My Favourite Game

Ash Morgan (@Ranooth), Games Production Student, Hereford

My favourite game is Dungeon Keeper 2, released on the PC in 1999. 

“It’s good to be bad” – As a 10 year old kid I didn’t really understand this concept, but I bloody loved it!

Being brought up on a steady flow of strategy and action games centered around saving kingdoms and slaying dragons the idea of playing as the bad guy was totally alien to me. I had played the first game in the series but I didn’t feel like a badass, I just felt like I was fighting someone who was more evil than me. The second game in this awesome series changed that, I was taking on angelic knights and wise old wizards and spreading fear and terror throughout the land and enjoying every second of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t some twisted and dark child. I merely loved the brilliant blend of gameplay, strategy and dark humour.

Having already played a lot of strategy games the mechanics and concepts DK2 used were fresh and very enjoyable, although a core part of gameplay building up your dungeon was fun and never became a chore. I loved experimenting with different layouts and seeing how stylish I could make my dungeon look. I also used to build huge casinos to increase the chances of someone winning the jackpot and having all my creatures dance to “Disco Inferno”.

Likewise with building up your army of minions it was a fun task and never got too tedious or boring, the game encouraged you to experiment with various different tactics and methods of attacking the enemy.  

I loved the learning curve; I still think it’s perfect to this very day. You would be given a new room each mission and the game would show you how to use it and use it well, in the later levels you learnt how to master these rooms along with your creatures and spells to gain the advantage over your enemies. And boy did you need that advantage. End game missions would put you against several enemy keepers or armies of good guys. It sounds tough, and believe me it was but it was never unfair or annoying. You learnt from your mistakes, re-tweaked your strategy and hit that restart button.

The game was also packed with so much humour, Richard Ridings was a great narrator and mentor and I used to burst out laughing with his random sayings. The extra movies that played when completing a level were also hilarious.

I could go on for ages about how finely crafted the game is but to be honest the best way to see this is to play it. It still remains one of the greatest RTS games of our time, and not many games out there can reproduce the simple yet deep gameplay along with its brilliant content and comical themes.

Every single time I buy a new computer or re-format this is one of the first games to be installed and I do end up jumping on it for a night every month to remind myself how magnificent it truly is.

This game shaped what kind of gamer I am today and how I go about designing and implementing ideas. I hope it continues to do so until I stop playing games for good.

This is my favourite game.

Derren Toussaint, Producer -  Eidos-Square-Enix (@Teflon_Monkey)

My favourite game is Homeworld, released on the PC in 1999.

I was going to do Windwaker, or Metroid Prime, Goldeneye, Unreal Tournament or even Skies of Arcadia, as it’s a struggle to dig out a true fav. But, in the end, I chose to do the one game that has been on my C.V. as my favourite game, since I entered the games industry some 11 years ago!

Homeworld is both an excellent game and one, considering it was the first fully three-dimensional RTS, that should have shaped the entire real-time strategy genre!! Unfortunately, no one can hear you shout, “BEST GAME EVER!!”… In space! (Yeah! I went there!)

Relic’s Homeworld is the sort of game that inspired deserved unbridled hyperbole in game reviewers. With its stunning 3D engine, uniquely challenging gameplay, great audio, and terrific story. But it is a largely forgotten game that wasn’t played by as many players as it should have been! A classic 10/10 game that no one bought! *sadface*

With a classic plot, simple and to the point and something you can quickly get behind. And, for those geeks amongst you, plays out a lot like Battlestar Galactica (minus all that spiritual nonsense!!)

It begins with an epic discovery; an ancient starship, buried deep beneath the sands of your home planet Kharak, contains evidence indicating that your people descended from aliens who colonized the planet many centuries ago. Spurred on by this discovery, your people construct a massive Mothership with hyperspace capabilities and undertake an expedition to find their true Homeworld. However, you complete your first hyperspace jump only to run smack into a swarm of hostile aliens, which proceed to reduce Kharak to a burning wasteland. Now, with only the Mothership to call home, you must lead the fleet onward to your fabled Homeworld, exacting vengeance for Kharak along the way.

But forget all that! One of the main reasons I sat of hours on end, just playing the skirmish mode repeatedly was because Homeworld had some of the most impressive space-based graphics ever.

This 3D engine is stunning, with an acute attention to detail that is staggering. Every ship, from the tiny scout fighter to the lumbering heavy cruiser, is amazingly detailed, right down to markings on the hull and individually animated gun turrets. One of the coolest features in the game is the ability to zoom right in on a single ship and follow it through a battle –every turn, manoeuvre, and shot fired is brought to life, and you get a front-row seat for all of it.

The ship design itself is also pretty impressive. And though the two sides in the conflict have nearly identical arsenals (there are only two unique ship classes per side), each has a completely different stylistic approach that is consistent throughout the fleet. Weapon effects are suitably spectacular, and explosions are also very cool, especially when the doomed vessel is penetrated by a beam weapon as it blows up – an effect that recalls those great ship battles from the Battlestar Galatica. And the large scale battles!!! Oh shit the battles!! 

Hollywood on its best day has yet to capture the feel of the massive fleet battles in Homeworld!

And the audio? Ahhhhh the audio, the always forgotten element that can make or break a good game! In a word. Awesome! The audio in Homeworld is just as impressive as the graphics engine. The score (a score that won the Best Score Award in 2000) alongside the unit acknowledgments and sound effects does a great job of setting the whole “space is really, really BIG!!” mood of the game.

The slick presentation of the game also extends to the plot injections. Most of the plot unfolds by way of simple yet elegant cutscenes, created using the game’s 3D engine. The game also makes use of some slick hand-drawn animation to convey other elements of the story. These black-and-white scenes have a simple but gritty look to them, and they work exceptionally well with the flashy 3D cinematics. They hold up to scrutiny even now and proof that flashy FMV’s aren’t always the way forward.

But the most obvious difference between this and other real-time strategy games and some that has only really been recreated maybe by EVE ONLINE (but far more complicatedly than required) is the true 3D nature of the game world.

You’re in deep space (and you’ll sure as hell know it!!), so there is no restriction on the direction in which your units may travel. As a result, you’ll have to learn to think and move using three axis at all times.

To keep that true cinematic feel going, there are practically no HUD elements to see!! This can be extremely confusing if you jump right in especially with no difficulty settings to test out. But you are taken through Homeworld’s excellent tutorial (a useful tutorial? remember those?), which are perfectly paced and required, regardless of your experience with real-time strategy games.

Fortunately, I never minded retrying some of Homeworld’s missions a few times until I got them just right. (This was usually me stealing/salvaging as many ships as possible.) This is because Homeworld nails one of those elements few games give you; you never get the sense that the computer is cheating you. (What!? No difficulty setting??!! Just a perfectly balanced game!? Surely I jest?).

And would you believe this game came out in 1999!!!?? They, literally, don’t make games like this any more!! – And what other game built 12 years ago, looks and plays like it was made yesterday? (Duke Nukem sure as hell didn’t!)

So Homeworld:

• ·         Amazing Graphics, both in Design, Tech and Audio
• ·         Brilliantly-told story
• ·         A tutorial (that doesn’t take you out of the game) that actually teaches you how to play
• ·         Immense sense of scale and vastness of space
• ·         Revolutionary 3D interface and controls that somehow work!
• ·         Perfectly balanced difficulty
• ·         A forgotten Masterpiece!!

Homeworld  - The game I use to convince industry peeps that I know what a good game is!

This is my favourite game.

Alex Wilkie, Notebook Dump, York

My favourite game is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000

I knew what I was going to put forward as soon as I read this. I’ve been certain for the longest time that The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is my favourite game. I don’t even know where to begin.

I guess I’m a massive Zelda fan? Let’s just say that, as cynical as I am about the quality a lot of games being released these days, Skyward Sword was the only game that I bought at full price on release day this year. I have some regrets about that which I don’t really want to go into here, but that should offer some indication of the sheer sense of magic that the Zelda series has instilled in me since Ocarina of Time made me really care about the world in a game for the first time.

So what’s so great about Majora’s Mask in particular? Well, kind of everything. All the things. All the individual aspects of it and how effectively and naturally they fit together. The atmosphere, the rewards, the emotions, the surprises. It was, what, the eighth Zelda game to be released? This is something that I appreciate much more now than I did the first time I played it, but what it did was such a massive and ambitious departure from the hallmarks of the series that its perfection almost feels like an accident. I’m sure that there’ll never be another one like it.

It’s great in a way that only a game can be, but at the same time, it succeeds in using its form to uniquely texture the quality of a narrative that would be perfectly functional in the form of prose or film. My emotional investment in the world amplified everything that it had to offer, and seeing as this Link was, on the whole, a silent protagonist, there was no conflict with the idea that I could inhabit the role. This is something that’s true for any Zelda game, but the combination of unique gameplay mechanics and its atmosphere offered me a much greater sense of the gravity of (or, at other times, lack thereof) my actions. Gameplaywise? It wasn’t a case of collect the things, climb the tower, kill the bad guy and save the maiden. This wasn’t a game that told you that the villain was nasty and that he was an active threat while he contradicted that idea by just sitting there and waiting for you at the top of the tower. This was a situation where nobody even knows what the hell is going on, but the world will end in three days, and if you fail to save it, it’s all your fault. Then you figure out how to control time, and you enter a world where you need to learn the workings of the world like a script, discover the clockwork lives of every character, and constantly race against time and the odds to gather the items and the artefacts and the lessons that could, just maybe, save this place. Every time you achieve something, you go back and start again, just a tiny bit stronger. And yet, when you walk out of the doors of the clock tower and see everything starting over… you realise that until you’re done, you’ve achieved nothing. Everyone’s problems are back. You just have a bow this time.

This is what I mean; the atmosphere. There’ll never be a Zelda this dark again. There’ll never be a world that feels so threatened, or one that you want to save so much for the benefit of all the wonderful characters you meet (forget about Tingle for a minute, alright). There’ll never be such a chilling sense of desperation that remains even during the little victories. That, and the frightening implications of a boy who can control the world and make it so what he did never mattered. Did you know you can kill Sakon the thief?

It’s true. You can knowingly murder a man in this game for children. We all know that he’s in North clock town at midnight, he steals the old lady from the Bomb Shop’s bag, you whack him with your sword, he drops it and runs away and you’re rewarded with the Blast Mask for your trouble. What you might not know is that if you shoot him with an arrow, he explodes. Right in front of you, without a trace. Doesn’t pop up anywhere that he should in the rest of the three-day cycle.

What we’ve got here is a scenario in which a young boy can murder a man, undo it, and repeat the process over and over, as much as he wants, for reasons that are up to the player and can therefore range from anything like experimentation to sadistic curiosity to a twisted sense of justice to a crushing act of nihilism.

The best thing about the story, and all the little, personal stories of Majora’s Mask is that it doesn’t just show rather than tell; sometimes it merely implicates instead of directly showing. And when you understand that, and you really dig deep and read between the lines, you find that there are stories in this world that are too tragic to just tell. They start as mysteries, and then the laws of the world are established, and then at a point so long after it even matters anymore, it hits you like a train. My condolences to the Deku King’s butler. His poor son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is my favourite game.

Richard Adams, Oxygen Addict, Scotland

My favourite game is Grand Theft Auto, released on PC in 1997 (along with PS1).

It had the turbo charged driving of Micro Machines in an open world environment. It was visually bright and lively with some awesome cars. If I ran over a group of Hare Krishnas it said Gouranga. I got more points for stealing someone’s car then running them over with it (even more if it was a cop!). It had Kill Frenzies along with various weapons scattered throughout the game world for me to find. Without a map or GPS I had to find my own way and as such felt good about myself for knowing the quickest route and relief for finally finding a car spray with every cop in the city chasing me.

Since the original I have bought every single GTA title but I don’t think I’ve played a game since that has the same insanity and chaos, especially not in an almost cartoon-like world. Others have tried and some of have come close (eg Saints Row: The Third) but I doubt even with next gen consoles, nothing will touch GTA with its top down view and crummy sprites.

If you’ve half an hour and want to cause some chaos I can’t think of a better game. It is bright, turbo charged and still to this day a hell of a lot of fun!

This is my favourite game.

Alistair Aitcheson, Independent Developer, Greedy Bankers

My favourite game is Kongai, released on the Kongregate Flash game portal in 2008.

I’ve always believed that playing good games makes you smarter. So when I came to revise for my university finals, what better study-aid than a deeply strategic and hugely addictive web-game? 

Developed by former Street Fighter II US champion David Sirlin, Kongai is a game of simple rules, complex strategising and sneaky mind-games. A mix of card games, fighting games and JRPG battle systems, both players make their choices simultaneously. In each round players have the option to attack and manoeuvre, as well as the option to swap a character out for a replacement, avoiding any damage that turn. However, players can also choose to “intercept”, forgoing a turn but doing large damage if their opponent tries to switch characters out. Anticipating your opponent’s decisions is core to play.

Each possible move is widely different from the others, but options are limited to a very few attacks and manoeuvres. The stats for each character are simple and obvious, so the benefits and drawbacks of each choice are clear. Every decision is meaningful and has a clear impact on the future of the battle. As a result, tension is kept high, with the mind-games never lost behind complicated statistics. What’s more, a good battle can be finished in 15 minutes, making it perfect for short revision breaks… or indeed to fit in one more battle after the previous thrilling encounter!

Just how much this game gets you thinking is hard to put down on paper, and I definitely did feel it expanding my mind. Of course, after a few too many late nights playing match after match, and study-time spent planning strategies instead of learning the Artin-Wedderburn Theorem (I was a Maths student), it became obvious that I’d become a little too addicted.

Luckily, I was able to quit while I was ahead, achieving a first-class honours. And I still credit Kongai with making me smarter!

The 100+ players that frequented the servers at its prime may have dwindled, but it’s still worth a play. At the end of that day, the reason Kongai is so addictive is through nothing other than genuinely intelligent and classy game design.

This is my favourite game.

Grahame Gallacher, Past the Pixels

My favourite game is Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, released on the Playstation 2 in 2005

The MGS series is the Marmite of the gaming world. For every person that loves Kojima’s bloated, stealth epics another three are on hand to offer less flattering opinions. 

I was one of those people that liked MGS2. Seeing Snake from another’s eyes was an interesting experiment and if anything added to his living legend persona within the MGS universe. But there were many that were left disappointed. With MGS3 Kojima knew he had to get the fanbase back onside, thus he came up with what I think is the finest of the series to date.

So why do I love it so?

It has the best, most evocative storyline of the series, boiling down to the ‘maternal’ relationship Naked Snake has with his mentor The Boss. The Cobra Unit is the most varied set of boss characters I think I’ve ever seen in a MGS game. The jungle setting is lovely, one of the most beautifully realised locales on a PS2.  The CQC system encourages the player to try different takedown techniques on enemies. And Big Boss is an even bigger badass than Solid Snake, he smokes cigars and fixes his own broken limbs!

I’ve played through MGS3 well into double figures. Like an old classic movie, I just never tire of its charms. Being able to go through the same areas in a new playthrough, yet play them in a completely different manner is a testament to how deep a game-engine Kojima’s team managed to build here.

In decades to come young gamers will ask what the Playstation generation was all about. I’ll show them Metal Gear Solid.

This is my favourite game.

James, York

My favourite game is NiGHTS into Dreams for the Sega Saturn, released in 1996.

NiGHTS into Dreams is a brilliant example of the best and worst of SEGA.

A spectacularly visionary game that totally failed at retail, it was short, bizarre and very Japanese. It’s also brilliant.

A game about beating your own best scores, it’s powerfully addictive and deceptively complex: if you want to set the records you’ll need to practise a lot. Even now 15 years on there are new scores being set all the time, but unlike many arcade games there is no “perfect game” to aim for; you just have to do better than last time.

Visually and aurally beautiful and imaginative, it’s one of the finest SEGA games of all time and a brilliant achievement. It’s my favourite game ever and I don’t think it’ll ever be beaten.

This is my favourite game.

Stephen King, QA Technician at Outplay Entertainment, Dundee

My favourite game is Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64, released in 2000.

I remember looking forward to this game prior to its release. As a big fan of Goldeneye; which was also made by Rare, a spiritual successor was bound to be great. After a number of lengthy delays due to issues with the censor board (removal of Gameboy camera functionality and hostage taking), it was finally released after a long wait.

On the 5^th of August 2000, the game & the necessary expansion cart were mine, and my binge on console shooting began. Over the course of three days my cousin, my brother and myself proceeded to play Perfect Dark to an unhealthy extent.

Perfect Dark was a huge jump in audio, graphics and gameplay. My multiplayer character has a number of weeks logged, and then the amazing campaign had me completing it on all difficulties. It was also the first shooter in memory that had a co-operative mode for playing through the campaign, and even threw out the crazy idea of having a counter operative mode, in which the second player would try to hinder the progress of the other player.

A lot of people will tell you that Perfect Dark doesn’t hold up too well, after the ten years it has been since its initial release. However, I can still play that game ad nauseam!

This is my favourite game.

Woody, Assistant Producer at Outplay Entertainment, Dundee

My favourite game is Ultima Online, released on PC in 1997.

Despite coming out in ‘97 I never picked up Ultima Online (UO) until 2000. At the time I was told I needed to be part of it by a friend. After much convincing my parents stumped up the £9.99 a month required to play the game and off I went, into a land of fantasy, mystery, adventure and griefers!

Ultima Online allowed me to step into a world where almost anything was possible, I could make grown men and women cry via my PvP ability, I could make myself cry due to my lack of PvP ability, but most of all I could step into an ever growing and evolving world, where my actions could and did impact those around me.

The title had its faults, many of them in fact, however those aside it taught me a lot. It taught me how to go against the design of a game, use its mechanics to benefit me and generally cause trouble for other users. Is Ultima Online the reason I got into QA and stepped into the games industry? Yes.

Short and sweet, without Ultima Online I would probably be doing what my degree is in; Marketing.

This is my favourite game.

Adam, Games Designer at Soshi Games, Birmingham

My favourite game is Banjo-Kazooie, released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998.

I was thirteen when Banjo-Kazooie came out and I remember playing it with my Brother (then fifteen). We took turns playing the game, alternating between lives lost or jiggies collected.

At a time when we didn’t have too many games, I liked to get as much from each title as possible. Thankfully, Banjo-Kazooie obliged with a huge assortment of items to collect and secrets to find.

Banjo-Kazooie was a brilliantly designed game and above all else, fun. The humour, characters and environments were fantastic and the music in particular is always a source of reference whenever I’m trying to communicate audio styles in the games I design.

Banjo-Kazooie proved that it wasn’t just Nintendo that could create magical 3D platform games. Rare took the Super Mario 64 template and improved on it in every way with a larger move set, more depth of character and larger, more complex environments. To this day, Click Clock Wood is, for me, still one of the finest examples of level design in any game.

The final boss battle is also a brilliant example of how a player should be truly tested at the end of a game. Using nearly every technique learned throughout the game under increasing pressure to finally vanquish the source of all your problems.

I think more than any other, Banjo-Kazooie is the game that inspired me to become a games designer. A fact that I wouldn’t come to realise until some years later when I started referencing this game more than any other in my game concepts.

This is my favourite game.