Anyone who played video games in their childhood will have some particular favourites they remember fondly. For many, this means Sonic the Hedgehog or perhaps Mario – certainly it’s one explanation for how Nintendo manage to shoehorn the Mario character into every franchise possible without their fans rising up in revolt – but I didn’t have a Sega Mega Drive or a NES. I’m can’t scare myself by sitting down in front of Sonic 1, instantly able to recall exactly where to find every secret in the Green Hill Zone as soon as the music starts. I know for a fact that some of you can.

I had an Amiga, the best home computer ever, but before that I had an Amstrad GX4000.

About as successful as the weird Amstrad emailer/phone thing that Sir Alan strangely never mentions on The Apprentice, the GX4000 was not a classic console. Wikipedia tells me that it was essentially an Amstrad CPC home computer without a keyboard, and only 25 games were ever published for it. This means I once had the distinction of owning 16% of its entire game catalogue, and our local Post Office seemed to have the rest on the shelves waiting for me. Impressive.

Among the games that made it into my collection was Navy SEALs, apparently a tie-in with a film of the same name. I’ve never seen it, and indeed I had no idea I was playing a movie tie-in at all until years later, but I became such a master at the game that I could easily reach the end without losing a life. Every time.

In the great time-honoured tradition of making the game your own, I re-christened all the game’s weapons and characters. Every guy whose face gurned from the corner of the screen had a name, faithfully recorded in the game manual. I’d love to say that it gave me an emotional attachment to them, inconsolable if I let one of them die, but remember I could play through the game without losing a life. I never had to see any of them beyond Number 5, whose grumpy visage doesn’t help me remember his name. Sorry man.

The flamethrower weapon became the “bum burner”. The mysterious screaming, exploding thing which I assume was supposed to be some kind of rocket launcher was the “screamer rocket”, or something along those lines. The final level of the game took place in Beirut, where for some reason your dude could jump twice as high as in the rest of the game, as though gravity is lower in the Middle East. Perhaps it is. It’s closer to the Equator after all.

I can only assume that the creators of Half-Life also played Navy SEALs, shamelessly stealing the idea for the final act of their game taking place in an alien landscape with significantly lower gravity.

Amazingly but inevitably, I can still play Navy SEALs thanks to the magic of emulation. The fabulous WinAPE emulates the entire Amstrad CPC range, including the GX4000. I’m sorry to report that I can no longer complete the game on a single life – in fact, thanks to the second level requiring some careful timing when it comes to crossing a lift shaft complete with moving lift, I can’t remember how to get through it at all.

You don’t get that problem with Sonic, do you? Navy SEALs – clearly a superior gaming challenge on a truly inferior console.

Wikipedia FACT: “In total, fewer than 14,000 units were ever sold, making the Amstrad GX4000 the worst selling gaming console in history.” Classic. Why doesn’t Lord Sugar ever mention this achievement?

Grand Theft Auto III celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. Scary, isn’t it? Looking back now, it’s easy to forget what a landmark the game was – one of the first games that presented you with a vast, open world to roam around in, populated by NPCs who would react to your actions and driven by missions that could be tackled in myriad different ways. Oh sure, it’d all been done before, but GTA III was the first time it was done right.

While other game types have seen similar leaps forward, one genre has stubbornly refused to move on. You can hardly even say that it reached its zenith in the late 90s and it’s been downhill ever since, because apart from a few isolated examples released since, hardly anyone has bothered to do anything with it at all. I’m referring to the good old-fashioned PC space combat simulator.

Yes, I’m talking about Wing Commander again.

The last good space combat simulator to be released commercially was Wing Commander: Prophecy. And the last good space combat simulator to be released in any form was Wing Commander: Secret Ops, the freebie followup to Prophecy. Those are the facts! I can hear you beating away at your keyboard proclaiming that Freespace 2 was pretty good or that the X: Beyond the Frontier series exists, but you might as well stop bashing and save your energy. Those games are rubbish. The fact is that Wing Commander has always held the crown for perfectly balancing the key ingredients, the Holy Trinity, of great games: fun, storyline, technical achievement.

My first exposure to Wing Commander was in glorious 32 colours on the Amiga 600. It was slow, and you knew when you’d died before it happened because the game would pause while it loaded in the death sequence from floppy disk. But that didn’t matter. It was a fantastically immersive game, managing to eke every bit of power out of the hardware to give you great-looking cutscenes alongside the space battles. It even had much better music than the PC version – inevitable for the time.

Fast forward to 2012, and it’s nearly fourteen years since the aforementioned Secret Ops was released. I’ve been playing through it again and it still holds up as a great game. For a game to deliver the visceral sensation of actually being at the centre of the action – whether that’s driving a rally car, swinging from buildings sporting Kevlar fetish wear because you’re Batman, or piloting a space fighter – is a comparatively rare thing, and Secret Ops delivers. Even without support for force feedback joysticks and constrained by the systems it was designed to run on in 1998, it delivers by the bucket load.

An amazing thing about the Wing Commander series is its dedicated fan following. Fan site the Wing Commander CIC has boasted an update every single day for x consecutive number of years, where x is an unlikely, silly number for a game series that hasn’t had an official update in over a decade.

Thanks to its dedicated fans, Wing Commander has had numerous unofficial updates in that time, all of which have kept it feeling fresh without the slightest input from EA, the custodians of the Wing Commander franchise. They’ve taken the original game engines and bent them to their will, to spectacular effect. There are at least a couple of excellent, high-quality fan games – I know of Unknown Enemy and Standoff – hosted entirely in the Secret Ops engine. I’ll probably come back to those games in another post, because they’re excellent!

Indeed, some bright sparks have been hacking around with the Secret Ops engine so much that you can now run the game in high resolution, with updated graphics, without messing around with patches or anything. Although some of the textures look a bit shoddy by modern standards, the game itself is practically timeless – and because nothing has come close to challenging it in the intervening years, Secret Ops with new graphics is the best space combat available for free.

Gamers. Get the Wing Commander: Secret Ops Enhanced English Installer Package now. Go on. You owe it to yourself.

And game developers: the PC space combat market is an open goal. What’s holding you back? Get on with it.

Christmas may be traditionally a time for giving, but over the past few years it’s taken on another role: as a time for buying countless cheap games in the Steam Sale, most of which you’ll never get around to playing.

This year, I bucked the trend by purchasing, downloading, playing and completing Limbo – all in the same week!

Limbo has been around for a couple of years, and was one of those games I couldn’t help hearing about when it was first released. People would wax lyrical about its unorthodox style and its beauty, so much so that I grudgingly downloaded the demo from Xbox Live and played as far as I could. It was lovely, but really, it was just a platformer. Wasn’t it?

Upon downloading the full game this Christmas, I started out with exactly the same thoughts. Yeah, the black-and-white, film-grain, silhouetted main character schtick is a lovely device, one to keep in your back pocket when a “games as art” discussion kicks off on your local pretentious Internet forum, but can you drag that out to an entire game? Luckily, for all my initial thoughts about Limbo being just another platformer, I found that there really is more to it than that.

As “The Boy”, you’re drawn into a mysterious world, the eponymous Limbo, where everything is in shadow and nothing is explained. For that reason, it reminded me of the Amiga classic Another World, except the plot here is even more undeveloped, to the point of nonexistence. All you know is that you’re alone – most of the time – in this Limbo, and you need to escape. Escape, it seems, is always just off the right-hand side of the screen.

With so many unanswered questions in the world, I couldn’t help but keep coming back for more. Who had left the helpful boats and, frankly, less helpful traps scattered around the world? What were these blurry, monochrome environments I could just about make out in the background? I was hoping for an answer.

Soon, I reached a point in the game where I suspected that answers would not be forthcoming. But luckily, at that point, the game’s puzzles took over as its main appeal. Inventive, 2D physics-based puzzles, including a few where the entire game world revolves with you inside it. From that moment, it began to feel less like Another World and more like a direct-control adventure game. One where you die an awful lot – which reminds me of some other game. Oh yeah. Another World.

I may be over two years late to the Limbo party, but I’m glad I joined in eventually. Limbo is a fantastically inventive 2D platformer, challenging but unlikely to be frustrating, intriguing but unlikely to disappoint with lame exposition. It’s worth every penny of the £1.74 I paid for it, and a bargain at four times the price.

P.S. If the headline “The King of Limbo” doesn’t ring any bells with you, you owe it to yourself to watch one of the most epic video game finales since GLaDOS warbled “this was a triumph”. I speak, of course, of the end sequence for Limbo of the Lost – the PC adventure game that infamously plagiarised most of its artwork from other games. With an end sequence like that, all is (almost) forgiven.

For those who enjoy their gaming to be an undemanding yet unpredictable affair, life has never been so good. Anyone who yearns to whack a ball around a colourful environment in a merely vaguely controllable way doesn’t have far to look: from the frankly terrible Pinball 3D that comes with Windows XP, you can progress up to the likes of Marble Blast, a game so addictive it managed to hook me in from its secret base on someone else’s iMac.

Those who truly believe that life has no meaning without a computer game to occupy their every waking moment can become chemically dependent on Peggle, the gaming equivalent of being hooked on sherbet: you’d dearly love to try that proper gear you paid good money for (Half Life 2: Episode Two in this analogy), but can’t get past the sweet, sweet allure of the cheap and easy stuff.

Despite the wide availability of this gaming crack, one game that’s stood the test of time is the excellent Pinball Dreams for the Amiga. Now well over a decade old, I still find myself going back to it on a regular basis with the help of emulation via WinUAE.

The really odd thing: I’m still terrible at it. While I’m sure there are people in existence who’ve managed to master it, I’m not one of them. But still, it’s a game that’s done so well – providing the player with just the right balance between whacking a ball around quasi-randomly and giving you real, rewarding targets to aim for – that it’s difficult not to return to its pixellated beauty.

Seriously, it’s beautiful. Observe.

Half-decent adventure games are terribly thin on the ground nowadays, as anyone who’s been scrabbling in the gaming dirt looking for a latter-day Monkey Island will attest. For me, it’s reached the stage where I have to admit that gaming has moved on to such an extent that it’s probably impossible to recreate those heady days, where pointing a cursor at a virtual world and watching a pixellated character wander around saying “That doesn’t seem to work” was the pinnacle of gaming. But still, I try the genre’s latest offerings in forlorn hope, making extreme allowances for the budget that hasn’t been lavished on them, the increasingly hardcore fanatics the game has been designed to pander to, and the fact that the developers’ native language is a special brand of double Dutch. So far, this approach hasn’t proven to be fruitful.

So, it was with some trepidation that I approached the demo of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the most unwieldy title I’ve seen since The Bill: Frontline: Shockwave spunked itself onto my TV a couple of weeks ago. While this isn’t a pure point-and-click adventure – what is nowadays? – its origins in comic-strip land and the involvement of the great Ronzo himself were enough to spark my interest.

The demo kicks off with a stylish intro cutscene, introducing you to the cartoonily-noirish New Arcadia, replete with lashings of rain and ominous forks of lightning. The intro sequence is great, hanging together really nicely – there’s certainly no need to make the standard nice-try allowances so far.

Sadly, once you get into the actual game, things begin to unravel a little. The transition from animated 2D comic panels to a fully rendered 3D world is more jarring than I’d have hoped, with the walk cycle of your character looking particularly sub-par. Considering it’s the one animation you see constantly while playing a game, it’s always disheartening to see it look so unconvincing. It’s a classic mistake made by those low-budget adventures I’ve been whining about.

But hey, once you get used to seeing a walk cycle, you forget about it, right? You’re far more likely to care about the gameplay itself. One of the first things to happen is a turn-based battle in an RPG stylee. It’s not so bad; quite enjoyable in fact. Unfortunately, once you take a few paces down the street, it happens again. Then you pick up an extra team member for your ‘party’. And it happens again. And then you pick up Gabe and Tycho in a sequence where, disappointingly, the dialogue somehow fails to capture the essence of Penny Arcade. And have another turn-based fight. And, finally, another one – all against basically the same baddies.

And then you’ve finished the demo.

I’m not the best person to judge, because I loath turn-based Japanese RPGs with all my soul, but what are these battles for other than to waste your time? Perhaps with a bit of banter between your new chums Gabe and Tycho, they would have been a welcome opportunity to indulge in some Penny Arcade style laughs before cracking on with the game proper. As it was, the battles seemed to serve one purpose only: to prevent you from completing the demo in three minutes flat.

I suppose the big question is, will I bother spending the $20 required to unlock the full game? The grudging answer is, yes, I will – the quality of the cutscenes and the pedigree of its writers is enough to make it worth the gamble – but judging by my demo experience, the game is dangerously close to being loaded with tedious battles to the exclusion of the writing and the dialogue which people will be expecting. I hope I’m wrong – and no doubt I’ll report back from beyond the precipice.

Man! When I promised a half-OOUR review of the Al Emmo demo, even I didn’t expect over a year to pass before I got around to doing it.

Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine is an adventure game released in 2006 by teeny-tiny developer Himalaya Studios, also responsible for those Kings Quest remakes people loved.

As ever, the rules of the half-OOUR review are simple: a game has half a f***ing HOUR to make an impression upon me, and the time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Prologue

The case of Al Emmo is complicated by two small matters, however. One is that I read a fair amount of commentary about the game when it was first released, which is more than can be said for other Half-OOUR Review candidates – they’re lucky if I’ve even heard of them. This gave me an insight into some of the game’s design decisions which, otherwise, would be frankly incomprehensible.

The second and more significant complication is that I had already had a session on the Al Emmo demo, a few days after I originally promised a review. The truth is, back then, I decided that nothing was worth suffering Al Emmo’s voice acting, particularly not a two-bit excuse for a web site like this one, and quit the game a few minutes in. Looking back, I think I was literally screaming, but sometimes the memory plays tricks.

Still, let bygones be bygones and all that, eh? One of the things I learnt by reading about Al Emmo was that the protagonist’s voice is supposed to make you want to punch your speakers in, and that it becomes less grating as the game progresses as part of his character development. The decision to imbue any main character, let alone the lead, with a voice so awful you never want to hear it again is questionable, but there you go: it’s deliberate.

The Beginning

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. How does the actual game play? I began my oddysey at 1:15am.

I think it’s best not to mention the opening cutscene. The music was pleasant and the direction passable, but beyond that, we’ll just pretend I never saw it, or that it never even existed. Sssh. Straight on to Part One.

The game proper begins with the protagonist, the eponymous Al Emmo (ho ho), stranded in some Godforsaken hellhole in the Wild West. Even to leave the first screen, you have to solve a puzzle. For someone used to the non-linear joys of the classic LucasArts adventures, this is enough to drive you potty in itself, even without the triumvirate of evil conspiring to get there first: rubbish graphics, annoying voices, and horrible dialogue.

To criticise the graphics of Al Emmo seems a little iffy, as its modus operandi – as I discovered by reading up on it – is to ape the style of the classic Sierra adventures. Therefore, it’s no surprise that it looks dated. Unfortunately, it also looks out-and-out rubbish, which is a criticism it’s impossible to level at even 15-year-old adventure games like Monkey Island.

I’ve already mentioned that Al has an annoying voice, but I think it’s important to pinpoint exactly how annoying. To say it’s high-pitched and whiny would be an understatement. It sounds more like Al has got his testicles caught in a threshing machine, then been force-fed helium until his vocal chords became permanently deformed, and finally had his nostrils surgically pinched together to elicit the sort of nasal whine usually heard only from French schoolchildren. It’s a struggle not to quit the game the first time you hear him speak, let me tell you.

Then there’s the narrator, his purpose in the game being to provide “classy and classic commentary” and elevate the game to “the epitome of unparalled adventure”. I quite liked this touch, in a very over-the-top Murray-from-Monkey-Island kind of way – for about five minutes. After that, his overblown wisecracks, many of which aren’t actually funny and definitely a world away from “classy”, are just grating. And then there’s the dialogue itself.

It’s stilted, delivered by uninteresting characters, and there are no dialogue trees in sight. There’s little more annoying in adventure game than having to sit through a conversation about whatever your protagonist feels like, despite the fact you’re supposed to be controlling them.

Brave New World

There are plenty of other flaws I could mention. You spend a lot of time looking at the hourglass cursor. There are lots of characters around, but you can’t actually speak to many of them (at least, not in the demo). And did I mention Al has an annoying voice?

But really, it’s not all bad. There is lots of interaction available with the game, with many on-screen objects having not only descriptions, but “amusing” responses when you try to use them, or speak to them, or pick them up. There are jokes aplenty, even if most of them are duds. But I think Al Emmo has one positive trait that’s missing from the vast majority of games released nowadays, and is certainly missing from modern adventure games: it’s brave.

Allow me to illustrate. Early on in the game is a cutscene in which the supposedly beautiful Rita Peralto – who appears to sport a lazy eye in her cutscenes – gets up to sing in the bar. Al stands up to serenade her, in painful, achingly whiny falsetto.

Such a scene should make me cringe. It should make me want to smash my computer. The first time I fired up the Al Emmo demo over a year ago, it did and I quit, vowing never to return; but this time, I saw it as the game’s willingness to take risks shining through. Yes, making the lead character annoying to be around is a strange move, and so is getting him involved in one of the most physically painful cutscenes I’ve ever sat through, but both of these decisions reflect the game’s bravery. Apeing the classic Sierra style, which many people thought sucked even at the time, is another audacious move, and for that I think Al Emmo is worth a look.

Don’t think I’ve gone mental – I certainly won’t be playing through it, though I admit I did overrun my half-OOUR slot and go back for a second look of my own volition – but amongst the dross of modern adventure games, Al Emmo stands out as being… well, different. Different good, or different bad? That’s in the eye of the beholder, but I certainly don’t hold Al Emmo in the same contempt as the subject of my previous Half-OOUR Review, Journey to the Centre of the Earth - poorly-executed cookie-cutter nonsense that it was.

The fact that Al Emmo exists as a commercial release at all, and is arguably more worthwhile than some of the rubbish churned out by big game publishers, says a lot about the tenacity and talent of Himalaya Studios.

Al Emmo? Er… Al-back-from-the-BigWhoop more like.

Monkey Island 2.

With some other nonsense falling by the wayside at #2. I honestly can’t remember what it was now.

Wait, got it: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Why not Ocarina of Time, you say? Well, it was a close one – almost too close to call – but Wind Waker is simply a more polished product. The music is incredible, the world alive and full of side-quests, and the cel-shading – naysayers be damned – works wonders on the graphical side. Never has a fantasy world been more appropriately portrayed in gaming.

Because, saps who complain that Wind Waker looks like a cartoon for children and babies and that Ocarina of Time was so much more adult and mature: you’re playing a game about an elf child fighting cutesy enemies with magic. Have you noticed?

Roll on Twilight Princess, I say, set as it is to be thrust into my waiting hands by the end of the week. For the Gamecube. Yes, I am a dismal failure.

Sophisticated, intelligent, witty. Not words you usually hear in relation to computer games, but Grim Fandango has them all covered. I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write, and it’s conjuring up images of the world Grim Fandango so effortlessly evokes.

Because I’d hilariously skipped playing some of the better console games, the Wing Commander series was as close as I’d got to an immersive, cinematic gaming experience. I’d played adventure games before, but they were mostly all about click here, talk to this guy, run over there. They had story, they had a setting, but not enough character. Then Grim Fandango came along and showed us how it was done. The game effortlessly captures the film noir atmosphere it’s aiming for, oozing it out of its every pore – from the music, to the characters, to the cutscenes.

In a way, it’s a shame Grim Fandango was such a pioneer. Restricted by the technology of the time, the game is in a style that’s come to be known as “2.5D” – 3D graphics overlaid on pre-generated 2D backdrops. While the end result is still rather nice, and simply lovely in places – see anywhere with a sea view in Rubacava – you can’t help but feel that a true 3D environment would have boosted its cinematic qualities still further.

I completed Grim Fandango in a week. What a pain in the arse. That’s the curse of the great adventure game: before you know it, it’s over, and there’s no way to forget the game so you can play it afresh. Bah.

I’ve spoken about Frontier, the sequel to the seminal 80s classic Elite, here before. It’s the game solely responsible for my continued pursuit of space trade-’em-ups, a genre which, on paper, sounds like the most boring in history. Fortunately, there are odd exceptions where it all works in practice, and Frontier was my First Encounter. Frontier joke for you there.

Although the initial draw of Frontier is obvious enough – it was one of the earliest ‘open-ended’ games, giving you an entire populated universe to pootle around in – I suppose it’s hard to explain why the game is so far up the list. I admit that Hardwar was a better-formed game in a similar vein; Frontier has no plot to speak of; and, having revisited Frontier repeatedly over the years, its flaws and numerous bugs become more and more glaringly obvious as the years go by.

But that’s just it: the fact I have revisited the game at all. It holds a special place in my heart as a game I poured days of effort into, and although I’d be lying if I said it never got old – the inevitable space battles Frontier throws at you if you venture into unfriendly space are boring and repetitive, especially when you’re stuck in a seemingly unending series of them – I kept coming back. There was something indefinable about the game. It’s hard to explain.

While my recent experience with EVE Online was disappointing, I’ll tell you why. It was because I had loved Frontier, and fantasised about an online version where the other ships plying the space lanes were piloted by real people. Well, here was EVE, and it was a reality. It was boring. Was I disappointed? You bet I was.

So then, Frontier. I can only come up with lame arguments for why, but man, it deserves its place here. And check it out: it’s survived the test of time. Perhaps reason enough in itself.

Beyond Good & Evil was a special game. I knew it within minutes of shoving it in the old Gamecube, and the buzz it generated – not just on this blog, but err, on Remi’s too (those were simpler times) – seemed instantly justified.

Alas, although BG&E received critical acclaim (from real people, not just us Internet hoodlums), it escaped the great idiot public’s attention. People ignored the game in their droves, opting instead for FIFA 2004 or some shit, while BG&E languished unloved in bargain bins. A tragedy.

Like Hardwar (and Psychonauts and Grim Fandango), BG&E suffered from the marketeers’ inability to encapsulate its nuanced brilliance in a single pithy sentence, and indeed the impossibility of doing so. “Photojournalism simulator where your uncle is a pig” just doesn’t quite cut it, nor does “superlative adventure game featuring a young heroine who must uncover an intergalactic conspiracy”. “Wonderful all-round gaming experience featuring a series of enjoyable mini-games and great music” falls similarly flat, while the lure of a well-realised alien world replete with half-human, half-animal denizens and beautiful scenery just can’t compete with the wonder of the 50,000 polygons used to model Wayne Rooney’s face.

I sound bitter, you say? That’s right, I’m bitter. Beyond Good and Evil is a criminally overlooked game, a game which should have been recognised as part of the missing link between old-school adventure games and the modern world. As it stands, the game has taken its place in gaming history alongside similarly tragic cases of mistaken identity – mistaken identity on the part of gamers everywhere, who thought it unworthy of their attention. Man, they were wrong.