With those “end of year” things now far enough away for this not to be a bandwagon post, and today my 24th birthday, I thought it apt to look back on what I played whilst I was 23 and anticipate what I’m excited about in the next 365 days of my life.

No. 5 – Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games

I was just as shocked as anyone when this was announced – after speculating what Sega’s DS surprise might be, to say I was taken aback by these two competing would be a gross understatement. I did change the work PC’s wallpaper to the announcement image, though!

I think, out of the 16 characters on offer, I’ve only ever played as Sonic, no matter what the event is. Swimming? Sonic‘s my man! Table Tennis? We all know Sonic‘s got a killer chop! The great thing about Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games is that it gets right what Wii Sports got wrong, and gets the right bits even better. With a proper range of tournaments, medals and events, it’s got the longevity that Wii Sports missed out on, but in pick-up-and-play terms it’s got instant appeal. The Dream Events are hit-and-miss, but when one of them is essentially Mario Kart on foot, you’re onto a winner.

Its success has surprised even me – we get asked for it a dozen times a day, and for it to top the all-formats chart two weeks before Christmas is an amazing achievement for Sega who, I’d like to point out, were the developers and publishers; Nintendo just lent them bits. It’s Sega’s biggest success in many, many years, and a wonderful thing to celebrate.

Best moment: Warming up on the long-jump track, Sonic waves to the crowd and shouts “it’s-a me!”, then as you push your Remote and Nunchuck together he leads the audience in cheering for him! Absolute genius.

No. 4 – NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams unveiled

How could this not feature as a top moment of my 23-dom? I’ve seen enough speculation over the years to know to take such hope-mongering at face value, but this was the first time I felt compelled, as a world-renowned expert on NiGHTS (just joking!), to answer some of the questions and put them in their place. And guess what? I was wonderfully, fantastically and joyfully wrong.

That whole period of scanning news pages, searching every games-related page and my good friends over at www.scoreattack.net for any new information was quite fun, actually. When the first screenshots emerged, I pretty much made myself want to cry because that’s what I’d always thought my reaction would be (in retrospect that’s quite weird!). In reality, I was filled with disbelief – there’s nothing quite like getting what you want to take the wind out of your sails.

In less than eight days I will have played NiGHTS 2 and no doubt bored everybody I know to tears about it (I think I’ll buy Hannah some headphones!) I can only hope it will prove to be the watershed moment in my life I’ve waited for since I was just thirteen years old. Not that I’m working myself up or anything.

Best moment: That fantastic realisation that it wasn’t all a cruel hoax played on me by the entire Internet, but a sequel to the best game ever on my favourite current console.

No. 3 – Sonic and the Secret Rings

I ran to Gamestation as fast as Sonic himself when this came in, and played it for eight straight hours on my next day off. It replaces the frustration and hesitation of previous 3D Sonics with exhilaration and precision. Some people complained that you simply steered left and right, which ignores the fact that in the best Sonics you only ever run forward, never backwards.

The skill and experience element keeps you playing to get closer to those elusive gold medals, and some of the unlockable artwork and videos are stunning. The less said about the party mode the better – hopefully we’ll see fewer tacked-on multiplayer ideas in future Wii games – but the main quest is so good as to completely restore my faith in Sega and their main man.

Best moment: Using Speed Break to burst through the torrential rain of Pirate Storm, only to run out of jetty and rush over the roaring waves on a surfboard, performing tricks as you’re tossed into the air.

Runner-up: Racing along slender beams of light on Levitated Ruin, Speed Breaking around corkscrews, dodging missiles and going faster than any game ever.

No 2. – Super Mario Galaxy

The controversy! Yes, even a hardened Sonic fan like me can admit that Mario‘s game is better than Sonic‘s. In terms of design, flair and execution, there’s nothing close to it on Wii, and probably on most other formats too.

Although some people feel it doesn’t take advantage of the Wii’s motion-sensitivity as well as it might, its controls are precise and do what many Wii games fail to do – become an interface for the game, not an obstacle to it. Even the two-player mode is quite enjoyable when used to kill Chain Chomps, shoot Goombas or, most enjoyably, make Mario spin in the middle of an important jump and send him plummeting into a black hole. It may not be particularly co-operative, but it is fun!

The game excels graphically, particularly with its texture work, which stands as probably the best ever in a Nintendo game. King Kaliente’s oil; the fur on the Queen Bee and Major Burrows; the subtle sheen on the apples in Gusty Garden. From start to finish the game is decorated with precision and a well-chosen palette, and proves HDTV isn’t the be-all and end-all some might suggest.

Aurally the game is every bit as good, with some of the strongest Mario musical moments for many years. The observatory theme grows as new galaxies are unlocked, adding new instruments and melodies to the arrangement. Your first visit to Good Egg couldn’t say “you’re going to enjoy this!” any more clearly with a voice over, and the theme from Gusty Garden alone stands out as probably the best piece of game music I’ve heard all year. It’s a shame about the frankly pathetic sub-MIDI instruments that play the fanfare upon completing the game, but I guess even the Super Mario Galaxy Orchestra need a day off.

Best moment: The first time you run and long jump off a walkway, you hover in mid-air, the camera flips and you keep flying to land on the underside of the same planet. One of many “wow” moments.

Runner-up: The beams of gravity from the game’s last level, which finally answer the question “why can’t we see forces?” – if we could, everyone would try to make impossible leaps and die all the time.

No. 1 – Endless Ocean

My WORD, that’s a turn-up for the books! A relatively unknown game about diving beating three triumphant appearances by the best characters in gaming for the coveted “Best Bit in a Game I Saw Whilst 23” Award? Read on, friends.

As you’ll know if you’ve read anything else on this blog, I believe games are so much more than entertainment – they’re talking points, exploratory vessels, launchpads for the imagination and still more. As with other media, there needs to be a spectrum of styles, and for every customer who buys War is Fun: Soldier Massacre, someone else favours We All Wear Leather Armour XI. But there’s still a bias towards confrontational, violent media, and that’s where Endless Ocean excels – there’s nothing else like it (with the exception of an old Konami PSOne game whose name escapes me.)

Endless Ocean is an atmospheric game, although not to the exclusion of “proper” game elements. There’s plenty of different areas, from the warm shallow water of Knives Reef to the mysterious Ancient Temple, and the chilling Graveyard at the bottom of Deep Abyss. The ocean is suitably huge, and after my ten hours there’s still plenty of grey areas I’ve yet to explore.

Although the overarching aim is to find out as much about fish as possible, you also have to lead clients on guided tours, pointing out interesting fish and sea features to them, and there are photographic missions that challenge you to capture a certain creature and pitch it to an editor for use in a magazine article. Remember how much I love the photography in Beyond Good and Evil? Well, the actual aiming and help system here isn’t as developed (ho ho), but it’s every bit as enjoyable when you take a rewarding picture, such as my beautiful Goblin Shark portrait the idiot editor turned down.

Best moment: Swimming down towards the foreboding Deep Abyss, the music cuts out, leaving just the sound of oxygen bubbling away from you. In the dark, you think you see something moving… something large… Suddenly, a triumphant choir rises in your ears, as though announcing the arrival of an angel, and before your eyes an enormous whale emerges from the abyss and swims inches away from your face.

It’s been many years since a game has literally taken my breath away and made me feel such a strong emotion, but I could genuinely have wept at this moment. The force of the music and the graphics combined to create a realisation that I was in the presence of something intensely beautiful, a gentle and inspiring creature to be admired and respected.

When I’m 24

There you go – those were my five best moments in gaming whilst I was 23. Pleasingly, I really could only have expected two of them, and number one was as big a surprise as you get. All I’ll say is that my number one moment in a year’s time isn’t finally playing a sequel to NiGHTS, I probably won’t bother playing games any more!

I’m listening to Words by Doves, from The Last Broadcast

January 18th, 2008. That’s the day when nearly twelve long years of waiting come to an end, and NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is released on Nintendo Wii.

I’m sure it goes without saying I’m incredibly excited about getting my hands on it, despite some of the things I’ve heard from people who’ve played it illegally (you know who you are!). To say that a year ago, the mere prospect of a new NiGHTS game was impossible, it’s incredible to think we stand less than two weeks away from a genuine, bona fide NiGHTS 2.

I will, of course, be posting my impressions as soon as I get my hands on the game, probably in pictorial form: expect either the anguished, contorted features of a man crushed after a dozen years of optimism or, for the first time ever, the purest essence of joy distilled in photographic form.

In the meantime, look out for my “Top Gaming Moments of 2007” post which I just decided to write now!

  I’m listening to Tijuana Lady by Gomez, from The Album.

Usually I like to celebrate the very best of games here, looking at intelligently crafted and inspiring video games. Sometimes, though, you don’t want to indulge yourself with a magnificent meal; sometimes you just want to eat rubbish, enjoying it all the more in the knowledge it’s really, really bad for you.

These games are just like that; really bad games that, on some level, have given me just as much entertainment and fun as any other game.

Number five – Renegade

Long before the scrolling beat-’em-up hit its stride with Final Fight and Streets of Rage, Taito’s Renegade stumbled in. I got this game for the Master System, and even at that tender age I knew it was something pretty special. Bashing enemies in the guts and throwing them into each other is as fun now as it was then, but the real enjoyment comes from sprinting at enemies and magically sliding across the floor with your fist outstretched. Kicking riders off their motorbikes in the chase level proves just as satisfying as you’re thinking, but apart from that every single level follows the same formula – run run punch. Punch punch kick. Kick punch “you ain’t tough enough for me”. Run run punch.

I spent quite a few hours on Renegade in my youth but to this day I only have one abiding memory of it: that of Mr K., all slicked-back hair and attitude, chewing wildly whilst the subtitle proclaims “you ain’t tough enough for me.” That and pinging thugs onto subway tracks.

Number four – Pinball Graffiti

Pinball games are all completely appalling, with perhaps two exceptions. Pinball Graffiti is not one of them. Bad table design forces you to alternate between hitting ridiculously easy shots and once-in-a-lifetime chancers to earn any points at all, and you’ll often find yourself doing the same shots for twenty or thirty minutes at a time on each of the game’s few tables.

What makes Pinball Graffiti so uniquely terrible is its story mode, where you play a poor slob setting out into the world to become… the world’s greatest pinball wizard! It’s the dream of every poor inner city kid, I’m sure. To achieve this goal, you of course need to practise religiously and develop unity with your steel ball, but that shouldn’t stop you, say, reading magazines, talking to people in bars and, best of all, playing basketball for money. Perhaps they didn’t think the pinball was bad enough on its own. I can assure them it was.

Number three – Sega Worldwide Soccer 2000 Euro Edition

I was a big, big fan of the football games on the Saturn – I spent many hours winning cups and trophies of all kinds, enjoying the ridiculous balloon physics and hotspots generously placed around the pitch. They were both pretty big successes too, and so a Dreamcast sequel seemed like the best thing ever.

Unfortunately the game itself is laughably bad. Virtua Striker 2000 is dire too, but looks like Pro Evolution 4 compared to this. After patiently sitting through a good two or three minutes of loading screens you then have to endure an even worse game of football, in which the ball flies from player to player and end to end like a particularly racy hornet. There’s no solidity to the players, the ball or the passing, and it’s possible to dribble around players without much opposition whatsoever.

There are worse football games than this one – World Cup Italia ’90 and UEFA Striker were both dire – but SWWS 2000 EE earns its place on this list for two reasons.

1. Ludicrous goals. No matter where the ball lands, you’ve got a pretty good chance of scoring. I cannot tell you how many halfway line bicycle kicks I have conceded, or how many opportunist volleys have sailed past my lumbering oaf of a goalkeeper, and many of them have been scored by reason number two.

2. Chewtang. My brother’s favourite (fictitious, I gather) player, Chewtang has scored more goals past me than any other player ever. If he were real, Pelé would be a nobody. Nothing makes losing more painful than the cry of “CHEWTANG” echoing around the room.

Number two – Gauntlet Legends

I was a big fan of the original Gauntlet – “Red Wizard is about to die!” and all that – but the modern day milking of its once-good name is absolutely shameful. Worst of all is the travesty that is Gauntlet Legends on the Dreamcast; with shoddy graphics, pathetic sounds and the most tedious gameplay I can imagine, it’s a genuinely awful game.

In a way I consider Gauntlet Legends a precursor to many modern-day MMORPGs – you select a class of character and improve your abilities, as a rule, by killing things. Lots of things. The same things over and over and over. Then, when you finally get to an interesting enemy, you find out the fifteen levels you gained in the past hour aren’t anywhere near enough, and you’ll have to repeat the same levels to stand any chance.

You can attack enemies if you want, but you can also just walk into them and let the game attack for you – it’s weaker, but at least it saves you grinding down the cartilage in your fingers to dust. Turbo attacks and magic are ridiculously poor, but the “team combo attacks”, where two players combine their skills, have to be seen to be believed, in the worst possible way.

Yet, for all its flaws, it’s still stupidly entertaining to hammer buttons with a friend for an hour or two. There’s a steady flow of enemies to batter and enough laughable graphics, FMV and sampled speech to satisfy anyone’s tastes. Good old Midway.

Number one – San Francisco Rush 2049

As far as futuristic racing games go this is bottom of the pile. F-Zero and WipeOut have the market cornered as far as anti-gravity ships go, but SF2049 has a cunning trick up its sleeve – put wings on cars! Hit a ramp at high speed in the race and your car sprouts wings that let you drift safely to the track below. It’s totally ridiculous and deserves no place in racing.

Thank goodness, then, for Stunt Mode. Here you drive your car on specially-designed stunt tracks with half pipes, ramps and more, and clever use of the wings allows you to execute skilful tricks such as Endos, Flips and Wheelies. That’s the theory, anyway – in practice it’s much, much more satisfying to hit ramps at full speed, waggle the stick and see what happens. It makes the Tony Hawk games look like pinpoint military strategy.

It’s not quite as dire as Gauntlet Legends, but it earns its place above it for the ability to use a first-person view in Stunt Mode. All I can say is: don’t do that after eating.

The Aftermath

They’re certainly not the kinds of games I usually play, let alone write about, but the more I thought about them, the more I realised how much fun I’d had playing them, and how much laughter and enjoyment they’d given me.

So, dear reader, isn’t the question this: are they really bad games after all? Yes, yes they are. But they’re good bad games.

Do you have any guilty pleasures? What games do you play in spite of – or because – their poor quality?

This post is part of the ProBlogger “Top 5” Group Writing Project. Go check out the entries and enjoy them!

With practically nothing of note happening in the world of games, this week’s podcast has a rather patchwork feel to it, which I like. The big news is today’s excellent Carnival of Video Game Bloggers, but I also let loose a few first impressions of Okami, Phantasy Star Universe and wax lyrical about the all-conquering, universe-changing Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution.

Let’s hope something interesting happens in gaming this week, otherwise in the next episode I’ll let you know what rares I found in PSO:Blue Burst (actually, two Snake Spires and a Black Odoshi Domaru!)

Related links

Carnival of Video Game Bloggers – the April edition, hosted by my brother Phil at www.sodaware.net. Excellent articles and a great post too. Well worth your time!

Virtua Fighter.com – the best VF site ever created.

Thanks to Hiro, this week’s podcast has a tremendous subject: are Sega’s franchises enjoying a renaissance on Wii? As well as discussing the upcoming revivals I also touch upon which games from their rich past would make for fantastic sequels on the Wii.

You can listen to the podcast here, and subscribe to the feed with this link.

Thanks for coming by, and feel free to make suggestions and leave comments!

The James Newton Podcast continues apace with the fourth show, and the first one done by request – thanks to Jeffrey White for the inspiration behind this one!

Following on from last week’s show about my hopes for NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, today I go into more detail about my favourite features of the original NiGHTS into Dreams and why it’s so innovative and enjoyable. I explain Nightopians, the incredible remixing music and a few little touches that are just plain cool.

You can listen to this fourth episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment. There’ll be another episode next week, and you’re free to request or recommend content!

I’m listening to Be My Somebody by Norah Jones, from Not Too Late

It’s Sunday November 24th 1996, and I’m in the Derby branch of Dixon’s – you know, the one in the Eagle Centre. I’ve come out with my parents to buy my Christmas present: a Sega Saturn. I’ve had the Master System and Mega Drive, so it’s a natural step-up for me; I’ve done my homework and know the games I want, and how much it should cost. I’m a pro by now.

The thing is, I’m not even looking at the deals or getting caught up in that wonderful pre-console rush. I’m stood frozen to the spot in front of two TVs, and have been for a good ten minutes or so. I can’t take my eyes off the beautiful falling stars beneath the blinking face I knew, even then, would grow to mean something special to me.

I keep watching and see a rendered movie of a young boy playing basketball. At one point, the ball is thrown into his chest and, as it falls to hit the concrete, the ground turns to liquid and the ball falls straight through. My jaw falls and my heart skips a beat.

Now here we are, ten years later, and I’ve got exactly the same feeling. The first screenshots of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (NiGHTS: Mugen no Tabiji according to my poor Japanese!) have emerged, scanned in from a Portuguese magazine, and there’s a definite lump in my throat. The visual style is breathtaking, and I get the feeling that graphically it’s showing the kind of ideas the Saturn just couldn’t cope with – a shimmering coral glow on the groundwork, gilded bronze on the boss chambers, stitches in the fabric texture on the boss itself. The images are easily as captivating as the original game, and stay up on my monitor practically all night.

The initial fear of a NiGHTS sequel has gone now: In Sega I Trust. They’re not the powerhouse developers they once were, but I take this as a marked step back towards greatness – giving players what they want and also taking a risk as they did originally. Of course, in their hardware days Sega had to take risks in their first-party software to sustain them as a company (the cruel irony!). The reasoning behind this NiGHTS sequel, according to Iizuka, is that he wanted to create a sequel that would offer more than just new graphics (my paraphrasing). I’ll drink to that!

I didn’t actually get the game with my Saturn that Christmas – although Sega Rally and Virtua Fighter 2 kept me going! – but I bought it from Makro in Loughborough after my birthday in January. They didn’t have the analogue pad so I played it digitally. For six hours. By the end of it, I could hardly move my left thumb, which remains to this day my only gaming-related thumb injury. I’m proud of that. When I first got Sonic and the Secret Rings I played it for eight hours, and when I went to bed that night I could still “feel” the controller in my hand, like some sort of phantom limb.

If NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is everything it could be, you’ll have to prise the controller from my cold dead hands.

Let’s face it – there was only ever going to be one topic for this week’s podcast!

With the first screenshots of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams on Wii revealed last week (scans are available here!) and the promise of a sequel to what I consider the greatest game of all time, this week’s episode features me discussing the original and the promise of the sequel. 

(Credit to Hiro for the tip-off about the name!)

Expect much, much more on the NiGHTS sequel in the coming weeks and months as I get incredibly excited and share all my thoughts, hopes and fears.

Listen to the podcast here, or here to subscribe to the website feed!

Related links:

ScoreAttack.net – home to videos and techniques from the world’s greatest NiGHTS players.
NiGHTS into Dreams – my in-depth scoring article on the original’s addictive appeal.

Yes, it’s the second episode of the James Newton Podcast (suggestions for snappier names welcomed)!, featuring five of the very best games released on the DS in the coming months. There’s some adult entertainment, juvenile fun and probably the best reason to leave the house this summer. To listen to the podcast, simply right-click and save this link, then pop it open with your chosen mp3 player.

In other news…

It appears I’ll have a little backtracking to do in the coming weeks, with Swedish magazine Game Reactor breaking the exclusive news on NiGHTS into Dreams for the Wii, and TRiPPY from NiGHTSintoDreams.com claiming to have known about it for ages. Well nobody bothered to tell me! Nah, it’s fine – I had no credibility anyway, so losing it in favour of getting a new NiGHTS game is a sacrifice I’m perfectly willing to make. Bring on NiGHTS 2!

I’m listening to Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad? by Prince, from The Hits 1

I did consider recording a special edition podcast about my experiences working the PlayStation 3 launch, but when a radio professional came down to conduct some interviews for BBC Radio York I thought I’d better let him do his job.

I’ve uploaded the segment so you can all have a listen to my contribution to the piece. Most of my comments were edited out, such as remarking how “midnight launches lend a social element to gaming that’s still sadly missing”. Personally I think my comments were a little more relevant than the clips used, my favourite being the pretty drunk guy who proclaims “I’m gonna be the top of the Internet gaming!”. If you listen out you can also hear my boss asking “what games did you want with that?”.

It was a piece for the breakfast show, so obviously it wasn’t all that in-depth, but I was a little disappointed that the angle of the piece was focused on two things:

• The weather;
• The price.

Granted it wasn’t exactly tropical outside, and £425 is a lot of money, but the overall impression I got was somewhat typical of most media’s portrayal of gaming and its community: bemusement. I edited out the breakfast presenter’s comments, as he bafflingly compares the PS3 to the equipment on Star Trek and moans about the price; pretty useless stuff.

The heart of the story should have been this: why were these people all so eager to get their hands on it? Why come out at midnight? What’s the most exciting thing about the PS3? Yes, the price is a factor and deserves mention, but it’s not the crux of the story, although perhaps to non-gamers it just makes these people seem strange, alien almost; if they can’t understand it, it’s just weird.

As always when dealing with mainstream media’s treatment of games, a little more research and understanding would have resulted in a better piece. Still, I am probably overanalysing this ever-so-slightly; it was just a segment for the local radio’s breakfast news.

There’ll be a new podcast from me up on Monday, looking at five awesome DS games to entertain you in the coming weeks and months. Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay informed!

   I’m listening to You Are My Evergreen by Feeder, from Yesterday Went Too Soon