. It could be tremendously funny too, with portraits of boss enemies clutching lollipops and recurring awkward exchanges between an enemy commander and his subordinate, all smothered under a massive chunk of cheesy. Oh, and the final boss is a resurrected Hitler in a fighter jet whose head explodes gruesomely when you finish him. Absolutely lovely.