Format: Gameboy
Release date: 1996
You might have heard of Pokémon. I can’t quite believe that date. 1996!? Holy crap. 21 years ago, apparently, I got well into this strange Japanese game about collecting made-up animals, stuffing them into balls and training them to fight each other. Yeah, the entire notion of Pokémon sounds horrific in this world of PETA and tofu, but as a game concept, it’s utter genius. Enjoyed by my entire generation as kids, we then grew up and got obsessed all over again in Pokémon Go!
But Pokémon Go gets tedious quickly because there isn’t really much meat to the game. The original Red and Blue versions (and consequently every other Pokémon game since then because they all follow the same blueprint), featured a coming of age story about a boy or girl setting out into the world to become the very best, like no one ever was… Red will always be my favourite because Charizard.
I still remember walking into Professor Oak’s lab, and him offering me the 3 starter Pokémon to choose from – Bulbasaur, Squirtle and Charmander. There wasn’t really any choice for me though because Charizard. After choosing my starter, Professor Oak asked if I wanted to give him a nickname. I thought why not, and amusingly called my beloved Charmander FIREMAN, in capital letters and everything. I didn’t realise that this name would actually be used every single time my prized Pokémon was referenced. So whenever I sent him out to battle, it shouted at me, “FIREMAN! I choose you!” And the worst part was it even kept the bloody name after it had evolved into Charmeleon and Charizard. Also, I taught him Cut without fully understanding that he could never unlearn it. So my single greatest Pokémon, the one I have put more effort into training than any other, even to this day, is my awesome but fucking stupidly named Charizard, who knows Cut instead of Fireblast, and is called FIREMAN.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
One of my all-time favourite gaming memories is playing Haunting Ground with my mates at the flat in Baldock for 16 hours straight. It was me holding the controller for almost all of those 16 hours. It’s a bit obscure, so if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a survival horror game by Capcom, in which you play as a pretty little fragile girl called Fiona, who must escape from a huge labyrinthine castle. Oh, and you can’t fight. Your only option is to run away and hide from the nasty people that are out to get you. You do have a companion throughout though, the best dog in gaming, a white German Shepherd called Hewie.
WoW consumed my life for almost the entirety of 2004/05, when I was studying for my A-levels, and was probably a key contributor to my D-grades. I’m probably not the only person who would admit to daydreaming of roaming through Elwynn Forest, even many years after I stopped playing. I just spent so much time there, and other places of that world, sometimes roleplaying, always questing, but best of all simply exploring an unknown land. Even though I LOVE what Blizzard did in Cataclysm, my favourite memories all come from what they call Vanilla WoW, the original version of the game.
The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.
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