Man that was short. Barely 90 minutes. Got this as a free download for the 3DS for registering enough games on Club Nintendo although it was originally a part of the small and exclusive DSiWare series. These Mario and Donkey Kong games have been evolving since the new Donkey Kong back in 1994 (which is still my favourite) but I think it's gone too far now with only the Minis and no actual Mario in it now. Fun enough, but gone too far from the original now and has declined a bit. Decent enough but I was expecting it to be more like the Minis game on GBA.

Don't know why this got such a slating in the reviews. It was nowhere near as bad as it was said to be in all the reviews. It wasn't stellar either but it was fun for what it was: a simple 3rd person shooter with a Left 4 Dead ish co-operative element to it based in the Resident Evil universe. It was cool to see events happening in Resident Evil 2 from a different perspective, but it did seem to make all of the situations much more intense with way more enemies. There were some complete canon shattering moments though (mostly the ending) but it was still enjoyable zombie murdering action while it lasted (it was very short). Only complaints would be that it needs to make it more obvious when you're about to die and it needs some kind of quick jump/dodge maneuver to get out of the way of shit. But all in all definitely worth a shot for fans of Resident Evil. It probably just got chewed to bits because with a franchise as old as Resident Evil a lot is expected of it now and it didn't fill all of these expectations. But it does not deserve the thrashing it got.

Bought this in...2008 I think (5 years ago now) after playing PGR 3 and enjoying it. This was pretty much more of the same. But it doesn't look as good as I remember it doing....maybe my visual standards have been raised with the years of PC gaming. This had the same unusual halfway point of handling between arcade and simulation that PGR 3 had. Not quite hard enough to control to be a simulation but not quite easy enough to control to be an arcade game. Fun for a while, but the career mode sure felt like it was dragging towards the end because of the weird points ranking system where the other racers on the board would keep getting more points so it ended up taking much longer than expected.

Wow. Hardly know where to begin. Approximately 4,000,000,000 % better than the previous entry. No more tedious grinding for respect. No more crap boring missions. No more scrounging for cash and guns and vehicles. Respect is not needed, cash, guns and vehicles all come easily allowing you to focus on just having lots of fun. Pretty much every mission was just rampant insane mad cap chaos. And lots of fun. The only possible exceptions were the activity tutorials which were dressed up as minor missions but they were still fun too to just do once.

Lots of voice talent too including Hulk Hogan, Jessie Ventura and of course, Mayor Burt Reynolds. Everything is vastly improved over the old game including vehicle handling, shooting, combat (which is hilarious), flying, voice acting, script, plot, everything. Just everything. Just madness. This series has gone from being a boring GTA clone to realising what it should be and having it's volume turned up to 15 to just make it mad as hell. This is what games should be. Just non stop roller coaster rides of fun. And even better in co-op. Can't wait for the fourth.

Mother of arse, that was a long one. Been quite a while since I played a game of this length. And even longer since I last played a JRPG too.... Kind of rusty at them. This was made by a team that mostly consisted of old Final Fantasy developers and it definitely shows. To all intents and purposes, this was the true Final Fantasy XI. Everything after X started to suck after Square merged with Enix and the teams changed and they kept trying to make them different.

This was very much an old school JRPG. If anything it remineded me of Final Fantasy IV the most. So many nods and references and musical similarities and character similarities and on and on.

A very bitter-sweet tale filled with lots of grief and lots of happiness too. The sound novel elements telling the back story were also a very nice touch and were genuinely moving a lot of the time.

The game-play as mentioned is just like old school JRPGs only simplified a bit. Less equipment and weapons. Each person can only equip a few things. Which I think is better. There were some odd difficulty spikes at the beginning and at the end also. Needed a lot of grinding which I am not so keen on any-more. The plot itself was strange as far as these kind of games go though....I still don't feel it was explained very well even having finished it and it was left almost revealed right up until almost the end. And even at the end I feel it was only partially revealed and never really clarified. Despite this, still highly enjoyable 90% of the time and irritating 10% of the time. Got this back in 2008 when it first came out (5 years ago now). Good to finally put it to bed. And on the topic of bed: this totally and utterly freaking exhausted me.

Started this on 8th of December 2012. Took over 7.5 months to finish it on and off. Extremely slow start. Albeit not as slow as the first game which I abandoned completely out of sheer boredom. Not something I do too often. But it did pick up later on when the missions got more exciting. The developers seemed to slowly realise that they have to stop trying to be GTA and just be sheer nuts. Something which seems to have carried on to the 3rd and soon to be 4th games.

This was a decent enough sandbox shooter but felt like quite a lazy port and it was very hard to get the PC controls to sync up well to a keyboard or another controller. And as usual with games of this size and scope, it did have its fair share of bugs and glitches. But all that being said, once you got into the good missions, got good gear and vehicles and got some momentum going, it was a lot of fun moving through the missions and it did have a very good story involving the Saints taking over the town from 3 rival gangs and then a huge corporation. But far and away my biggest complaint was the padding used to make you require doing the optional side missions in order to earn the respect required to activate the main missions. So annoying. On to the next one in the series. It seems like it will be way less fluff and irritants and just much more madness.

Yup. Definitely a very large step up from the first entry. In every conceivable way imaginable. Graphics, scale of lunacy, scale of missions, cast, range of weapons and vehicles, and most important of all, the size of the sandbox. My god, the size of the sandbox. If I recall correctly, it was 30 km square. Definitely sounds right. While this gives a huge space to play in, it also means that you spend a very large portion of the game just travelling (mostly in helicopters) because again, fast travel options are quite limited.

That was the only real problem I had though because apart from that it was a lot of fun. Mostly due to the sheer lunacy of most of the operations like hijacking planes and vehicles while moving. And the ability to jump between vehicles to hijack them and the grappling hook that lets you move across terrain an a huge speed, climb things instantly, hijack vehicles and people and much much more. Lots of fun all round, but as with most games like this, there were quite a few duller filler missions. Would have preferred more insane epic ones. Also, I bought loads of DLC for this in the forms of special vehicles and guns but couldn't really use it much because I had to keep buying it again in game, the ammo runs out quickly and you have to keep re-buying the special guns and the average life of a vehicles in this game (even special ones) is about 49 seconds. Never mind the negatives. So much positives. So much madness. So much action and so much grappling.

Interesting little sandbox game. Got this as a present many years ago but only now getting round to playing it. Quite easy with the exception of a few serious difficulty wall missions. This game came out quite early in the 360's life (and also had PC and XBox ports) so the graphical quality was not great. One of the most touted features was the sheer size of the world. And it was indeed quite sizeable. But there were not a great many fast travel methods so a lot of the game was spent just getting to the next point. Got fairly repetitive around the middle, but the ending was very epic. The sequel is meant to be a big step up. I will now find out.

Another long forgotten entry from the vast backlog. This is from 2003 (10 years ago now) which was played briefly when it first came out and now finished. A charming little Mario RPG game, but I still think the Paper Mario series is more enjoyable. My main complain in this one is that the counter attacks were quite difficult to execute as well as figure out and the cost of not regularly performing them correctly would be quite high. Quite a lot of grinding was involved to get to the levels required to progress a few times. But apart from these rather unpleasent difficulty spikes, it was overall a very enjoyable trip through the bean bean kingdom. But still probably not good enough to warrant me playing more in this series sadly.

Spin off of the Guitar Hero series only using a turntable instead of a guitar. Fun enough for a while, but got old fairly quick. Quicker than the Guitar Heroes did sadly. Mixing just ain't as fun as strumming.

Very old Atari ST game that I didn't think I had finished before, but it turns out I probably had cause it was only 15 minutes long and not very hard. Just driving round town either escaping cops or busting crims. Fun enough considering the technical limits, but runs out of steam quickly. Good thing it was short, I guess.

Offered to take this game off someone who was giving it away and for the life of me, can't remember why....Never been that fond of World War 2 games. And case in point, this one was just okay. It had a few epic set-pieces that were cool but overall will be fairly forgettable and the bits in between the epic set pieces felt like they dragged a lot. Overall felt quite long too. Longer than it needed to be. Still, another tiny piece chipped off the backlog.

Side note: This was also the 100th game I have finished in 2013. Making good progress this year!

Brilliant adventure across a zombie infected America based on the classic Oregon Trail. Captures the necessity of balancing supplies and risks in the situation very well. The purposefully clunky combat controls make you think hard about what you should and should not risk. Loved the presentation and especially very fitting music. Only complaint would be the total absurdity of some of the event that happen along the way. Zombies trying to grab you and taking tyres by accident? Fine. Cans of gas falling out of the car? I guess. People breaking bones just by sitting in a car? Unlikely. I liked a lot of the references to other zombie games too particularly in the pictures of the major stops like Left 4 Dead and Zombies ate my Neighbours. Highly reccommended and at a little over 2 hours long for the main campaign you'd have to be mad not to.

Yet another ancient entry played for maybe an hour when I first got it in 2004 (9 years ago now) and finally cleared off the backlog. Initially tried to play the improved port on PC, but could not get it to run so just decided to go with XBox after that. Which was better I suppose because I still had my save a few chapter in.

Overall a very tidy little game. Have a feeling it ran on the Doom 3 engine or something very similar to it cause visually it is strikingly similar. I did have an unusual problem in that all the visuals were extremely blocky. Don't know if this was an XBox thing or if I had some other problem but it didn't hamper me too much. Lots of interesting mechanics in this game such as the shining eyes, good mix of stealth and combat and well though out paths through the escape of the prison. Overall was quite easy though but definitely more enjoyable than I was expecting. And of course, the charm and charisma of Vin Diesel was a big part of it too.

This DLC episode kind of just suddenly was launched out of nowhere. It serves as a prelude to the second season. More of the usual Walking Dead stuff with an interesting twist this time: depending on how you play the 5 different characters, they may or may not split up at the end, which I'm assuming will affect how the second season plays out. All in all a nice prologue to the new series. And exceedingly short. Which isn't always a bad thing.

Epic conclusion to the story. If a little bit of a cliffhanger. The progress of hardware again allowed the progress of the game engine and combat in this entry was much slicker and faster. Sadly, as a result, the platforming was made almost face-eatingly difficult at times due to the static camera angles. There was again, a lot of retreading of environments in this game again and at points it felt like it was being padded artificially. But I didn't mind because it was just so awesome through and through. Glad to have this series done and still don't know why I put it off for so long....might have been because I got stuck so much in the original Soul Reaver I thought it would prove tiresome. How wrong I was. Epic music, epic story and all around awesome. Hope they revive this series like some of the rumours I have been hearing.

Mad as a cat in a hat. And tough as nails. Especially towards the end where the difficulty curve hit a wall. Eagerly anticipated this ever since playing Castle Crashers but for the life of me could not figure out what the hell kind of game it was. This mystery remained right until I actually got to play it. And it did not disappoint. Behemoth put their usually zany humour into it, especially the narration between chapters which is probably some of the funniest I've heard in any game ever. All round top notch co-op action. If a little frustratingly difficult in places. But still awesome through and through. More please, Behemoth.

Another epic entry in the Legacy of Kain series. The story, while awesome and circular referencing back to itself a lot (due to much time travel and paradoxes) is also quite mind bending at times.

Thanks to the power of the Playstation 2, this entry was technically much superior to the previous one, but maintained all the good parts too. Very theatric and well voiced again. The combat did seem trickier, or maybe just more awkward, but there were only a handful of bosses this time and all right at the end rather than periodic ones like in the previous game. This entry was much more puzzle based and it seems "The Bosses" were actually just small dungeons that you had to figure out in order to get upgrades. One small complaint I have is that there was butt loads of back tracking and re-treading. There were maybe only 6 main areas or so and you visited each at least 3 times, sometimes more so by the time you were a third or so into the game, you had seem almost all the landscape there was to see and would only see it altered slightly from that point on. Hard to tell if this was due to intent, laziness, time constraints or technical constraints such as memory or storage. Never the less a truly epic title that again I'm not sure why I put it off for so long. On to the final and hopefully epic conclusion of this tale....

Wowzers. Got this when it first came out in 1999 (14 years ago now) but didn't get too far due to frustration from clunky controls and uncertainty on how to progress. Wish I had stuck at it because once getting into it proper it was amazing. Clever puzzles, fun combat, interesting mirror world dynamic and fascinating well written story full of twists and turns. Despite the hardware limitations of the time it actually was a very well put together game and just lots of fun to go through and watch events dripping in irony and poetry unravel. Can't wait to get into the other 2 games.

Decent enough shooter. If a tad generic. One of the 360's launch titles. I remember seeing it being played early after the consoles launch, and subsequently got it on PC, but never got into it myself. Until now. The most memorable thing I saw at the time was the awesome opening where the aliens rip open the bar to the background music of "Don't Fear the Reaper". One of the best game intros ever. Fairly standard FPS action. The most remarkable things about it I would say are the amazing set pieces and architecture. Just ended up taking screenshot after screenshot of them. I was kind of tempted to scratch this one from my list because I didn't think it would really be worth playing. After having played it, I could have probably lived with myself having done that. Seems they really wanted a sequel and I have heard whisperings of it from time to time. But now, 7 years on and still no sequel, it seems unlikely to happen.