Gaming’s 9 Most Important Crates
Back in the 90s, the Crate used to be the most powerful force in gaming. It was actually impossible to find a title which didn’t involve trekking through some warehouse, factory or, in a perfect universe, a Crate research facility. And it didn’t matter if you were exploring an alien world because even despotic extraterrestrial races needed cubic storage devices to transport their ammo and health supplies. It was a golden age for Crates.
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
What's Serious Sam like in HD? Well, it's like Serious Sam. It plays exactly, and unapologetically, like the 2001 original. Croatian developers Croteam are confident that this, along with the engine's new jinglier bells and noisier whistles, is enough to tempt you to spend the best part of twenty quid. They also wouldn't mind if you forgot that the alternative is rooting around a second-hand bargain bin and picking up a dusty old copy of the eight-year-old original for fifty pence.
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
The negative qualities of the Wii are often mentioned. The common ones: it's comparatively expensive for what you get, SD graphics look crummier than ever and the supply of quality games seems to be a little on the sparse side. Say what you might about Nintendo's money-printing license, New Super Mario Bros. Wii proves that Nintendo's premier design guru Shigeru Miyamoto is still at the top of his game. We'll just forget last year's Wii Music ever happened.
LEGO Indiana Jones: The Adventure Continues
LEGO games are for kids, aren't they? That might be the whole point, but I'm 23 (and the best part of a half, sadly) and I merrily stroll through them every autumn, lapping up their inimitable sense of humour and simplistic platform mechanics. But whilst those youngsters might be happy to consume any old LEGO game in-between trips to McDonalds and committing knife crimes, I wasn't exactly enthralled at the prospect of spending a week with Indiana Jones 2. It seemed like a bit of a lame duck from the start, signalling a deficit of creativity and inspiration from even its usage of inelegant numbering. Quite simply, I had the game flagged as an unnecessary stop-gap between the excellent Lego Batman and 2010's Lego Harry Potter.
Left 4 Dead 2
You only need to peek at EA's immense marketing spend for Left 4 Dead 2 to see what all the fuss is about. Last year's affair was comparatively muted, spurred along by word of mouth, adulation from the gaming press and a communal respect for Valve's pedigree as a developer. Left 4 Dead 2 begins with the success of the original, creating a sequel born out of dedication, a shrewd understanding of the online market and the realisation that the first one of these was pretty dang good.
F1 2009
Is there anybody left who remembers what racing games used to be like before the arrival of the racing line? Hard, that's what. Case in point: old F1 games. The speed of the simulated cars is so intense that it used to be all too easy to fly straight off a corner and into an unpleasant pause-restart cycle, which was usually enough to put you off those games completely. Needless to say, I was incredibly relieved to see a helpful guiding line in Sumo Digital's F1 2009. Phew.
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age is big. Really big. Over fifty hours big, and that's if you skip tons of side quests. Then your eye creeps over to the suffix: Origins. BioWare's latest unashamed fantasy epic, which once again pits you against impossible odds to decide the fate of the entire world, is - sales and reception permitting, I imagine - the equivalent of dipping your foot in the pool to test the waters.
Tekken 6
Even the most die-hard fanatic of Namco's flagship fighter will concede that the series, in terms of mass-market consumption in the West, peaked at Tekken 3. That was 1998 - a long, long time ago, when Microsoft hadn't even begun to think about getting into the console market and European versions of everything still came locked at a despicable 50hz. Such faraway sentimentality ensures that the home version of Tekken 6, released to coincide with the series' 15th (I'm so old) anniversary, has a tough gig: it has to compete with nostalgia, the fighting genre's increasingly niche status in the West and the fact Street Fighter IV arrived earlier this year entirely unfazed by both.
Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games
If the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics were anything like Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games they'd be more fun. And snowier. And also happen in October 2009 as opposed to February 2010. But it's not exactly like blatant accuracy is what Sega are striving for when you're performing a loop-de-loop as the iconic anthropomorphic hedgehog in a level that's a recognisable mash-up of the Green Hill Zone and the original level in Super Mario Bros.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
The Zone is a hostile place. If it's not the mutants, bandits or aggressive weather conditions putting an end to the player's expedition around Chernobyl nuclear power plant, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s unoptimised, uncompromising engine will routinely throw its own spanner in the works and spectacularly crash to desktop.
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