Going back to the roots…

One thing that strikes me as a new PS3 owner is the number of sequels and instalments in long-running franchises on the system in which I have never even played the original. Were these first games huge critical successes or simply box office smashes that drove the publisher to demand sequels, ‘good’ game or not?

A cursory glance at any sales list for the PS3 will uncover entries such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Half-Life 2 – all franchises of which their original instalments all passed me by.

At the weekend, I was in CEX in my hometown, which stocks a huge number of pre-owned PS2 games. Predicating my purchases on some franchises that have at least spawned a sequel, if not a string of subsequent releases, I snapped up the following titles:

The Getaway
Half-Life
Manhunt
Red Dead Revolver
Call Of Duty: Finest Hour

I’m looking forward to finding out what it was about these games that prompted their developers/publishers to further develop the IP and whether they were justified (huge pots of money aside) in doing so. Watch this space.

Vintage Videogame Advertising

At the weekend, I found myself in Birmingham at the British International Comics Show (BICS), despite being completely ambivalent to comics while I was growing up. But a friend of mine was keen to go, and I decided to tag along, thinking that being a visual person there must be something of value for me in attending the show. In the end, I struck gold in the most unlikely of sources.

The 7 Commandments

This funny article recently did the rounds at work – the 7 commandments that all videogames really should be obeying. It pretty much hits the nail on the head, even if it is guilty of a little light sexism on the way!

Too many games, too little time

It is, unexplainably, one of the hallmarks of any self-respecting designer – a worrying predilection for collecting things. I think it ties in with the need for perfectionism. With not feeling complete unless a collection is wholly present and correct. This tendency to collect things has spilled over into my passion for videogames. In fact, it’s been prevalent there for many years; dating back to when I bought a Virtual Boy with the intention of collecting every game every released for that doomed console (the games numbered in the tens and not hundreds). Even though that venture was scuppered by a need to raise cash to eat during my college days, I’ve still managed to accumulate a vast number of games consoles in my collection, and subsequently, games for those systems.

The picture above is all of the games I currently own that I’ve never even opened. I’ve not even included any of the games that I’ve had one go at and banished to a drawer, never to be seen again. These are games that I have no experience of playing, spread out over four different console formats. It’s my intention to try them all and blog about the first impressions that they give, before then taking some of them on to completion. This blog is a useful way for me to combine two of my passions – videogames and writing, and what better way to kick-start that than by playing a lot of games! Look out for my First Impressions posts of these (and other games) over the next few weeks.