I enjoyed my time with this game at the time but in recent years, it shows its age and limitations in comparison to its contemporary Sonic titles. The continuation and evolution of the boost mechanic is welcome, and with the additional power of the Whisps (that future Sonic games would oddly return to, creating a very strange sense of continuity without fully commiting) it makes stage traversal fun and imaginitive.

Obviously being on the Wii, Sonic Colours runs at 480p but thankfully also at 60hz so it at least feels like a smooth experience even if it being between Unleashed and Generations leaves it feeling like a forced mid-trilogy downgrade. Sound direction is solid as always and the soundtrack is brightly poppy with great electronic beats. The story is a much more low-key affair in comparison to previous titles of Eggman's quest for world domination via an elder god of some kind but its really here where the "meta" era of Sonic begins in the English scripts, with a lot of self references to its franchise whilst poking fun at itself. It's fine, it does its job at maintaining the family-friendly vibe, but there's also a sense of cynicism creeping in which I've recently grown weary of.

Overall, a solid Sonic title for the Wii - a shame it was only released for that console (at the time) but hardly any worse compared to Unleashed and Generations because of it.

In the wake of Alice: Madness Returns and revitalisation of "disturbing Alice" content, the Alice is Dead trilogy of flash games were an excellent addition to the large mythos of Alice in Wonderland media.

A collection of fairly simplistic point and click puzzle games were you usually had to escape from an enclosed environment, Alice is Dead put a great deal of emphasis on story-telling and playing with your expectations. It created a wonderfully creepy experience through clever sound design and music choices while the art style never felt too amateurish or forced.

The whole series can be played through in roughly half an hour and is still a fairly engrossing experience. Shout out to episode 3's night club song especially.

Assassin's Creed II is a complete improvement of every facet over its predecessor - the gameplay is more fluid, the level design is more engaging, the story is more interesting. Even bland boy Desmond gets a little character injected into him here and that's a pretty big boost here.

After 2007, Assassin's Creed was the new big hotness in gaming - merchandise, comics, animations. It was the biggest multi-media franchise in gaming, arguably since Halo. It was a new idea that had enough sci-fi and fantasy in it whilst grounding everything in a layer of suspended realism to really appeal to anyone and Ubisoft knew it. There was so much hype after people played the first game - what would the sequel do, what weapons would it introduce, where would the plot go? The question of what time and place the new Assassin's Creed game will take place in is one that still gets asked today, if with a little less enthusiasm now than it was back then.

So, Renaissance Italy? People were maybe hoping for Japan or maybe China, but Italy? This was actually a genius idea, and one that was inkeeping with the first 5-ish years of AC's life - pick a period we know relatively a good chunk about in terms of history and famous people, the cultures at play, etc, and the Renaissance period was enough of a jump from the Crusades to really distance itself in terms of expectations and art direction.

ACII really was the perfect sequel in every way.

I don't think it's possible for me to be impartial with this game - it was my watershed moment for the quality of storytelling in video-games and remains my favourite conclusion to a trilogy of all time, possibly in all media. I was 10 when this came out and I had never been so hyped for a video game release before.

The story manages to balance out the edginess of it's predecessor, making it the integral theme to it's narrative, all the while improving gunplay, having more platforming segments, and creating a whole driving mechanic that still feels satisfying to control today.

The Last of Us? Uncharted? This is Naughty Dog's true opus.

Possibly one of the most infamous "remasters"/ports out there - broken lighting, misplaced textures, and iffy collision detection are abound in this edition of Sonic's amazing 3D debut, and they only get worse and worse with each new re-release since they're all based on the previous port. Character models get a significant upgrade but it's just not worth everything else going wrong.

If you have to get this version on one platform, make it the Steam release where you can install the Dreamcast Conversion mod which fixes everything.

There's not really much left to say about Portal that hasn't been said - the first-person shooter as a puzzle game was a great new concept at the time, and mixed with the sterile, clinical scientific environments and AI voice assessing your every move that both became delapidated and deranged over the course of the levels was a very memorable experience. The ambient electronic music pulls a lot of the weight too, keeping you in the zone when you're puzzle solving but not afraid to fully disturb you whenever you discover something the facility didn't want you to see.

It's overall a great game that can be experienced in a few hours and I still go back and visit it occasionally.

What an odd decision for Naughty Dog to hop on the GTAIII band-wagon and make their own "hijack vehicles in a vast open world and blast folks with guns, oh and also a skateboard too" game. It works, just about, but there is a charm from the original that definitely gets lost in favour of the more edgy approach to story-telling. It's very much down to each individual that plays it to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But hey, open world with a fairly solid art direction on the PS2 at 480p, 60hz was a great experience at the time!

EU copy played on a Xbox 360.

The perfect sequel and bigger in virtually every way. The original Portal birthed somewhat of a miniature meme culture around it with the whole cake and sarcastic AI business, and while it was a great, small-scale experience, it was rather straight forward once you'd arrive at its narrative twist. Portal 2 however ramps everything up in terms of its world, gameplay and puzzle design, and executes it all flawlessly. The co-op stuff was similarly fun but if you managed to find yourself playing with a friend who had either blasted through it with someone else already or had a different skill level of problem solving to you it could be a frustrating experience at times.