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.
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.
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.
Aliens Versus Predator
Xenomorphs are probably the scariest things in the entire world; the fanged proboscises are terrifying and they've been designed to intimidate men by being made to look like terrifying willies. Or something like that. Just thinking about them means I'm going to have to sleep with the light on tonight, repeatedly reminding myself they're just men in suits.
MAG
People lose their minds as soon as they step online. It doesn’t matter if your teammate is Head of Intellectual Studies at Boffington University, as soon as the Ethernet cable is connected they’ll transform into a crazed, gibbering mess, nonchalantly bounding around looking to perforate whatever moving targets they can find, with little consideration for tedious nonsense like ‘rules’ and ‘tactics’. And no matter how hard MAG tries to force its users to play nice, all too often it feels like an uphill struggle.
Halo 3: ODST
Halo 3: ODST starts with a rather fetching vista of 26th century Earth. You, affectionately dubbed the Rookie, are being dropped from orbit into the smouldering ruins of New Mombasa. Originally planned as a petite single-player side-mission in the Halo archives, ODST has progressively spiralled into a series iteration in its own right. Microsoft certainly seem to think so, anyway, and have elected to release the game with a forty quid price tag. As the Rookie steps out of his pod he's about to stumble upon what has inadvertently become one of 2009's most high profile and significant releases. That's got to be a lot to take in for the new guy.
Duke Nukem 3D
For a brief moment, forget Duke Nukem Forever and the trials, tribulations and false starts of 3D Realms' presumed-doomed twelve year project. Cast aside the ever-populist morbid fascination with Duke's disappointments and hark back to 1996, the year Take That went their separate ways and Michael Bay's action opus The Rock was released. It was a glorious age, one where it was excessively cool to suffix games with '3D'; a little trick the movie industry has recently rediscovered over a decade later. And whilst Quake would arrive six months down the line and revolutionise the aesthetics of my childhood, Duke Nukem 3D's brash antics, flamboyant design and overtly gratuitous destruction would capture my heart.
F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
It's 2009 and F.E.A.R. 2 is going very much against the grain. It sports a health bar, harking back to an age before the meteoric rise of the console FPS. With their sequel, Monolith have declared the two shoddy expansion packs for the original non-canon, which is good, and have clearly tried to engage with the criticisms levied against them for former efforts. If we're going to be completely brazen with the truth, though, it hasn't evolved too far beyond the original F.E.A.R. This is no bad thing, mind.
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- Watching a couple opposite me celebrate an anniversary. Am both disgusted at their public affection - this is ENGLAND - and horribly jealous
- A Guardian caption typo is currently claiming that Northern Rock is to pay 16 billion in bonuses. That's a big wad of cash.
- Holy moly Jagged Alliance 3.
- Hank Chien's life sounds awesome. Plastic surgeon by day, King of Kong by night!
- @JCRgate That and whatever hefty update the PS3 needs every time I get around to switching it on.