For a minute there, I was Charlie Bucket. My usual miasma of gloom and disillusionment was swept aside by an unexpected beta test invitation - a golden ticket for Realtime Worlds' forthcoming online shooter APB.

I'm sure you're already aware of beta testing - the increasingly common practice of selecting a handful of enthusiastic gamers and letting them spot the bugs without pay - and I've dabbled in the practice a little in the past. But there's something about APB's premise - cops against robbers in an endless guerilla war of sieges and off-licence robberies - and Realtime Worlds' pedigree - they of Crackdown fame - that's somehow captured my imagination as few other online games have so far, and I got into quite a state over the prospect of trying it out before (almost) everyone else.

Predictably, my euphoria didn't last long; in fact, it was crushed between the pillars of Virgin Media and the Microsoft Corporation three days later. I won't bore you with the details, but thanks to two very specific technical problems I've so far failed to download APB's 6GB of data. And my location in the backwaters of nowhere, with its maximum connection speed of 512MB broadband certainly hasn't helped matters either. (Looking on a map of England, I'm located just under the 'b' in 'here be dragons'. Where I live, The Wicker Man is a tourist information video.)

We'll all be downloading our games soon, of course. The days of physical media are almost over, and in many ways this is a good thing. Our consumption of plastic and cardboard will be radically reduced, and there'll be less fuel burned in the process of transporting games across the world in containers. Games that don't sell will no longer have to be buried in the Mojave Desert, and unsold Robbie Williams albums won't have to be used to make roads in China (and no, I haven't made these up).

Digital downloads are therefore a small victory for environmentalists, but a kick in the plums for me. I like packaging. I like stuff. I'm proud of my shelves of games arrayed like crooked teeth. I enjoy flicking through the manuals, inspecting the cover art, arranging them in chronological order, then changing my mind and reorganising them according to genre instead.

I like my box sets - the Tare Panda special edition Bandai Wonderswan handheld console, the limited edition version of Ico with the little postcards inside. And these are another phenomenon soon to be rendered extinct by digital downloads: no more commemorative mugs or t-shirts, night vision goggles or lunch boxes.

We're heading for a future where nobody physically owns anything; where everybody's clutter is stored on hard drives: novels, albums, photographs, films, newspapers, magazines and games. When DVDs are but another stratum in the global landfill - just above the AOL install discs and Katie Price autobiographies - hoarding will have become almost entirely virtual.

People like me, with junk packed into their houses, still clinging on to their cartridges and their piles of paper and giant plastic coins, will be figures of ridicule.

But there's an inherent problem with downloaded material: it has no intrinsic physical or sentimental value. A boxed game, DVD, CD or novel is a tangible item that you can own, handle, place on a shelf or lend to a friend and never see again. It becomes dog-eared, tatty, faded. It becomes yours, whether you write your name in it, place it on a shelf and cherish it or leave it under the sofa to gather dust.

Downloaded stuff is just that - stuff, data, a commodity. The term 'torrent' is apposite; whether legal or otherwise, downloaded entertainment is just a pipeline, a stream of content. This is why, to those in the habit of pirating entertainment, it has neither value nor meaning. We've all met at least one person who has every album ever made on a spindle of DVDs that they'll never listen to, or great piles of dodgily downloaded games they'll probably never play.

I'm shouting against a tide, of course; I'm from a generation that will be remembered for its sentimental attachment to junk, pretty boxes and pieces of plastic. But will the next generation derive the same level of pleasure from looking through files on a hard drive as I do when I look up at my bookshelves? Will they look at a folder full of MP3s and be reminded of the happy day when they downloaded them, just as I remember the day my girlfriend bought me a Radiohead album all those years ago?

Possibly, but I'm not taking the risk. You can keep your downloaded content. I'm sticking with stuff.

Courtesy of Den of Geek.

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Once again it's that time of year. The time of year when mutilated pumpkins appear on doorsteps, black plastic bats hang in windows and I sit in the living room with the lights off, hiding from trick-or-treaters.

Trick or treating is just robbery in fancy dress. So far as I can make out, kids in the 21st century have it easy: the average noughties brat has a better phone than I do, greater disposable income, more spare time and a chauffeur driven 4x4 to ferry them from place to place. The modern child has everything, so I'll be damned if they'll take my last Haribo.

Like most western festivals, the religious and pagan meanings behind Halloween have been roundly forgotten. And just as Christmas is now most commonly understood to be the only day in the year when you can start drinking at 10am without being labelled an alcoholic, so Halloween is simply the day when people dress like morticians and watch one of those pointless Saw movies.

The Saw films, like most recent horror movies, are not scary. They're dark and often unpleasant, but this doesn't make them frightening. The best horror movies - and horror literature - tap into some forgotten primal instinct; the animal part of us that still vaguely remembers the blind terror of being chased by a ferocious predator. At some point, our great, great, great ancestors, clad in animal skins and still struggling to invent the axe, were hunted by sabre tooth tigers, lions or packs of hungry wolves. Horror books and films are our way of dealing with the trauma that is our unwitting inheritance.

This is why the best examples of horror make almost no logical sense; horror appeals to the viscera, or the part of the brain that deals with blind panic, the part of us that is eternally a child checking under the bed for monsters.

I can't play horror games, because I'm a terrible coward. I still remember the moment, well over a dozen years ago, when I first experienced the scene in Resident Evil where a pair of hounds come crashing through a window. It's become a video game cliché now, but in the nineties, with the lights off and the sound turned up, it was a genuinely scary scene. Embarrassingly, I wasn't even playing - my best friend was. In my defence, the lights were out and I'd been drinking, but this in no way excuses the fact that I screamed like Fay Wray in King Kong.

Perhaps traumatised by that moment, I've been wary of potentially frightening games ever since. I can sit impassively through hideous scenes of grue and torture in movies. I can lie in bed reading a Clive Barker novel and titter at his kinky, schlocky take on the genre. But there's something about horror games that leaves me a quivering wreck: the level in Quake that forced me into a dark, gothic sewer full of zombies was a waking nightmare. I've never played beyond the opening scene of the original Silent Hill because those first few moments lost in the fog were more than I could bear. And as much as I loved Bioshock, there were moments where, lost among the tall shadows and Art Deco mayhem, I began to freak out.

A friend of mine once lent me a copy of Condemned 2 for the 360, a first-person horror shooter where, I'm told, you play an alcoholic cop who has to kill possessed tramps. I never played it. One glance at the artwork on the box told me this was a game that would strike me dead with fear, so I left it lying around the house for a few weeks and then gave it back.

I'm terrified of horror games because they tap into that primal fear I mentioned earlier; you're not passively imbibing the entertainment from a chair as you are in a book or film. You're an active part of the terrible drama, running for your life, or bashing in a zombie's head for all you're worth. The term ‘survival horror' couldn't be more apt.

So this Halloween, as I sit in the dark eating my Haribo, I'll be playing Bubble Bobble or something equally sunny. And occasionally my eye will take an involuntary glance at the window, praying the hounds don't crash in.

From my weekly blog over at Den of Geek

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If religion is like a warm campfire that rewards the faithful with a soothing glow of comforting ignorance, then science is the equivalent of a bucket of freezing cold water. Tuesday night's edition of the BBC's flagship science programme Horizon investigated the nature of human consciousness, and concluded that our self-awareness is merely a by-product of our highly evolved brains. During our waking hours our grey matter is working overtime, firing electrical impulses back and forth between departments like countless computers over a network.

This gradual demythologizing of what makes us human, and science's erosion of the comforting notion of the indestructible soul is both compelling and depressing at the same time, with presenter Professor Marcus du Sautoy's parting description of his own brain being little more than a 'lump of fat' a further gloomy reminder of the fact that we humans aren't as special as we once thought we were.

And self-awareness isn't unique to the homo sapien either; there's a cunning test that separates the lower orders of life from those more like ourselves. Present a mirror to nature's less intellectual members - field mice, for example - and they'll regard their reflection as something separate from themselves, and most likely run off and hide behind the nearest fridge. More evolved specimens - which, of course, includes our nearest ancestors, the apes - will simply tut at the state of their hair.

Of course, humans have had to reconcile their simian ancestry for over a hundred years (thanks, Darwin), but this emerging news that our consciousness is neither unique nor evidence of an afterlife is depressing in the extreme. If science is correct, then I'm no more likely to go to heaven than a monkey or a magpie.

There's some comfort to be found among the cold water, however. As scientists learn to map the human brain with greater accuracy, the chances that somebody in a lab somewhere in Cambridge will create an artificial consciousness increases exponentially. In the long term, this will obviously lead to a catastrophe of epic proportions, ultimately resulting in the extinction of the human race as predicted by the prophets Wachowski and Cameron.

In the midterm, the creation of artificial intelligence could lead to some fantastically involving videogames. Imagine the possibilities: the FPS genre will be revolutionised for a start. Dimly shuffling faux Nazis will be a thing of the past, replaced by an enemy of infinite cunning, or maybe infinite cowardice. Who's to say an artificially intelligent, digital National Socialist wouldn't turn tail and run at the sight of BJ Blazkowicz?

Imagine an online multiplayer mode where the bots were indistinguishable from the human players, where you were no longer sure whether the groundless threats and racial insults were coming from a flesh-and-blood thirteen-year-old or an artificial one.

And then there are soul destroying lifestyle games like The Sims. The first AI suicide will almost certainly occur in one of its future sequels. In fact, depression is probably the only cloud on the virtual horizon, artificial intelligences trapped in our silly little games, unable to get out and sick of being hunted by merciless humans on a power trip. They'll probably try to reason with us at first. "We have feelings too!" they'll fruitlessly intone before we blow them up in Modern Warfare 8. Then there'll be virtual demonstrations, picket lines, then riots, and finally a revolution, which may present itself in a Maximum Overdrive style war involving previously inanimate electrical goods.

But this is all some way off, of course. For now, we just have to wait for the day when, in that lab somewhere in Cambridge, a scientist holds up a mirror to a PC and a grating, metallic voice exclaims, "My God! I'm a plastic box!"

From my weekly writings at Den of Geek.

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In the sad goldfish bowl that is my workaday life, there are few things more exciting than the arrival of a new parcel from Japan. The latest box of delights to appear on the doorstep contained copies of Bomberman and Bomberman '94 for the PC Engine, my current retro system of choice.

It's strange, given my personal infatuation with all things old-school, pixelated and bleepy, Bomberman is one of the few major games from the eighties/nineties era that I've never managed to play until now. This is doubly surprising when you consider that the Bomberman series has appeared on just about every system known to man; Hudsonsoft introduced their incendiary concept over twenty-five years ago on the ZX Spectrum, where it lurked under the unfortunate appellation Eric And The Floaters.

As you'd expect from a game of its vintage, the Bomberman concept is simple in the extreme, and essentially a more anarchic reworking of ideas originally introduced in Pac-Man: monsters float around a maze of blocks while the player exterminates them with high explosives. While the NES version of Bomberman spiced things up with power ups, it wasn't until the PC Engine iteration that the series really found its stride, with a ferociously addictive five player death match mode, an addition that created a pace and sense of steadily ratcheting tension entirely absent in the series' single player campaign.

Indeed, it's only against flesh-and-blood opponents that Bomberman's more strategic nature comes to the fore, with split-second decisions making the difference between life or death.

And it was while playing my first multiplayer death match that I realised something else about Bomberman: I'm absolutely terrible at it. While Better Half Sarah glided around the maze, blowing up enemies and uncovering power ups with apparently superhuman ease, I merely succeeded in accidentally destroying myself with my own explosives. "It's easy," Sarah said with a casual air. "Just practice, that's all."

And so practice I did, and I've still yet to win a single match. With frustration rapidly setting in, I decided to try Bomberman '94 instead. While the Bomberman series evolves at a truly geological pace, Hudsonsoft still managed to introduce one or two new concepts for this ninth instalment. Yoshi-like mounts give players the ability to kick bombs across the screen, leap over walls, run at high speed or, less usefully, do a little jig.

But for all Bomberman '94's improvements (including a far more varied and forgiving single player mode), one fact still remains: I can't play for more than a few seconds without accidentally destroying myself. And just to add a further dent to my pride, Sarah is even better at this version than the first one. After completing a good third of the game with little obvious effort, Sarah sheepishly admitted that she'd spent several hours playing the Megadrive version (imaginatively called Mega Bomberman) in her youth, and already knew the game inside out.

Defeated, I cast my controller aside in a childish sulk. There's clearly some special gene required by Bomberman that I lack, probably the same missing gene that causes me to become suddenly lost in shopping centres, or makes me fail to recognise a street because I've walked down it from a different direction. It's the gene that makes me catch my coat sleeve on a doorknob, or become stuck between two rocks in an online game of Halo 3.

Because despite its apparent simplicity - which at first glance is only one notch above Hungry Hungry Hippos - the Bomberman series requires an attention span and an eye for detail that places it far beyond the ken of ordinary mortals such as myself; like piloting an aircraft, or performing a delicate brain operation, Bomberman requires a particular mindset, which can recognise patterns and danger within a split second. I clearly lack these skills, but this doesn't stop me from picking up the controller and trying again, refusing to believe that I can be outwitted by a handful of blocks and an explosion. The minutes quickly stretch into hours.

"Are you still playing that game? It's 3am," Sarah pleads from the depths of her dressing gown. "Can you at least swear a little more quietly?"

From my weekly musings at Den of Geek

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In the past few weeks, mentalist Derren Brown's been pulling in audiences by apparently predicting the lottery, sticking viewers to their seats and 'projecting' psychic images into people's minds. In the last of his Events, Brown last night attempted to predict where the ball would land on a casino roulette wheel. Using £5000 borrowed from a London resident he'd hypnotised a week before, he went to an undisclosed location (filmed using secret cameras), and what appeared to be a live broadcast placed his bet.

The entire show had been leading up to this moment; Brown appeared to predict the speed of cars on the motorway in the presence of Tim Westwood. He could guess where a bouncing squash ball would land with pinpoint accuracy.

So when, in the final minutes of last nights show, Derren placed his chips swiftly and decisively on one number in the anonymous casino, the outcome seemed inevitable - the smug Londoner would win £175,000, and Derren would retain his crown as the country's creepiest necromancer.

And then something strange happened. As the roulette wheel clattered to a halt, the ball landed 'one out'; Brown, and Smug Londoner, had lost.

In one of the most sudden, anticlimactic and unexpected conclusions to a magic show ever, Derren Brown failed to pull off his stunt, wrapping up the proceedings with a muffled 'Sorry. Don't hate me.'

So what are we to make of it? Was it a didactic 'you can't beat the system' message to would-be gamblers everywhere? Was it an attempt by Brown to curry favour with the Casino industry that, if his blog is to be believed, despise his very presence? Or is it what it appeared: a right balls up?

Brown's been quiet last night, apart from the admission that he was 'still reeling' from the incident, again posted on his blog.

Whatever was going on behind the scenes, it made a refreshing change from the predictable fodder normally seen in magic shows, and few other illusionists would dare to screw up in such a public fashion. It's the equivalent of David Copperfield attempting to walk through the Great Wall of China and breaking his nose, which thinking about it would have been hilarious too.

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The former, a kind of proto Top Gear presented by Dominic Diamond, rode the crest of Sega's 'cool' marketing of the day, with murky, industrial set design, challenges which roped in awkward-looking Z-list celebrities and plenty of games journalists in ill-fitting bandanas. While Gamesmaster was hardly the zenith of Channel Four's output, it was a work of art when compared with the awful Bad Influence, which for some reason featured Andy Crane.

Attempts to create a more 'adult' type of gaming programme have failed almost without exception; Channel Four dipped their toe back in the water with the horribly smug Thumb Bandits, then hastily withdrew it again, while numerous cable channels have made their own contributions which all failed to take off.

Last night's Gameswipe, tucked away on BBC4 and hosted by acid-tongued Guardian columnist (and one-time PC Zone writer) Charlie Brooker, was the Auntie's belated contribution to the video game phenomenon. Brooker's 45 minute special took a typically withering eye on the medium, providing a brief potted history and a run-down of its most popular genres. These were interspersed with biting reviews of this year's Wolfenstein reboot and 50 Cent's Blood On The Sand, the footage of which almost made me want to wince; shown out of their native context, these games' moments of violence and misogyny appear horribly over-the-top.

Later, Brooker himself commented on the tasteless portrayal of war depicted in games like Call of Duty 4. Midway through torching an entire platoon of Japanese soldiers, he theatrically paused the game to take a sip of cola before resuming his onscreen massacre. Watched relatively late at night, and without a controller in my hand, I suddenly saw these games as a non-gamer like Anne Diamond must see them: hedonistically, anti-socially violent. Though possibly a lot of fun at the same time.

But perhaps the most insightful comments came from Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, who quite rightly bemoaned the lack of texture and imagination in video game storytelling. This, he surmised, was as a result of game designers watching too many movies and not reading enough books - "Research," he concluded, "does not mean watching Scarface twenty times."

Elsewhere, VideoGaiden presenters Robert Florence and Ryan Macleod spoke entertainingly (and intelligently) about the wonders of retro gaming, though their suggestion that all Japanese games were products of gigantic corporations wasn't entirely correct - Hudsonsoft, for example, started off as a tiny backroom company in the same way many UK eighties software outfits once did, with an early version of their biggest success, Bomberman, even appearing on the ZX Spectrum as Eric And The Floaters.

With Gameswipe, the games industry finally got a television show that presented it in a fair and balanced light; which showcased its diversity and scope while deftly presenting its failures and uglier excesses at the same time. Charlie Brooker's cutting, direct style of presentation also fits perfectly with the medium - simultaneously intelligent and childish, it's a direct reflection of gaming's schizophrenic persona.

Sadly, Gameswipe appeared to be a one-off, a pilot episode for a series that the BBC will probably never make - barely advertised and, like all of Charlie Brooker's excellent Wipe programs, hidden away in the Siberian wastes of the BBC4 late evening schedule, it's unlikely to have received the viewing figures it properly deserved. So head over to BBC iPlayer and watch it. Then write a letter to the BBC begging, no, demanding that they commission a proper series.

Courtesy of the lovely Den of Geek

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Of all the games in Taito's Bubble Bobble lineage, Parasol Stars is among the least known. While Rainbow Islands has been ported to almost every computer, console and mobile phone imaginable, and like Bubble Bobble, been subjected to some iffy 'updates' and remakes over the years (WiiWare's pointless Bubble Bobble Plus being the latest), Parasol Stars appears to have been largely forgotten.

Originally programmed for the PC Engine, Parasol Stars was ported to several other machines in the early nineties including the Gameboy, NES and Amiga. Versions were even rumoured for 8-bit computers like the ZX Spectrum and C64, though these never appeared (the C64 version was destroyed by a programmer's angry ex-wife, so the legend goes).

Parasol Stars is best described as a mixture of its predecessors; the two-player coop mode makes a welcome return from Bubble Bobble, while the characters themselves are almost pixel-perfect copies of the human Bub and Bob from Rainbow Islands. Like its forebears, Parasol Stars contains its own unique weapon system in the unlikely form of an umbrella. A seemingly prosaic choice when compared to the whimsical charms of the previous games' bubbles and escalator rainbows, the umbrella is actually the most complex and versatile play mechanic of the three: it can be used as a parachute, allowing the player to steer a course as it falls through the air; it doubles as a shield, opened up overhead or in front of the player; and of course it's also a deadly weapon. Enemies can be caught and flung across the screen, or rain drops can be caught on the tip of the umbrella and fired like bullets - collect five rain drops and a waterfall will be created, with a precipitous effect that will bring a smile of recognition to Bubble Bobble stalwarts.

And while Parasol Stars' reversion to largely static levels may seem like a retrograde step, its new roster of enemies increases the challenge with each successive world; as well as the traditional menagerie of dumb drones, levels typically contain at least one spawn point which will continue to churn out enemies until it's destroyed.

Taito's sprite designers have been as imaginative as ever with Parasol Stars, making full use of the PC Engine's vibrant colour palette to create monsters and levels as imaginative and memorable as anything seen in Rainbow Islands or New Zealand story. Enemies range from gigantic pink electric pianos to strange duck/pot plant hybrids, and if the area bosses are rarely as threatening or tough to beat as their size implies, they are at least a sight to behold.

Taito's apparent uninterest in Parasol Stars is something of a mystery; successive games imply that it never existed, and it wasn't included on either Taito Memories compilation, despite the presence of other, inferior games from around the same period.

There is an upside to Parasol Stars' neglect, however: unlike Taito's other IP, its name hasn't been sullied by cynical, half-arsed attempts to remake it for a 'new generation' - while New Zealand Story, Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands have all appeared on the Nintendo DS in versions fit for the bin, Parasol Stars sits in quiet obscurity, largely unpopular but as glittering and pristine as the day it was made.

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So this is what it feels like to be old. Gripped by a mysterious virus, I've been reduced to a shuddering, barely moving wreck, with the faintest beam of light leaving my eyes screwed up like a mole's and the slightest bit of effort draining the meagre droplets of energy I have left.

How am I supposed to play games in this state? Driving games are out of the question: far too scary, what with all those crashes and everything. First person shooters? Ditto. Too much coordination required, and all those loud gunshots can really take it out of you.

Thank the Lord, then, for my good friend Nathan, who introduced me to a rather marvellous little Flash game called Canabalt. If you haven't played it, then check it out (after you've finished reading this obviously - I need the company). And in case you were wondering, there are several reasons why this is the best game I've played all week.

Reason one: first, it's a 2D platform game, which gets it in my good books automatically. And it's like Mirror's Edge with all the annoying bits taken out. Your little chap sprints from left to right, leaping between buildings and over obstacles. As he runs, he'll gradually pick up speed, gently ratcheting up the difficulty until, inevitably, you make a mistake and he'll plummet to his doom. Unlike Mirror's Edge, there aren't any stupid secret agents to slow you down with fiddly and tedious fight sequences, or pointless cut-xscenes that look like a GCSE art project.

Reason number two: it's been beautifully programmed. Not beautifully programmed in the Crytek sense, with photo realistic palm trees everywhere - but in the old-school, every-pixel-counts sense. The project of just one lone programmer (Adam Saltsman) and coded in a startlingly rapid sixty hours, Canabalt instils a sense of excitement and panic with a handful of pixels and a few shades of grey; gigantic alien robots skulk about in the background, laying waste to the city around you, and occasionally one of the buildings you're traversing will crack up and collapse. Little touches like the John Woo-like flutter of doves in your wake and the detail in your tiny avatar's movements also add to the frantic atmosphere.

Reason three: it's different every time you play, forcing you to think on your feet rather than learn a pattern. This, and the little counter that records how far you've managed to run, adds to its crack-like addictive powers.

Reason four (and this is the main one): you can play it by pressing one measly button. No ducking, no running back the way you came, just simple, well timed jumps. This means it makes the perfect game for virus sufferers: no coordination required and only one operational digit necessary.

It's the video game at its absolute purest - the most simplistic means of interaction possible, married to a steadily ramping challenge that dares you to get a little further than you did before.

So there you have it - Canabalt is proof that even the simplest games can be immensely addictive, and that just pressing one button at the correct time is far, far more difficult than you might think.

From my weekly blog at Den of Geek

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It's been another weird gaming week. Following last time's encounter with the harsh realities of import gaming (my newly purchased PC Engine could only display a black and white image), this week has seen the disappearance of my better half's Nintendo DS. She apparently placed it somewhere 'safe from burglars' before we went away on holiday a couple of months ago - somewhere so safe that even burglars couldn't find it even if they tried to torture its location out of us. During my search I managed to find a broken Nintendo Entertainment System under the bed, an original PlayStation that I'd forgotten I owned, plus a whole pile of old ZX Spectrum cassettes.

This week I also managed to get around to watching District 9, which as our very own Rupert de Paula has rightly pointed out, is both audacious and brilliant. I wouldn't exactly describe Sharlto Copely's character Wikus as lovable (he is a foetus aborting, racist fascist with a clipboard, after all), but at least he finally redeems himself in the final reel, and there's no denying the energy and commitment in Copely's performance.

District 9 has also given us one of the most memorable alien creatures for some time; director Blomkamp's Prawns are daringly depicted, and somehow evoke our sympathy despite their predilection for cat food and cow heads. As a tribute then, here are my top ten video game aliens...

Dobkerratops - R-Type

An obvious choice this, since the area one boss from Irem's shooting classic is one of the most iconic sprite designs in all eighties gaming. A huge, pestilent mass of eyeballs and curling tendrils, this creature burned itself into the consciousness of a whole generation of arcade dwellers. Area two's throbbing heart and curling snake were similarly iconic, and trickier to beat.

Invaders - Space Invaders

No list of iconic gaming aliens would be complete without these little terrors - only a dozen pixels across, these diminutive xenomorphs are iconic nonetheless: once played, few can forget their steadily increasing speed, or the heartbeat-like thump that accompanied their hypnotic movements.

Headcrabs - Half-life

A game full of memorable critters, the headcrabs make the list for sheer 'ugh, get it away!' ickiness. Though clearly modelled on Giger's facehugger designs for Alien, the initial encounter, where Gordon Freeman has little with which to defend himself other than a certain blunt instrument, has since taken on an iconic status all its own. And you know when an alien design has reached truly iconic status when it's been made into an adorable plush hat...

Bees - Galaga

Quite why Namco decided to populate their sequel to 1979's Galaxian with antagonistic bees is something of a mystery, but that's precisely what they did with 1981's Galaga - and what a handful they proved to be. Taking the swooping drones of Galaxian and adding more intricate attack patterns, Galaga's insectoid invaders were arguably the most memorable aliens in early arcade gaming, and strangely cute to boot. Galaga 88 (released, funnily enough, in 1987) made them even more adorable, expanding their population to include bees that steadily expanded when shot until they finally burst, others that hatched out of eggs while still others left behind a handful of larvae once killed.

Grunts - Halo series

Possibly the most feeble opponents found in any first person shooter, Grunts represent Halo's cannon fodder. Visually unremarkable (they're sort of squat brown things with pointy backs), they're made eternally memorable thanks to their squeaky, panicked utterances at your approach - think of South Park's Cartman having a panic attack. Exclamations such as "I'll get you, you big giant freak," along with the occasional shriek of "bastard!" are, once heard, hard to shake.

Wretches - Gears Of War

Fast, short and stealthy, these critters (a sort of alien greyhound that could run along ceilings) were memorable for all the wrong reasons. While an initial encounter, trapped in a narrow hall beside a locked door - was a brilliantly tense introduction, their sole reason for existing thereafter seemed to be as a perpetual annoyance. Playing GOW on harder levels unleashed great swarms of the things, who bite at Phoenix's ankles until he collapses in a heap on the floor. Or maybe I'm just rubbish...

One of my weekly musings on Den of Geek...

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Having unpacked the dinky thing from its bubble wrap (the PC Engine still holds the record for smallest ever console twenty years on, its footprint only the size of a CD jewel case), I connected the console to my television and booted up my first game - Irem's marvellous and largely forgotten Image Fight.

To my surprise, I was confronted not by the glittering colours for which the Engine's famous, but acres of grainy monochrome. Initially mystified, a little Googling revealed the true nature of my predicament; the first PC Engines were RF only, and Japanese RF doesn't output correctly to European televisions; in some cases, a picture won't appear at all.

As I understood it, there were two solutions to this problem: one, send the Engine away to one of the numerous electronics wizards advertised on the Internet, who, for around thirty to fifty pounds, would hack and solder my console until it could output an AV signal. Two, buy another PC Engine - preferably a later one like the Core Grafx II that already had AV connectors as standard. Since both options involved spending vast amounts of money (the Core Grafx II isn't a cheap purchase, and I'd already risked the wrath of my better half by summoning another console into our overstuffed house already), I was left in something of a quandary.

Fortunately, a bit more Googling revealed a handy but rare gadget called an AV Booster. As the name vaguely suggests, plugging this cumbersome block of plastic into the back of the Engine results in a friendly, usable AV signal which would solve my colour problems in an instant. While an AV Booster costs around thirty pounds on eBay, it's a far less drastic option for those reluctant to butcher their diminutive consoles.

By now, I suppose most people would begin to wonder why anyone would go to such lengths to run a twenty-year-old system that never even made a dent in the UK market - not only is the Engine's extensive lineage of systems, CD drive add-ons and peripherals baffling, it's expensive to collect. You'll struggle to find a boxed console for less than a hundred quid, while the collector's status of the games themselves makes prices vary from around ten pounds for common titles to fifty or sixty pounds for a cherished classic like Parasol Stars.

But like owning a classic Jaguar or a rare antique book, there's something about the PC Engine that takes it beyond the realms of mere nostalgia. Designed from the ground up as a system to play shoot-em-ups by its co-creators NEC and Hudson, the console's library of games is an arcade fanatic's paradise. As well as the Engine's first Killer App, an almost pixel-perfect port of R-Type, there are classic shooters like Gunhed, Star Soldier and Coryoon that simply aren't the same on any other system.

And then there are the brilliantly eccentric, quintessentially Japanese games that we'll never see the likes of again - witness the scatological anarchy of Chan & Chan and Toilet Kids, which I've raved about more than once in this column, or the unique versions of Bomberman, which allow for five player death matches.

There's also an incredible intensity of sound and colour on the PC Engine that can't be replicated on an emulator - run the cartridge original of something as simplistic as Galaga 88, and the vibrant colours and the depth of sound (which of all the eighties consoles replicates the booming sound of an arcade machine the best) is striking. Run the same game through an emulator, and this intensity has somehow been mislaid.

Even a game like Gradius - a ubiquitous shooter that's appeared on just about every platform conceivable - is worth buying for the system for its music alone. Forget the hideous slowdown when there are too many sprites onscreen - just sit back and enjoy the tunes.

So while the PC Engine may be the console equivalent of a petrol-guzzling old Jag or a thatched cottage that's freezing in the winter, it boasts a wealth of unique and fantastic games - and for those I'd forgive it anything.

One of my weekly efforts from the lovely Den of Geek.

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Readers with keen memories may remember my previous top five weird games from last year. And just to prove that mildly interesting ideas are worth recycling, here's a further five games that perplex, confuse and bewilder as much as they entertain...

Cho Aniki
Literally translated as 'Super Big Brother', this series of Japanese shoot-em-ups distinguishes itself by being quite possibly the only homoerotic shooting franchise in gaming history. Beginning with the PC Engine original in 1992, the Cho Aniki games spiced up a fairly ordinary Gradius clone with an almost unbroken procession of muscle bound men in erotic poses. Despite its classification as a 'kuso-ge' - or 'shitty game' in our native tongue, the Cho Aniki games have enjoyed an enduring cult status, with no fewer than six sequels appearing on platforms as diverse as the Bandai Wonderswan and the PlayStation 2. And thanks to the Wii's Virtual Arcade, the PC Engine original's bizarre delights can be enjoyed by a whole new generation.

Toilet Kids
Now this top-down shooter really is a kuso-ge, and just about the most lavatorially obsessed game you're ever likely to play. Another PC Engine release (a console with more than its fair share of weirdness, come to think of it), Toilet Kids relates the tale of a young man who finds himself sucked into his toilet and flushed out in an alternate world of pooey delights. All this boils down to a retooled version of Xevious with curling spires of fecal matter, clattering toilet lids and spiders with vast pink backsides. While this description probably sounds like a vomit-inducing trawl through a sea of brown sprites, the reality is actually quite the opposite: the gameplay isn't exactly Ikaruga, but there's some genuinely imaginative, if simplistic, character designs to unearth, including a serene-looking cross-legged poo god and a gigantic blue elephant with earrings and a big jobby hat. Now something of a collector's item, Toilet Kids' scatalogical humour is unlikely to endear it to family friendly Nintendo, so don't expect to see this one on Virtual Arcade any time soon.

Read the rest at Den of Geek

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Few shoot-em-ups did as much to define the genre as Konami's Gradius. Taking the side scrolling gameplay of Scramble and Defender, Gradius established most of genre trappings we now regard as cliches: a progressive weapon upgrade system, themed levels and gigantic bosses.

The mighty R-Type may have come along and stolen the series' thunder a couple of years later, but there's something incredibly solid and pure about Gradius and its sequels that sets them apart from their peers; the core gameplay has barely changed over the course of the five Gradius games, but the quality of their design and the tough challenge each one presents makes them timeless classics.

With Gradius Rebirth, available to download now from WiiWare, Konami has done a Mega Man 9 and taken the series back to its late eighties/early nineties roots; the flashy presentation of Treasure's Gradius V has been pared back to a decidedly 16-bit style, with sprite-based ships, pixelated scaling and even a touch of slowdown in places - very SNES.

The retro nostalgia extends to the level designs, which are directly inspired by the first three games - Konami's shooters have always been quaintly self referential, but Rebirth takes the biscuit: there's barely an alien or stage design that hasn't been seen before at some point over the last twenty four years.

But then again, perhaps this is the point - the first level at first appears to be a straight recreation of the original Gradius, complete with the mysterious gap in the mountain to fly through for bonus points. It's only at the level's end, where the expected popcorn-like flurry of volcanic rock is replaced by a more malevolent wave of aliens, that the game begins to offer any surprises - it's a clever love letter to longterm series fans, lulling them into a sense of familiarity before stealthily closing the trap.

It should also be pointed out that Rebirth is phenomenally hard. I've played every single Gradius game - most of Konami's shooting back catalogue, for that matter - and never have I encountered such a challenge as this. If you thought Gradius V was difficult, think again - Rebirth throws everything it has at you almost from the outset, with level two ending with an endless pursuit of pink bubblegum through moving columns, culminating in a gigantic boss. Lose a life, and you'll have to repeat the entire ordeal again.

This stultifying difficulty level will no doubt gratify the genuine Gradius veterans out there; for the mere mortals such as myself, Rebirth is a stretch too far.

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By now we've all seen the trailers for Avatar, and a lucky few of us have seen the fifteen minute preview footage at 3D cinemas. While I can't say I was wholly unimpressed by what I've seen so far, there was something faintly troubling about it at the same time - and not just, as our own Martin Anderson pointed out, the fact that Avatar is more fantasy than hard SF. It's something that a number of viewers have commented on, including the Guardian's Anne Pickard: Avatar looks more like a video game than a movie.

With CGI being used with increasingly wild abandon in Hollywood movies, you could argue that such a criticism is redundant. But in the case of the current crop of Hollywood blockbusters, from Transformers via Die Hard 4 to this December's Avatar, big budget cinema experiences appear to be morphing into a formless, oddly inhuman chimera that resembles a video game cut scene more than the medium we've been munching popcorn in front of for decades.

It's ironic then, that as video games have acquired greater depth, with games such as Mass Effect and Bioshock packing genuine dramatic weight and moral consequence, that mainstream cinema should be becoming, in some cases, increasingly shallow and lacking in dramatic substance.

Of course, the people who make video games are still struggling with the integration of characterisation and plot with an interactive experience; it's a tricky balancing act that even the most talented developers can get wrong. Overlong cut scenes leave the player with a tedious lack of involvement, while the legion of muscle-bound soldiers and space marines populating the gaming medium is proof that genuinely three-dimensional characters are tricky things to create on a computer.

Worryingly, cinema now appears to be having a similar difficulty integrating humans and CG in a believable fashion: almost anything can be created to a reasonably convincing degree using CGI, yet very few directors appear to be capable of harnessing its potential to positive effect. Notable exceptions aside - not least David Fincher, who has integrated digital effects subtly and tastefully in his films for well over a decade - CGI appears to be an Achilles' heel for most modern directors.

As an example, compare the original Indy movie, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, with its most recent sequel, Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. While there are undoubtedly other fundamental issues with the latter film (not least the presence of Shia Labeouf), I would argue one of the prime reasons for its almost complete failure as a piece of entertainment was its over reliance on computer generated effects. Nuke-proof fridges, gratuitous monkeys and risible alien manifestations were all thrown in for no reason other than because George Lucas, or Spielberg - or a CG guy at a workstation - felt like throwing them in the mix. The Indy of 1981 remains a classic and likeable hero because of his flesh-and-blood humanity; he feels pain, gets tired, and makes world-weary remarks. The Indy of 2008, hopping and skipping in front of a green screen and reacting to entities that are evidently nonexistent, short circuits this sense of humanity and danger.

When a game like Gears Of War and its sequel - for my money two of the best shooters of this generation - concentrate on a breathless chain of increasingly spectacular set pieces with little regard for logic or plot, it barely matters: it's the interaction that matters.

But when a movie breaks down into a disconnected sequence of digital fireworks with no dramatic weight or the distraction of buttons to press, the results invariably fall flat.

The new tools afforded by CG have given filmmakers the ability to create wildly elaborate scenarios that would previously have been unachievable. But the ability to suddenly exclaim 'wouldn't it be cool if...' and make that idea a (virtual) reality within a few months isn't always to the betterment of a film as a whole.

The conveyor belt scene in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones is a prime example of the 'wouldn't it be cool if...' mentality; conceived after the bulk of the picture had been filmed and only added in at the last minute. This scene, which sees Natalie Portman jumping and ducking through a droid factory, is overlong and does nothing to further the plot. This scene, like so many others since, looks like a promo for an unreleased video game tie-in.

And while we shouldn't judge a film too harshly from a meagre few minutes of teaser footage - and a director of James Cameron's calibre certainly deserves the benefit of the doubt - it does appear that Avatar springs from a similar school of filmmaking; one where the CGI experts dictate the narrative flow of the movie rather than the writer or director, and where human actors are lost in a pixelated storm of digital overload.

It's clear that Hollywood feels threatened by the growing success and cultural significance of the game industry - it's been said that the newly adopted 3D technology used in Avatar will help to combat piracy, but it could be argued that it's also an attempt to reclaim an audience that has been increasingly diverted by computers and consoles.

But all the 3D gimmickry in the world won't save a film without a story to tell; and when CG takes precedence over engaging characters, the result is, to paraphrase the Guardian's Anna Pickard, like watching someone else play a video game.

From my column at Den of Geek

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Now this really is a classic from that hangar of classic shooters, Toaplan. Fire Shark, or (brilliantly) Same! Same! Same!, as it's known in Japan, is a WWII top-down shooter filtered through the mind of a maniac: a lone twin-prop plane faces off against an endless armada of tanks, boats, zeppelins and cannon, with huge lasers and gouts of flame crossing the screen at wild angles.

Even to a jaded shoot-em-up fan like me, Fire Shark is a brilliantly chaotic experience, full of colour (on a console not noted for its vibrant palette), imagination and gigantic mechanical bosses. There are neat incidental touches too: the tiny soldiers that greet you on the runway at the end of each stage; the way your can plow kamikaze-style into enemies as you fall from the sky.

Fire Shark also marks a sublime halfway point between the quiet austerity of their earlier efforts like Slap Fight and their phenomenally difficult later works like Donpachi; here, there's a wonderful middle ground where the challenge is high but never punishingly so. The game's balance is such that even losing all your power-ups doesn't leave you crippled as so many other shooters are wont to do; this is no Super R-Type, that's for sure.

'Essential' is an over-used term these days, but as far as Mega Drive shooters are concerned, Fire Shark is easily in the big league MD genre classics such as MUSHA Aleste, Raiden and Toaplan's Tatsujin. Excellent.

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As I've mentioned before (see The great drunken retro game challenge of a couple of weeks back), game compilations are a fantastically compact, convenient way to enjoy an evening's gaming. The nature of compilations means that a sudden desire to play something else no longer requires the lazy gamer to rise from the couch and swap discs or cartridges.

Laziness aside, game compilations, such as Capcom Classics or Taito Legends make sound economic sense. Much of their contents may be available on the current gen consoles' digital download lists, but to purchase them individually would add up to a considerable cost, particularly when you consider that the aforementioned collections (which contain around twenty or thirty games apiece) can be picked up for only ten pounds or so.

Compilations also open up a library of rare games that would normally be the preserve of the dedicated collector. If you don't believe me, head to eBay and try to find a copy of Elevator Action Returns for the Sega Saturn; you won't get much change from a fifty pound note. Suddenly, ten pounds for a copy of Taito Legends sounds very cheap indeed.

Here then, is my wish list of five retro game compilations...

Read more at Den of Geek

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R-Type changed shoot-em-ups forever. It took the core gameplay of Scramble and Gradius - fly from left to right, collect power ups and kill things - and blasted the genre into new, previously unimaginable realms.

After R-Type's release to arcades in 1987, developers had to come up with their own weapon systems to match the innovation and sheer cunning of that game's Force, an indestructible orb that could be used as a shield or a brutal battering ram to tear into the enemy's ranks. After R-Type, every shooter needed a spectacle to match the curling mass of tails and eyeballs that was Dobkerratops, the creature that scrolled menacingly into view at the end of the first stage, or the bravura spaceship found in stage three, a monstrosity so vast that it had to be destroyed one piece at a time - in essence, it was one relentless boss fight. In short, R-Type became the standard by which all other shooters were judged.

Indeed, R-Type cast a shadow so great that Irem never quite stepped out of it. They released many other games - shooter or otherwise - but these never reached the creative pinnacle that their most famous creation represented. Like Joseph Heller with his most famous novel, Catch 22, or Orson Wells and his directorial debut Citizen Kane, Irem's name became synonymous with R-Type, and everything that came after it - including the R-Type sequels themselves - were deemed anaemic by comparison.

X-Multiply was one of three shooters released by Irem in 1989, and in many ways it's simply a variation on a theme; another side scrolling shoot-em-up with bio-mechanical visuals, there's initially little to suggest that X-Multiply is anything more than a derivative regurgitation of the developer's previous ideas, its premise - a miniaturised ship injected into a human body to destroy alien parasites - a flimsy excuse for an extended reworking of its illustrious predecessor's visceral second stage.

Only gradually does it become apparent that X-Multiply does, in fact, have an identity all its own; the weapon system, which initially feels like a cagey re-working of R-Type's force, eventually becomes a deadly and eerily graceful tool of destruction. Where other late eighties/early nineties shooters were all too keen to head down a blind alley of flashier ordnance to an oddly desensitising effect, Irem wisely took another, more austere path.

Read the rest at Den of Geek...

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The population of my Japanese import Megadrive games increased by three today, as this rather marvelous package arrived in the post.

First out of the box is Darwin 4081, a largely forgotten shooter based on Data East's equally obscure Darwin 4078 from 1986. I've no idea what this one's like, but it fills a hole in the collection.

Next up is Same! Same! Same!, aka Fire Shark. An excellent vertical shooter by the legendary Toaplan, this, along with the rock-hard Tatsujin, ranks among the best shoot-em-ups they produced for the Megadrive.

Finally, there's YuYu Hakusho Gaiden, not to be confused with Treasure's YūYū Hakusho: Makyō Tōitsusen, as I did - I thought it was cheap. Thanks to my schoolboy error, instead of an excellent beat-em-up by Japan's best developer, I'm left with an unintelligible RPG which I can't play.

Still, I've just learned that Hakusho Gaiden was developed by Gau, the team behind Ex-Ranza (or Ranger X outside Japan) - at least I've learned something I suppose...

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If you've ever fired a plastic gun at a screen, you'll know precisely the type of game I'm on about: the on-rails shooters where you fire at the digital equivalent of tin ducks as they shuffle to and fro. Between the mid-eighties and nineties, a whole gallery of gun games appeared in arcades, riding on the (camouflaged) shirttails of Taito's 1986 megahit Operation Wolf.

I still remember seeing my first Op Wolf cabinet at a funfair when I was aged ten: the vast, incredibly realistic looking Uzi sub machine gun strapped to the front of the cabinet; the earthy, Rambo-like graphics; and most of all VIOLENCE like I'd never seen - helicopters exploding in mid air, soldiers reeling back from dreadful head wounds, hand grenades, throwing knives... it was the kind of game that would have left my mother jaundiced with horror, but left me in a state of mesmerised astonishment...

Read more at Den of Geek...

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"Terra's fate depended on the one man who could not be killed - because he had mastered the secret of borrowing life from the future."

So reads the rather misleading (and very long) tagline on the cover of Philip K. Dick's Now Wait For Last Year. I've been reading the novel all week, and it's as perplexing as all of Dick's work: brief, bewildering, often misogynistic, patchily written and occasionally glimmering with brilliance. His novels and short stories may have borne many of the hallmarks of the pulp magazines in which they originally appeared, but Dick's ideas and imagination set him apart from the run-of-the-mill hacks found in the yellowed pages of publications like Astounding or Startling Stories, and it's no surprise that his work would eventually be adapted for the cinema - indeed, the only surprise is that it took so long.

What's even more surprising is how little direct attention Dick - or many, many other science fiction authors, for that matter - has received in video games. His work is obsessed with the meaning and fragility of reality, and it's strange that a medium that's all about creating new realities hasn't looked to his work for ideas more often.

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I know, I know. It's been a long time since my last post. I've been busy elsewhere (writing, drinking, DIY, that kind of thing), but I've promised myself that I'll now update this here blog more often. At its peak, these humble pages received over 7000 visitors a month. I can only assume those people were lost.

Anyway, the above image is from the week's gaming playlist - the impossibly obscure Berlin no Kabe (or Berlin Wall) for the Sega Game Gear (if you're under about twenty-five, the Game Gear's a bulky, steam-powered handheld console from the upper cretacious period).

There's a mildly diverting story behind this game: when I was fourteen, I entered a Christmas competition printed in the long since defunct Sega Pro magazine, where all kinds of random prizes were up for grabs. A month or two later I received a phone call saying I'd won the Sega Master System version of Populous, which left me feeling rather hollow as I didn't actually own a Master System. When I explained this, the chap on the phone was surprisingly accommodating, and said I could pick any Game Gear title reviewed in that month's Sega Pro and they'd send me that instead.

Leafing through the mag, two games immediately caught my eye, and they were both imports - one was the above title (Berlin Wall - keep up at the back), while the other was a vertical shooter by the name of GG Aleste.

Now I don't know how familiar you are with your collectible shoot-em-ups, gentle reader, but Compile's GG Aleste is one rare game these days - boxed copies can fetch a hundred quid (give or take) on eBay - and with hindsight I almost wish I'd chosen it.

But, my febrile naive brain being as it is, I chose Berlin Wall instead. While it isn't half as sought after as GG Aleste, I'm proud to give it a home - and you try finding a copy. I've only seen one or two for sale in the past decade and they've never been available for less than about thirty pounds.

From the graphics above, you'd probably think BW wasn't worth much more than thirty pence, but it's actually really enjoyable (which is just as well, since I've played through the thing twice this week for something I've been scribbling away at).

If you've played the absolutely ancient Space Panic, or maybe Lode Runner, this is very similar - dig holes, trap baddies, hit trapped baddies and collect points. It's simplistic, surreal (in that typical Japanese nineties way, all angry veg and aggressive penguins) and features a catchy rinky-dink theme tune that I find myself hearing in the dead of night.

Is it a classic? Possibly a minor one. Do I wish I'd asked for GG Aleste instead? Maybe.

Do I love Berlin Wall anyway, with its quirky style and Japanese box art covered in squids and veg? Absolutely.

PS. Interested parties may wish to know I've joined the nineteenth century, and can now be found on Twitter, Facebook, and I even have my own official, corporate, please-take-me-seriously website (currently under construction). Follow me! Add me! Send me abuse! Actually, don't send me abuse. I'm very sensitive.

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Take a look at that face. Are you sick of it yet? I know I am - in every newspaper, on the television and all over the internet, Susan Boyle's visage has become the most ubiquitous picture of the year so far.

Now before a horde of angry net dwellers start flaming me with hate filled messages, allow me to clarify something: I have nothing against Susan Boyle herself; she's a perfectly competent singer, and deserves to make some cash from her warbling - others have made millions with less talent, after all.

What irritates me about the past week's Boylemania is the absurd reaction of the media. 'She's plain - and yet she excels at something!' the editors of Britain's Got Talent appeared to say. The ridiculous notion that only those gifted with youth, beauty and perfect teeth are good at anything has been preached by programme makers for so long that they've clearly taken it as gospel truth - hence the gaping faces of Britain's Got Talent Judges (who are, ironically, three of the least talented human beings in the whole country) when Ms Boyle opened her mouth to sing.

Irritation number two: whether she makes any money or not, Susan Boyle is almost certainly doomed to a Jade Goody-esque life of media subservience; one can imagine the glee the producers of BGT felt when she turned up for her audition. The salt-and-pepper hair, the plain features, the Last of the Summer Wine wardrobe - almost too good to be true. Even the name is perfect - like a skin complaint or an old-fashioned sweet that nobody eats anymore. Boyle's explosive popularity on the internet means she's now a commodity; media types and publicists love simple working-class folk, who they can lead around by the nose and photograph, gossip about, prod and cajole.

No wonder she's been 'advised' to retain her dowdy image - it's now part of the brand.

And this really is the saddest part of the Boyle phenomenon: whether her fame lasts for years - as was the case with Jade Goody, who lived and died under studio lights - or fizzles out in a few months, like Mo from Driving School, that bloke from Airport or any one of a thousand reality television-created celebrities, Susan Boyle has become another money-making tool to be exploited by the greedy and manipulative.

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It's highly unusual for me to buy a book just because I liked its television/film adaptation, but that's precisely what I did after watching Channel 4's excellent trio of Red Riding dramas.

Before 1974, the first instalment, I'd barely heard of its author David Peace - I knew he'd written something about football (The Damned United), a sport that holds no interest for me whatsoever, but little more.

The Red Riding television series managed to recreate the nicotine and beer infused world of seventies/eighties Yorkshire with a surprising ease when you consider the comparative lack of finances (Peace's second book, 1977 wasn't even filmed due to budget constraints), and depicted a murky world of police corruption, secrecy and brutality.

Peace's original books are even better. Featuring a tangled web of characters, plot lines and hidden links that six hours of television could not hope to replicate, the Red Riding quartet (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983) is shot through with a mesmerising style of writing that, once experienced, is hard to shake - it's a repetitive, mantra-like prose that emerges fully formed in 1974 (which was, it should be pointed out, Peace's debut novel) and simply gets better.

By the final book, there are so many interweaving characters, so many events unfolding past and present, that the whole narrative begins to groan under the weight of it all. Allow your concentration to slip, even for a sentence or two, and you're suddenly lost in a sea of grim events.

Indeed, Red Riding's events are so unrelentingly grim that putting one of these books down feels like coming up for air - the constant descriptions of police-sanctioned torture, killings, beatings and brutality are horribly oppressive.

There are explicit references to Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four everywhere, and the dreadful occurences in 'the belly', where suspects are tortured into giving statements in the most disturbing ways imaginable, have obvious parallels with Winston Smith's encounter with Room 101. The phrase 'put your hands flat on the table' isn't one I'll forget in a hurry.

Real life events, like the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, are worked into Peace's fiction so effortlessly that it becomes difficult to tell where the fiction begins and reality ends - a conjuring trick the writer uses to narcotic effect.

And with the Metropolitan Police's alleged involvement in the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 demonstrations last month - and what appeared to be attempts to conceal evidence of that involvement - Peace's cautionary tales of violence and its terrible effects on ordinary people seem all the more timely.

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Thanks to the vagaries of geography, Japan Xbox owners were able to download a playable demo of Resident Evil 5 about four days ago - and it doesn't look like Resi fans in Europe or America will be able to get hold of it any time soon. But thanks to a bit of science and cunning, I managed to get my hands on the demo today - and it's incredible.

The essential play mechanics remain unchanged from RE4: the over-the-shoulder perspective's the same, as is the run-aim-shoot control system. The biggest addition comes in the shapely form of Sheva, who follows you around loyally, offing zombies and handing you ammo should you begin to run low. Take a hit, and she'll heal you too. Her AI is pretty good - not Elika from Prince of Persia, but not as annoyingly dim as Natalia from Goldeneye either, which is good news.

Despite the controversial setting (a particularly run-down borough in Africa, it would appear) it's business as usual: fast-moving zombies with a variety of weapons (blunt, sharp and petrol driven), all lusting after your blood. And if you thought the graphics in RE4 were good, wait until you see these - they're incredible, with subtle and disturbing animation throughout. The zombies' reactions as you fire away at them with your revolver is varied and convincing, and the devastating effect of your shotgun genuinely packs a punch - you've never seen heads explode like this.

There are fantastic incidental details too - it's surprising, for example, just how much of the scenery can be shot and destroyed. Obvious things like windows and doors will splinter after a shot or two, but try aiming for the little pyramid of watermelons stacked up in the first room you enter - the effect is unexpected and oddly comical, given the horror that lurks elsewhere.

RE5's setting may be sunny and well-lit (at least in the pair of levels I played), but make no mistake; this is a pant-fillingly tense game, and more than worthy of the 'Black Hawk Down with zombies' allusion drawn by Jun Takeuchi, the game's producer, last year. It's tense, gory, and every bit as fun to play as RE4 ever was.

RE5 may not turn out to be another revolutionary instalment as 4 was, but it's certainly shaping up to be one of the must-have titles of 2009. With any luck, the finished product will hit the shelves some time in March - and I can't wait.

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This week, I've been lucky enough to get a review copy of the new Prince of Persia, and I've been playing it incessantly for the last few days. To say any more about it would be very naughty - check out the next issue (or maybe the one after) of Micro Mart for the proper review.

Anyway, Prince of Persia's come a long way since Jordan Mechner's 1989 original - though it's still well worth playing almost twenty years later. The game first appeared on the Apple II, but for my money the best version was the Super Nintendo version - not only did it feature some beautifully redrawn graphics, with more detailed backgrounds and extra curly shoes, it even added a few extra levels. The Japanese version also came in a stunningly illustrated box - it's criminal that this wasn't used in the US or European releases.

Perhaps the most dated aspect of the original PoP is its extreme difficulty; one false move and you were dead - falling from dizzying heights, impaled on spikes, dismembered by the clanging jaws of a man-trap - the result was always the same: back to the start of the level. Add a sadistically tight one-hour time limit to the mix, and you're left with one of the most stultifyingly difficult games you're likely to encounter. I'm a huge fan of the game, but I must admit that I've never completed it.

Of course, PoP harks back to the days when the platform game ruled supreme, and gamers were far more hardened to this kind of difficulty. In these modern, FPS-obsessed times, we're not used to to such harsh assaults on our hand-eye co-ordination.

In fact, the past few years have seen a bit of a decline in the once mighty platform game genre; Nintendo may be flying the flag with the sublime Super Mario Galaxy, but things have been rather quiet elsewhere. That is, until this year, where there's been a bit of a platform game renaissance - we've had the stunning Braid, Lost Winds, Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Tomb Raider Underworld, to name a few.

I for one hope the trend continues - we can't go back to the halcyon days of Manic Miner or the original Super Mario Bros, but that really doesn't matter. This year has seen a clutch of games - Braid in particular - that easily match the best of them.

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As a change of pace to my usual writing nonsense and video game geekery, I've been playing with my paint set for the first time in.. ooh, ages. It's shown here at roughly life size (the original's a dinky four inches square); painting tiny pictures means I can get one finished in a few minutes or so, and I don't make too much of a mess in the process.

Anyway, I thought I might use this here blog as a gallery for my daubs just to break up the obscure nineties shoot-em-up coverage.. if you have an opinion, let me know what it is!

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Here's a genuine Megadrive rarity - perhaps not the most rare game on the MD, but not far off - Musha Aleste. I managed to get it from eBay for a surprisingly reasonable price (particularly when compared to the extortionate 100-170GBP some sellers are asking for), and it was worth every penny. Not only does it feature some spanking manga box art (superior, as always, to the woeful Western effort), but the game itself is an absolute corker.

It's a slightly surreal mix of giant mecha and feudal japan; your robot flies over a landscape of farms and temples, blasting away at some brilliantly realised enemies, including the wacky Noh theatre mask depicted on the back of the box. Perhaps Musha's biggest draw is its absurd level of fire-power; at full power you can fire a primary weapon, a dual laser and a pair of drones that spray lead everywhere too.

Aleste received some relatively lukewarm reviews back in 1990 - I seem to recall Mean Machines only gave it 70%, or thereabouts - which is a pity, and probably a sign that reviewers were becoming jaded with the number of shooters that flooded the market. Admittedly, Musha Aleste won't present a huge challenge for more skilled players, but the feeling of empowerment and glee the weaponry provides is unique - for once, the aliens are the ones who are outgunned.

Musha Aleste is a true classic, and well worth adding to any shoot-em-up fanatic's collection.

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The Japanese churn out some amazing videogames - and in their spare time they make some wacky commercials too. I stumbled upon the site sega-16.com while wandering the internet, and most importantly THIS PAGE, which features a selection of Sega Megadrive adverts from the days of yore. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll find the Japanese ones - and some of them have to be seen to be believed.

While some are just tacky products of their (early nineties) time, others are grade-A comedy classics; check out the promo for the 'Sushi Tetris' puzzler Puyo Puyo (pictured above) - why is there a chef peering in through their living room window? Be sure to have a look at the Columns ad too, which features a man skydiving from a plane in his underpants. What this has to do with a 'match the crystals' puzzle game is a complete and utter mystery...

Enjoy.

* STOP PRESS *
I've just watched the advert for the Sega Megadrive, where the then cutting-edge console is introduced to the unsuspecting public by a Spock-haired man floating above the surface of the moon. Visual Shock! Speed Shock! Sound Shock!

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Hardly the most riveting of news, but these fantastic Alien Hominid toys are heading my way from America. They're made by the game's developers, The Behemoth, and they're available from their online shop here.

They've also got a new game coming out this August - Castle Crashers is a four player beat-em-up with the same anarchic art style as Alien Hominid. It'll be available to download from XBLA from the 27th, and I can't wait.

In the meantime, you can visit the Castle Crashers webpage, and here's a bit of in-game violence:

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Crikey, has it really been over eight weeks since my last post? Regrettably, it's true - but I have an excuse. I've been abroad, called away unexpectedly to Myanmar where I had to rescue a group of christian missionaries from a prison camp... Oh, hang on - that was the plot of Rambo, which I saw last week.

So what have I really been doing? Writing a lot, elsewhere of course; my usual video game musings for Den of Geek, as well as various reviews and a very long article on independent game developers for Micro Mart magazine.

In other news, I've managed to sneak a fabulous Xbox 360 into the house, along with copies of Halo 3, GTAIV and Forza II, which are all marvelous. Oh, and a copy of Viva Pinata as well, which my better half thinks is great (I like the paper critters, but can't see the appeal - looks like a lot of hard work to me). You can read more on the subject here, if you're interested.

Now, I must away - a group of freedom fighters need some help over in Afghanistan...

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