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Recently the official battle of Playstation 4 vs X Box One begin, and it got me thinking about my own personal history with computer games. Although I don't play games as much as I used to, back in my youth it was very rare that I wouldn't spend time on computer games (although unlike today's youth, I did plenty of outside activity as well, such as playing football), so I wanted to go through some of the more memorable games that I have played, all in chronological order.
Outlaw - ATARI
The first console system that I ever owned was the ATARI, a system that I suspect a lot of people who are younger than 20 have never heard of. It was pretty much the first home console in existence and whilst the games look extremely basic by today's standards, they were incredibly addictive.
Cowboy was the first game I can remember playing and the objective is to simply shoot the other person on the screen, that is it. It was about as basic as a game could get, but I remember playing it for a long time. The deaths weren't dramatic (basically it was a guy falling over), but it was a good first game to remember. If anyone still has an Atari that works, get this game.
I have early memories of this extremely colourful game. The objective was simply to get from the bottom of the screen to the top, whilst also trying to avoid enemies and the rising waters. To do this you shot rainbows to form a bridge and climb up to the next level.
Looking back on it is also looks quite trippy and I don't think I have ever seen a more colourful game. I think the only colour they don't use at all is black.
Would I play it again now, probably not, but I will always have fond memories of this day.
Monkey Island - Amiga
Back in the early 90s the most popular type of game was the point and click adventure, and none were better than Monkey Island. This was the first game I truly fell in love with, it was amazing, it was pretty much everything you could want in a game. There was comedy, pirates, romance, horror (the main protagonist is a ghost, and takes various similar guises in the subsequent games), sword fighting and action, it was pretty much the pretty game.
You take control of a wannabe pirate, Guybrush Threepwood, and take him on a quest that he hopes will lead to him being a pirate, the only problem is that he's a bit of a wimp. Along the way he meets a woman and falls in love, only for the aforementioned ghost (LeChuck) to kidnap her. Along the way Guybrush meets several interesting characters, such as a bridge troll who turns out to be George Lucas in disguise, as well as the lasiet ship crew that ever existed.
For the time it was probably one of the most graphically sophisicated games available, and also one of the longest, as a full playthrough, even if you knew exactly what you were doing, would take at least two hours, which was very long for the time.
They made a special edition version a few years ago along with the sequel, which you can view below (none of the videos for the original were good enough).
Mortal Kombat - Sega Megadrive
Those who I went to school with know how obsessed I became with the Mortal Kombat series throughout my teens, however at first it was just another computer game, a game that I was very good at. It got to the point where I was regularly beating my brother, who is 15 years old than me, quite easily, and at one point he invited me and a friend round, I was told that I wasn't allowed to use special moves (such as freezing people with one of the characters) to make it fair....did I stick to that? Did I fuck.
What made this game so much better than the vast majority of it's sequels was that there were no overly poor characters, which is something that the games later on in the series suffered with, each character had a great background and a decent ending, and you knew they weren't just thrown in for the sake of it. The first three games were all like that, but then after that they started introducing shit characters that no-one really gave a shit about (hello Kai, Tanya, . Infact, in the Armageddon game, the last before they rebooted the series, there were so many characters that it became a bit of a farce.
Mortal Kombat, the original one, was everything a multiplayer game really should be, something you can just pick up and get right into, and most of all have fun with. Most games these days have forgotten about the fun element.
Theme Park - Amiga
Not many people remember Bullfrog games (and this isn't the only time they will appear on this list), but for those that do, you would agree that they made some awesome games. If you want to talk about addictive games, few could ever replicate the "Theme" series, and it all started with a game where you built a Theme Park.
It was one of the earliest games where you were rewarded for sticking with the game, as you could buy researchers after getting sufficient customers into the park, and they would come up with new games. You do start off with some very shitty rides and attractions, but stick with it and you end up with rollercoasters that allow you to build the track yourself, as well as other similar attractions.
This game was followed by the equally addictive "Theme Hospital", and then the slightest less addictive and considerably more cartoony "Theme Park World". Would I play "Theme Park" again? No, probably not, but as I say, it was one of the earliest games where you felt rewarded for sticking with a game.
Resident Evil - Playstation
In 1997 my brother gave me a game called Resident Evil. He had owned it for a while and couldn't get past a snake that appears 30 minutes into the game, and just got completely frustrated with it. I didn't even know what it was about, it could have been anything, so I start playing and within minutes I find a zombie, and from that moment on I have loved zombie games and movies. I played the game for the rest of the day and easily defeated the snake that my brother had struggled with.
Whilst not generally scary, especially by today's standards, this game was groundbreaking and unlike most of the sequels, there was VERY limited ammo around the place, so much to the point where you regularly had to rely on your knife....which isn't very handy.
Whilst not brilliant in it's own right, it started off one of my favourite computer game franchises and a series for which I have owned ten titles (1-6, Code Veronica, Zero, Re:Make and Outbreak).
It remains the only Resident Evil game I have never completed.
The Curse of Monkey Island - PC
At the time (1997) I had never been so excited about a new game. The third installment in the Monkey Island series became one of the first games I got on the day of release, however, I couldn't play it due to system restraints. My first PC had a capacity of 12MB, no, that isn't a misprint, the youth of today will never know the limitations we had those days and running out of space was a common occurrence, the problem with TCOMI was that it required 16MB of space and my dad bought me a new PC specifically for the purpose of playing this game.
Unlike the previous two games, this game had vocal audio rather than text, which I personally thought made the game far, far more enjoyable as it was easier to understand the jokes. Visually it was also superior to the previous games, understandable given that Monkey Island 2 came out in 1991, and the advancement in technology in those days was far superior to these days. Although it looks very cartoony, this was probably one of the funnest games that I ever played.
I played this game a LOT and it even proved to be the basis of my Graphical Technology coursework during school. I do still also play the game occasionally, although it requires installation of the ScummVM engine if you're playing it on Windows 7.
This was the last good Monkey Island game. The subsequent sequels of "Escape From Monkey Island" and "Tales of Monkey Island" were both terrible and lacked what had made the previous games fun to play.
Populous The Beginning - PC
I had played the demo for this strategy game and become slightly obsessed with it. I even kept the demo long after I had gotten the game because there was a level on the demo that wasn't on the game.
The basic premise of the game is that you control the Shamen of a tribe and the aim is literally to destroy the other tribe(s) on the map. What makes this different to other similar games (such as Age of Empires) is that you use magic to help you destroy the enemy, afterall, what could be more fun than walking up to your opponents and casting a tornado on their church, or even creating a volcano right in the middle of the camp? It was damn addictive and the best part is you can make the levels last as long as you want. There is nothing actually saying that you have to attack, occasionally I just set up my defence and built my force. At one point I just left the game for six hours to go to football, came back and all I had lost was one defence tower....but had gained an army of more than 500 (which was very big for the game), I subsequently marched on the other tribe....500 vs 30 was very one sided.
One of my favourite types of game is building bases, defending and then attacking, but this is by far my favourite one of these types of games. It was hard at times as well, obviously as you move further up the 25 levels the opponents can do more, such as using invisibility spells, turning your own army against you, and numerous other things.
You can still buy this today and it does still work on more advanced systems (I still play in regularly on my Windows 7 computer), or alternatively you can buy it via the Playstation Store
I'm going to leave this section with a video of my favourite level....Level 17 - Middle Ground.
Forbidden Siren - Playstation 2
Fuck a duck, this shit was scary. I had NEVER stopped playing a game because I was too scared before, but that is exactly what happened with this, it's something I haven't done before or since.
This game was unusual in the sense that you could actually use your R3 button to tap into a nearby enemy and see exactly what they see, however, whilst you're doing that the normal gameplay still goes on, so you could come out of that and all of a sudden there was an enemy just stood in front of you....and you have no weapons to defend yourself with.
I played this at 2/3 in the morning with no lights on, and I was sweating buckets by the time I eventually went to bed because it scared the shit out of my that much. That game is AMAZINGLY tense. I still own this game and it's sequel....I have never even opened the latter (I genuinely don't know what I own it :P )
Resident Evil 4 - Playstation 2
Quite possible the PERFECT game and much like Curse of Monkey Island, the definite peak in the series, especially as the two sequels have been crap.
Resident Evil 4 was different to it's previous installments as it moved away from the zombie genre and did lose a bit of the survival horror aspect, however, that didn't stop it being a great game. The graphics are stunning and even nine years on from when I first bought it, it remains as one of the most beautiful games I have ever owned.
This game was excellent from start to finish, and the boss fights were far enough between that you actually enjoyed them when you got to them, whereas the subsequent sequels have had boss fights every five minutes. The boss fights were also genuinely difficult, again, something that has been lost in the sequels, and you had a proper fight on your hands, which was the case with 1, 2 and 3, but this was different due to the fact that in previous games you viewed the game from a fixed angle that many seeing difficult, but in 4 the camera moves with the character, meaning you can see what's coming at you, which in a way makes it scarier, or at least as scary as Resident Evil gets.
There have been a lot of Resident Evil games, but just talking in terms of the main series (in other words the numbers ones), here they are in the order of greatness 4, 2, 3, 1, 6 and then 5. Infact, 2, 3 and 1 are all pretty much on the same level, and 6 is only saved from being last by the Leon campaign in it.
The ONLY problem with Resident Evil 4 was that it was extremely difficult to actually get working. The disk would very rarely read correctly, so on many occasions I really wanted to play it but the PS2 was having none of it. Thankfully this issue has been solved since I was able to download for the PS3 and it works perfectly every time.
Assassins Creed 2 - Playstation 3
The first game I owned on the PS3 was, at first, one of the most frustrating things ever. The first thing you to try and beat the character's brother to the top of a church....it took me nearly an hour to get off of the ground, I was getting so incredibly fucked off with the game that I think I made one of my housemates at the time very worried. I also packed it all in after a few minutes, although I am definitely glad that I didn't.
As you'd expect, the graphics were beautiful and they did an excellent job or creating a brilliant environment for you to explore and kill people in, you could tell that they had spent a lot of time working on the look of the game and that made a change from most games I had played.
I got very involved in this game and completed the main storyline within days, and what I loved was that after you complete the main storyline, it allows you to keep playing afterwards, going around doing sub missions and exploring. At the time I had never had a game that allowed me to do that, and is one of the main reasons I keep buying the Assassins Creed games. I am definitely glad I played this game before the first one though, because whilst the first one is ok, it's very poor in comparison and had I played the first game first, I probably wouldn't have bought number two.
I let a friend from work borrow this in April 2010....I am still waiting for it to be returned to this day, however, I don't really feel I need it back because there is a need Assassins Creed game every year, meaning that you regularly move onto the next game, and forget about the previous one....afterall, it's just over three years since I got my PS3...and in that time 2, Brotherhood, Revelations and 3 have been released....and 4 is going to be released in a few months.
