Yes, this series is moving on far slower than I said it would. I blame university. Anyway, today I’m going to link to a series of very different games.

• Game And Watch Emulators – Several slices of classic twitch gaming. I thoroughly recommend Donkey Kong Jr., a game which gave me hours of pleasure as a child. Incidentally, I still have the originals of most of these. These are, unfortunately, Windows only executables.
• Puzzle Bobble – Or Bust A Move if you prefer the non-European title. A flawless recreation of Taito’s fast moving, precision puzzler that spawned a dozen clones (Flash).
• Grid Game – Pretty, simple, frustratingly addictive; all signs of a good puzzle game. On my first go, I managed a chain of 1407. I’ve yet to beat it and it’s annoying me enough to keep trying. Actually, I take that back: just as I was writing this post I managed 2364. Eat that, Derek.
• Prince Of Persia: Special Edition – A new adventure in the vein of the original Prince Of Persia. Shame that it has a time limit. The controls are as shite as ever.

Enjoy. Next up: handhelds.

(Editorial note: yes, I spacked up the title. It should be part 2 and a constraint in my CMS stops me from changing it immediately. It will remain as it is anyway, for permalink consistency).

Twelve years ago or so, Christmas morning, little Johnny excitedly rips through his presents. Among them, a shining bastion of a console: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES to its friends. Super Mario World was the game to playing, and play it he did. Here was a game that was a truly a step beyond what had gone before. Not because of its richer graphics (although the sadder among us no doubt remember the mode 7 rotation and dozens of background layers) did it stand above previous titles.

No, it stood out because it brought a rich new set of toys to play with: yoshi, spinning worlds, the ghost houses and lots more. The whole generation of games was full of innovation (see Pilotwings and F-Zero for examples).

Eight years ago or so, another generation was under way. This time Johnny thought Super Mario 64 was the most revolutionary game. It represented a real step forward in so many areas. Worlds seemed to be real for the first time, various skills allowed exploration in small steps, and Johnny felt more involved than ever. Mario was a genuine avatar.

A few years ago, we got another generation. This time, however, there was no major upheaval. Sure, there were great games, but nothing substantially different. More solid lighting, certainly. Better effects. A huge increase in the number of polygons on screen. None of that really mattered though, it wasn’t all that different. Somewhere in the transition between hardware periods revolution had been killed in the pursuit of realism.

The pursuit of realism had long been a goal, and an admirable one at that. An obvious argument is that the more we recognise the worlds we see in games the easier they are to empathise with and enjoy. Are games necessarily about that though? Does it really matter if we immediately recognise the game world as being similar to our own? Simply put, no.

As far back as games have existed, there have always been large levels of abstraction graphically that were profoundly easy to cope with. Pong, Pac Man, Centipede. Hell, games have been around for centuries that have one foot in reality but are marvellously abstract. Checkers, Go, Chess. We don’t need things to be completely familiar to enjoy them.

That this pursuit of realism has all but killed innovation graphically (with the exception of a few rare titles) is not important though. More consistent rules and better toys (the gravity gun from Half Life 2), tiny graphical details (being able to see the weave on clothing, for example), opponents who better realise their role; immersion is the new revolution.

Where Mario World gave us a few wooden trains to play with, Grand Theft Auto gave us the complete Hornby back catalogue (and enough explosives to destroy it). Wolfenstein might have left us shoot monsters, it’s Halo 2 which lets us play with them. While Johnny might not remember this generation as being all that different from the last superficially, it is. He just needs to immerse himself.

Games have never been a major topic on Solitude, save links to flash games and the odd comment about how something has been eating up my time. Given that I’ve been playing games a lot longer than I’ve been interested in web design, computing, music and the other things I’ve been writing about of late, this is a somewhat odd state of affairs.

While the amount of time I spend playing games has been heavily marginalised (very low priority after all), I still like to follow what’s going on and understand significant issues in the gaming world. (Yes, I am an Edge reader).

So, the next series of posts are going to focus on several gaming related issues. Expect focus to be thrown on the current handheld battles, the pursuit of realism, net gaming (yes, more flash), and possibly some other non-video game topics in the wider world of gaming (of which I have almost no interest).

Non-gamers: switch off for a week.

There has been a lot on the yourcodenameis:milo front this month. They announced the details of their new EP, Rapt. Dept, which appeared on the 31st January with superb artwork by Storm Thorgerson (who has done Mars Volta artwork), as well as their forthcoming album, Ignoto. The album (due March) will feature one of the finest song titles of all time, “Unfinished Drawing Of Cats”, as a UK bonus track. As well as this, the video for Rapt. Dept appeared and is fantastic, fitting the song like so few videos beforehand. Moody rock picked apart by heavenly imagery, breaking down into a bizarre ethereal spookiness. Incredibly good stuff on both the audio and visual front.

Bands who split: Mclusky have ended it, after 3 great albums, and Ikara Colt split on the 16th. Both shall be missed.

Idlewild released the video from new single, “Love Steal Us From Loneliness”. Very loose storyline involving two people who are alone, even when together. A playful enough video, but lacks depth. Idlewild played 5 acoustic shows across the country this month, followed by a full electric tour in April/May.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead… released their new album, “Worlds Apart”, on the final day of the month. Very heavily hyped, and sounding superb. Trail Of Dead albums have been masterpieces in the past, but this is the one that might live on as seminal.

As observers of this site might know, I had planned on removing film reviews from Solitude, a plan I revised in the comments of that same post a day later. Now the plan was, and is, to wait until the end of the month and compare that months cinema viewing against each other and try to come up with a favourite. This would make my life much easier when it comes for the inevitable best films of 2005 post. As one might expect, there has been a slight hitch in that plan: I’ve only been to the cinema once this month.

Team America: World Police is what you might expect from Matt Stone and Trey Parker when given puppets: silly plots, stupid characters and blatant attempts to piss off the most people possible. Absolutely hilarious in places, the duo know how to utilise odd mediums to make a point, but it lacks in a lot of places; large gaps of the film just don’t have any jokes. Also, the number of jokes that are taking directly from South Park (the “montage” song, for example) is pretty disappointing.

Still, given there are no other contenders, it’s an easy January victory for Team America.