EU copy played on a PlayStation 4 Pro.

Easily the better version of the game. While the Vita release was impressive and fun in a lot of ways, the frustrating touch mechanics to slide and gyroscope aiming really detracted from my experience.

On the PlayStation 4 however this game really shines with upgraded art, all the DLC and a solid 1080p 60fps performance.

PAL copy played on a PlayStation 2 Slim.

Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is a fine game. It had the unfortunate timing of being an animal mascot platformer during a period when they were losing popularity, whilst its game design really only being possible as soon as the PlayStation 2 era.

Compared to Jak and Ratchet, it holds its own fairly well and has the great novelty of a a variety of abilities via the boomerangs. The art direction is bright and fun while the level design keeps your attention for the most part but feels a little stuck in the 90s. The story is pretty meh but that's not really a slight during this time when good narratives and characters weren't a solid "must have" in the big releases.

If you're exploring the platformers available during this period, I'd easily recommend you check Ty out - it has its own fun gimmicks via the boomerangs and it was cool to see a gaming character represent Australia in a positive manner.

EU release played on a Xbox 360 and via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

Ooh boy, this is a rough one. As a Sonic game it's not quite the worst the franchise has to offer, but as a continuation of Yuji Naka's programming within the original numbered titles, this is not way past cool.

Honestly the conversation for this game should begin and end with how movement works - the physics feel like a far cry from those of the Mega Drive/Genesis era, with running feeling sluggish and moving up ramps and loops being a gravity-defying experience. The presence of the homing attack is actually a great inclusion here as it was wholy respoinsible for me maintaining any sense of momentum in most stages.

The stages themselves are a mixed bag - I had a great time in the casino and cave levels with the great gameplay gimmicks of running along a deck of cards and timed mine cart jumps but I'm honestly struggling to remember most of the rest of the game. Both levels and bosses are all rehashes of those original games' with very little deviation outside basic design.

Music also manages to disappoint with Senoue trying to emulate those old games' musical genre and pattern and not quite pulling it off. Again, a couple tracks are pretty good, but the majority lounge in the forgettable.

Overall this is just a disappointing entry. It doesn't please new or old fans and generally feels like an insult to the original numbered titles. It's certainly playable and it's not an entire waste of your time, but there were better 2D platforming efforts on the horizon from indie devs at the time so it's just not recommendable.

Tekken 4 is not a bad game - the ability to play the game at 480p, 60hz was an amazing accomplishment for it's time, and the further-expanded detail into character models and environments goes to show how much of a tech demo Tag Tournament was in comparison. It tries to strike a balance in innovation for both the gameplay and everything else, with nice cinematic slideshow intros for characters and a few interesting animations sprinkled through the arcade campaigns, but the fighting itself feels a lot heavier than past titles. it's not necessarily bad, but there's a weight there to animations that feel strange to see in a fighting game.

EU copy played on a Xbox 360.

A strong follow up to Asylum, but while most claim it to be the best of the Arkham series I personally don't quite agree. Rocksteady manage to do almost everything far better in City with a great new selection of gadgets, a larger open world to explore and traverse through, and a wide array of challenges to lose yourself trying to complete. The story is also a lot stronger this time around with good pulls on the comic characters and a genuinely bold ending.

City does lose a little of Asylum's charm though and that's really my personal gripe with it. Opening up the world ends up making the game feel less claustrophic and horror-inducing than the original. There's still that feeling of spookiness there with my favourite area revolving around the old Gotham "City of the Future!!!" business ripped straight out of Mask of the Phantasm, but due to the game now being set right in Gotham itself instead of a dillapidated gothic castle, it's just not quite the same.

Still, a strong second entry to the Arkham series.

NTSC-U copy played on a region modded PlayStation 2 Slim.

Despite me having played this game pretty much since it's release (and despite the fact I was roughly 7 at that time) this past weekend marked the first time I actually took the time to sit down and finish Grand Theft Auto III for the PlayStation 2.

I feel like folks from my generation who played these games grew up mostly playing them with friends, not really knowing what to do or understanding most of it and just inputting the flying cars and weapons cheats and having a blast. In fact, a frequent challenge whenever my friends and I were over at someone's house who had these games would be to take turns "flying" over to the other islands and see how far we'd get before the police obliterated us. Maybe we'd play a mission or two as well, but they never really held our attention long before we would return to hijacking cars, with mindless destruction and mayhem.

And I feel that's the aspect that's really held up the most over the years, the core feature of the sandbox where you can go wherever you want, explore hidden areas and generally muck about to your heart's content. It was an incredibly innovative release back in 2001 and it holds a large amount of responsibility for where video games are today.

The other department I feel still holds up is the art direction - the environments range from the dirty, grimy approximation of New York City to the more upper class suburban areas of the outer city areas, with a dynamic weather system introducing fog and rain with the occasional glimmer of sunshine. There's a bit of cartoonyness featured in the characters, but I feel it comes off more as caricature to better fit in with the overall satirical tone of the game alongside the cheerful radio adverts for shoes made with child labour.

As for the general gameplay and story, well the missions are fun and adhere to a very arcade-like sensibility. There's optional stuff available like street racing and emergency-vehicle missions to offer a change in pace to the insanity the regular gameplay provides. Punishment for failure is often not very severe outside of having to do the mission again while being arrested or dying results in a cash penalty along with your weapons being frustratingly confiscated which is exacerbated by the lack of an in-game map. Being in need of weapons or trying to ditch a wanted level can often leave you frustrated trying to find gun shops and pay'n'sprays whenever you're in need of them - you need that foldout map that came with a boxed copy of the game, otherwise you'll have to have one saved on your phone. The camera is also a relic of a bygone era, relying on a combination of buttons that never feel natural while the framerate and full-screen motion blur can be incredibly distracting. You can adjust to these "features" over the course of the gameplay, but it never really feels quite right and you'll constantly be resetting your expectations whenever you boot the game up again.

The story itself adheres very much to the "it's expected to be there, but it's not important" model of video game development that was the standard during this period. You start off with a cutscene of the player character being betrayed during a bank heist and being arrested, before making a break for it during his prison transfer. After that it's a case of meeting a series of criminals for missions and working up the proverbial ladder, earning more money and gaining access to other areas of the world map. It's not until you're near the end of the story where the woman who betrayed you at the start shows up by sheer coincidence and you go on one last mission to kill her and rescue a woman whom your former boss was in lesbian with. The characters you meet along the way range from moderately amusing to downright offensive but there's no-one that ever particularly stands out bar the characters on the radio stations. It's all just window dressing to make you play more ellaborate missions and have a fun time while doing so.

All in all, Grand Theft Auto III is still a fun time - the aesthetics and general gameplay to a good enough job of distracting you from some of the more awkward features present. For me it used to only ever be the sandbox to have whacky high-octane bursts of imaginitve fun in, but I have come to enjoy the actual mission content that is available too. The radio stations feature the best comedic moments available where the story beats feel janky and non-existant. I wouldn't recommend beating this version of the game in any way, I believe the PC port fixes a lot of the gameplay issues I had, but it's definitely still fun to pick up and play for a couple hours here and there from time to time.

Special shout out in particular to my copy of the game that would freak out whenever I had the radio on or drove in a police car for too long. The world would just start disappearing and the game would freeze up for indeterminate amounts of time, rendering progress I'd made useless unless I saved after every mission

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

The Walking Dead: Season One really hit the video-game landscape at exactly te right time. Point and click games had been dead in the water for quite a number of years, despite Telltale's own attempts at the genre, but securing the rights to make a game within the universe of the (then) incredibly popular tv series of TWD, alongside having an incredibly well-written script was the shot in the arm this company, and by extent this genre, needed.

I won't go into this game too much - it's puzzles, story, and even soundtrack have all been (deserrvedly) highly-lauded for nearly a decade now - but I will argue it's probably one of the most important video-games of its era, setting a new standard for story-telling within the medium and garning attention of an audience that wouldn't normally play games, let alone point and click ones.

This, to me, is the perfect stepping stone between the N64/PS1 era of 3d platformers and what they would become in the years following. Jak and Daxter was a huge technological evolution from the Crash Bandicoot formular for Naughty Dog, with vast, open, challenging world areas, an entertaining plot that didn't talk too down to it's audience, and a killer soundtrack - and all with next to no loading times whatsoever. This was my first 100% completed game as a kid and is still stunning to this day.

EU release played via Steam on a Lenovo Y50-70.

When it comes to the classic Sonic games I'll admit my experience is rather limited. I played the hell out of Sonic 2 back in the day, always getting so incredibly close but never quite being able to beat the last boss rounds. Sonic 1 I played a bit of before getting reaching Labyrinth Zone and checking out and Sonic 3 and Knuckles admittedly remain somewhat of a mystery to me even to this day.

Sonic CD however is a wildly different beast altogether. I could maybe appreciate it's sprawling and complex level design if this were the first title or had a different graphical style about it, but it getting lumped in with other regular Sonic collections over the years and looking pretty much like a more jazzy Sonic 1 is incredibly deceptive for the amount of bashing your head against a brick wall you're in for.

I finished this game. It took me roughly 10 years but I got there in the end and I can't say I remember a damn thing about it outside the creepy easter eggs and the rad animated intro sequence. Maybe I'll come back to it again at some point and take my time to explore the game fully, but trying to plow through it from start to finish like the rest of the 2D games leaves you utterly bewildered and frustrated.

When Crackdown first released it was an interesting take on the 3rd-person shooter with platforming and rpg mechanics. Now it feels like at one of the earlier attempts of a 3D rogue-lite with the ability to go take on whatever boss you want in whatever order with you learning more and more with each attempt. The leveling-up system for your guns, driving and platforming are really cool and running and jumping around the large city was entertaining back when we still didn't have a lot of open-world superhero games, but the lack of any realy plot or characters can make the game feel mildly entertaining at the best of times and dull and tedious at its worst.