The intro sequence is the part that endures, obviously; the commute into the creaking heart of the Black Mesa Research Facility will never quite lose its majesty. Once the soundscape oozes in and your eyes open, your tramcar winds its way down through the massive complex, sweeping you through a foreseeable world in which technology is definitely awe-inspiring, but far from reliable and farther from invasive. Incredible multi-articulated robots repair busted-up chemical vats. Steel airlocks and e...

Cave Story is definitely the right game, but it's in the wrong place, at the wrong time. If you time-warped (again) back to 1990 and released it on the Mega Drive, the time you returned to wouldn't be the rubbish one we know. It'd be an endless pastel-hued Age of the Pixel, where men express themselves in only sprites and double-jumps and catchy 16-bit tunes. Nobody'd remember Mario or the Green Hill Zone or the rain or tetrominoes or El Viento or any of that crap; they'd remember ...

WarioWare Inc. is a drug. Don't mess with it, kids, or it'll mess with you. It might seem 'cool' or 'hip,' but you'll enjoy the pretty pictures and catchy sounds at the expense of your sanity, dignity, and smug sense of moral superiority. It's like a white-frocked mind doctor, dangling rudimentary aptitude tests in front of your gaping eyes and rewarding you with funny pictures whenever you respond as hypothesised. And you'll obey, giggling and drooling like the witless goonchild that you...

Sonic's flashy revolution concerns an issue far more important than pace. It's the one critical to every platformer, the one that separates the triple-hopping superstars from the clumsy goons tripping off the bottom of the screen: control.

Like Half-Life's Black Mesa, it's a place infused with an atmosphere and culture that you can only experience through microcosms. Even more so than VALVe's immortal debut FPS, Half-Life 2 is a single, seamless scripted journey that's not so much about where you're going as much as who you meet on the way. Sometimes, you get there in time to be a hero; others, you're too late, whether it's by seconds or years.

If a shooter's DNA is in its enemies, then The First Encounter is an impossible monstrosity, all bones and steel and slime, standing ten stories high. Dumb and furious, it hurls anything it can and charges, unconcerned for itself. Why should it be? If it goes down, a million more will follow...

Nintendo's commitment to creative design is clear, but it can be difficult to enjoy when it comes in a form seemingly fathered by the same ruthless pimping that sees Mario crying himself to sleep at nights.

MSA's primary flaw is that it's conspicuously devoid of the heroic intensity that stirred fans of the original so. On a mechanical level, it's visibly Metal Slug; your pistol-packing grenade-lobbing hero storms through the side-scrolling levels in the expected fashion, terminating the screaming infantrymen and adorable artillery with regulatory-extreme levels of prejudice. And yet the battles utterly fail to excite. What's to blame?

Only once you finally access your unwitting target is brutality essential. Be it a 7.62mm NATO round to the heart, a poison-loaded sip of vintage Springbank, or just a silk pillow held over the breathing passages, it's that moment of perfect catharsis - when the ragdoll body slumps and the objective status politely flicks to completed - that the Hitman series has always been defined by.

If ICO is one thing, it's underrated.

Is Deus Ex set in the real world, or a fictional one?

Prime.

Arbitrary catch-all labels they may be, but style and substance are useful terms. I'd like to submit a theory regarding these famously independent elements of game design: style and substance are not only separate, but opposing. I submit that slavish devotion to sumptuous visuals and high atmosphere can result in a game with a sensory bite that sullies your experience while it enriches it.

Metal Slug 3 marks the series' evolutionary peak in a number of areas. In terms of raw game quality, it is unmatched; not only in the series, but in the genre at large. The addictive, pulse-pounding action the series is renowned for is injected with gallons of pure ludicrous variety, resulting in a mind-blowingly unpredictable adventure. MS3 is pretty much the best side-scrolling shooter there is.

Superheroes.

Why does everyone like this game so much?

It's fun to kill people in games.

You think they've dug as low as they can get, and then someone throws them a shovel.

It's crap living in Britain. Truly dire. We have finally gotten rid of the Black Death, but we're still plagued by the mind-numbing scenery, the vomit-inducing food, and the jaw-dropping idiocy of the vast majority of our population. Worst of all though is that unchanging, unescapable chalk-grey sky; I'd go so far as to say it is the sole reason that life in the United Kingdom is so unbearably fucking grim.

What would videogames be without international conflict? World peace is undeniably a noble goal, but a game about dancing in a circle with your brother man wouldn't be quite as entertaining as one about, say, fighting the Nazi menace through World War 2 Europe. Previously the Medal of Honor series has been the leader in this particular field, but now Activision and Infinity Ward have landed on the genre's metaphorical beach with Call of Duty.