Herodotus
An alternative take on skating to contrast with the arcadey Tony Hawk series, Thrasher was a game I ended up enjoying for brief moments. There's one thing that really makes this game stand out compared to THPS - fleeing. I grew up in a city that didn't have skate-friendly architecture or parks at all. Skating wasn't really a subculture here, really. Bikes were the big hitter. Thrasher and THPS allowed me to pretend I was part of a world I'd see on television a lot which was nice enough, but unlike THPS, Thrasher showed the risk of it. The allure of being where you shouldn't be, doing what you shouldn't do? That was interesting, and it was even more interesting that there were consequences for it.
Unfortunately the rest of the game isn't quite as good. The feel of it is comparable to GTA3, oddly enough, but the actual gameplay is quite sluggish and hard to get a grip of.
I saw the most recent review by largebagofrocks, where they wrote "It gets closer to imitating the experience of IRL street skating by putting you into a similar frame of mind that figuring to how to skate a spot asks of you" and that got me thinking of a glorious cross between Mirror's Edge and Tony Hawk.
Somebody, make that a reality. I'd buy it.
Unfortunately the rest of the game isn't quite as good. The feel of it is comparable to GTA3, oddly enough, but the actual gameplay is quite sluggish and hard to get a grip of.
I saw the most recent review by largebagofrocks, where they wrote "It gets closer to imitating the experience of IRL street skating by putting you into a similar frame of mind that figuring to how to skate a spot asks of you" and that got me thinking of a glorious cross between Mirror's Edge and Tony Hawk.
Somebody, make that a reality. I'd buy it.
GTA London has been outdone by two games since, The Italian Job and The Getaway - but these are both 3D adventures so I guess it doesn't really count.
The novelty of it, however, pushes it above GTA1 immensely for me because DMA's love of classic Brit crime capers is on full display here. The characters and setting are borderline Guy Ritchie and the whole Mod aesthetic the box art has is great. This was released during the waning years of Cool Britannia and by God I wish it would come back.
Plus; pulling off an expansion pack on the PS1? Very cool.
The novelty of it, however, pushes it above GTA1 immensely for me because DMA's love of classic Brit crime capers is on full display here. The characters and setting are borderline Guy Ritchie and the whole Mod aesthetic the box art has is great. This was released during the waning years of Cool Britannia and by God I wish it would come back.
Plus; pulling off an expansion pack on the PS1? Very cool.
1997
Grand Theft Auto is a top-down... thing. It's a driving game. A shooter. An early open world title. It sparked the beginning of a global phenomenon and helped raise what was once considered one of the greatest development studios in the world to prominence.
It's also crap. It's crap now and I can almost guarantee it was probably considered crap in '97, but I was but a wee lad in 1997 and was more concerned with trivial matters like being fed from a bottle and having my bottom cleaned - which is how I intend to go out in 2097, by the way.
GTA takes place across three cities: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. If all of these sound familiar it's because they were done extremely well in 3D and do not work in a 2D environment. Repetitive missions, nightmarish cutscenes and an often confusing map layout lead to not a whole lot of fun. GTA is a curiosity. DMA Design used the British press so well to generate controversy and sales for a game that, to a modern audience, seems remarkably tame. The gore is cartoonish, the existence of a dedicated fart button is wild, and the driving... the driving is dogshit. The gameplay itself is actually insufferable.
Get me outta here. How about they do a game set in London in 1969 next?
It's also crap. It's crap now and I can almost guarantee it was probably considered crap in '97, but I was but a wee lad in 1997 and was more concerned with trivial matters like being fed from a bottle and having my bottom cleaned - which is how I intend to go out in 2097, by the way.
GTA takes place across three cities: Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. If all of these sound familiar it's because they were done extremely well in 3D and do not work in a 2D environment. Repetitive missions, nightmarish cutscenes and an often confusing map layout lead to not a whole lot of fun. GTA is a curiosity. DMA Design used the British press so well to generate controversy and sales for a game that, to a modern audience, seems remarkably tame. The gore is cartoonish, the existence of a dedicated fart button is wild, and the driving... the driving is dogshit. The gameplay itself is actually insufferable.
Get me outta here. How about they do a game set in London in 1969 next?
A fine little bit of verticality that you don't really get in Half-Life 2 that much. It's a pretty good map and the inside of the church is particularly well made.
2004
I was ten years old when I played Half-Life 2 for the first time. I got stuck in Ravenholm and had to get my dad to do the cemetery escape with Grigori. I was terrified of Nova Prospekt's dingy lighting and ruined corridors. I couldn't aim to save my life because I had never played a shooter on PC that wasn't Halo on Easy.
114 hours and seventeen years later, Half-Life 2 is one of my favourite games ever made. It is timeless in how simple it is to pick up and play, how immersive and rich yet charmingly simple its environments are, how brilliant the sound design, music and voice acting are as well. Mods for Half-Life 2 are still being produced 20 years later, like Entropy Zero, which should by rights have been a full priced game in itself considering how fantastic it was.
Half-Life 2's setting is a marked departure from the concrete, steel and desert that characterised Black Mesa. Now in City 17, an anonymous Eastern European hellscape following the end of the world, noted mute and crowbar enthusiast Dr Gordon Freeman must flee a bloodthirsty gestapo, break machinery whenever he touches it, solve simple physics puzzles, visit the cleanest town in Eastern Europe, stage a prison break with giant insects, and spark a full scale uprising before going back to sleep for about thirty minutes.
It has one of the best shotguns in a game, one of the best gimmick weapons ever produced in the form of the Gravity Gun, some incredible setpieces and a replayability that you don't really get with modern FPS games anymore. Wonder if they'll ever make a third one?
Half-Life 2 deserves every praise it gets, and I hope that 2024 sees a 20th anniversary update the way its predecessor got for its 25th.
114 hours and seventeen years later, Half-Life 2 is one of my favourite games ever made. It is timeless in how simple it is to pick up and play, how immersive and rich yet charmingly simple its environments are, how brilliant the sound design, music and voice acting are as well. Mods for Half-Life 2 are still being produced 20 years later, like Entropy Zero, which should by rights have been a full priced game in itself considering how fantastic it was.
Half-Life 2's setting is a marked departure from the concrete, steel and desert that characterised Black Mesa. Now in City 17, an anonymous Eastern European hellscape following the end of the world, noted mute and crowbar enthusiast Dr Gordon Freeman must flee a bloodthirsty gestapo, break machinery whenever he touches it, solve simple physics puzzles, visit the cleanest town in Eastern Europe, stage a prison break with giant insects, and spark a full scale uprising before going back to sleep for about thirty minutes.
It has one of the best shotguns in a game, one of the best gimmick weapons ever produced in the form of the Gravity Gun, some incredible setpieces and a replayability that you don't really get with modern FPS games anymore. Wonder if they'll ever make a third one?
Half-Life 2 deserves every praise it gets, and I hope that 2024 sees a 20th anniversary update the way its predecessor got for its 25th.
2004
This was my first experience with the original Half-Life and in 2008 I really didn't know what I was missing. Now that I do, I couldn't choose to play this over the original, especially not now that the 25th anniversary update exists.
Steam says I've put 85 hours into this and I think the game's developer console REALLY extends that playtime - I mention in a Steam review that I would just spawn NPCs and pin them to the walls of Black Mesa with the crossbow. That's psycho behaviour but damn if I didn't enjoy it at the time.
Nowadays though, it's far far inferior and it's hard to believe this was an actual Valve product that they no longer offer for sale.
Steam says I've put 85 hours into this and I think the game's developer console REALLY extends that playtime - I mention in a Steam review that I would just spawn NPCs and pin them to the walls of Black Mesa with the crossbow. That's psycho behaviour but damn if I didn't enjoy it at the time.
Nowadays though, it's far far inferior and it's hard to believe this was an actual Valve product that they no longer offer for sale.
2004
Garry's Mod was actually my introduction to Half-Life, as I'm sure is the case for plenty of kids. It was the Bananaphone video and then classics like Full Life Consequences that made me interested in it. GMod, as a platform, is perfect. It deserves a five star rating for longevity and content alone.
This game is the definition of "sandbox". You can call Grand Theft Auto an open world game where you can do anything, but you can't. You're constrained by what Rockstar will let you do - here, the sky is literally the limit. Scripts, models, sounds, maps... if it has been made in the public eye, it's probably in GMod in some form. I have fond, fond memories of just wasting hours in this game.
But I don't think I could go back to it now. I lack the imagination now, the "but what if..." aspect of interactivity. Something in modern game design has made me this way exclusively for this medium - I can still pull off all sorts of wild ideas in my head for other subjects but games tend to stump me. It feels like experimentation in a lot of games is unrewarded at best and punished at worst; but with GMod there isn't any reward beyond self-satisfaction, which I'm very fond of.
In the grand scheme of things, 123 hours really doesn't seem that much compared to other people's runtimes. It was the first game I owned on my own computer - and then I discovered I needed OTHER games to make this one work, since I got the Steam release and not the original sourcemod version. But GMod opened up an entire wealth of gaming history to me. This daft, "only as wild as you are" exercise of a game helped shape my taste to this very day.
This game is the definition of "sandbox". You can call Grand Theft Auto an open world game where you can do anything, but you can't. You're constrained by what Rockstar will let you do - here, the sky is literally the limit. Scripts, models, sounds, maps... if it has been made in the public eye, it's probably in GMod in some form. I have fond, fond memories of just wasting hours in this game.
But I don't think I could go back to it now. I lack the imagination now, the "but what if..." aspect of interactivity. Something in modern game design has made me this way exclusively for this medium - I can still pull off all sorts of wild ideas in my head for other subjects but games tend to stump me. It feels like experimentation in a lot of games is unrewarded at best and punished at worst; but with GMod there isn't any reward beyond self-satisfaction, which I'm very fond of.
In the grand scheme of things, 123 hours really doesn't seem that much compared to other people's runtimes. It was the first game I owned on my own computer - and then I discovered I needed OTHER games to make this one work, since I got the Steam release and not the original sourcemod version. But GMod opened up an entire wealth of gaming history to me. This daft, "only as wild as you are" exercise of a game helped shape my taste to this very day.
1990
Up there with Tetris as one of the most perfectly made bits of entertainment ever produced. Solitaire got me through countless dull lectures, constantly chasing the high score. Can you speedrun this? Has this ever been at SGDQ?
1983
Not a bad little time waster of a game. Iconic first screen, but not much more than an arcade port.
2002
SOCOM could never understand my high pitched voice and harsh accent; but it was magical to try and comprehend. Looked really good for its time, fond memories of the opening mission where you scuttle the cargo ship.
New Horizons helped keep a sense of normality when the world went crazy four years ago, and coming back to it now on a different platform is like being sent back in time before my dad had the cheek to get sick and pass away. New Horizons doesn't have the same nostalgia factor as Wild World or even New Leaf for me - but my God I can smell our garden in April 2020, I can hear Tiger King on in the background, I can't see my friends but I can tend to a real garden and a virtual island at the same time.
New Horizons is laden with a crafting system that sort of outstays its welcome, an apparent step back in villager interaction where you can start seeing repeating dialogue far quicker than previous entries, and an aggravating Nintendo sense of not being allowed to take things at the pace you WANT to take them. I should be allowed to skip the ridiculously lengthy tutorial section of the game if I previously had a save file on the system. This tutorial legitimately takes about five real life days to complete. I understand the concept of a game you pick up and play for just a bit at a time, but this is a full priced release, not a mobile game.
There is not enough content to justify the absolutely glacial progression and gameplay, especially compared to the offerings from Pocket Camp, a free mobile game. Even simple actions take a small animation to get through and often text that you've read dozens of times before, leading to mashing buttons to skip through them. This is sort of comparable to something like Red Dead Redemption 2's lengthy skinning, looting and cleaning animations - but at least in RDR2 there's something intricate and detailed to look at, while ACNH has a far simpler art style.
All of that in mind, though - there's such a genuine charm and addictiveness to New Horizons that I can't help but really enjoy it, flaws and all. Musically it's bouncy and memorable, the graphics are lovely to look at and the weird mix of realistic bugs and fish contrasted against the cartoony environments and characters works surprisingly well. Once you get out of that first week and the game opens up? It's good. It's very good. Not quite great, but I'm enjoying it nevertheless.
New Horizons is laden with a crafting system that sort of outstays its welcome, an apparent step back in villager interaction where you can start seeing repeating dialogue far quicker than previous entries, and an aggravating Nintendo sense of not being allowed to take things at the pace you WANT to take them. I should be allowed to skip the ridiculously lengthy tutorial section of the game if I previously had a save file on the system. This tutorial legitimately takes about five real life days to complete. I understand the concept of a game you pick up and play for just a bit at a time, but this is a full priced release, not a mobile game.
There is not enough content to justify the absolutely glacial progression and gameplay, especially compared to the offerings from Pocket Camp, a free mobile game. Even simple actions take a small animation to get through and often text that you've read dozens of times before, leading to mashing buttons to skip through them. This is sort of comparable to something like Red Dead Redemption 2's lengthy skinning, looting and cleaning animations - but at least in RDR2 there's something intricate and detailed to look at, while ACNH has a far simpler art style.
All of that in mind, though - there's such a genuine charm and addictiveness to New Horizons that I can't help but really enjoy it, flaws and all. Musically it's bouncy and memorable, the graphics are lovely to look at and the weird mix of realistic bugs and fish contrasted against the cartoony environments and characters works surprisingly well. Once you get out of that first week and the game opens up? It's good. It's very good. Not quite great, but I'm enjoying it nevertheless.
ECDUD!
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ECDUD!
If I had a pound for every time a game released that featured a team with the acronym SCAT, I'd have three pounds - which isn't a lot, but it's odd to have happened thrice.
1991
One of the first games I remember playing properly - but the sequel is better in every way.
A good, solid beat 'em up that doesn't outstay its welcome. Was pleased to see it released on 360 but over 30 years on and it's a little strange that it only ever got two modern ports.