Little Gems

Some games just don't get the success they deserve...

I've played a few games over the years, as I'm sure you have, but what are those games that truly are... special? Titles that just seem to arrive at a certain time, like a newly discovered diamond in the rough?

I'm talking about games that you think should get a little more press than they did, games that might have been released a long time ago but you'd like the world to play. The planet seems to be going game crazy, but they've missed so much. It's our responsibility as gaming dinosaurs to show them what they've missed.

Here's a few examples of games I think no true gamer should miss (in no particular order).

For the FIFA/PES generation:
Check out Sensible World of Soccer (on XboxLIVE). A true classic of substance over style. Guide your super slick little sprites around a nicely cartoonish environment with rewarding and subtle gameplay. Not graphically immense (it was orginally an Amiga game) but the gameplay is so fastpaced and subtle that it rewards persistance and excellence. Amazingly for the time it was released it featured pretty much EVERY team from EVERY league in the world. (You wanna play as a team from New Zealand? Sure go ahead no problem!).

For the modern strategist:
X-Com Enemy Unknown / UFO Earth Defense
Atmospheric and nicely presented this strategy game broke new ground for the genre. A truly memorable game that had you swimming upstream from the start. With poor weapons and terrible troops you'd be scraping enemy artifacts off the dead and legging it back to your ship before you were wiped out, but as the game progressed you'd start to research better technology and the tide would begin to turn. Eventually you'd be in a position to comfortably defend the Earth from it's invaders and launch an assault against their Mars HQ itself. Phenomenal.

For the FPS professionals:
Perfect Dark: A brilliant follow up (ish) of Rare's classic GoldenEye. How much fun can you have with shooting henchmen in the backside and watching them jump into the air rubbing away the pain? LOTS. The way that the enemy reacted to being shot was absolutely unique at the time (and still not really bettered imho). Soldiers would take a shot to the arm and run off around a courner, shouting something to there cohorts you'd next see him holding his wounded arm, or limping with leg wound.

You could also shoot weapons out of the enemy's hands. Awesome fun was to be had making a soldier chase his rifle around the floor (until he pulled his side-arm on you). Some soldiers would actually SURRENDER to you and beg you not to hurt them. I've not seen that since!

There was a fantastic weapon in the game that would turn the enemy against his own side, especially fun when you'd disarmed him! I could talk about Perfect Dark for a long time, and I'm sure I'd have no shortage of people to join me.

For the adrenalin junkie:
Afterburner. If you've not played this, or heard of it, let me fill you in. Picture this... TopGun and Tom Cruise had made the F-14 Tomcat the sexiest fighter plane in the world. You've just wandered into an arcade, a large cabinet takes your eye. It has a fighter jet joystick, a throttle and flashing warning "Lock On" lights. It's like nothing else around.

In goes your 20p...

Your F-14 sits on a carrier... "Get READY" wow! Speech! What do I need to be ready for? You take off and cruise for a bit as the LEVEL ONE indicator comes and goes... then suddenly, dots appear against the sky in the distance... incoming head-on enemy jets!? Awesome!

Before you know it wave after wave of enemy jets are hurtling straight at you as you fire missile after missile one after another and barrel roll through heatseaking missiles and close calls with the jets themselves. A real adrenalin rush. Then POW! and you're suddenly plummeting into the ground and ploughing a long firey grave.

In goes another 20p...

Well, that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed it. Have a think and let me know what I've missed. There's so much... Rampage, Rock and Roll Racing, Wings, Elite, Desert Strike, Dizzy...

This post is interactive, please leave your comments on the games you'd like the gaming world to (re)discover.

Thanks for reading,
Keep nade-ing


UNOFFICIAL RULES OF GAMING # 2:
You can carry as much money around as you want, it doesn't actually weigh anything.