It’s 1999 and the earth is under attack by aliens. Fortunately there’s a United Nations funded defense force known as X-Com who are equipped to deal with the invaders. And fortunately for X-Com, you’re in charge. Defend your homeworld and beat back the aliens. Mulder and Scully only wish they had these sort of resources!

UFO was a a turn based strategy and tactics affair. The main game required you to take control of a squad of soldiers who would deal with crashed UFOs or, rather, UFOs that you’d shot down. As well as eliminating any aliens that survived the crash, capturing live specimens and retrieving any weapons or equipment was also prudent as they could be researched back at your base and reverse engineered to provide better weapons and gear for your team. Clever, huh?
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Beneath A Steel Sky is, for me, all about the story. It’s a cyberpunk tale about an abducted man struggling to find answers in a futuristic and typically dystopian city. B.A.S.S. is a graphic adventure and despite being a relatively mature and sombre title taking place in a dark and fantastically envisioned setting, it is still a comedy at heart and is brim full of subtle humour, taking it’s cues from such luminaries as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. Like other graphic adventures, it’s also loaded with pop-culture references; everything from Mad Max to Doctor Who, William Gibson to Friedrich Nietzsche.

You play the protagonist, Robert Foster (so called because he was “fostered” by aborigines who also stumbled on the label from a Fosters beer bottle - it makes sense) who finds himself in Union City along with this robotic pal Joey and not much else. It’s fairly standard cyberpunk thriller fare - people mistake him for someone else, there’s an all knowing AI that runs the city and may or may not have Fosters best interests at heart and there’s a nightclub scene - de rigeur for all cyberpunk ventures. If the game were to take itself seriously, it would probably have been quite poor but it doesn’t and it isn’t.
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Syndicate is the first game on the list that I would love to make a film of. Yes, yes, I know - films of games are shite but as I always witter on to anyone who’s listening, they don’t have to be. A film of Syndicate could be utter shit, of course, but only if they tried to make it like the game rathe than use it as inspiration.

Syndicate is yet another controversial game in large part to the graphic displays of violence that, for the most part, you initiate. Okay, so that’s nothing new but in most games, violence is normally enacted on very obvious baddies - in Syndicate, anyone is fair game: enemy agents, police or random civilians wandering around the cityscape. What’s more, you don’t get penalized for it: it’s collateral damage, unfortunate but acceptable, regrettable but necessary. As the man said, you can’t make an omlette without cracking a few eggs and if you don’t have what it takes, you’ll never make it to the top.
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Hired Guns was a futuristic RPG that, in the style of the 1987 game Dungeon Master, showed the action via a first person perspective viewport. (Although earlier games such as Bard’s Tale and Ultima had done this, Dungeon Master was, to my knowledge, the first to eschew a turn-based game for a realtime approach as adopted by later games such as Eye of the Beholder it’s various rip-offs). What set Hired Guns apart, however, was that it provided a single viewport for each member of your four strong squad, allowing them to do their own thing and several of the puzzles required co-operation between 2 or more of the squad.

The reason this game made my top 20 is mostly because of nostalgia and associated memories. I remember playing this over a quiet christmas break listening to Butthole Surfers and Foetus (which I had just been introduced to). That’s not to say that I don’t remember anything about the game although it’s the best part of 15 years since I played it. A lot of inspiration came from the movie Aliens - which is no bad thing - even down to the monsters that not only hatched from egg-type things but also looked a lot like albino versions of H.R. Giger’s famous creation (but nothing like the Newborn in Alien Resurrection I hasten to add). Your arsenal even included automated sentry guns which were much more useful to you than they were to the survivors on LV-426.
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Another World is the first game that I played that left me stunned as the ending sequence played out. The story told is about an experimental physicist who has an accident while playing with a particle accelerator during a lightning storm and finds himself transported to another world. Which is mega convenient as that happens to be the title of the game too. The new world he finds himself in is unsurprisingly alien and predictably hostile, populated as it is by feral slinkies, rabid dog-creatures, man-eating plants and large, pink, golem types.

The beauty of the game came from its cinematic nature. The graphics were simple but effective and the animation was superb - especially the lead character which had been rotoscoped from the movements of a real human. The gameplay itself was largely a mystery in so far that you had basic movements to learn (left, right, jump, crouch, run, hit) but occasionally you’d find yourself in situations where you’d have to think a little outside the box (or, in one case, inside the box) and work out how to apply those same movements to a problem. While a puzzle might stump at first, thinking about how you might solve it in real life often helps.
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Things start to get more interesting now. I spent a fair amount of the 80s playing arcade shoot-em-up games on my faithful CPC with the odd puzzler and platform game thrown in for variety. In about 1991/1992, I upgraded to an Amiga 500+¹ and discovered the joy of games that strong characters and involving narrative, mostly provided by graphic adventure games. The market leader of this genre was, without doubt, Lucasarts - the gaming arm of George Lucas’ mighty empire.

One of Lucasarts’ early highpoints was “Monkey Island 2 - LeChuck’s Revenge”, the sequel to the fantastic 1990 game “The Secret of Monkey Island” and created by the great Ron Gilbert. Both games centre on a wannabe pirate named Guybrush Threepwood, the beautiful, intelligent and impossibly charming governor of Mêlée Island, Elaine Marley and Guybrush’s erstwhile nemesis, the ghostly pirate LeChuck. If these characters sound vaguely familiar to anyone who’s seen any of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, you wouldn’t be far wrong. There is an enormous similarity between the two and it’s not a huge stretch of even a severely dehabilitated and limited imagination to consider that the first film is actually an adaptation of a Monkey Island game.
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A last minute change to this 1986 entry sees me choose a little known and slightly controversial game. Zoids were a range of toys that were (and, in fact, still are) popular in Japan and surfaced for a couple of years in Europe too. In essence they were mecha dinosaurs that came in little construction kits and the smaller ones were powered by a rather ineffectual wind-up motor. Larger models, such as the Zoidzilla and Redhorn the terrible models, were battery powered and had flashing lights and everything. You won’t be surprised to learn that I thought they were great.
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My first encounter with any type of electronic thinking machine was when my primary school bought a BBC Micro B computer. This would have been back in about 1983/84. It wasn’t until I got to my secondary school that I was introduced to the legendary game of Elite.

Elite was an open ended, sandbox type space-simulation game. The player would start as Commander Jameson with a paltry sum of 100 credits and his trusty Cobra Mk III spacecraft. From there he could engage in trading, bounty hunting or pirating in order to make more money and upgrade the components on his ship (although you could never trade in the ship itself). Destroying other ships earned you ranks with the ultimate one being, appropriately, Elite. While it wasn’t the first game of it’s kind, Elite was the forefather of just about every subsequent space trading game developed since 1984.
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In the year that Return of the Jedi was released, Atari also put out a licensed game based on George Lucas’ famous trilogy. Star Wars was a simple, vector graphics based shooter focussing entirely on the final assault on the Death Star. After an initial approach, destroying TIE fighters and their “fireballs”, the game proceded to a surface attack on the Death Star with a final run down the infamous trench. If you managed to shoot your torpedos down the exhaust port (oo-er!) you got to go again but the challenge would increase - such as more turrets on the surface attack, and increased barriers in the trench run.

As a young boy obssessed with Star Wars, this game was simply fantastic. It was the first (but by no means the last) time I could indulge my dream of flying a Star Wars spaceship. Alright, so it was only a poxy X-Wing (even at the tender age I was, I already had a fascination for the Dark Side and would much rather have been Darth Vader) but nevertheless. If you were lucky enough to find a full seater cabinet, like the one pictured, then you could immerse yourself fully in the fantasy while your mates would watch over your shoulder.
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Seeing as it’s that time of year, the gaming site F13 is putting together a list of the top games as suggested by the registered members of the forums. People are simply being asked to nominate their top 20 games as they see them and the lists will be collated and random hypotheses will be deduced from the results.

I’m nowhere near as hardcore a gamer as some of the people on the site (some of whom are actual game developers so it’s fairly reputable) as I’ve always had multiple hobbies and interests on the go at once. Plus I’m obviously more of a film whore than gamer slut although I doubt I could do the same task (and nowhere near as quickly) for a top 20 list of movies although that would be a challenge. There weren’t many rules to the process: any format was allowed, including arcade, but you were only allowed to choose one game from a series. Fortunately that wasn’t too much of a hinderance.

I’m not going to publish the list here though - well, not yet anyway. I’ve decided that, seeing as we’re now in Advent, the list will make a suitable series of posts to cover the next few weeks (which I can also write in advance, leaving me time to concentrate on some other things without feeling like I’m neglecting the post count here!) wherein I can count down my list and talk about the game in question. The only disclaimer I make in advance is that it won’t be a countdown to the best game as I see it but a chronological list.

If you do play games, feel free to think about your own list (although a post a day is not necessary) and blog it if you like.