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.

Ah, simpler times. That’s me in my Asp Explorer, approaching Boston Base in Barnard’s Star. The game was Frontier, easily one of my favourite games, and probably the single game I’ve invested most time in.

For some reason I find difficult to pin down, I’ve always found those games - we’ll simplistically call them ‘open-ended space trading games’ - fascinating. From Frontier to Hardwar to X - Beyond the Frontier, whether the game is represented by rough polygons or the latest in graphics technology, these games somehow fire the imagination. You can almost imagine you’re there and that these starships, pirates and orbital stations are populated by real people.

And so when Stan - vile temptress that he is - asked me to join him on a 14-day free trial of EVE Online, how could I resist?

Empty Spaces

EVE Online is a MMORPG - the largest game universe in the world, apparently. It’s set entirely in space, where every player pilots his or her ship across the vast game universe, making a quick buck while avoiding pirates and the law. It should be fun.

But it isn’t.

The first thing that strikes you about EVE is how empty it all seems. Of course, you encounter other ships as you fly about - they’re all around you, in fact - but it’s still dead and lifeless. Hardwar, still one of the best single-player examples of the genre, is teeming with life by comparison.

After a short time playing EVE, you start to see why it feels so dead. EVE isn’t so much a game to be played as a game to be left minimised while you, say, implement categories on your web site. You are perfectly able to let your ship ply the vast open spaces on autopilot. It begs the question, why are you - and these other people - here? Wouldn’t the game work just as well without you?

Nobody Home

It’s a sad conclusion to draw, but the answer is ‘almost’. For the first few days of playing EVE, I have to admit I was addicted. It wasn’t the actual game that made me stay, though; it was the potential the game had.

When I was pilfering cargo crates abandoned in space, the game warned me that the owner would be free to exact his grisly revenge. Well, bring it on. When I entered a dangerous system, the game warned me that it was an unsavoury place. I might get attacked here, too.

But did either of these things happen? Did they bollocks.

Hey You

In the mid-90s, when I was fascinated by Frontier and later Hardwar, the multiplayer potential of these games was clear to me even then. What if these other ships were being flown by real people from all over the world?

Unfortunately, EVE utterly fails to capitalise on the fact that this is now a reality. Your humorous ship name appears on no-one’s radar; instead they get your player name. Even the ability to role-play, by a mechanism as simplistic as sending out communications to nearby vessels, does not exist. Such additions could, quite easily, elevate EVE to much greater heights with very little effort.

Imagine being able to look around your cockpit. Imagine being able to use your ship as a taxi, or simply invite other pilots round to check out your fluffy dice. Wouldn’t that make the game that much more engrossing? Wouldn’t it make the ship feel like it was yours?

Don’t Leave Now

Sadly EVE does none of this. Most of the pioneering space stuff is still left to your imagination, and what’s left of the game - flying from A to B - manages to be so hopelessly unengaging you might as well not be playing. Of course, EVE has the usual set of abstract ’skills’, ‘equipment’ and ‘money’ that you have to clock up hours upon hours of game time to obtain, but is that fun? Could I even see the game becoming fun once I’d earned my millions? Not really.

You’ll notice that I’ve ignored the bread and butter of most online RPGs, the guilds. Here they’re called ‘corps’, and they’re rubbish. I don’t know this first hand, but I can extrapolate from my meagre experience. Stan and I tried to go mining in dangerous systems together, and it was hard. Not the mining itself, but sticking together. Flying in formation was impossible; even remaining remotely near one another degenerated into constant checking-up via the in-game chat.

Playing on your lonesome is boring, playing with others is boring and hard. All in all: lame.

Goodbye Cruel World

I’ve left the most damning condemnation of EVE until last. Stan and I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, at the end of our free trial period, and have a fight.

Even that was boring.

And if fighting is boring - surely the culmination of years of buying the most powerful guns, constructing the most pimped-out ship and fitting the strongest shields - what chance does the rest of the game have?

Having said that, 25,000 people can’t be wrong. Are Stan and I? Check out his review of EVE and then decide.

I’ll leave you with the final indignity - my death at the hands of Stan. The one and only public airing of my ship’s given name makes it all worthwhile.

Nintendo’s ethos of putting the fun back into games - well, did it ever really leave on their consoles? - works wonders on the Nintendo DS. Features which might at first seem like gimmicks, like the touch-screen and to a lesser extent the built-in microphone, add depth and immersion to the gaming experience in a way I hope the Wii’s ‘revolutionary’ (ho ho) new control interface will.

I have only one complaint so far, Nintendo. In the good old days, attempting to be naughty with text input would more often than not result in a hasty smackdown from the game in question. Why, then, was I allowed to teach Animal Crossing’s sweet, innocent Bree the following rudery?

Honestly. That takes some explaining when people try out my town.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Just another adventure game in the extensive and (almost) uniformly excellent LucasArts portfolio. However, it is special to me in a couple of ways:

1) It was the last LucasArts adventure game to be released for the Amiga, and consequently the last LucasArts adventure I played until Curse of Monkey Island.

And…

2) I have just replayed it for the first time in over ten years, this time in its full IBM-PC compatible, VGA, CD-ROM’ed, talkie glory. It is excellent.

I mean, really excellent. Due to the many significant shortcomings of the Amiga conversion, I had never been able to fully appreciate its charms. Playing Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga was more an ordeal than a game: it was inexplicably slow, running at approximately one frame per second on the Team path (not a word of a lie), the music was restricted to just a few of the PC version’s main themes reused over and over, and the graphics were a pale shadow of their full 256-colour glory.

Playing it on the PC was a revelation. The voices really work. The interplay between Indy and Sophia is well-written and funny. The dialogue system is sophisticated, with Indy able to comment to Sophia about most aspects of the current environment. And the story is real Indiana Jones. All of this was hidden under layers of frustration on the Amiga.

Fate of Atlantis has leapt from being “just another LucasArts game” to being one of my favourites. As a testament to how much I must have enjoyed it really - and much to my disappointment - I hadn’t forgotten how to solve a single puzzle, even at the distance of ten years. But that didn’t detract much from an excellent gameplaying experience.