It’s simple and beautiful, and painfully, painfully addictive, and games like this make me thankful that this kind of thing has been given a revival in the era of online leaderboards, which is the most relevant they’ve been since the original Pac-Man was in the arcades. While the implementation of leaderboards falls short of the high water mark, Geometry Wars 2, this game rivals that one for content and certainly beats it for competitive high scores.

When I play Geometry Wars and look at the top of the rankings, I know I’m never getting up there. In Pac-Man, on the other hand, I’m only a few hundred thousand and, judging by the replays, a couple of eliminated mistakes and some route optimisation short of the top, so small are the margins for error. Let’s be honest: I’ll still never get there, but at least this lets me feel like I’m in with a chance of getting that carrot.

In the pantheon of classic retro arcade games, I’ve always had a soft spot for Pac-Man, and feel that its classic high-score-chasing gameplay has held up better than many of its contemporaries. Really, jazz it up with some HD neon graphics and I’d be pretty happy to pay for that, but the Championship Edition gave it a full modernisation, ramping the speed up to sometimes ridiculous levels, giving it a pumping soundtrack, doubling the maze width, and bringing in a host of new mechanics. This DX edition brings in some new mazes and further tweaks, so it’s one of those convenient follow-ups for latecomers that renders the original redundant.

But even with all the modes and mazes to choose from, I’m happy with the new Championship II on the standard five-minute score attack. That’s where the competitive play is, and although I’m unlikely to reach much beyond my current position, skimming the top 1,000, adding a few thousand to your top score and pushing yourself up the ranking is brilliantly intense. Get much beyond about 1,300,000 points and it becomes necessary to get yourself completely ‘in the zone’, and one mistake can warrant a restart – and you’re still miles off the 2,000,000+ scores at the top of the leaderboard.

I’m not the only one who’s gone head over heels for this game, and even if you’re one of the multitude of Call of Duty addicts, this is highly recommended. The five-minute games lend themselves to quick blasts now and again, with the occasional new high score dangling like a carrot the whole time, and as I’ve jumped between my current playlist of Black Ops, Halo: Reach and Castlevania, it’s become the perfect palate cleanser. Work up those reactions for COD after a spot of adventuring, or relieve the pressure of a hard day’s deathmatching before you go to bed.

Or, more likely, some twerp on my friends list is taunting me about overtaking my high score again…

Microsoft’s new Game Room is far from exhaustive, of course, but the plan is to grow it rapidly with games that are often otherwise unavailable elsewhere. To be honest, the vast majority simply serve to remind you of how far we’ve come and that it wasn’t any better back in the day, but they’re all available for a free play and there are some classics to be (re)discovered. Personally I’m a fan of Tempest and Crystal Castles, and I think that a quid or two is a reasonable price for them in this context.

It’s certainly a cool implementation of retro gaming with modern technology, and I think that if we can get some other big names like Capcom, Sega, Midway and Konami in there – somehow I don’t think even the biggest optimist expects to see Donkey Kong – and expand the selection up to the 16-bit era, it could be a big hit. I already enjoy visiting my friends’ arcades, but let me do it with games that I actually remember playing with them – the likes of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Golden Axe, etc – and the nostalgia factor is broadened beyond that 40-year-old creepy guy who hangs around in Gamestation. Although I can appreciate the historical value of Adventure and Asteroids, I would argue that I’m not the typical under-30 gamer.

But even so, I love how clearly Game Room is designed for fans. It’s so cool to wander into your friend’s arcade and see 80s gaming decor and a Bentley Bear sprite walking around in three dimensions, Paper Mario-style, and then to have a crack at their high scores. Everything from the way that rival high scores attack your pride with red neon to how the rewind function maintains the retro theme with a VHS rewinding effect is made to provoke a smile, and it usually does.

A good start, then, to a promising new system. I really hope that Microsoft can expand it and resist the urge to nickel and dime us too much on ultimately pointless tat like the decorations, but hey, I want to be an astronaut too. Let’s just hope that it can do the former.

I adore Chrono Trigger, and have ever since I first played it when it remained the holy grail of what a UK gamer could find only on the import ‘grey market’. Indeed, the DS version, released 14 years after its original release, was the first time it was actually available in PAL territories without braving inflated eBay prices or less legal routes.

I’ve owned and played all three versions, but I’ve never actually finished the game, which made it an even easier choice. Classic RPGs and portable systems just go together in my book – this complementary relationship was how I finally got the Final Fantasy VII monkey off my back – so if I was ever going to do it, this would be it. Throw in the fact that this is the best version of the game – the largely issue-free SNES version lacked the extras and animated scenes of the PSX, while that one suffered from unforgivable slowdown and crippling load times for a SNES port, and this one takes the best from both - and I was set to be a happy, mildly obsessed chap.

First, though, that new translation, because it’s probably the most contentious change. Cleaning up old translations generally gets the thumbs up from me because, let’s face it, most translation work from the 16-bit days could, at best, be described as ‘charming’, but it’s hard to ignore one particular tweak in this one. Some of the changes make sense, like ‘Antiquity’ is a better and more fitting name for the ancient magical realm than ‘Dark Ages’, and taking advantage of the fact that names no longer have to be limited by cartridge space is a no-brainer, but did they really have to drop Frog’s Shakespearean ‘ye olde’ dialect?

Cheesy it may have been, but it was cute and fit the character, and I think it’s a good reason – this is the other reason – why Frog is such a fondly remembered character. Even if it wasn’t in the original Japanese, there are other quirks that didn’t make it in, so staying true to the original wasn’t top of the agenda. It’s no big deal and Frog is still a great character, but he’s lost something.

That’s really my only complaint, though. In short, Chrono Trigger is still one of the best RPGs ever made. It has it all: timelessly beautiful art; a great, multilayered story; memorable characters; a classic – in many ways – soundtrack; no random battles; tons of totally optional side quests that add to the characters… Hell, it popularised if not invented the New Game+ concept and had 14 different endings when most games could barely manage one. They really don’t make them like this any more.

And that’s another unfinished classic RPG off my list. Next stop: Persona 4… maybe.

It had already sent me on a wild adventure of learning HTML and using it to create the imaginatively named Shenmue Fan Site, and my first couple of trial-and-error playthroughs – I didn’t speak Japanese, and no one else had yet written a guide, which made simple tasks like ‘speak to Yamagishi-san’ very difficult - were followed by my first FAQ, which directly led to freelance work with the precursor to the company where I now work. I’ve wanted to write about games for a living for a long time, but no single game had as much direct influence on my future career path as Shenmue, and that’s a big part of why I still hold it in such high esteem.

To be honest, if I was trying to choose my game of the last ten years, this would probably be it. It was highly influential – not many games had real-time weather and day/night cycles in 1999, and it’s largely responsible, for better or worse, for the continuing popularity of the QTE – and far ahead of its time. Its cult following is formidable and still rapacious, devouring every snippet of ‘news’ that comes out of Sega regarding the future (or not) of the series. My bet is that the inclusion of Ryo will be directly responsible for at least half of the sales of Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. Hell, that’s why I’m going to buy it.

Playing it now, parts of it are of its time, and it may have been pushing the Dreamcast hardware further than was wise, but it still has so much atmosphere, even when playing the impenetrable Japanese version, and that’s a big part of why I love it. Yokosuka feels real – I know it is real, but you know what I mean – and, way back when, I had a place where I’d like to live, a favourite Chinese restaurant, the works. How many games do that now? Bethesda’s stuff, maybe.

The lack of Shenmue III is an empty space in gaming to me and is, sadly, likely to remain so. But, until then, we’ll always have Sakuragaoka…

They’re not going to fool anyone into thinking that they’re new releases or anything, and some of the perspective tricks are shown up in HD like ropey special effects on a Blu-ray movie, but a few added pixels, some v-sync and a mostly locked 60fps – I’ve seen drops in areas with lots of particle effects, like the first game’s Desert of Lost Souls – do them a world of good. The spell is broken somewhat when you see Athenian soldiers who look like troop models from a 1998 RTS and the unchanged FMV looks horrific – rendered from the PS2 engine for standard definition and badly compressed to boot – but this is a retro compilation at the end of the day. I’m not going to dock a retro compilation point for not looking completely shiny and new.

I’m disappointed that the remastering on both of them couldn’t have extended to proper surround sound, though, with only PS2-era Dolby Pro Logic II present and some glitches in that to boot. Remixing the whole thing might have been a lot to ask, but Sony’s been excellent this generation in terms of pushing next-generation sound as hard as visuals and I think it would have made a world of difference.

Given the PS3′s current situation surrounding backwards compatibility, maybe this is testing the water for the approach to come. I’d have no problem rebuying some of my favourite PS2 titles given this kind of treatment.

The obvious one to ask for and one that’s probably likely is a Team Ico compilation in advance of The Last Guardian, but I could reel off a list of PS2 favourites that would be excellent candidates for this kind of treatment: Kingdom Hearts, Silent Hill, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy… Stick them on a disc or release them individually as à la carte downloads from PSN. Hell, why limit this idea to the PlayStation? Splinter Cell and Hitman both have sequels in the works and I’d relish the opportunity to play through the earlier iterations again. If universal backwards compatibility isn’t possible, this is the next best thing and has plenty of benefits of its own.

The God of War games remain a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, and this is definitely the way to play them. They’re two of the best action games of the last decade and the low price for them looking and playing this smoothly is a steal.

The screenshot in this post was borrowed from Bitmob’s comparison feature here.

It’s not bad, though. The voice acting is excellent, bringing great delivery to the old jokes and with some great touches, like the way selecting the wrong riposte during an insult swordfight will result in a different delivery to if it was correct; the new background art is superb, with some nice enhancements to familiar environments – I particularly liked the ships docked behind the previously uninhabited Scumm Bar, for example (see above); and it even controls acceptably with the analogue stick, only becoming mildly annoying during certain sequences that involve time-sensitive manipulation of certain corrosive materials between receptacles.

I also love how you can switch between the old and new versions completely seamlessly, which is a feature that should be in more retro remakes. In fairness, I suppose having to keep the versions in sync was limiting in what could be done to update things, and it is quite technically impressive – I assume that the Special Edition is some kind of new ‘skin’ running on top of the emulated classic version. It shows when you occasionally get overlapping dialogue, presumably when a line runs out of time to run without bringing the two versions out of sync. On a similar note, it’s also a shame that you can’t play the old game with voice acting, but it seems like that’s more of a technical limitation than anything else.

But as nice as it is to see the original Monkey Island looking fresh, I’m not the biggest fan of the new art style. I thought that just flicking between the two versions on the close-up character portraits – compare this and this – shows the new style as really soulless, particularly when there are existing sources of inspiration to use when taking the Monkey Island series in a more cartoony direction.

All this makes me wonder if it really justifies the ‘Special Edition’ tag. The voice acting is the only absolute improvement, there’s no new content whatsoever, and the flaws of the original – my main beef is the to-ing and fro-ing when you’re going from place to place, in particular the arduous walk from the town on Melee Island to the overworld map, which you’ll have to do several times – are still there. If this was a DVD special edition, it would be from the days when ‘interactive menus’ counted as a bonus feature.

Even so, it’s still Monkey Island and I’ve already finished it twice in the five days it’s been out. It’s still very funny, only helped by the voicework, and I’ll be first in line for Monkey Island 2: Special Edition, if only because it’ll be a nice experience to play one that I haven’t finished several times before with the new look.

And, while we’re on the subject, how about those DS and iPhone versions?

Final Fantasy VII is a perennially popular game, but one that is almost as fashionable to hate. It’s true that it has its flaws and probably isn’t even the best Final Fantasy game, let alone the best RPG ever made, and it’s probably equally true that the reason for its popularity is because it was many players’ first RPG. But even so, there aren’t many games that have spawned a CGI feature film, an anime short film, several novellas and four spin-off games, and I think the only Final Fantasy that would be more anticipated than XIII would be the much-rumoured FFVII remake. It really is a franchise in its own right.

Anyway, it was the latest chapter in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core, that originally got me interested in revisiting this world. The PSP game is very impressive, but I got the feeling that some things were going over my head, given that I’d never finished Final Fantasy VII. I hadn’t finished a Final Fantasy game full stop, with a save at the end of Final Fantasy IV Advance being the closest I’ve got. Yes, I’m ashamed.

Back when it came out I didn’t have a PlayStation and so had little opportunity to play it – I don’t think I even got out of Midgar around release – and my most successful attempt so far was almost three years ago, when I bought a new NTSC copy and actually made it to disc 2 (OMG Aeris dies!!!1) before petering out somewhere on Gaea’s Cliff, about 19 hours in. With custom firmware PSPs supporting multi-disc PS1 games, I worked out how to get my original PS1 save ported to the PSP – it involves a chipped PS2 and some homebrew voodoo -and, after familiarising myself with the abilities that I’d left on the characters, I powered on through the previous sticking point.

What usually happens with JPRGs is that I enjoy myself up to a point until I find myself underlevelled and give up, and as I was determined that this wouldn’t happen this time, I found out the levelling hotspots and spent several hours grinding and finding my party’s ultimate weapons and final limit breaks. Cloud and Cid with their ultimate weapons can now cause up to 9,999 damage with regular attacks, and my high-level materia and summons meant that I could take down Diamond Weapon and Ultimate Weapon in four turns each. These are supposed to be reasonably challenging bosses ;)

In short, by the time I reached the endgame my levels were in the low 70s, with most guides recommending 60-65 to make it comfortably possible, and after putting it off for a few months I was able to finish the final dungeon without too much trouble.

Now allow me to stop waving my virtual genitals around for long enough to say how good this game really is. As I said, yes, it’s flawed – the ‘see what sticks’ mentality with the innumerable mini-games, the way that the materia system effectively does away with specialisation, the poor English translation – “This guy are sick”, “Off course!”, etc – and the occasionally poor storytelling are the worst offenders - but it’s still one of my favourite RPGs.

I like the characters and, if you’re willing to read into the parts of the story that the game never tells you – how many people are actually aware that it wasn’t Sephiroth himself who killed Aeris? – it has a remarkably well-developed and interesting universe. Final Fantasy IV-VI are superb games, but which Final Fantasy world do you remember most? Apart from maybe Kefka, is there a more memorable villain than Sephiroth? And between those two, I don’t think there’s any contest over who wins in terms of depth of character and motivations – just being a bit mad and megalomaniacal doesn’t really cut it. And do any other RPGs have moments as memorable as scenes like Aeris’s death or Sephiroth’s razing of Nibelheim?

It’s hard to be surprised by Final Fantasy VII because even if you haven’t finished it, its great moments have been picked apart so much that it’s become the closest thing that gaming has to Star Wars, but that’s not to say that it’s not nice to have joined the club and actually finished a Final Fantasy – this may even be my first finished JRPG, embarrassingly. For its flaws it does have a good story, it does have some of the best characters in the series, and it does deserve at least some of the popularity that it still has. I also found that it’s a brilliant game to play on the move, so if Square has any sense it’ll bring it to the PSP legitimately and stop those who don’t play theirs in less legally nebulous circumstances from a good opportunity to re-experience it.

That or finally do that PS3 remake, of course…

Speaking as a fan of Street Fighter III, which is a beautiful, deep, competitive game that didn’t receive nearly the attention that it deserves, it really has nothing on its predecessor. A rough calculation tells me that I’ve already bought Street Fighter II three times this decade, and playing the new HD Remix has really reminded me of just how brilliant this game is.

Besides its better, more iconic characters that have gone on to become archetypes in themselves, Street Fighter II is a game that just never seems to age at all, no matter how many times I play it, and that amazes me every time I return. The lick of paint for the latest release obviously helps, but looking beyond graphics it’s as much fun today as it ever was. Everyone must have at least some experience with this game, and you only have to play for a little while to feel at home again, even if you haven’t played since it came out, which is pushing two decades ago. It’s impossible to have ‘just one more game’, especially now that we have a version that works extremely well online.

What’s impressed me more than anything, though, is how playing online has shown just how deep a game it is, even compared to one that is so deliberately tough to master as its sequel. People know every in and out of every character and move, and some of the high-level players you’ll meet online can completely humble you, switching styles as they go and thrashing you, even with characters that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Even after all these years I can’t work out how to effectively play as a ‘charge’ character like Guile, and yet I can go online and be routinely humiliated by one of them. Such is life…

It seems like HD Remix has been timed to hype up a certain other fighting game due in February, and if that was indeed one of its purposes it’s worked with me. The previews are coming out and suggesting that the talk about Street Fighter IV going back to the deep yet accessible roots of Street Fighter II, appealing in the process to both the hardcore and casual fans – that’s ‘casual’ in the old sense, not the ‘plays Imagine Party Babyz’ kind – may actually be true. While that ‘back to basics’ marketing trick has lost its power not to make me suspicious after its repeated use on Sonic games, there just isn’t a better foundation for a fighting game than this.

Because of this, no matter how good SFIV ends up being, it won’t be its immediate predecessor that it’s held up against. Aiming to succeed Street Fighter II is ambitious, given that even the best new fighting games struggle to be played for three years, let alone seventeen, but again, this is the sheet to crib from. I hope it succeeds, and I bought an arcade stick as evidence of my faith – okay, so HD Remix had something to do with it as well – but I have my suspicions as to which Street Fighter I’ll still be buying with each new generation when 2025 rolls around.

It wasn’t to be, of course, either that day with the disappointing Japanese launch games, or indeed ever, but I couldn’t let the tenth anniversary of one of the greatest systems ever made pass without a mention. Virtua Fighter 3tb, Godzilla Generations, and Pen Pen TriIcelon might not have done it for me, but at that point we were only six months from the Japanese release of Soul Calibur, which would be the one to break my resistance and buy the little white machine that would outlast the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube in enjoying a dedicated spot among my currently active consoles.

I really think it goes without saying that the Dreamcast is pretty much unparalleled for a library of innovative, technically impressive – for the time, obviously – games. It had a network connection as standard three years before the Xbox and four years before Xbox Live, and used it – some of the time with voice chat, no less – in games like Quake III, Alien Front Online, Unreal Tournament, and, of course, Phantasy Star Online: a game so good that Sega still can’t repeat its magic formula. And with 480p VGA and 60Hz PAL games as standard – how long did it take for all major PS2 games to be full-screen/full-speed over here again? – it’s one of the few retro consoles that will actually look good on an HDTV.

It was the hardcore gamer’s dream system; a haven for arcade-perfect 2D fighters - Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, most of SNK’s library – and scrolling shoot-em-ups, a genre that is still getting commercial homebrew releases today. RPGs were represented with such fine and diverse examples as Skies of Arcadia, Grandia II, and the aforementioned PSO. The only properly good 3D Sonic game. Soul Calibur. Ports of some of Sega’s latter-day arcade classics like Crazy Taxi, Sega Rally 2, The House of the Dead 2, and Ferrari F355 Challenge. Virtua Tennis and the 2K series if you were into sports. Great and innovative games like Rez, Jet Set Radio, Seaman, Chu Chu Rocket, Power Stone, Segagaga, Space Channel 5… Traditional genres represented by the likes of Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Metropolis: Street Racer, Sega GT… I could go on reminiscing about the games on that box for hours.

And, of course, my favourite game ever: Shenmue. A moment of silence, please.

…

But we shouldn’t mope. Despite its fate at the hands of that fucking air-conditioning unit lookalike with its jaggy graphics and dearth of good games – not that I’m still bitter – it remains a console that can and should be played. Assuming you still have your Dreamcast, as every self-respecting gamer should, stick it on tonight and have a play at one of your favourites that you might not have touched in a while. I plan to have a crack at finishing Shenmue for the first time in a couple of years over the weekend, and even with these shiny new games coming out on a daily basis at the moment, I’m going to love it all over again.