My Top Five All Time Most Favourite Computer Games Ever

1 Arkham City. Playstation 3.

So this list in my favourite games, but I think this would probably top a list of the games that I think are the best games. You can be Batman. And it feels like you are Batman. The game is so superbly designed.

I finished the game last night (except for the Riddler’s Revenge challenges which to be frank, I’m a bit pants at) and I can say it’s the best designed game I’ve played. As in Arkham Asylum, there were a few of the Riddler Trophies that I couldn’t work out and had to Google but this is partly due to my stupidity and partly due to being a boy and not reading the instructions on some of the gadgets I was given.

Also, I have an inexplicable crush on Harley Quinn.

2.Micromaniacs. Playstation.

My second favourite game would have been Arkham Asylum if I didn’t think it’d have been a more boring list. So instead, it is Micromaniacs on the old school Playstation.

For those of you that didn’t play it, it’s basically the Micromachines game that was on the Megadrive but instead of micromachines, you control little characters who run around the track and all have special powers. My favourite was Maw Maw whose special powers were farting in his opponents faces and extending his tongue (he was some sort of mutant creature) and biting off other player’s heads so that their controls got reversed until their head grew back. Genius.

Probably my all time favourite gaming experience is when there were 8 of us playing this on the Playstation in teams of 4 and my team was so awesome at the game that we won the race before we got to the first corner.
I discovered a while ago that you can play original playstation games on the PS3 and I’m looking forward to giving this a proper run out sometime soon.

3. Goldeneye. N64.

This is the game that prompted me to buy my first console of my own. There probably isn’t anyone of my generation who doesn’t look back on this game fondly. It was the first first-person shooter game that finished. Come to think of something, that probably also makes it 50% of all the first-person shooter games I have finished.

The single player had great replay value by encouraging you to complete levels on certain difficulty settings in a certain time in order to get amusing or fun cheats for the multiplayer game which – frankly – was what the game was all about.

Getting 3 mates around to run around one of the brilliantly designed levels shooting at each other was brilliant fun at the time – as long as no-one cheated and went for Odd Job – and is one of the reasons why I don’t want to taint the memory by setting up my old N64 and seeing how much it has ages or playing one of the undoubtedly unfaithful remakes that have come out on recent consoles.

4. Freddy Hardest. Amstrad CPC 464.

This gets in the list as both the first computer game my family ever owned and the first computer game I ever finished. I don’t expect many of you will be familiar with it. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. From what I recall, it’s a 2 level platform game which involves running along and smashing up aliens.

Freddy had an amazing blonde quiff and a giant chin and to be honest, I think I probably thought I was going to grow up to be him. The game was in two parts and when you finished the first one you got a code so that you could put in the tape to load up the second game which usually took around 5 minutes and then you could type in the code and complete the game.

This reminds me of a quaint time when I wasn’t entirely sure if the game was going to load or not. If the tape had a bit of fluff on it, or had got twisted or fallen some similar fate, then you could be waiting around only to find that you weren’t going to be able to play the game after all. This is the reason I never finished Taipan. Kids these days don’t know how hard they’ve got it when they have to spend 20 seconds cleaning a bit of dirt off a CD.

5. Dead Rising. Xbox 360.

I love smashing up zombies. I love smashing up zombies with a chainsaw or a sword or a sickle. But I also love putting toy heads on them or throwing teddie bears at them. This game is possibly the most fun way I’ve killed zombies or indeed human beings or aliens or anything else.

This game gets the nod over the second game as I think it was more novel at the time and perhaps even a little more fun, especially as the second game didn’t really expand the concept as much as perhaps I would have liked.

One of the novel things about this game is that you had to attempt to take pictures of zombies which would score points based on the content of photos being gruesome or amusing. The fact that there was an on screen zombie kill count is great motivation to keep playing and smashing.