Hardwar box art

Title: Hardwar
Format: PC
Release date: 1998
Obtained: On release
Place of purchase: GAME
Price: Approx. £30
Completed?:Yes

I'd been a huge fan of Elite and Frontier: Elite II, so the prospect of a game that was a little bit like it but not exactly held a certain amount of appeal. Hardwar is one of those titles that isn't really remembered all that much nowadays, having had a pretty minimal impact on the world. It was set on the Saturnite moon Titan, which appeared to be rather rocky with lots of pink fog and poor draw distance. Your task as Player Character 1 was to work out a way of getting off the moon and off to somewhere else, possibly to be featured in a sequel that never happened.

You flew around in a ship called a moth (incidentally, I hate moths, with the horrid flappy wings and general persistence on being as bloody irritating as possible), and you had a certain amount of freedom in the way that you made money in the game. You could be a pirate (aaarrr!) or a legitimate trader, or something in between, as you travelled between the different craters that made up the gameworld, connected by a series of tunnels. There were some cool touches to the game, including the fact that you needed to recharge your ship every so often by hovering over a recharging point, leaving you potentially vulnerable to enemy factions, pirates or the local law enforcement if you happen to have annoyed them in some way.

Sadly, to me the game seemed to be one that never seemed to get particularly interesting. The world, despite the involvement of funky Wipeout designers The Design Republic, was just a bit dull, and everything moved at a pretty slow pace. The storyline didn't grab, not helped by the fact that most of the cut-scenes had some awful acting and dodgy costumes. Like the player character, I wanted to explore the universe away from Titan, and it seemed a shame that just as we manage to escape the game ended.

Booty inlay (this is the ZX Spectrum version, but I couldn't find the C64 one of this style).

Title: Booty
Format: C64
Release date: 1984
Obtained: Unsure, probably circa 1990.
Place of purchase: Gift.
Price: £1.99
Completed?: No.

Every time Charlotte watches the-surprisingly-not-completely-awful Jake and the Neverland Pirates I'm reminded of Booty. The only real connection is the pirate theme, of course, and it's not even as if Booty was particularly a favourite game. In fact, I think I only played it a handful of times because I found it so soul-crushingly difficult to even get past the first screen.

The game was a pretty typical 8-bit single-screen platformer, with you cast as the character of Jim the cabin-boy (or somebody the cabin-boy, anyway) wandering around a pirate ship collecting coloured keys and treasure. Thinking about it, the ship must have had an utterly bizarre team of architects, since they came up with what is surely the most impractical layout for the interior of a sea-faring vessel. Doors that can only be unlocked with keys of a particular colour? Okay, then. Ladders placed seemingly at random throughout the ship? Erm, all right.

I do recall it being incredibly difficult, though that may have been a comment on my still-fledging gaming skills. My dad bought it for me one day back in the times when you could buy computer games from the local newsagent, not long after I got my C64 back at Christmas 1989. He used to get quite a lot of games from there for me, actually, which is why I ended up with a large number of random old titles.

It's Booty, complete with ludicrous ship layout.

Donkey Kong 64 Boxart

Title: Donkey Kong 64
Format: N64
Release date: 6th December 1999.
Obtained: On release.
Place of purchase: GAME (online).
Price: Approx. £60.
Completed?: Yes.

Three main things stick in my mind about Donkey Kong 64: 1) the damnably awful 'rap' song that started every time you plug the cartridge in; b) spending an absolutely age playing the in-built version of the original Donkey Kong arcade game just so I could get one of the game's collectable golden bananas; and iii) the fact that my copy came with a free inflatable banana that I kept in my room for a long time before it deflated into oblivion.

DK64 was developed by Rare and was pretty similar to Banjo-Kazooie. Replace golden jigsaw pieces with golden bananas, and swap musical notes for, erm, differently coloured bananas, and you've pretty much got the same game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, and indeed I remember DK64 quite fondly. Sure, it was incredibly frustrating in places and the continual collection of lots of different items became a bit tedious after a while, but it was pretty fun.

Swapping around between the characters provided a fair bit of scope for variety, as they were all sufficiently different as to give some interesting challenges each. There were plenty of good ideas around, as well, albeit sometimes you did feel that they were just a bit stretched out and indeed, the game overstayed its welcome a bit.

Graphics-wise DK64 was pretty decent for an N64 title, more impressive given the scale of the levels. Having said that, the title was the first to require the use of the optional RAM expansion pack. Thankfully the initial release of the game came bundled with one, which saved me the bother of having to source one from elsewhere.

That rap, though, that rap was really, really bloody awful. Whoever thought it might be a good idea to have some polygonal apes doing a cheese-infested rap number that would have embarrassed the makers of Saturday morning cartoons deserves a slap around the face.

Heimdall 2 Boxart

Watching Thor on TV the other day made me think of Heimdall 2, mainly because Heimdall appears in the film and even my rather sluggish neural pathways can make that connection. In truth, I really don't remember an awful lot about the game, probably because I'm fairly certain I only ever played it about six times. Whether there was a bug in it or just a puzzle that as a naive (and rather lazy) 13-year-old I couldn't get past, I can't remember; but something obviously stopped me from playing it and I never went back.

The game is an isometric adventure rather in the vein of Head Over Heels, with the player controlling Heimdall and a Valkyrie warrior 'chick' named Ursha. Together you must solve puzzles and defeat bad guys to stop the evil (or at least slightly misunderstood) Loki from doing something that presumably he shouldn't be doing. The game has a good understanding of Norse mythology, and as such has a fair amount of atmosphere, but never really struck me as being particularly enthralling.

I had intended that as I was writing these little remembrances of games past that I would have a quick replay of them, but in the case of this one I can neither be bothered to dig out my Amiga or an emulator to play it on. Really a minor footnote in my tragically long gaming history.

Heimdall rescuing a guy in a cupboard. Not the most heroic act ever recorded in the annals of history, but I guess somebody needs to do it. These people can't stay in cupboards forever, after all.

X360 boxart

Title: Bully: Scholarship Edition.
Format: XBox 360.
Release date: March 2008 .
Obtained: Sometime in 2009.
Place of purchase: GAME (Walsall).
Price: £25 (I think).
Completed?: Yes (12th May 2012).

Seems fitting to start off this potentially very long series of musings on every game I've ever played by talking about the one I'm mainly playing now: Bully by Rockstar Games. Specifically I mean the Scholarship Edition of the game on the 360, not the PS2 original. I actually did once own the PS2 version (renamed Canis Canem Edit here in the UK for reasons best left to the censors and the gods), but it arrived pretty much at the end of the console's mainstream life when I was just getting a 360, so I never really played it. In fact, it became one of the very few games that I've ever traded in.

An even more obscure and utterly, utterly worthless bit of information is that B:SE was the only game I ever bought from GAME in Walsall I remember 'nipping' there on the way back to the office after meeting a customer one time. The customer in question I won't name for the simple reason that I thought he was a bit of a prat.

Bully for the most follows the template of Rockstar's open-world games laid down in GTA III and not really changed all that much since: you wander around at your own volition, progressing through the game by completing main- and side-storyline missions. Where it really stands out is it's setting: a school. Admittedly it's an Americanised boarding school complete with cliques of 'jocks' and 'greasers' that those of us brought up in the glories of the British educational system will know only from Saved By The Bell, but it's a stunningly well-realised set-up. There are lessons to attend, buildings to explore and a whole town to play in. Plus you can beat up kids, stick fire crackers in toilets, vandalise school property and a whole litany of things that I never did at school because I was a good boy and, more pertinently, scared of getting caught.

Jimmy Hopkins beating up a random kid for no real reason.

Never having really played the PS2 version, I'm not entirely certain what new content the Scholarship Edition adds, other than what the back of the box tells me. The graphics have been spruced up a bit, but their last-gen origins are evident throughout, and it looks a bit of an eye-sore in places once you've witnessed the visual majesty of GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption. Lack of checkpoints in the missions harkens back to a time when games were more challenging (or frustrating, depending on your point-of-view). Having said that, the majority of the missions I've played through thus far (and I'm around 50% in as I write) haven't been too troublesome, with only a couple causing me to re-try. Actually, what's caused me the most problems hasn't been the difficulty of the game but a combination of the frequently-stupid camera and target-lock-on, which seem both designed to irritate and cause headaches at the most inconvenient of times.

When it first came out I remember people comparing it to the Microprose classic Skool Daze. To be honest, setting aside, there's not really a great deal of similarity between them, probably a result more of the twenty or so years in between the two titles. Still, the game's a good one and I'm glad that - after a couple of false starts - I've finally gone back to it to try and finish it once and for all. There's plenty of fun to be had, with an entertaining storyline and lots of mini-games, albeit of admittedly varying quality, to try your hand at.

What has actually impressed me most about the game - and I really hope this is something that Rockstar build into the upcoming GTAV - is the passage of time and the fact that the story takes place at different seasons. You start off at the beginning of the school year and progress through Autumn, Winter (complete with Christmas decorations) and - presumably - Spring and Summer too. There's one particularly memorable moment where you start off one mission at the end of the second chapter and the snow suddenly starts to fall; it's a small thing, but one that's still unusual enough in sandbox games, and has a bit of the same impact that the arrival in Mexico sequence had in RDR.

Christmas in Bullworth. Pity the snowman.

UPDATE: After three aborted attempts over three years, I managed to complete this yesterday. I'm pleased to say that the remainder of the game keeps up the quality that I spoke about above. The storyline never really gets going all that much, but it's entertaining and the high standard of the dialogue keeps it moving along. In ever want to do the bloody annoying stealth section in Finding Johnny Vincent ever again, though.

Finally got around to finishing Super Mario 3D Land today, though as it turns out I've really only done the easy half of the game: there's another eight 'special' stages after what at first glance appears to be the final level. This has been the first handheld Mario game that I've really felt stands up properly against its console cousins. The original Super Mario Land titles back on the original Game Boy were good, but always felt a little like weird offshoots. I mean, what on Earth (or Sarasaland) were those shoot-'em-up stages in Mario Land 1 all about?

Nintendo seemed to stop bothering about original Mario handheld games during the GBA era, as all that was graced with was ports of the NES and SNES titles. When the DS came about we were given New Super Mario Bros. this was good, but when we'd seen Mario 64 and Sunshine the game seemed like a weird retro homage (though perhaps that was the point).

When I first read the previews of SM3DL I was a little worried: the scrapping of the hub structure that so defines the modern console games and the return to more traditional A-to-B levels suggested that, again, the handheld title would be a slight side-quest. Upon playing it, I was more than pleasantly surprised by one of the most well-crafted games ever, and certainly the finest handheld Mario to date.

Nintendo have been pretty clever with the game. At first the decision to bring back flag-poles and single-shot levels seems retrograde, but in actuality it's a smart way of appealing to the depressing number of people who didn't buy Super Mario Galaxy but did get New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The addition of the invincibility power-ups if you fail a level too many times are also there to make sure that everyone gets a chance to finish the game, but can be safely ignored if you don't want to use them. The title also shows the first real useful and thoughtful uses of the 3DS's eponymous feature, although my dodgy right eye means I'll never be able to see it properly.

It's not without some flaws, of course. I can't imagine, for instance, that the first few worlds would provide much of a challenge to even those with reaction speeds of an elderly slug. I also don't think adding a little non-linearity, perhaps in the SMB3 style, would have gone amiss. As it is, the world map of the Mushroom Kingdom seems to consist solely of straight roads, and the various worlds for the most part lack identifiable common themes.

All in all, though, an excellent game and one I'm sure I'll return to. Just need to finish these special worlds now.

Achievement name: Continue? Y/N
Points: 5
Description: Mused on the future of GAME.

Oh dear, GAME, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The story of the UK's biggest specialist games retailer has been all over the news for the last few weeks, and not for any particularly good reasons. Following on from EA refusing credit terms to allow them to stock Mass Effect 3, the seemingly inevitable has happened and they've gone into administration. My sympathies, of course, to the thousands of employees - it must be a horrible time for them.

I have vague memories of my first visit to a GAME being in Manchester, having been on a family day out to Granada TV Studios. At the time we had no such specialist store in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, so seeing this giant shop filled with games was something of a revelation. I brought a copy of Panic Dizzy for the Commodore 64 (though rather wished I hadn't after playing it for around ten minutes). At the time, GAME had a rather dark atmosphere to it, as suited the outside-the-mainstream gaming community. In later years they've become much 'brighter' as befits the all-inclusive world of video games we live in nowadays.

I was a loyal customer of GAME for years, until their increasing obsession with over-priced used titles and high prices in comparison to online retailers finally put me off. For the past five or more years I've barely bought anything from them, excluding the odd sale title or pre-owned game I couldn't find elsewhere. Still, it'll be a shame to see them go if they do disappear altogether; another casualty of the slow but steady death of traditional retail, and an end to big-name specialist games stores, especially since they also own the rather horrid Gamestation.

Here's hoping they make it out with a few bits intact.

Years ago, when my main source of video game entertainment was my Commodore 64, I was madly into text adventures. Perhaps it was because of my interest in writing, or perhaps because they didn't tax my sloth-like reactions too much. In retrospect, most text adventures were exercises in frustration, with hours spent trying to guess the right verb-and-noun combination from an often-unclear vocabulary, punctuated by the odd 'eureka' moment when you finally made it past a certain puzzle. The march of technology has long since rendered the text adventure obsolete, though pockets of interest in so-called 'interactive fiction' still exist.

There used to be a company called The Guild, a public domain distributor of text adventures via mail order. Thinking about it now, it was probably just some bloke in his house with a load of blank cassettes and a twin-deck recorder capable of high-speed dubbing, but as an impressionable youngster I imagined it to be something much grander, possibly based in a castle. I particularly used to like adventures written by a chap called William Quinn. I first came across him on a Zzap! 64 covertape with his game LA Adventure. I found his sense of humour similar to mine, and proceeded to buy the other games he'd written.

Quinn's best titles, IMHO, were Nightmare and its sequel Bumble's Revenge. There was one game, though, which had me completely beat: Undercover. It was a story about an undercover spy (would you believe?) who wakes in a darkened cellar with one of those bouts of amnesia that are all too frequent in the world of video games. I remember it taking an age just for me to work out how to get out of the cellar, and I never managed to make it much further. To be honest, I never managed to complete most text adventures, but this one seemed particularly annoying as not only was I still so close to the start, I also had this unshakeable feeling that the solution was just out of reach.

The first location in 'Undercover'. I never got much further than this...

This annoyance stuck with me, and a few years ago when I started playing around with C64 emulators I tried it again, thinking that the wisdom I had accumulated in the intervening years might help. They didn't. I still got stuck at the exact same point. I tried in vain to look for a solution in the murky under crofts of the Internet, but to no avail; as a game that was only ever available via public domain distributors it was never well-known.

And then, yesterday, on a bit of a whim I did a quick Google search to see if there was anything out there, and - lo! - the whole solution was available. In fact, it appears to have been available for quite some time, so my missing of it before is a bit perplexing, and something that I think I'll blame on Google's indexing rather than my incompetence at being able to string together a four-word search term. It seems I was indeed tantalisingly close to the answer, though I don't believe I would ever have guessed it in a whole year of Sundays (involving, as it did, swinging on a branch to raise a secret elevator from an icy lake. Obvious, really). So, next chance I get I shall be firing up a C64 emulator and finally finishing this game, around 20 years after I first started it. Admittedly it's not a massive achievement to mark off the 'things to do before I die' list that I don't have, but every bit of closure is good.

• Flange;
• Xylophone;
• Grunt;
• Wobble;
• Spanner;
• Fridge;
• Fish;
• Intercourse;
• Rubble;
• Ribble;
• Rabble;
• Robble;
• Lickety.