Dave Lamb's top 25 games of all time.

In light of some of the IGN editors recently sharing their top games, I thought I'd lay down some of the best experiences I've had with gaming. Games are a relatively new medium but there's so much potential in what can be achieved though interactive storytelling. We're still in the early days but many studios are proving why the format can be so powerful. Here's my top 25 favourite games of all time. Enjoy!


25. Skate 2

For a long time, the Tony Hawks series was the king of the extreme sports games and many others copied its formula. Then along came Skate, which completely reinvented the wheel. No longer were you grinding the loops of a rollercoaster. Instead, Skate brought things down to a much more realistic level. Its biggest change was using the right analog stick to perform ollies and flip tricks, by pulling the stick back and flipping it in any direction. After you become accustomed to this, you were left with one of the most realistic and organic action sports games ever created. Added to this is a generously large open world to explore. You can happily skate around at your leisure searching for nice spots to pull off tricks. It’s the finest example a game that captures the feelings associated with the real sport itself. 

24. Devil May Cry                                     

Devil May Cry puts you in the shoes of a half devil anti-hero named Dante, who is rebelling against the Dark Lord himself. This game has some of the most incredible heart stopping action you’ll ever encounter. It creates fluid and exciting combat by effectively combining sword and gunplay. Its revolutionary combat system created its own genre and it was adopted by modern action titans such as Bayonetta and Ninja Gaiden. It has a very stylish atmosphere akin to the Resident Evil series but more gothic and decadent. If you can forgive the slightly wonky camera this game is a real gem. I also thoroughly enjoyed the recent reboot of this series. It was quite underrated and is more than worth a look if you didn’t catch it.

23. Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped

Whatever happened to Crash Bandicoot? Once a world phenomenon but now I wonder if children today would even recognise him. While I won’t get into the mistake Sony made in selling Crash to Activison, the original games made by Naughty Dog are still superb today. At the time, it created a familiar, yet unique formula of platform gameplay that was very enjoyable. The third entry in the series was a particular favourite of mine. At least we can say Naughty Dog went on to bigger and better things. I’m not sure I’d trade The Last of Us for decades of Crash sequels.

At E3 last year Sony showed a live action trailer in which the sign on the left was shown. It's been suggested that the picture is Crash Bandicoot with an arrow pointing towards the Sony logo as show on the right.  Could this possibly mean Crash Bandicoot is returning to the property of Sony? Could we eventually see another high quality first party Crash game from Sony? I for one,  certainly hope so.

22. Halo 

This was the game that gave birth to the modern console first person shooter. It led to the genre becoming the forefront of the industry in the Western world with the likes of Call of Duty. While it didn’t invent the first person shooter it did nail the mechanics on a console for the first time. It effectively used the dual stick layout of the original Xbox to deliver a fluid experience. I enjoyed this game so much that first person shooters became my genre of choice for a quite a few years. Sadly, the current genre behemoth that is Call of Duty has done few favours for the industry by producing the same uninspiring game every year for the sake of profit. If like me you feel disillusioned with COD go back to Halo and remind yourself of the potential of the genre.

21. Metal Gear Solid

One of the first games I played that offered a cinematic experience combined with excellent action/stealth gameplay. It set a new precedent of what was achievable in games. I’d never seen a game offer such a compelling blend of cinematics and gameplay. It was a sign of a shift towards producing grand thematic titles, that games would eventually offer legitimately cinematic aspects as well as an immersive experience.

20. Super Monkey Ball Deluxe

Some great games are also simple. Super Monkey Ball involves navigating a ball around obstacles towards a goal. The player maneuvers the board underneath the ball, causing it to roll. That’s it, no power ups or special moves, just simple gameplay that leads to a challenging and addictive game. It’s most memorable aspect is its turn based multiplayer where players compete to see who can complete the most boards. I had hours of fun playing this with friends and would recommend it to anyone looking for some excellent offline multiplayer fun.

19. SSX3

While I chose Skate (25) because of its realism, SSX3 I chose because it committed itself to the eccentric. This incredibly fun game lets you pull off physically impossible tricks and gets everything right while doing it. Whether its sound, course design or gameplay SSX3 exceeds at all of them. I’d played a few snowboarding games before this series came along but I never realised just how good they could be before SSX3. It’s still unmatched today due to its mechanics and wonderful presentation which makes the game a spectacle to behold. SSX3 is my favourite in the series and I feel it is the best snowboarding game ever, even if it does make the purists furious. 

18. Sonic the Hedgehog 2

Sonic was the reason I started playing video games. I must have only been around 5 years old when I saw and played Sonic at my cousin’s house. It was probably the first time I’d touched a video game and the memory stays with me to this day. While I recognise it technically may not be one of the best games ever made, it holds a special place in my heart for starting my interest in gaming. That said, it’s still a more than worthy platform game that anyone interested the classics should check out and arguably the best all round game in the series!

My love of Sonic also led to this rather extravagant purchase. 

17. Burnout 3: Takedown

I don’t mind realistic racers but Burnout’s insanely fast arcade action is what created my favourite racing game of all time. The game’s extremely fast pace is balanced by not punishing you too much for mistakes and a clever crash system. I’ve never had more fun playing a racing game than I did with Burnout 3. The game also incorporates an excellent crash mode where you try to cause as much damage as possible to the surrounding area. I haven’t liked the series transition into an open world game recently. I just don’t think speed mixes well with tight corners and staring at a mini map. The thrill of belting it down a race track against traffic was the whole reason this game existed.

16. Goldeneye

Goldeneye was the one of the first first-person shooters I had ever played and I was blown away at the time. Although the control scheme may not stand the test of time, it is without doubt the best video game adaptation of a film, an area in which few studios have ever pulled off so well. The game forces you to think before you destroy everything in sight by adding spy based objectives into the mix. This deep gameplay is combined with excellent presentation though skilfully recreated set pieces from the film. I’ll always have fond memories of the 4 player split screen multiplayer as well. This game also receives a bonus point for having the best pause screen ever and we all know why pause screens are important!

15. Grand theft Auto 5

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5) is the most impressive technical achievement I’ve seen to date. Not only did Rockstar manage to create a huge open world, they managed to make it incredibly detailed as well. It’s received much criticism for essentially being a crime simulator but there’s no denying its popularity. It’s so huge but also includes so much detail. It’s GTA5’s beyond-obsessive attention to detail that truly sets the game apart from others. Take a street performer in the game, in most other games they would just recite the same action over and over again, till you perhaps run them over and the rag doll physics kick in. Not in GTA5. If you take a picture of them and don’t tip they will become annoyed. If you watch them long enough they may eventually get a phone call and break character. It’s this insane level of detail in parts of the game that many people won’t even encounter that makes GTA5 so special.

14. Skyrim 

Skyrim is one of the finest single player fantasy role playing games going. It takes place in a huge beautifully crafted world, which includes a staggering amount of creatively designed content, and the game gives you an enormous amount of freedom to choose how you play. Don’t fancy the main quest? You can get lost in hours and hours of side quests and exploring. Don’t like hand to hand combat? Then make use of magic and the shouts gained from defeating the huge dragons that roam the lands. Skyrim allows you a wealth of choice when it comes to play styles and narratives, both of which are missing from the GTA universe generally. You can often choose how quests conclude and there’s more freedom to be good or evil without being forced to restart a quest if you kill an NPC you don’t like. The variety here is endless and the whole world is thrilling to explore.

13. Super Smash brothers Melee

This is my favourite multiplayer game of all time. An excellent fighting game where choose one of 25 iconic Nintendo characters to do battle with up to 4 players. While the game may seem simple at first, the depth here comes from the decision making and learning how every action plays out. It’s no button masher and novice players stand little chance against skilled players. It may be a little difficult to attract new players to a clique of experienced players but the enjoyment I’ve had from this fast and frantic game is second to none. It’s still gets broken out every time I’m with my friends I started playing this beauty with over 10 years ago.

12. Psychonauts

I love games with character and Psychonauts has bucket loads of it. A free roaming adventure platformer, where Tim Schafer's comedic stylings make it one of the few games I find genuinely funny. The game has excellent artistic design which is beyond many others. When I first played this game there was a moment that clicked for me when I realised how important variety can be in video games. Psychonauts has diversity between levels, both in aesthetics and gameplay which keeps it feeling fresh throughout the adventure. This is unfortunately something which Activison and EA have made it their mission to ignore. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I played this game and would recommend it to anyone who missed out.

11. Conker's Bad Fur Day

In this game you play as a squirrel who gets so drunk he doesn’t know where he is in the morning and your first task is to cure his hangover. This sets the tone for this twisted adventure which is one of the most hilarious games I’ve ever played. At the time the industry was flooded by cutesy titles like Banjo-Kazooie, the developers were inspired by South Park to make a more adult themed title. The game features a well-written, lewd script that uses witty parodies of the likes of Alien and Saving Private Ryan as themes for the various chapters. This game is a blast from start to finish and there’s never a dull moment. For instance you battle the gargantuan and operatically inclined “Great Mighty Poo” or you meet a talking cog on the wall who demands you recover his counter parts or “fuck off”. It may sound puerile on paper, but Rare's sense of humour really shines through. It’s a shame Rare aren’t still producing games like this rather than terrible Kinect games but that’s another story.


Carry on top my top 10 on page 2

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Gaming Netiquette: "Well Played" in Hearthstone.

For those of you who haven't tried Blizzard's new entirely virtual collectible card game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, I would heartily* recommend it. It's one of the few competitive online games which is appealing to all skill levels, handles the free-to-play/monetisation side of things with great care and probably most appealingly, protects you from unwanted abuse from those toddlers out there who like to swear at people on the internet whether they are winning or losing. But that's not to say that Blizzard didn't leave considerable leeway for complete strangers to taunt each other in a subtle but powerful way. 

The most common meanings of this emote.

Emotes are the six word language that each character class in the game possesses. To actually chat with someone the traditional way you need to 'friend' them first so for the most part you will be letting the voice actors do the talking for you. I'm sure that the most widely used emote by far is 'Well played' some common uses of which are listed in the above image. A friendly post-game handshake to indicate that all important "gg" moment is something that polite players should do in almost each and every game they play, if you're losing I'd almost say that acknowledging defeat in this way is tantamount to a post-game handshake anyway. It's just the decent thing to do because it's sportsmanlike and everyone who takes part in gaming should feel like they are having fun, even in defeat...

 ...except this guy.

Three turns in a row he's kept me waiting like this...

For those of you who aren't familiar, my opponent (whose name has been blurred) has lost. 100% Lost. The only way that I could have lost at this point is if I had conceded the game voluntarily. Yet in theoretical defeat, my opponent has decided to leave his keyboard and force me to wait for his turn timers to run down in full before allowing me to actually win, or concede defeat out of sheer impatience. This is sour grapes at it's finest. In a game which is deliberately designed around preventing abusive players from having a negative influence, this player, in spite of well funded opposition, has found a way to stick a thorn in my paw. I feel safe in saying that I did not waste time shaking this player's hand as I whittled his health down to zero. This did not make me feel any happier.

Luckily, someone in Blizzard was watching and decided that I was worthy of compensation. After winning the game I was awarded with enough gold to purchase a booster pack and lo and behold, a legendary card for the Paladin class I was just playing as.

Getting one of these 'orange gem' cards feels incredibly satisfying anyway.

Well played Blizzard, well played indeed.

*The temptation to have the 'hearth-ily' pun in my opening sentence was great, but I thought better of it. I leave it here for the hardcore** readership.

**Footnotes are hardcore. Deal with it.

2048, 4096 (and possibly Threes) - a brief strategy guide.

In a lazy and cynical attempt to cash in on the buzz around smash hit browser game 2048 (and it's countless clones) I'll tell you briefly how I managed to do this.

I won!

Just follow these simple heuristics:

1) If you see a risk free chain of moves which combines several high value tiles in a row 32's into a 64 that will then be next to another 64, which when combined to make 128 will be next to another 128... then take advantage of it!

2) When you have more than 7 empty squares (ish), try and bunch up your tiles in a corner. That is to say, ban yourself from using one of the four direction keys (say up) and sparingly use one of the orthogonal keys if you can help it (say, right).

3) If you're in the situation as in 1) but you have no choice but to use your forbidden key (up in my example) use it once and immediately press the opposite key again (down), unless....

4) If you're running out of room, STOP and take a quick breath and see if you can find a good way to combine high value tiles together or just free up some space. If you can combine two or more tiles at once this way that's preferable as you'll have a net space gain of at least one.

5) Be aware that a 2 is most likely to appear in any one of the random empty tiles after every move. I know that sounds obvious but it drives how the game works.

Good luck!

Also be aware that Threes for iOS is a subtly different game altogether, but a lot of the above strategies will still help a little.

Gamification Part 1: Gamified e-business

I invited as a guest speaker to run an interactive session on the subject 'gamification' aimed at third year business and marketing undergraduates. Gamification is simply the process of incorporating game elements into functions which are not purely designed for gaming entertainment. In this article I focus on how this technique is used to gamify online businesses. An expanded and edited segment of my original lesson content and publish it here on 103 for the interested reader. 

Games have been proven to reinforce engagement and influence consumer behavior in the business world. Social games (e.g. Angry Birds, Candy Crush) currently integrate many desirable features of online businesses, as specified in e-business literature. Games are rich content by definition, syndication is readily implemented, gaming necessitates a level of participation (especially if it has a strong social element) and games already appear on every relevant variety of electronic content access platform. It is also very easy to gather and track a wealth of gameplay data to track engagement and conversion rates once a game has been created.
 
Here are a couple of simple examples of game mechanics that are designed to get you to spend real money online buying products or services which are not necessarily games or game related merchandise.

Free to Play: 

A website or e-community built mostly around participation in a game where the cost to play is usually nothing at all. The attraction and retention comes from the game itself being popular with the customer base. The conversion can come in many forms. Social games such as Candy Crush Saga are extremely popular and the product is in fact the game itself. Coursera is a free-to-play model of education. You can take online courses for nothing and get achievements and points for doing well in quizzes but you need to pay to be accredited. 

In Hearthstone you are always exposed to the opportunity to shop, and people frequently do for that reason alone.

Players tend to purchase real and virtual merchandise to celebrate their enjoyment of the game’s community and this investment in the experience positively feeds back into sustained future engagement in the system over time by the consumer (game first, products second). However chances are your target product/service isn’t peripheral merchandise to a game so developing a game to complement a product you want to sell is challenging to do in an engaging way. Products first, game second is often what we want in business so let’s look at some examples of that.

Points, Levels and Badges:

By far the most common form of e-business gamification is to simply provide some sort of positive stimulus to the customer when they do something you want them to do more of. Loyalty schemes are an example of this but monetary rewards and freebies aren’t the sole driver of repeat/increased business to your website over your competitor’s sites when you use a game. The spectre of saturation means that if a competitor can easily implement your successful game for their own business then they will do so and the differential advantage over rivals is diminished to what it was before everyone implemented their games except now all business have lost money and time implementing games and offers. 

Many of us bought or played inferior Xbox 360/PS3 titles for no reason other than that this felt great.

Creating the belief in the consumer that their actions are contributing to some over-arching record of achievement has a positive impact on sales and engagement. There is a healthy flow of pull marketing from the consumer as they play more of your game and actively seek out content, and push marketing as special offers and new products are integrated into the game in the form of limited time goals/quests. The idea of wasting an opportunity to build up your Nectar or Club Card ‘score’ of points can influence customers into limiting their shopping for goods at stores which do not offer such a scheme.

Abstract, colourful but tangibly worthless experience points, virtual trophies and milestones are powerful on their own but the interactivity needs to be active in order to have the most impact on the consumer’s psychology.  Interest rates, loyalty cards and points which are automatically earned are very passive non-interactive effects in a game.

Bottom centre. Even Snapchat has a completely arbitrary scoring system.

Creating the idea in the mind of the player that they have ‘played’ their way to the offer and the feeling of having ‘won’ the prize of a special discount can be emotionally engaging and more difficult to refuse than if the offer was open to everyone without the need to strive for it. This sustained engagement promotes the brand, sells products and creates a social buzz about the business. All of this hinges on creating a compulsive game environment that integrates the business in an appealing way.

Next Time: 

I'll talk more about how general approaches towards gamifying your online business to make your business stand out on the web. I'll also recount how business students used these lessons to come up with some fairly solid sounding pitches for gamified e-businesses.

Further 'Reading':

1. Skinner Box video by Extra Creditz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
2. Foursquare Analysis.
3. How Nike uses Gamification.

Eldritch Horror: Fighting Cthulu with a Shotgun

Here at 103% we don’t like to limit ourselves to any one type of game, but rather discuss gaming as a whole. As such, we occasionally discuss games that aren’t electronic but more traditional. In the past we’ve covered the stone-cold classic “Settlers of Catan”, and we’ve also talked about various 2 player games that serve as a great alternative to sex (after all, sex isn’t always the best way of interacting with any given person).

Sex may not be appropriate at a job interview, but Yu Gi Oh sure is!

I recently acquired a brand-new copy of the Fantasy Flight game “Eldritch Horror”, a sequel to the relatively popular “Arkham Horror” game and it’s various expansions. The mythos of the game is based around the works of H.P. Lovecraft (I always like to pretend that the “H.P.” stands for “hit points”), and as such features various monstrous abominations to be fought, as well as a heavy focus on Lovecraft-crafted narratives. After playing half a dozen times I felt I should share my thoughts and reactions with the 103 community.

The game is a co-operative effort to win against the game itself, that can be played by 1 to 8 players. I for one like to envisage the battle-hardened nerd opting for a solo playthrough yet still reading every single card aloud. Each turn involves each player taking 2 actions in an attempt to prevent the advancing of the Ancient Ones, before moving on to the encounters phase, where each player has a narrative encounter of some sort, before the monsters make their moves against humanity. These encounters tend to be the most entertaining part of the game. Either the collective players choose to embrace these Lovecraftian nuggets with a horrified gravity or they laugh knowingly at the melodrama of it all; every game I have played thus far has fallen into the latter category. A particular highlight was when a “partially insubstantial insect” flew out of Jak’s brain “leaving knowledge of an alien world”. I hate it when that happens.

After a couple of test games where we had put the game together with a very easy set up we decided to go for the full Eldritchian experience, pushing aside the casual menace of Azathoth for the famed insanity as that internet favourite, Cthulu. Team 103 (myself, Jak, and Liam) did everything we could to make the game as hard as possible, thinking ourselves invincible after our near-victory over Azathoth. Oh, did I not mention that even when scaling the game to super-easy mode we lost? Yeah. Azathoth devoured our planet. You have us to thank for that one, humanity.

We're sorry.

Needless to say it was a massacre. The focal point of Cthulu’s Blitzkrieg of insanity ended up being Sydney. You see, if a character dies surviving investigators can attempt to recover their belongings, and eliminated players can respawn as a new investigator. Sydney rapidly became 103’s folly, as the more dead investigators piled up there the more tempting booty appeared. Also, on an unrelated note, “Cthulu’s Blitzkrieg of Insanity” would make an excellent name for a band. That’s a freebie.

As the patented “doom” counter hit zero and we had failed to make any substantial progress we set ourselves the makeshift win condition of killing Cthulu himself (this can happen in the game, but we were a long way off it happening. Lovecraft was quite right in describing him as “an excessive motherfucking badass”). We piled all our weapons and buffs on to my character, Norman Withers, the aged astronomer, and flew headlong into battle. Wielding a double-barrelled shotgun with an axe in case things turned ugly, I tried my luck. Did I win? No.

And so, as I left that accursed object on the table where it lay, I knew my mind was only a few days away from complete collapse. I leave this document as a testament to my time table-topping a really, really hard game.

Descent Into Madness (Suggs To Be You)

Very rarely do I find games that get to me. This isn’t through a lack of trying; I primarily look for strong and engaging narratives when purchasing games, though very few of them tend to register with me on a mental or emotional level. However, when a video game does get to me, it seems to have to have just as powerful an effect on me than if I was watching the story as a TV show or film, if not more so. Now I don’t mean to sound pretentious when I say that because for something to register with me, I only ask that it have some lasting effect and I don’t instantly forget about it after I’ve finished, which I think we can all agree is the measure of an experience being worthwhile. For example, I would say Psychonauts has registered with me in the same way Monty Python and The Holy Grail has because I haven’t found a game as genuinely hilarious. The tongue-in-cheek, surrealist humour of both of them has definitely had an influence on me as a comedian, yet in terms of mental or emotional resonating with an audience, video gaming as a medium has distinct advantage due to it being an interactive medium; especially when it comes to empathising with a protagonist’s descent into madness.

Just needed to get this joke out of my system. Last one, I promise.

I recently played through Spec Ops: The Line. For those of you who haven’t played it, Spec Ops is a 3^rd person shooter that follows a special operations task force into storm hit Dubai to save any of the remaining survivors and  investigate what happened to the decorated American Platoon of Soldiers, the Damned 33^rd. The game is loosely based on the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and is an examination of both the Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder that soldiers can experience in action and how removed actual video games about war are from the real thing. After a few hours of game play, there is an incident that involves white phosphorous that made me as a player feel physically nauseous and incredibly guilty. Why? It was because it was the player who causes the incident. That simple fact alone means that the player is more invested in the narrative. They’re not passive watching it on a TV screen for the main character to deal with as if it was a film. Having watched Apocalypse Now last weekend, a film inspired by Heart of Darkness, the horrors in that didn’t get to me as much as Spec Ops although it is based on nearly identical themes.

The game finds subtle ways to break the fourth wall to remind you what you've done. (Until that moment where all the characters look directly to the camera and call the player a dick.)

From that point onwards, the player watches the main character try to cope with the things he is doing to survive while also trying to comprehend what he has done; thus allowing the main character’s self-awareness to be that of the audience, making them feel guilty about the horrors they are committing. There comes a certain point in the game when the battlefield changes in a sudden flash to look like a hell on earth before transforming back, which is both symbolic as well as representative of the main character has losing a part of his sanity and being scared forever. Needless to say, Spec Ops: The Line got to me.

I find this altering of the pre-established reality as a way representing the main characters diminishing mental state at its most effective in video games because you are able to actively observe it at your own pace. We all remember the Scarecrow sections of Batman: Arkham Asylum for doing this masterfully to give us both an insight into Batman’s psyche and a unique way for him to battle the Scarecrow. For those of you who have played Eternal Darkness, you will recall how well the game was able to mess with the player in a variety of ways when the sanity meter was low and made them think their TV was broken.

World's worst Pic 'n' Mix salesman ever.

Not that all video games get this right. The desert section from Uncharted 3 is a test in patience at best. I find the key to getting this to work effectively is to use it both sparingly and subtlety. The best uses have those moments where the player isn’t sure what they have seen and are able to doubt themselves. It is a good way of re-enforcing a theme or an idea in the games narrative. Of course, not all games need to incorporate this to be a good game or to give a deep and meaningful experience.

I am a firm believer that video games have the potential to have a more powerful effect on the audience than film and TV. While there will always be shining examples of masterful story telling in every medium, watching a character walk through hell on earth and having the choices you actively made be the reason he is there are two completely different experiences altogether (and I know which one will stay with me for the longest). Now I’m going to play some Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time to remind myself there is still joy in the world.

You don't need to understand what's going on in Kingdom Hearts. Nobody does.

Sorry to make a lot of people feel old (or alienate a lot of young readers at once) but It's been at least ten years since Kingdom Hearts came out on the PS2 which was a lovely idea on paper where Disney characters and their associated worlds get smushed together with cameos from Final Fantasy characters and other original content from Square-Enix. It was awesome, taking on the role of Sora... or someone, you got to team up with Aladdin to smash Jafar with a key-sword... or something to go on an epic journey with Donald Duck and Goofy to track down the legendary Kingdom Hearts... or somewhere.

Whatever was happening in this game, it was awesome.

So after having a magical journey fighting The Heartless through Alice in Wonderland, Halloween Town and Neverland among others I ended up in a location called Hollow Bastion and then some stuff happened involving some guy called Ansem, who wasn't really a guy called Ansem as it turned out because of events that transpired in Kingdom Hearts 2, which is actually the third game in the series as a matter of fact, which explains why "Organisation XIII" consisted of only four people due to the rest of them being thoroughly dispatched during the events of Chain of Memories on the Game Boy Advance, which people understandably mistook for a spin-off title instead of a fully canonised, core story title. The Kingdom Hearts series then became a kind of equal opportunities campaign for gaming platforms, having a main series title appearing on smartphones, microwaves and the long since defunct Neo Geo Pocket. 

This fight, of course, being the turning point of the entire story... eventually.

So when I bought Dream Drop Distance for the Nintendo 3DS I was worried that I would be completely lost having not followed the series in its entirety whatsoever. Turns out that although this was true (Who or what is Braig?) it turns out that you can just sort of power through and get to the business of twatting stuff with keys on sticks without having to worry about why you're doing it. It turns out that these games have a habit of saving all their inter-game lore for five minutes at the start and half an hour at the end, leaving plenty of time for good clean Disney related fun for the thirty hours betwixt.

Also, Sebastian becomes the size of a goat in the GBA title. Fun!

Twenty Keyblade (or chi-blade) Masters? Fuggedaboudit you can just concentrating on having fun with Quasimodo! What on earth is Master Xehanort up to? Who gives a shit because... Tron. The series is certainly self-aware of it's own uncontrollably burgeoning plot and makes up for it by being lots of fun to play and very pretty to look at. Just pick up a copy of whichever title is easiest for you to acquire and get to the happy business of speculating whether Disney will be including Darth Vader and Wolverine into Kingdom Hearts 3 due to wealth of real world corporate stuff that has happened since ancient times when Kingdom Hearts 2 (3) was released. Of course, Kingdom Hearts 3 will be closer to Kingdom Hearts 10 at this rate for anyone keeping count but if you've learned anything from my article today is that it does not matter one bit.