The Sounds of the SNES

It's been said that contraints often liberate rather than limit creativity. Give a musician a state of the art recording studio and he'll come back to you with an over-produced and boring piece of music. Give him the SNES's sound chip and he'll write some of the greatest melodies of all time.

Koji Kondo - A slightly sinister looking genius

Hit the break for a walk down memory lane, and maybe feel a little despair that videogame music today isn't quite what it used to be.

Tales of Monkey Island Review

My review of Tales of Monkey Island has now been posted on Savygamer, and you'll see I had less fun with the game than most other reviewers. Im hoping that's because I'm the only reviewer whose judgement wasn't impaired by nostalgia, rather than the seemingly more likely explanation that I've been too harsh. Hmm. Have a read and decide for yourself.

Tim Roger's Top Games of 2000-2009

Exactly a month after my half-hearted attempt, Tim Rogers goes into mind-boggling detail over on Kotaku on his top games of the decade.

Go try not to be awe-inspired.

2010 Hype-o-meter

Don't you just hate the way the videogame press hypes forthcoming releases while knowing next to nothing about how they're actually going to play? Me too! So here are the games I'm most looking forward to playing in 2010:

Red Dead Redemption

From the creators of Grand Theft Auto comes what might be the first great videogame Western.

Mass Effect 2

A delicious nerd-fest.

Alan Wake

I'm a sucker for this kind of eerie, moody, plot-driven adventuring.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

If it's half as good as the first it will be amazing.

Brink

Mirror's Edge style controls bolted onto grand-scale objective-based team-deathmatch should result in something truly ground-breaking.

Heavy Rain

Perhaps the game that finally turns the PS3 into an essential purchase for me. Or bloated gameless crap. We shall see.

Goodbye

I'll be away for the next week. Perhaps you should take this opportunity to brush up on your maths:

World of Stuart Blog

Stuart Campbell (perhaps best described by Kieron Gillen as "videogame journalism's answer to Al Qaeda") has started blogging. He's probably the greatest polemicist there is and might ever be in games writing, and the vast number of Internet hate groups that have been set up against him over the years are a tribute to his success. No-one divides opinion quite like he can (except perhaps Tim Rogers), but even when I'm vehemently disagreeing with what he's got to say, I never doubt that he's among the most entertaining, original and informed people you can read.

His blog is particularly exciting because there's been so little new content on his main site for the past three years (even for those willing to pay £2 /month for access to his subscriber features). On the WoSblog there have so far been 16 posts in the space of less than a week, including this quite inspired spin on those over-exposed "Game of the Year" features. This compares with a total of 21 posts over all of 2009 on the regular World of Stuart.

Wherever he decides to put his words, long may his prolificity prolificness continue.

Fire Action! - Lucy Fang

On this I'm playing the bass AND the washing up tub.