Japan Gaming Guide

With Mario 64 it felt as if every element of Mario’s universe had been given an extra dimension.  Miyamoto delivered again with the N64s flagship title.

Like making your own soap opera – the sims lets you take control of the lives of little people, keeping them clean, well fed and socially functional.

Simple twin stick shooting games have been given a new lease of live by Xbox live arcade – and this is probably the best example, combining psychadelic visuals with fast furious gameplay and the perpetual desire to climb those leaderboards.

This simple maze game was lifted to greatness by letting 5 players compete at once.  Run around dropping bombs trying to blow up your opponents without getting blown up yourself.  Recent attempts to replicate the gameplay have added frills without capturing the perfectly balanced, frantic gameplay.

Deep gameplay, deus ex presented a dark, complex gameworld encouraging the player to make moral choices as well as tackle tasks in different ways.  The game allows players to feel that their actions have wider implications within the game world and the conspiracy filled plot.

After Virtua Racing had dropped jaws everywhere with its fast 3d polygons, Namco raised the graphical bar again by texture mapping everything, ushering in perhaps the biggest leap in visual fidelity gaming has ever seen.  Ridge Racer was perhaps the last arcade machine that felt really essential to play – it also spearheaded the playstation’s charge into gamers living rooms.  It wasn’t all graphics however – Namco delivered a hedonistic, escapist atmosphere and a racing model that allowed insane power sliding round bends at high speeds, rewarding risk as never before.  3d Racing games had tended to be sturdy serious simulations before Ridge Racer but now became something different entirely, taking over from fighting games as the most popular genre around.

Tiny little soccer players from pretty much every club on the face of the earth grace this fantastic 2d soccer game.  Sensible Soccer takes the bones of soccer and converts it into a kind of soccer like game that has high pace and simple controls but somehow still feels right along with it.

Build rides, let people ride them, have fun.  A great game hiding the tedium of economics and management underneath a glittering exterior of coasters, snack machines and entertainers.  Rollercoaster Tycoon let you build the theme park of your dreams.  It was also fun to lock the doors and then close all the toilets.

Much maligned for being short and easy, King Kong is a hugely atmospheric game that has a real cinematic feel to it.

Lucasarts used to make great games as a matter of course.  The X-Wing series felt like a flight sim, enabling you to do all the things you heard in the films – lock your s-foils in attack position, switch all power to the front deflector screen, and yet they still delivered exhilarating space combat and challenging missions.