minus zero

Lander is, I believe, the first game I ever played. Calling it a game is a bit of a misnomer, perhaps, as it was really just a tech demo that was put together to show off the graphical prowess of the Acorn Archimedes. However, trying to explain that to my 8-year old self would have been a hard task, given the sheer amount of joy I got out of flying this little space ship around a rough-and-ready 3D terrain and blowing up trees and buildings. The game was notoriously difficult to control - you tilted the craft with the mouse and engaged the underbelly thruster with the middle mouse button, but the slightest twitch in the wrong direction or misjudged boost would send you crashing to the ground - but once mastery was achieved, you would be the envy of your friends who looked on in awe (silently hoping that you'd crash soon so they could have a turn).

Moving forward a decade and a bit, this is perhaps an obvious choice but the GTA series are all fantastically well-executed, IV especially so. I've always been a PC gamer, but I couldn't help but join the console crowd when this was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 without a release date for the PC version anywhere on the horizon. The tipping point came when I realised I'd have to spend about the same to upgrade my PC to be able to play this game as it cost in a 360 bundle deal from Play, so I took the plunge.

There's not a lot I can say about this game that hasn't already been put far more eloquently by others, and a Metacritic score of 98 (at the time of writing) speaks for itself.

Putting two games together is perhaps cheating a little, but they're so tightly intertwined in my memory that separating them wouldn't be right. Both old platformers, both brilliant fun and both a great way to introduce my 8-year old self to 'proper' gaming. Many an hour was spent staring at the screen whilst my characters ran around collecting crystals, power-ups, jumping on bad guys and completely failing to understand the more intricate plot twists and subtle humour intended for the game's more grown-up audience.

In some ways, these games were more than mere entertainment, they were my introduction to computers and how they worked. cd, diring my way around the floppy disks' directory structure and tweaking settings in the games' configuration files piqued my interest in how it all worked behind the scenes, and it was only a couple of years later that I was writing my own programs in GW-BASIC.

No 'best games evar!' list would be complete without a nod to the epic created by Valve Software and its subsequent episodes. The original Half-Life was a phenomenal game so of course all eyes were on Valve to come up with something that surpassed that game's greatness. Of course, those geniuses pulled it off with aplomb. Never a dull moment in the game, and 3.5 years later the game looks fantastic as ever.

The deathmatch component, while taking a little longer to appear than people had hoped, is an absolute blast, and cutting people down by launching office furniture or broken toilet bowls at them never fails to bring a huge grin to my face.

Warcraft II was a fantastic game, the multiplayer especially, but Starcraft improved upon it in just about every way possible. I'll admit that I never really got into the single player mode, but that was purely because I spent so many hours playing multiplayer with friends. It came along at just the right time - all my friends had PCs capable of playing the game, and we were at the age when there was nothing more exciting than congregating at one house and spending all weekend playing the game across a hastily-cobbled together LAN. Here's hoping Starcraft II is able to live up to the reputation of its predecessor (all signs point to 'yes', it seems).