Resident Evil (Capcom game, Sony PlayStation, 1996)

Our perception of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is strange. Normally in our minds we have a set of arbitrarily defined tick boxes. Cross enough off and something is good. If you have lots of gaps then it is bad. But now and again you find flawed genius. Something that on the face of it has too much wrong to be good, but despite the many faults, greatness still shines through like a beacon. George Best, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers were all regarded as genius’ in their respective fields, even though they all suffered deep character defects.

Crash Bandicoot (Naughty Dog game, PS1, 1996) reviewed by AlanG

It is impossible to review a platform game without mentioning a certain Italian plumber or a blue hedgehog. They basically laid down the blueprint for the genre, setting the standards for the world to follow and every subsequent effort is measured against them. Their games demonstrated that there are some elements that are a prerequisite for such a game to be successful. It must be challenging. It must be fun. The levels need to offer variety. It shouldn’t be possible to be killed by something that was previously unseen. There should be a central character that is cute and appealing. It should be well drawn and the levels should be clear and well laid out. It needs that ‘one more go’ factor and, above all, it must be fun. Seemingly a straightforward list, but the halls of gaming history are littered with those that tried and completely failed to repeat the formula.

Ace Combat 3 - A grand English translation released for a Playstation 1 game

Thanks to a heads up by our good friend VizionGamer via our twitter feed, we have learnt of the release of the English translation for Ace Combat 3 on the Playstation 1 by Team NEMO. You probably haven't heard of this game before, that's because the better version was released in Japan in 1999 as Ace Combat 3 : Electrosphere; an arcade air combat game by Namco. The problem was with the game and according to romhacking, the original story was altered and the characters were cut from the NTSC-U and PAL regions. Now thanks to Team Nemo the original Japanese game is back as it should be, but this time all 52+ missions are now in English!