I see a lot of people who have a problem with paying the price of a console game for a handheld game but I have no problem with that at all. Why? For some reason I find handheld games much easier to play for long periods of time.

I love a good adventure, but despite this I’ve never finished a traditional console RPG. I’d put Skies of Arcadia, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy IX in amongst my favourite games of all time, but I have saves for all of them abandoned around the 20-25 hour mark. On the other hand you can give me a GBA or DS RPG and I still might not finish it but I’ll almost certainly come close, usually stopping when I get stuck on a difficult final boss.

The only reason I can really think of is that, like when I preferred Animal Crossing on a handheld, I just don’t want to be tied to the television. When I get into a handheld game like I am now with FFIV and was recently with Fire Emblem I’ll be taking it literally everywhere and get a few minutes in wherever I can. For some people the quick fix games are what they want in a handheld game (not that I don’t love those too), but I love something on them that I can really get my teeth into.

This seems like a weird thing to be talking about but FFIV really got me thinking about it. While the ongoing success of the DS might be encouraging developers to focus on the quick fixes, but I hope they keep the long and engrossing adventures coming to portables.

How about FFVII on the PSP? Then I might actually finish it and use my PSP.

A lot has been said by various people more qualified than me about the short attention spans of much of the gaming community, as it certainly seems to account for how certain companies can sell the same people the same game year after year for £40 a pop. That’s one thing, but what’s of more concern to me, especially in light of certain criticisms of the Xbox 360 launch and its place in the upcoming generation of consoles, is the complete lack of memory that people seem to have for the PR rubbish that’s thrown around at this time in a gaming generation.

This phenomenon first became apparent to me in the run-up to the launch of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories on the PSP. Right up until the launch of the game there was next to no screenshots or previews and on forums across the Internet this led to mass outcrys that the game must be delayed and would never make it out in a week from then. That would seem logical, after all.

It would seem logical, but there was the fact that the exact same thing happened with GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas. GTA3 had little hype, and the others revealed little except some official screenshots and Internet reviews a couple of days either side of release. Rockstar PR can just sit back and see it populate the front pages of every letters page and forum while preparing their money bags and people fall for it every time.

More recently, and perhaps more relevantly, I’ve been looking at the brewing and inevitable Xbox 360 vs PlayStation 3 debate. First of all there’s the number of people critical of the games at launch and that it doesn’t bode well for the system – the PS2 basically had Ridge Racer V, Tekken Tag Tournament, and Fantavision. None of those looked any better than anything on the Dreamcast at the time, and I didn’t see anything that I’d even consider buying a PS2 for until Zone of the Enders which came out a year after launch. While the 360 doesn’t have its Halo yet, PGR3, COD2, and Perfect Dark Zero are far more worthy than what the PS2 had.

Now there’s Sony’s rhetoric around the PS3. They’ve said it can output a 1080p signal on two TVs (that’s just not going to happen), run games at 120fps (no TVs can even display that rate), and most seem to think that it’s going to be significantly more powerful than the 360. How does it do this when, looking at a specs comparison, the CPUs are the same speed, it has less memory, a smaller CPU cache, and the GPU is only 50MHz faster (that’s less than a Nintendo DS). I’m not naive enough to think, and indeed I know that 3.2GHz for one CPU type does not equal 3.2GHz for another, but the difference won’t be night and day.

The PS3 is supposed to be out in Japan in the Spring, so we’re talking four or five months away from now. How come, then, have they only shown us tech demos? Killzone was a prerendered concept and MGS4, though real-time, wasn’t a game. It probably will look that good, but it’s not coming for a couple of years yet and they have implement little things like AI. I’m sure they’ll manage it, but it’s not going to look as impressive as it does now in two years when we’re playing second or third generation 360 games.

So how does this relate to memory spans of the gaming community? I seem to remember the hype for the PlayStation 2 which promised it would be the entertainment hub of your home, that it would blow away all existing gaming systems graphically, that it could render Toy Story and the Final Fantasy VIII ballroom scene in real-time, etc. Then it came out and the entertainment hub-ness was limited to poor DVD playback, the initial games had nothing on the Dreamcast (by later in life the Xbox was ahead graphically anyway), and I haven’t seen anything close to CGI quality. In fact the only things on the PS2 that are close to what they promised are, surprise surprise, the prerendered tech demos.

I’m not here to be a fanboy and say that Sony is teh d00m3d or anything like that, but we have to be aware of things like this that are going on all the time. The companies certainly know about it and are more than willing to exploit it, so we need to be cynical about some of this stuff and not bend over and take it. I’m not going to and I hope that more other people will choose not to as well.

A slight deviation of subject matter for me, but I enjoyed putting together my top ten games enough to decide to do the same thing with films. I spend most of my time on this site talking about games and indeed I spend most of my time actively in that community, but film is very much my second passion. I have a pretty extensive DVD collection (growth has stalled slightly since I started saving for Japan, but at one point I was spending most of my income on it) and I see most of the big theatrical releases on opening night.

My enjoyment of games and movies ebb and flow together, and when I’m tapped out on one the other inevitably provides my entertainment fix. Like games, I try to enjoy the classics as much as the modern stuff and I like to think that my favourites strike a nice balance, even if I do have a weakness for creative direction.

1. Trainspotting – I said I liked creative direction, didn’t I? What I’m not usually a fan of is dance music and narcotics which Trainspotting is full of, but I still enjoy it more than any other film because of how well the aesthetics gel to create something that never gets tired to watch. It also deserves credit for its protrayal of the drug culture: it tackles this touchy subject in a totally non-judgemental way, really showing all sides of it. You see Renton’s lows but also, perhaps more uniquely, his highs, showing that for all their bad parts you can have a good time on drugs. It’s not glorified (he does crawl down a shitty toilet, after all), but it’s given a fair crack.
2. Pulp Fiction – The first of the directors who has to be on everyone’s favourites list (™), this is still Tarantino’s best. Everyone knows what makes it so great – Tarantino dialogue, the music, effortlessly cool performances from the whole cast, and some good old fashioned violence. It’s totally entertaining every time you watch it and has completely permeated the same culture that it analyses, teaching most of us what a gimp is and what they call a Quarter Pounder in France.
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day – T2 made two significant contributions to the Hollywood blockbuster. Firstly, it showed how CGI could be use to accomplish things that simply couldn’t be done with any other media. I could probably write pages on how good a thing that was, but T2 itself is up there with Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings as examples of how it should be used. Secondly, it showed that a movie could have bombastic and thrilling action scenes, big guns, chases, and quotable catch phrases but still be intelligent. The first two of the Terminator series, like James Cameron had done with the Alien series with Aliens, showed that similar material could be done in totally opposing ways and still become defining examples of the genre.
4. Fight Club – The direction thing strikes again. Riding 1999’s wave of millennial paranoia into one of the best modern movies around, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton are absolutely blinding form as the unnamed narrator (did I spoil something there?) watching as a simple alternative therapy morphs into the destruction of civilisation as we know it. Most people remember the first time they saw this, when either the fact that it wasn’t just bare-knuckle brawling disarmed them and the ending delivered the killing blow, and repeat viewings are an absolute must so that you can see just how obvious it was all along. The second time it’s a whole different movie, changing Marla from a clingy neurotic to someone who was just as confused as we were.
5. Jaws – Following Quentin comes Steven as the one who has to be on the list. With Jaws he managed to crash the economy of various beach resorts and, more importantly, almost create the modern summer blockbuster. Arguably he’s done nothing better since, either. Everything Jaws does is done nearly perfectly, and so much of it can be seen in every monster movie since – you barely see the thing that you’re scared of until the end, the characters have great rapport which makes for one of the best third acts you’ll ever see. You know that a film is good when something that, in my opinion at least, was very much inspired by it, Alien, almost makes it into the top ten itself.
6. The Lion King – Disney have animated films that are considered better, but in my opinion The Lion King is their absolute best. It’s just Hamlet mixed with Bambi (maybe a dash of Jungle Emperor Leo, depending on who you ask), but in a mere 80 minutes it takes you on a wonderful journey through the whole spectrum of emotions, put onto the screen via some of the most beautiful hand-drawn animation ever. I don’t think that CGI or live action could make Africa look this beautiful in a film of this kind. The score also deserves mention, as I consider it Hans Zimmer’s best – it never fails to give me goosebumps during Simba’s ascension at the end.
7. Spirited Away – I don’t know anyone who’s seen this and not loved it, even those who claim to hate anime (isn’t that like saying you hate live action films?). This is proof that traditional animation isn’t dead, and I don’t believe that Disney can distribute this and still want to close down their own animation wing. Miyazaki takes a basic shell of a story and fills it out with almost nothing but spectacle – you can’t find a common thread to the design at all – without making it seem pointless. It just takes you back to being a kid again when the plain weird stuff just seemed to make sense.
8. The Empire Strikes Back – Who hasn’t seen this? Every list needs a Star Wars and unsurprisingly I think this is the best. It’s just plain better than the other two in the OT and is leagues ahead of the shitty prequels, just by taking everything you love, making it much darker (when that was a good thing; not an excuse for a crap comic adaptation), and then putting all the characters into a worse situation than you’d ever think they’d dare to. No happy Hollywood endings here – Han’s gone, Luke’s had his universe shaken to its foundations, Yoda and Obi-Wan think that their last hope is gone, and for a while it looks like the Empire might actually win. It really shows how utterly crap I-III were.
9. Monty Python and the Holy Grail – No question, this is the funniest film ever made. Some people seem to think that Life of Brian is better, but they’re wrong. This one just makes Arthurian legend into a total joke with barely any possible gag missed. Get together two people who’ve even only seen it once and watch them spend hours just quoting lines and laughing themselves silly at their favourite scenes – The Black Knight, The Knights of Ni, Tim the Enchanter, the killer rabbit, the French insults, and even the opening credits. Pure comedic brilliance.
10. The Truman Show – You either love Jim Carrey or hate him, but whether you enjoy his rubber-faced mugging in his usual comedies you have to give him credit for his more serious performances, both in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I think Truman is the better of the two because I love the premise which is perhaps more pertinent today than it was back in 1998 as reality TV becomes ever more widespread and more invasive. I always seem to be able to find something in the movie that I missed the last time, from a new product placement to creative camera placement. And who can forget the ending? It’s hugely emotive and, like when you watch Apollo 13 and wonder if they’re going to appear through the clouds at the end, you can’t help but wonder if he’s going to stay or go.

So there you have it, about three days after I started writing it. Once again I welcome your feedback.

In case I don’t see you…good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.

Reading through and disagreeing with large amounts of IGN’s Top 100, I was inspired to come up with my top ten games ever. IGN’s is one of the better lists I’ve seen (infinitely better than their abysmal readers’ list where people apparently couldn’t remember beyond six months ago), but anything like this is hugely subjective so nobody’s going to agree completely.

Making a list like this is always something that I always find very difficult. You have to come up with an initial list and then whittle it down to ten before you can then arrange them into an order of preferences, and inevitably you find games that you’d dearly love to give this little bit of recognition to, but I guess you have to break some eggs. Halo, Skies of Arcadia, Call of Duty, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the glorious multiplayer component, at least) are all deserving but ultimately had to be trimmed.

Anyway, without further ado…

1. Super Metroid (SNES) – Simply my favourite game ever, without a doubt. It’s a massive game with a ton of stuff to find and it still looks great today when you see the enormous, screen-filling bosses like Kraid, drawn beautifully in detailed and vivid sprites. More than that it’s simply fun to play, whether for a quick blast or a long session spent exploring the planet’s nooks and crannies. As good as subsequent titles like Fusion and the 3D Prime series have been, I doubt that they’ll ever recapture the synergy that this game has going inside that little cart.
2. Shenmue (Dreamcast) – A lot of people hate this game, some didn’t think it was anything special, but there are still few games that have such a passionate community clamouring for some resolution to the series and reminiscing about good times spent playing it. I’m a card-carrying member of this community and enjoy few things more than exploring Yu Suzuki’s wonderful recreation of 1980s Japan. There are now better looking games but I can’t think of any that have such a sense of place and atmosphere, brought to life in some beautiful artistry and a stunningly evocative soundtrack. Now give us Shenmue III…please?
3. Tetris DX (Game Boy Color) – Tetris is as ubiquitous to most gamers as a controller and Tetris DX, the Game Boy Color’s big draw, is the best version ever made. It didn’t make the mistake that subsequent versions have made by overcomplicating the near-perfect Tetris formula. The splash of colour and inobtrusive animation added some welcome visual sparkle (aided by the sharp screen of the GBC) and the inertia was tweaked until it could almost be played on reflex. It didn’t have that iconic music from the original, but I can forgive that when this game still keeps me going back and gives my GBA SP more playtime than my DS.
4. Chrono Trigger (SNES) – This one is one of the staples of most “best game ever” lists and when playing it it’s easy to see why. Akira Toriyama’s designs are translated into some gorgeous artwork and some of the most recognisable themes around, but underneath this is a game that seamlessly mixes the best of Square’s turn-based RPGs and the likes of Zelda to create something unique. It might lose steam towards the end but repeat plays never get old.
5. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) – Who doesn’t have this in their list? Link made the transition to 3D better than anyone could have hoped for in a game that even today transcends its technical limits into an adventure that few can come close to. Probably Miyamoto’s most cinematic game, and frequently awe-inspiring.
6. Grand Theft Auto III (Xbox) – Probably the most influential title in a very long time, GTA3 shattered boundaries that most games considered insurmountable with an engrossing jump into the world of organised crime. The newer GTA games may have added more and be technically better, but they don’t match the first time you played this one and realised that you had a whole city to run around and raise hell in. I chose the Xbox one simply because of the tweaks and improvements over the PS2 version.
7. GoldenEye (Nintendo 64) – Probably the most influential FPS since Doom, it brought first-person gunplay into the living room and made it such a popular genre that it still won’t leave. Not only that, it proved that a movie adaption didn’t have to be a piece of crap that relied solely on its name to sell. Countless hours were spent playing and replaying the missions with new tasks and easter eggs to find on each difficulty and then, of course, that multiplayer mode. Is there anyone who didn’t love getting a group of friends together and cutting them down with a spray from the RCP-90? As Oddjob?
8. Counter-Strike (PC) – The fact that people still play this game religiously in its various guises should be some proof of just how much staying power it has. While Counter-Strike Source adds all kind of graphical hoo-ha I still prefer the tightly tweaked gameplay of the older CS1.6/Condition Zero. It took me weeks to get over the Everest-size learning curve but once you know the maps and the idiosyncrasies of the gameplay it becomes a game of skill where you know that the guy who keeps killing you is a better player that you’re going to have to work to beat. That, or he’s a cheating little bastard.
9. Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation) – One of the first “true” RPGs that I played, it wasn’t until fairly recently that a real love for FFVII really clicked with me. I never felt it was as much of a technical feat as it was hailed as at the time, but it still managed to bring to our consoles one of the best storylines in any medium coupled with classic RPG gameplay. It can be convoluted and hard to follow in places but everyone who plays it remembers those iconic moments – Sephiroth disappearing into the fires of Nibelheim, the escape from Midgar, and, of course, Aeris…
10. Street Fighter II Turbo (Arcade) – Fighting games have become exponentially more technically accomplished over the years but with very few exceptions the basic gameplay has barely moved at all beyond the cardinal rules that Capcom set down in Street Fighter II. Add in some extra speed and the ability to play as the bosses, and you get a near perfect example of the genre. It’s infinitely playable and exists to be mastered, with new combos and strategies to learn for all of the distinctive combatants. The gameplay has a balance between simplicity and complexity that allows for a continual learning curve that carries across all of the countless editions that I’ve bought over the years.

Well there you go. Some might be surprising, some not so, but those are my favourite games that I’ve ever played. I’ll be interested to hear any feedback that you might have because it took a bloody long time to put together.

Sony’s crusade against UK PSP importers continues with the news that they’re now after a list of consumers who bought import machines. They say it’s to do with trademarks and lost revenue, but I can’t remember a more blatant attempt to rip off the British gaming public than the PSP.

Why is it that we have to wait until almost a year after Japan and six months after the US, and pay a hell of a lot more for the privilege? The Japanese pay ¥19,800 (£99.49), the Americans complained that it was too expensive at $249 (£136.66), and so Sony sell it to us at £180 (not even counting the fact that ours will be made in Taiwan by people getting 10p/hour as opposed to the Japanese ones which are actually made in Japan). I know we pay more tax than they do, but not that much more. It’s daylight robbery when importers can bring them over themselves, add their sizable cut on top, and sell it for only £10 more than that. Is it any surprise that people are importing in such huge numbers?

If the price wasn’t insulting enough, it’s the same hardware as everywhere else. They don’t need to go out of their way to make a special PAL version just for us. Hell, they don’t even need to manufacture enough to meet demand since so we’ve all seen them on the shelves of American stores as sales fail to meet projections. They have stock there that can be flashed with UK firmware and put on the next flight here, and they’ve had it for months. There are plenty for the American and Japanese, and most import outlets here have sold hundreds each – more than they’re likely to even see on the UK launch.

As for the lost revenue argument, we all know that the current model within the industry is to sell the console at a loss and then make it up on £40-a-time software sales. Maybe I’m missing something here, but doesn’t the current model mean that SCEJ/SCEA are the ones who take that loss, and then when it comes out here SCEE are left to clean up, making pure profit off those importing early adopters who prefer the convenience of popping down to Game for the new release instead of ordering online and waiting for it to come halfway around the world. That seems like a pretty cushy situation, but apparently they prefer to take the loss. This suggests to me that the price has been bumped up over here simply for the sake of lining their pockets.

Perhaps Sony would also be interested to know that I know of at least three Sony sales reps who own imported PSPs. Maybe they should ask them why people are importing.