the background noise

It begins! You know what? I'm just going to do it. No more procrastination, no more delay, no more shifting the ranking around to accommodate the latest greatest game I've played. No it's time. Time to deliver on a mission I set for myself back in the first glorious age of this blog before everything went dark for a few years. It's happening folks, I am beginning the Top 100 ranking of my all-time favourite video games.  These will be games I've played so if any obvious contenders are not there it's because I never got around to playing them or I did and then forgot about them meaning they probably wouldn't have made the list anyway. It's all entirely my own personal opinion of the games that mean the most to me. It is the sum total of my best experiences in gaming over several decades of playing them. So where better to begin my Top 100 game ranking than by err... the honourable mentions?

Deadly Premonition was a funny old game, an earnestly idiosyncratic tribute to the sensibilities of its creators wrapped up in a Twin Peaks style murder mystery. Of course it's that last part that caused it to pop up somewhere on my radar in the early to mid part of the last decade, anything that even partly channels the weird sensibilities of Twin Peaks and David Lynch invariably gets my attention but back to the game. This is a murder mystery, a dream like odyssey through the unknown and a reckoning with oneself that I wasn't quite prepared for. Short form social media wasn't all the rage just yet when this game was released, yet  Deadly Premonition found a popular little online niche for itself that captured the imagination of much of the gaming public. A curiously beguiling mix of gaming oddity that shouldn't have worked as well as it should have. Indeed some would say it barely worked at all.  As to why it worked for me, well I think there is something to be sa...

Well if it isn't the dying days of summer once again? That time of year where the blue skies and fine weather persist but you can detect that ever so subtle change in the air. Full beam heat is no more, the green is a little less greener than it was a few weeks ago and the stage is set for the inevitable arrival of the Autumnal hues. This is all a very fine way of saying: why look at the time? See how it's getting on? Why what better way to mark it than to showcase some of my favourite game music. Not just my favourite game music but music from what might just be one of the all time greats. A game series that may or may not be my favourite of all-time. That's right, behold some of my favourite music from Metal Gear Solid and its many sequels.

There are those pivotal moments in one's gaming habit that come around every once in a while. Critical junctures or vital forks in the road where things could have been very different had the other choice been taken at the time. Usually you don't see them for what they are in the moment, they are very much things you only recognize retrospectively. Such is the case for the subject of today's post where I am going to ramble on at length on the subject of what might be my favourite game demo of all time. This would be the time-limited taster of everything the original Grand Theft Auto had to offer. Yes the first one that most GTA players at this point probably haven't played, an historical artifact developed by DMA Design out of Dundee and published by BMG Interactive back in 1997.

A moment of appreciation if you will for the humble giant robot, mecha or walking tank. Playing a lot of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries lately, a 'war-em-up' set in your standard grim future of near total conflict across, between and beyond the stars. Why it's been a good long while since last I played one of these. In fact there was no less than a nineteen year gap between this game and MechWarrior 4 . not entirely certain that was the game I played then or whether it was perhaps a budget release of MechWarrior 3. Regardless that's o ne nine years  I tell you! Sure there's been mobile and online games in that time but by and large this is a series with some serious underexposure in my humble opinion. Shame really, because when it's firing on all laser cannons, it satisfies that ever eternal need to pilot a giant bipedal tank through a future battlefield whilst wrecking all what you see. I'm having a lot of fun with this game is what I'm saying...