Hardwar may have less enduring appeal than any other game on my list, but while it had its hooks into me, I played it intensely. For a few short months, it didn’t just have me addicted. It consumed me.

The game pitches you as an intrepid pilot struggling to eke a living on the inhospitable moon of Titan, having been abandoned (along with the rest of the population) by the merciless mining corporations a hundred years ago. So far, so Elite meets Total Recall.

However, what sets Hardwar apart from its generic space-trading brethren is the execution. The game world, in contrast to the vast algorithm-generated voids of Elite or the X trilogy, is compact, hand-crafted, and – most importantly – teeming with life. Where other trading games revolve around markets and numbers, being essentially glorified stock-market simulators, Hardwar throws you into a living, breathing world. Not an in-game day goes by without you being targeted by pirates, swooping in to plunder the spoils of someone else’s space battle, or spotting a hapless trader carrying goods that just demand special attention.

Hardwar’s optional storyline is the icing on the cake. Those who decide to take a break from hardcore trading to respond to the cryptic in-game emails stumble upon that staple of video-game plot devices, the global conspiracy. The true nature of the grimy, corrupt custodians of Titan is gradually revealed to the player through a combination of in-game missions and delightfully offbeat FMV sequences. The live action footage is undeniably made on a shoestring, but man, it’s great.

Hardwar may hold the dubious honour of being by far the most obscure game on my list, but I’d like to think that poor sales were no reflection on its quality. It was simply released at the wrong time, and – like games from Psychonauts to Grim Fandango which shared its fate – was impossible to market in a single sentence.

I’ll say it up front: Quake is the highest-placed first-person shooter on my list. And I know what you’re thinking. Of all the FPS games in all the world, why did I have to pick Quake? What does this dinosaur of a game have to offer that more refined, recent examples of the genre don’t?

The answer, for me, is uncomplicated fun. Since the halcyon days of Quake, when even being able to jump in a first-person shooter was a novel innovation, developers have sought to evolve the genre through the addition of what I can only term ’stuff’. Stuff like recoil on your gun, the need to stop firing and reload, missions and objectives, squad-based wrangling and, worst of all, the concept of stamina. While these features combine to give the player a more complete gaming experience, they’re not what I would call fun.

And fun is what Quake provides, in pure unadulterated form. Not for id Software the trappings of plot and storyline; no, Quake’s single-player mode threw you into a quasi-medieval, semi-futuristic landscape of zombies, ogres, gargantuan alien creatures and knights, all fiendish in their own way and none of them fitting any kind of theme, beyond “these guys are trying to kill you, kill them first”. Similarly, the deathmatch mode has no storm-the-base, free-the-hostages mission nonsense – just frag everyone in sight before they blow your face off.

Quake’s enduring appeal is part of what keeps it in the top ten, from its active open-source community who are still beavering away on the engine – with impressive results – to the numerous developers who have paid homage, such as Valve with their Deathmatch Classic mod for Half-Life. If you haven’t had much fun in a shooter for a while, give Quake another chance. You’ll be laughing as you rip some sap a new one with your quad rocket within minutes.

GTA III has been shamelessly copied so much since its release that it’s easy to forget, but make no mistake: it changed the gaming landscape. Its lasting influence is clear to anyone who picks up a gaming magazine – not only do countless games continue to ape its concept, but so unique is GTA that these games defy genre classification. Instead, they’re simply ‘GTA Clones’.

I love the idea of free-roaming in computer games. It’s always seemed to be what games are intended for, to give you the ability to do whatever the hell you want, without repercussions. The original GTA started the ball rolling, and titles like Carmageddon with their open-ended 3D environments and loose criteria for success evolved the idea. But the eventual 3D incarnation of the GTA series, GTA III, combined these elements so skilfully that it took everyone by surprise, and they’ve been copying it ever since.

Sure, it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles as its successors in the series. There’s no tyre-popping or motorcycle-riding, there are no big-name voice actors, and it lacks the tedious roleplaying aspects of San Andreas. But for me, GTA III was a revelation, and I spent more time playing it than any other game in recent history. The go-anywhere, do-anything ethos is so compelling that the missions sometimes seem an unwelcome and primitive distraction, but the gems amongst ‘em – and the variety of inventive strategies you can employ to beat them – keep you coming back.

Developers may have been brutally ripping it off ever since, but for me, nobody has managed to beat Rockstar North at their own game.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, apparently.

And the price of Wing Commander IV was very low indeed once I bought it on budget, years after its release. I was a fan of the first Wing Commander game, but sadly, it was the only one ported to the Amiga. Fast forward to the era of PC ownership in 1998 or so, and I could finally discover the remainder of the series.

It’s easy to see how Wing Commander IV was, at the time of its birth, the most expensive computer game ever produced, clocking in at a reported $10 million (fairly standard nowadays). Although its gameplay was severely limited by the PC hardware of the mid-90s (its SVGA, pseudo-3D graphics have not aged well), its vast budget had been lavished on its cinematic, ‘interactive movie’ cutscenes. And it showed.

I’ve said this before, and it wasn’t a joke: the cutscenes in Wing Commander IV make a better film than the actual Wing Commander movie.

Ironically, it’s the non-interactive cutscenes that are most enjoyable, the ability to choose between a couple of options at certain points – mostly having very little impact on the overarching storyline – being little more than a distraction. Somehow, the fact you’re taking over the role of your protagonist during missions makes the on-screen action more compelling all by itself. You are Mark Hammill.

I’ve been gradually creeping my way through the remastered DVD edition of the game. Even the high-res enhanced cinematics have stood the test of time, though the in-game sequences certainly haven’t, and Wing Commander IV remains one of that rare breed: more of an experience than a game.

I’m easily pleased. Give me an online action game where I can merrily blow things up, and I’ll be happy for hours. Give me an online action game that incorporates strategy and teamwork, and I’ll be happy for weeks.

There are lots of games that fit the description above, but few of them manage to strike the right balance between the complexity of their gameplay and the simplicity inherent in blasting things to bits. Unreal Tournament 2004 offers a dazzling array of game modes with something to suit any gamer, but for me, its Onslaught mode is the perfect blend of action and strategy.

Onslaught pitches your team at one end of a vast battlefield, with the enemy team at the other. You each have a selection of vehicles at your disposal, which you must use to capture territory sequentially. It’s as simple as that: there are no classes to worry about, no preset ‘missions’ aside from the core objective, nothing.

And yet, the gameplay is vastly more varied than anything Counter-Strike or Team Fortress or any of those other team-based shooters can offer. Shrewd individuals really can make a difference, and – in contrast to Counter-Strike in particular – no two rounds are the same.

Add to that its stirring music, often evocative environments and seamless network play, and UT2004 is a wonderfully absorbing experience that lasts and lasts. Shame no bugger seems to play it online any more, though.

It’s suddenly fashionable to create a list of your all-time top ten favourite games. Stan started it, and soon just about everyone in the world will join him, so I’d better pitch in.

I’ll be using the same rules as Stan: my list will feature my top ten games ordered on a purely subjective basis, though I will be attempting to compensate for any excessive childlike excitement that may have warped my perceptions at the time. There will be no more than one game per series in the list – which is just as well, unless you want to read about every Wing Commander game ever released.

Believe it or not, I’ve done something like this before. Written in the hallowed days of antiquity before I had a blog to post it on, my list of ‘top ten recommended games’ was the authority on gaming. If you had an Amiga in about 1995.

Click the image for the full list.

How will my modern list compare? Will it include such obscure classics as RoadKill, the Amiga 1200 top-down racer, or the latest in the series of Doom or similar?

I’ll tell you something for nowt: Zool, which I recommended despite professing to “hate it”, will not be appearing.

Stay tuned over the next week or so for the countdown!

Forget playing modern PC adventure games, they’re uniformly rubbish. Fact.

This is where it’s at.

More on this exciting development, such as a step-by-step guide on how you can join me in the slightly scary world of running homebrew software on your DS, may follow.

Until then, I’m off to finally play Beneath a Steel Sky the way its creators never intended – on the bog.

We’ve established that I own too many games. What better excuse to play them than to review them for this site?

Of course, when some of my games are as high-calibre as those in The Adventure Collection – three games for a fiver, folks, there’s nothing suspicious about that! – I don’t want to commit myself to playing them all the way through.

With that in mind, I present the first in a potentially regular column: the half-OOUR review. The concept is simple: a game has half a f**king OOUR either to impress me, or make me think it was MORE FOOL ME for tainting my computer with such gash. The time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Without further ado, the first candidate: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one of the games in the fine Adventure Collection.

I didn’t have high hopes.

12:35 am

Installation went well enough. Actually, what am I on? Of course it did. This is sounding like a JA+ review already, scrambling for compliments like a pig scouring marshland for truffles. But still, it’s true: there was even an installation splash screen that didn’t burn my eyes.

Of course, as soon as the game began, I found myself making allowances for it. Good cutscene, I thought, for an adventure game. In reality it’s amateurish in the extreme and looks about as visually stunning as a Blue Peter competition entry. One unconvincing rockfall and a crashed helicopter later, and our sexy female protagonist (I’m sure that’s the look they were going for, anyway) is stranded in the middle of nowhere.

What does the game smack me with first? Terrible pathfinding? Naturally. A character who has to turn laboriously on the spot before she sets off in a new direction? Of course! Tiny hotspots? Yep.

The interface is unresponsive, to the point that it only does something when you try something you’re allowed to do. Objects you can interact with – but not necessarily pick up without manipulating them first, for reasons the game does not offer – are highlighted with an icon. There are no descriptions or even text labels, so if you can’t make out what an object is or why you can’t pick it up immediately from the illustration alone, you’re out of luck. Oh man.

What’s outside the helicopter? A vast expanse. What happens if I click on the footprints icon that appears over this tiny, tiny piece of land?

Oh, I see. It’s slipping. Thanks for that. As you can see, no expense has been spent on the visuals, nor on the protagonist’s dialogue.

At this point, I’d picked up everything possible from the downed helicopter. I’d found a crevice in a rock, only to be dropped what felt like a heavy hint, “there might be a way out over there”. I located the tiny hotspot for ‘over there’ and found a panoramic view over the sea, at which point my spunky heroine proclaimed that she “should tell the office about the accident”. Well, yeah.

12:45 am

Ok, enough blind stumbling around. I decided I must have missed something about the interface. It couldn’t really be this bad, could it?

Sadly, it could and it is. There really is no way to tell what an object is other than by sight. There is no feedback when something doesn’t work, only when it does.

Thanks to a walkthrough in the manual, I found I had missed some objects in the helicopter cockpit – a medical box that I initially couldn’t pick up (the game couldn’t tell me it was screwed to the wall, natch), and some wires I had to cut loose.

12:50 am

At this point I decided to screw wandering around the same three screens of the crash site, searching for new ways to pit myself against the interface in battle, and went back to the walkthrough from the manual. It transpired that “telling the office” equates to “sending an email from your laptop”. Sending an email from a laptop while stranded in a remote spot in Iceland, of course, makes perfect sense, but only when you have a panoramic view over the sea!

Email sent. I was no further forward.

12:53 am

Walkthrough again.

You see her there, brazenly saying “over there”? She means here. There’s a way out here, where she’s standing. Getting rid of the rock I didn’t even know was a problem – no feedback, y’see – had me on my way.

1:00 am

Only five minutes left, thank God. It was set to be a telling five minutes, though.

Play any number of ‘fan games’, amateur efforts generally created as a labour of love by one person, and you’ll find one common thread running through most of them: pointless player missions. You know the sort of thing: find the shaven llama and take it to The Insidious Overweight Moon God before Mars is in the eighth house. Usually there’s no plausible reason for these missions, because the amateur adventure maker can’t be bothered with a plot or a cohesive storyline or any of that nonsense, but you have to do them to progress through the game.

Guess what? Journey to the Centre of the Earth has one of those.

Mmm, so I have to find a crystal and polish it? Like you polish your ‘wand’? Sounds intriguing, do tell me more.

Naturally it isn’t intriguing at all, it’s boring and rubbish. I found the crystal, and the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. How do I pick it up?, I wondered. Do I use everything in my inventory with it? Go out and find more inventory and then try that? Tinker with this fusebox – with no feedback – in a vain attempt to repair it?

Or did I just Alt-F4 the hell outta there?

Admittedly, by this stage the game was beginning to show at least a smattering of potential. If I was interested enough in adventure games not to mind the bad gameplay (see signature), I might have persisted for, ooh, five minutes. But as it turned out, my time was up.

1:05 am

Half an OOUR? Seemed more like three. Just out of interest, I decided to take a look at how JA+ reviewed it. I’ll give you a clue: it scores more highly than Monkey Island 2.

Next up in the series, the demo of Al Emmo: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I might have to steel myself first, though.

I used to have a serious problem: I couldn’t stop buying games I didn’t have time to play.

Actually, who am I kidding? The problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just loosened its grip slightly. There are still games on my shelf I’ve barely unwrapped.

Prince of Persia. Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Deus Ex. Eternal Darkness.

Just last week I spotted an irresistable deal on play.com: three adventure games for £5! Granted, I’d never heard of them, and even the reviews on Just Adventure were prepared to admit they were sub-par – meaning they were each a pathetic waste of space, and playing them would compare unfavourably with repeatedly impaling your head on a fork – but still, that’s three games for £5. How could I resist that?

And of course they’ve joined the ever-expanding ranks of games I’ve never touched. I did manage to make inroads into the pile a few years ago, by forbidding myself from buying any new games until I’d given each of the existing ones a fair chance. Obviously, with my self-dislipline, that lasted about five minutes – but it gave me the chance to play some decent games, seemingly for free.

Ah, so that’s why governments stockpile some of their natural resources.

I must admit, my recent foray into MMORPG-land with EVE Online did have one plus point. It reminded what a great game Frontier: Elite II was, and I fired it up under the Amiga emulator WinUAE for another quick blast.

Several hours later I was still there, genuinely more engrossed in the tedium of space flight than at any point during my EVE experience. It wasn’t so much the game itself that kept me entertained – thirteen years after release, it’s looking a little tired and its many irksome bugs wear thin rather quickly – but the game world.

In 1993, a game world typically wasn’t expressed entirely through the medium of the game as it would be now. For a game with the scope of Frontier, it’s hard to see how that would even be achieved. No, it was expressed through something that used to be commonplace inside boxed games: extra goodies.

The Frontier manual was a thing of beauty, a 100-page brusier detailing every possibility in the game, from mining through to piracy. You didn’t even have to play the game to be able to taste the possibilities, the wanton open-endedness of it all. Mining in Frontier may have sucked in reality, but it certainly didn’t when you read its chapter in the manual.

Having a decent manual certainly wasn’t unique to Frontier, especially back in 1993. Even some modern games – the GTA series springs to mind – uphold the tradition with detailed, lovingly crafted manuals, chock-full of detail from the game world. No, what was almost unique about Frontier’s offerings were the other two booklets.

There was the Gazeteer, featuring profiles of many of the star systems and planets featured in the game, and Stories of Life on the Frontier, a compendium of short stories based in the Elite universe.

It was partly these additions that brought the blocky, largely empty universe of Frontier to life. Even the other day, as I cruised from my pulsating blue circle of a Hyperspace Arrival Cloud Remnant to the rudimentary 3D geometry of an orbital station, I could recall the nuggets of detail I’d read about the game world, and some of the childish sense of wonder – I’m flying through a colonised star system! – came back.

How many games can you say that about, eh?

Just for kicks, compare and contrast this approach with the situation today, where the mechanics of the game world are – generally – delivered 100% in-game. Have a look on Wikipedia for the storyline behind Half-Life 2. It’s clear that an immense amount of thought has gone into it, but how much of that background detail makes it into the final game? How much of that is the player aware of?

I’m not sure whether it’s preferable to make the player experience the game world first-hand, rather than reading about it in a manual. The fact that it’s even remotely possible nowdays is certainly encouraging, but is it the best way? I’m not sure – but I know which approach fired my imagination more.

I know, I know, GameFAQs exists for background. Strategy guides do too. But nothing quite beats the freebies you used to get with those big boxed games.