Those who follow me on Twitter may have seen that I, along with several other games journalists and a few people who don't even do anything to do with games at all, am embarking on a year-long writing project. That is, to write one thing a day that isn't an actual commission or assignment.

Others taking part include Playstation Mag's Andy Kelly, who masterminded the whole thing, PC Gamer UK's Jaz McDougall and Rich McCormick, Reso's own Dan Lipscombe and Jen Allen, BritishGaming's Mark Brown and a whole heap more.

My stuff's all happening over at www.lewisdenby.com. Have a read, if you want. And go to Andy's blog for a full list of participants.

As a first-person shooter, it’s incredibly competent. Quake 2 might have had the tempo, and Half-Life the suspenseful pacing, but Unreal had the variety and the challenge. Its weapons drew criticism for feeling weak and weedy against the Skaarj oppressors, and it’s a fair comment. They often do. But I’m sure that’s partly because the buggers are so tough, right from the start.

Quake still absolutely stands up today. Its visuals might be pixellated, the environments often rather monochrome, as became the running gag. Yet the design of the world is tremendous, the levels balanced, structured and elegantly paced. The variety on display, despite the vast swathes of brown, dwarfs that of most modern games as well.

Enemies dart and dodge, firing sprays of bullets in the final seconds of their lives, trying everything they can to bring you down, even if it means losing their own lives in the process. The range of enemies on display is perhaps the only area in which Quake II rivals the variety of its predecessor, too.

Planescape’s fiction is perfect: it takes two intrinsic human fears, turns one on its head, and allows the other so much room to breathe. In Planescape, you play as a man who has already lost his entire memory, including that of his own identity, yet he can never escape this dreadful state.

In The Nomad Soul, you don’t play as any of the main characters. Instead, you play as all of them. Sort of. In fact, you play as a person playing a computer game, in which the player plays as a soul who can transfer between different bodies. Yes. And it’s all absolutely merrily acknowledged by the game. None of this is real, it tells you. It’s just a game.

I’ve found Fallout to be enormously irritating. It’s a grotesquely unfriendly game. Its interface is convoluted and confusing. Wandering through the desert early on will almost certainly get you killed by foes you’re totally unequipped to defeat... yet wandering through the desert is the only way to progress. You can complete some fairly menial tasks in order to become strong enough to tackle them, but - well - they’re fairly menial.

The central narrative arc is beautiful: this is a game which expands on its predecessor’s coming of age story, and presents something altogether more grown-up. If The Longest Journey demonstrated the progression from the naivety of youth to the responsibility of adulthood, Dreamfall is a game about taking that newfound maturity and giving it back to those in need.

There have been complaints, and will be many more, that Dragon Age II is appealing for a more mainstream audience by removing all the fiddling of its predecessor, but I don’t think this is a fair accusation. There is very little that you could do before which is no longer possible. The difference is that the extraneous elements have been stripped away, giving the action space to breathe.

It’s a game in which you want nothing more than to see what’s thrown at you next, just so you can eagerly ramble about the amazing things that have just happened, and share theories with friends who are also playing. It’s so effective in stirring discussion, in fact, that it took me a while to realise I was enjoying talking about the game a great deal more than I was playing it.

And here’s a major place in which Civilization V seems to fall down. Maybe it’s just too long since I last tackled a Civ game, and I’ve simply lost my ability to play make believe within its boundaries. More likely, there’s a problem. Because for the life of me, I just could not even fool myself into being convinced by the diplomacy system.