Favourite Game

I figure that at some point in the future I may have people coming up to me and asking me what my favourite game is, or at least what I really think makes a great game. The problem is whenever someone asks me that in the real world I end up going cross-eyed for a few minutes then saying that my favourite movie is Transformers (2007). So, here I go with a list of games I respect, or at least a list of things I like about them, and who knows, maybe I'll see this through to a conclusion.


Ok, firstly, the thing I always look forward to in a game is the point where it feels new and makes whatever I'm playing on feel new. You must know that odd combination of bewilderment and amazement brought on by something really good, but really unique at the same time. Think back to when you played GTA 3 for the first time, and how being able to roam around Liberty City in 3D for the first time made you feel. It may not sound like much now, but considering that until that point everyone had just been playing Croc and Spyro on the original Playstation, it was pretty immense. And that's what I'm always looking for in a game, something that makes it immense, compared to the relative crap that proceeded it.

The problem is though, publishers seem to have stopped taking any decent risks, so what we're left with is an achingly slow advancement in gameplay, something so slow we don't notice until we look back a year or two (like the seek bar on your MP3 player, yeah, it is getting further along, but you can't really see it happening until you ignore it for a long enough time).

Somehow I recently reminded myself of the Oddworld games. I remember being obsessed with the original, but too young to actually play it because when you're 8 years old, you're attention span is measured in seconds, or more accurately, the length of time it takes for the opening credits of any TV program to roll by. Yes, I miss being a normal, active child sometimes. I always had enormous respect for Oddworld games, because they were quirky, cool and really weird. But I personally think they lost the plot a little with Munch's Oddysee, I liked it, and I think it was one I was actually able to finish, but something wasn't quite right. You're supposed to be trying to free a bunch of broken slaves using... more slightly less broken slaves. Abe seemed to be bit too much of a real hero for my taste, and rarely gave me the impression he was absolutely shitting himself whenever there was a loud noise - as was the tradition. Everything got a bit too heroic.

Don't get me wrong, the Fuzzles are fantastic. I could talk about Munch for a bit, but he struck me as a (and I never really use this word) complete retard, so I only used him when I had to. Then there was Stranger's Wrath, which as far as tangents go is remarkably weird. Maybe dragging you somewhere where the Glukkon meat-obsessed empire, and their uber technology plants to the weird wild west was their way of saying planet Oddworld is really quite fucking big?

While Stranger's Wrath had about as much to do with the original games as a chicken sandwich, it was added to my collection of games I've always respected it for being, well, really big and weird. I wasn't best pleased when some of the boss battles left me with a few injuries myself, but as we know, any games with piss easy boss battles are about as rewarding as the merit badges you got in Primary School, so that's one thing. But enough about Oddworld, this is supposed to be me talking about my favourite game.

I generally want to keep racing games out of this, because I only really play them to be able to beat my friends and brothers, so they have to be good to be playable at all, otherwise they can just go suck somewhere else, preferably the same corner people use to deny the conspiracy behind health meters. That said, special mention goes to Test Drive Unlimited, and I admit, that it quickly put a sour taste in my mouth when I first played it. Everything just looked odd, and not quirky odd, just, I don't know, but something wasn't right. Graphically speaking, it was a masterpiece, but it's not exactly fucking hard to get a racing game to look good. The idea of being able to drive around the Hawaiian equivalent of the Isle of Man was pretty intoxicating, and I quickly came to love it for no other reason than to take a drive from my living room... ok, bedroom.

By this point it just sounds like I love free roaming and action, but I played Oblivion and thought that level of freedom was just ridiculous, and I spent hours just wondering around wondering what the game wanted me to do. In fact, I'll admit it. I hated Oblivion. Other games can get away with making you feel lost, but when an RPG does it you just feel abandoned. And I don't hate all RPGs, I racked up a silly amount of time on KoTOR 2 and until further notice, my favourite Mario game is Mario RPG: Search for the Seven Stars. Now that's odd for me, because I prefer games full of lovely action and violence, and consequently have about as much patient for turn based combat as the average person does for chess.

What I really want to be able to do is to say that a modern game is one of my favourites, rather than being yet another reviewer who wants to live in a time when portable music was only found in cars by saying the best game ever looks and sounds like it was drawn using a BBC computer. While suffering from hay fever. Mass Effect is very promising, but there's something about it that stops me from having an active desire to play it. I can't think of anything wrong with it, in fact I think it's a brilliant game, I just can never be arsed to play it.

Fable is a game I've always loved, despite not having a hope in hell of living up to the hype it generated, I always thought it was a good RPG, because there was no faffing about. Just buy a weapon, find someone you don't like, and hit them with it until they stop moving. Add in the ability to laugh in the face of their distressed widow, then swear at the guards while they close down on you with large swords, and you're onto a winner.

Assassin's Creed had a handful of really interesting features. Free-running. Awesome. Using crowds to hide. Cool. Jumping off a building and landing on a tiny bale of hay to convince people you just died. Very nice. Stabbing people in the throat. Hell yeah. The problem that made me get very bored and not be arsed to see it through to the end was that it was just a collection of some cool elements, and some not so cool that would get really dull if you had to do them too much - which is the next problem, the balance of the fun stuff and the not so fun stuff was misjudged about as poorly as a blind pole vaulter running determinedly towards a volcano's crater. Just like those Olympic officials writing letters of apology to that man's family, Ubisoft should be still scratching their heads until they expose their brains, wondering how the hell they managed to cock up such a good game. Assassin's Creed had everything going for it until I realised it was something like the 8th hour of gameplay, and I'd been doing the exact same thing over and over to the point where the game itself got confused and bugged the living shit out of my horse, sending Altair... somewhere into the distance while I walked around as a lonely horse being harassed by guards.

At that point I thought, fuck that, and went in search of something with guns. Which is a pity, because I really liked Assassin's Creed, and thought it was really impressive, but after a while it suddenly becomes about as interesting and linear as those clear rulers you get in stationery packs. Even though no one knows where anyone actually gets them from in the first place. My current favourite game would probably be Super Smash Bros. Melee, because it's a simple, pick up and play beat the living shit out of each other fighting game with a pace rivalling a startled gazelle.

If you want me to pick a more modern game to pick as my favourite, wait until I get hold of Fable 2, or maybe even GTA IV. Maybe something else interesting will crop up this year? Maybe Too Human will warrant my attention? Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be finished? Or maybe the games industry will be destroyed by Microsoft cramming everything that makes the Wii special into the 360, leaving us with just an arbitrary trickle of really shit games? Maybe Yahtzee will see someone about his obsession with Branston Pickle? Who knows?