dartmonkey

From the outside, it appears that they've boiled game down into a furry, cynic-sucking fiesta that makes everyone from grouch to toddler want to play. I mean, I want this. I want that multi-coloured case. That boxart is beautiful. Is this not game? All I know is I've changed my wallpaper to Cat Mario FFS. I want to be playing THIS on Christmas morning! Re. Sunshine, I should really go back to it. I sold it years ago without finishing it. Something else to head to ebay for.

It's fantastic to see appreciation for Nuts & Bolts. The vehicle building mechanic captured the Lego spirit perfectly and it felt so satisfying to jump from the builder to testing your contraption in seconds. I spent ages playing about in it. I made an Enterprise. Gee, it was wizard! There were some good challenges, but overall the game failed to offer interesting tasks once you'd built your crazy vehicles. The time-limit trials became repetitive very quickly, whether racing or knocking things over or activating switches/whatever, with the arenas offering little else. I think they could have opened it up by incorporating environmental puzzles (eg. building a bridge to open up a new area, a platform to transport a rocket to a launchpad, a moveable blastshield or a circuitboard to power something or a tower to reach...). Also, was the spectre of the inevitably crappy licensed tie-in finally put to rest this past generation? Of course, they still exist but they're no longer a foregone conclusion. Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Wolverine, Toy Story 3 - they were all strong games. The Lego series is mostly solid, though skewed towards a young demographic. And at the real top end we've got The Walking Dead and the Arkham games. Re. underappreciated games, I had a lot of fun with Excitetruck.

The biggest personal development this gen was having the means to own multiple platforms. Owning a PS2, Xbox and Gamecube just wasn't an option for me ten years back, but the length of this cycle has allowed me to put my finger in lots of pies. Which is just as well because Nintendo really forced our hands with the Wii, for which I'm grateful. Having three near-identical boxes sitting beside each other just for a handful of exclusives would have been interminable - I liked that Nintendo splintered off and made it less of a dick-measuring contest. I also don't quite get people clamouring for next-gen - the pros of a protracted cycle vastly outweight the cons for me as a consumer. I had a Wii at launch and Bioshock made me get a 360 over PS3 because I always hated Dualshocks and Old Rare were making a new Banjo (*high-fives juv3nal and Laco for Banjo love*). PGR4 and Forza wowed me, I binged on CoD4, The Orange Box and a handful of other multiplatform games. Good times. 2007 was an incredible year in gaming. I got an old PS3 last year to play Thatgamecompany's games and I'll play The Last of Us at some point, although the disc drive is broken. And as a recent Steam/PC convert I'm busy hoovering up all sorts of things. And that's not even mentioning 3DS which is a beautiful beautiful thing. This generation has seen so many things spring up, from motion to proper online, mobile, the indie explosion, the rise and fall of peripheral rhythm games - it's hard to pin down one defining aspect. But I think the variety and availability of video games have changed beyond recognition in the past 8 years.

The more I see and hear about the next/current gen, the more I'm leaning towards a Steam box. Valve have taken the ballache out of PC gaming for me. If I plug in a 360 pad, cross-platform games behave exactly like on consoles but with PC benefits. The only thing missing is a comfy sofa seat. Pair it with a Wii U and I've got the generation 95% covered. It's all going to boil down to the pad. Does anyone know if the boxes use Steam controllers exclusively, or will I still be able to plug in a 360 pad?

Arkham Asylum. This feels like a real cocktail game. 1 part Gears/2 parts Bioshock/1 part Sands of Time, shaken with Batman, garnished with a dash of Metal Gear. And I drank it and liked it. It felt like a 'fan' game, by which I mean made by fans who thought up the concoction using off the shelf ingredients but really made it gel perfectly. There's absolutely nothing original on offer, except the chance to be Batman, and feel like Batman. Rocksteady should make a Bond game. Detective Mode was a great conceit but I did wonder what the point was of the beautiful texture work when I spent 80% of the time looking at it through a luminous blue filter. Overall though, I liked most that it felt like a 'game' - it had collectables that I actually enjoyed collecting but it felt doable without resorting to the internet or scouring some massive gameworld for hours on end.

I now own my house! Boom. I have two questions for you knowledgeable folk: 1. Perfect fruit does not exist in my town. I don't know why. My town has been perfect for months. Perfect peaches will not appear and never have. Ideas? 2. I don't have ONE picture yet. Not one. I've written to people, I've played their games, had them round, gone round theirs, delivered their parcels, fetched them fish - you name it, I've done it. What's a guy got to do to get some hot pics?!

Little Inferno Great to play something with the spirit of World of Goo though it felt a little repetitive where that game didn't. I think an ipad/3DS touchscreen (I played PC) would be the natural home for this - it's better suited to shorter play sessions and the interface is skewed towards touch. The Holiday for Strings-esque shopping music worked well, evoking in me that same stress I get when I'm waiting for someone in a department store at Xmas and I'm just a notch too warm in my winter clothes but can't be arsed to remove my jacket because, damnit, we're leaving any second! Also *PEDANT ALERT*, I thought it really odd that the brick textures in the fireplace didn't align! In an FPS you can get away with the odd mismatching doorframe but here you're spending 2 hours+ staring close up at the same brickwork. Seemed odd for something that is otherwise so polished.

I've got myself into a place where I'm not buying games I want because I've got a backlog of Humble Bundle to get through. Papers Please, Skulls of the Shogun, Cart Life, The Stanley Parable, Papa & Yo, Gone Home - they're gonna end up in an upcoming bundle before I've got through *checks Steam*... Brutal Legends, Fez, FTL, Little Inferno and Trine 2, not to mention a half dozen randoms. And listening to an old podcast episode just inspired me to pick up Beatles Rockband off ebay with the drums, bass and mic. Too much game. And I've just added the WB Humble Bundle to the list. Batmans, FEARs, Scribblenauts.

Having recently become an uncle, I've been thinking a lot about how difficult it is to catch up with games from the past. With every new must-play there's a dozen industry-shaping games I never got to for whatever reason (lack of money, time or years). It's the same with all media. I'm sure we've all got long lists of classic films and books we feel bad for not digesting yet. My claims to be a cinephile can feel illegitimate because I haven't seen X, Y or Z. Imagine having a kid today and trying to expose them to a good video game 'education' as well as fostering their love for modern stuff (and without preaching). What games would you choose in order to give someone a foundation knowledge of classics without turning them off? Not necessarily your favourites - things you think will give them a decent historical perspective on 'video games' WITHOUT boring them to death or having to contextualise too much about how amazing they were back in the day. Train Pulling into a Station and Citizen Kane are both seminal but is it important to see the former? Let's just assume your kid is old enough to play whatever you give them, and that they're a willing (or humouring) participant in your Game Nazi curriculum. Taking into account there are massive gaps in my own experience (specifically PC) and obviously I have preferred genres, I'd probably include: Super Mario Bros. 3 - a better intro than the original I think. It's still NES but it's a better game and contains more elements of the lineage that carry into the modern games. Sonic 2 - to demonstrate Sonic at his best and show why people still give a crap after so many disappointments. Portal - short and a perfect demo of melding narrative and a puzzle mechanic. Also shows an evolution of the standard FPS. Super Mario Galaxy - as a 3D counterpoint to SMB3. Journey - though I wonder if you need a little life experience to appreciate it. Would it not otherwise feel like a rerun of SMB3? There are others like Half-Life hovering around, and there's only two and a half genres in there. Could do better. Sonic 2 is probably a bit frivolous, much as I love it. The challenges of parenting...

I've just finished Black Mesa. I never played the original HL and, this being FREE, t'was a no-brainer. A really amazing piece of Valve-quality work. The time and effort that have been put in are incredible and it dovetails beautifully with my Orange Box memories of HL2. Watching some comparison vids between this and the original, it becomes clear just how rebuilt and reimagined this is. I was getting itchy for it to end though, perhaps because the platform-y bits were testing my patience. Cutting the Xen section was a good call, and I'll be interested to see what they do with it.

I'm a couple of decades behind with this one but I just finished Zelda II on 3DS VC. I had trouble at the beginning telling what was just old from what was janky/bad, but it did grow on me a little. I would never have finished it without save states - I don't have the skill and my patience wouldn't have held, but being portable meant I could chip away at it on the bus. Having plugged that Zelda gap, I've only got Link to the Past to go (playing on GBA atm) and I've completed them all, minus the Oracles games, Four Swords Adventures on GC and the ones-that-shall-not-be-named. Really looking forward to some serious changes to the template. Playing as Zelda rescuing Link won't wash.

It's a bit difficult to see with the cam footage I can't be the only one to think this looks incredible, no? I realise it's only droids and storm troopers but it looks... real. Apart from the floaty boxes. In realtime. Is this what they were waiting for before making the TV show, I wonder. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/200959/Lucasfilm_using_game_engine_to_render_movie_scenes_in_realtime.php

But for a TV show based around predominantly suited characters, perhaps for kids, this looks to have loads of potential in the very near future. Maybe the gleaming 3PO and stormtrooper (and that music) are convincing me it's better than it is. I'm just blown away by the realtime of it.

Banjo??!! *Homer-style dribble B-K on XBLA was the barest minimum HD upgrade, but it still hit the spot for me. But I have regular day dreams where Nintendo buy B-K back from Microsoft for 50 quid, reassemble the old Rareware team, name it Bareware and let them make games next to a big poster of DK64 with a cross through it.

I'm confused by the Humble Bundle. I don't quite understand how the maths works. It just seems too...good. And then they throw in 4 more including Bastion and Limbo. I guess they're all getting on a bit so inclusion in a bundle brings in some more pennies and exposure. But for someone like me who's playing catch up on so many of these it feels too good to be true. By the time I've mopped all these up the next bundle will come and Bob's your uncle. I guess I've just jumped in at a good point. Were bundles 1-7 this good?

Those comparison videos are nice. Other than the bloom lighting, the remake is how WW looks in my memory anyway. Nostalgia is kind to jaggies. I'll pick this up with a Wii U eventually, possibly at Christmas if I can find a white one for £150.

On a whim ebay hooked me up with a copy of Link to the Past GBA. It's my missing link (sorry) - never played it before. Would have preferred it on home console but portability is just too attractive, especially with some long journeys coming up, and for some reason it's not on 3DS VC yet, even with a sequel just round the corner. Now, I've got an old GBA lying around but with no backlight and AAs it feels a bit too retro. I could borrow a DS Lite. Or I could take a punt on some SPs and Micros on ebay and see what happens! SP makes most sense (scratch that - using what i've already got makes MOST sense, but that aside...) though there's something compactly appealing about the Micro. Edit. Punts were taken, outbids were made, bids for other things were made and won. So now I have A Link to the Past AND Super Mario World for my GBA and I'll be using my trusty GBA Phat or borrowing a DS Lite. I'll be playing Super Mario World for posterity but I'm going in with LOW expectations thanks to Yoshi's Island which I've got on the 3DS Ambassador Programme. I just can't get into that game. I always preferred classic Sonic to Mario and Yoshi's Island is everything that irritates me about Mario x2. Being chained to that baby every time I take a hit is a ballache. I don't like the flutter jump. Perhaps losing some screen on the portable is hindering the experience but I'm just not digging it. It looks lovely though.

Definitely wasn't up til 5am playing this. Playing as England, I started slowly with America, Italy and Persia building up around me. Everything was fine until the 1400s. An island to the west had two city states on either side so I ventured over, paid off Singapore and attacked Warsaw. All was fine, but then I turned against Singapore (for no reason other than to be tidy) and all shit broke out. Washington AND Caesar AND Darius declared war on me and I spent an hour fending them off. Washington brought out the cannons. Nightmare. I managed to hold my own but it's a diplomatic clusterfuck. Good game.

A high-def 'reimagining'. Hmm. The teaser trailer looks like an underwhelming showreel and the screens don't just look like the old game in HD (like Ducktales). The director of the original has been 'consulted', whatever that means. Not sure what to make of it. Can Sega be trusted not to cock it up? The 100% good news is Grant Kirkhope (of Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye, sexy-era Rareware) is doing the music.

Get some pixel salt on that hat, JKO http://www.polygon.com/2013/9/3/4687826/castle-of-illusion-review-mouse-in-the-mirror I get the impression that DuckTales may have helped helped lower expectations. Reviews say it's solid and that it nods to the original without getting bogged down in reverence.

I backed this even though I'm not a Mega Man nut. I've played 1 and 2 only, and that was on the 3DS eshop earlier this year. Both are great, though I'd have never finished them without save states. I might pick up 3 sometime next year to whet my appetite for this.

I can see this being the first thing ever backed for a lot of people. Like me.

Played both Proteus and Dear Esther today. Really enjoyed Proteus. I felt very happy just to wander, chase animals and touch the gravestones. Dear Esther gave me tech problems which affected the experience. At first it was crashing every few minutes, then it went down to every 20 minutes. Finding the quicksave prevented me from chucking in the towel. At first the camera was disorientating. it felt very fishbowl-y and it took a good few minutes to acclimatise (or acclimate in Am Eng - something I learned from listening to the podcast). The game has convinced me that our children will all be plugged into the matrix and we may as well burn all the fossil fuels we can. I was just staring at the ground for large portions of my playthrough. You can see the cracks - the texture resolution doesn't hold up in extreme close up, and the foliage rotates towards the camera as you strafe past - but the richness and detail of the island was incredible to the point where those cracks didn't matter. Sitting a meter from the screen, there was just too much visual information to process, just as there is in reality, and that richness bamboozled my brain into submission. In terms of the actual experience, I enjoyed Proteus more, though the crashes might have coloured Esther for me. I genuinely thought the ending was another crash. I disliked that control was taken from me at the end - really, what else would I have done? - but it was an enjoyable and thoughtful (if frustrating) couple of hours. Humble Bundle 8 is jostling with the Orange Box for the Best Vidya Game Deal in History title. I've just started Metroid Prime after finding the Wii Trilogy disc for a tenner. I'll persevere but scanning everything is getting old quickly. Will I miss much if I go against instinct and just run by all the scannables?

Fire Emblem Awakening Went back and finished this off tonight. Have had the final chapter unlocked for ages but hoovering up all the side stories and streetpasses (plus Mayoral duties in ACNL) have kept me from the final showdown. I went for a no-deaths playthrough on Hard which doubled my playtime (my save file says 52 hours, but my Activity Log says 99 hours 42 minutes!) Thoroughly enjoyed it. The writing is excellent and the 3D really adds something and helps make the battlefield more readable. The fact that everyone you kill ends up coming back in a side story grated toward the end and the story got a bit shlocky (again, does anyone ever ACTUALLY die?!) but those are minor points. A fine game. Thomas Was Alone Played through this this afternoon as I continue to plough through the Humble Bundle. Towards the end I was getting strong whiffs of VVVVVV and gameplay-wise I'd had my fill by the time I'd finished. I really enjoyed the 'personalities' and how they corresponded to the blocks and their abilities, and the little farty bloop sound Chris made when he landed. I wanted some little epilogue pay-off for those characters. Hearing Danny Wallace repeat narration after I died took away from the great writing and exposed all the triggers, but it was an enjoyable 2-3 hour game.

The more I look at this the more I like it. I won't buy it, but I've gone from WTF to 'that's genius' in the space of an hour. This Moffitt interview (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-08-28-nintendo-we-dont-want-to-walk-away-from-3d-gaming) is pretty coherent and buzzwordless and it clearly states their intentions for the console. I disagree that it causes confusion for parents. It says exactly what it does on the box. It plays EVERYTHING, and in 2D. It's cheap(er). It's sturdy. After the mixed, bungled Wii U messaging it's strange to see something so razor sharp with its marketing aim. The only disappointment kind of links with Rodi's point about novelties. This signals the end of 3D as a potential gameplay mechanic. It has never been used as such (those 3D block rooms in 3D Land were the closest and could be circumvented by changing the camera angle) so as not to alienate people playing in 2D, but I assume we'll never see a game (or even minigame) that relies on 3D now. Which is a shame.