Harvest Moon

• Release Date: 1996
• Platform: SNES
• Developer: Natusme
• Genre: Role-Playing

What role would you want to play as in a video game? A spaceman? A God? A soldier? A knight on a perilous quest? Okay... How about a farmer? Tilling the land, tending the livestock, looking after crops, and basing your life around the passing seasons. Not so keen? Are you sure?

Harvest Moon is a farming simulation, but a farming simulation in which the nasty bits of farming, such as wrenching chicken's heads off and putting bolts through cow's brains, are taken back a bit to make way for a gentle anime depiction of the countryside lifestyle in all it's glory. The game will have you feeding and looking after your animals, watering your crops, milking your cows(and talking to them while you are at it) and other farming activities in the most timely manner imaginable in order to maximize your farm's potential.

As unlikely as it sounds, the game's agenda will cast a strong spell on you until you are so hooked into the game that you can't escape it. With time management mechanics at it's heart, Harvest Moon is capable of dressing it's bare clockwork up in such a way where you don't really mind being rushed around or sent on a series of what are, essentially, thankless tasks.

Fans certainly don't seem to mind, as they buy near identical sequels by the boat-load. They ensure that every season of gaming has a Harvest moon release or two. While the recent titles in the series are only for the hard-core pretend farmer, the original was a title that anyone could pick up and enjoy. The game is available on the Wii's virtual console service. So what are you waiting for? Give this unique game a try!

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Grand Theft Auto II

• Release Date: 1999
• Platform: Various
• Developer: DMA Design
• Genre: Action

Grand Theft Auto 2 has been unfairly marginalized by the success of both its predecessor and it's successor. Keeping the top-down view of the first game in the series, it has been judged to be a minor iteration on an old formula, before the series' huge leap to 3D. But the game's innovations are far from insignificant. As with Grand Theft Auto, the game launches the player as a free agent in an open city, full of criminal potential. The sequel breathes life into the game with the addition of pedestrians. They get on buses, call on taxis, and even get in fights with the local gangs.

The gangs, too, present an important step, although not one Grand Theft Auto III would follow entirely. Multiple missions are on offer from the three competing gangs in the area, and each one, when successfully completed, will increase the favour of that gang and decrease that of it's competition. The player must continually juggle the satisfaction of each so as not to get gunned down when entering their territory.

Perhaps the game's greatest mix-up was to set the game not in contemporary America, but in the near-future dystopia, the cyberpunk feel which undoes a lot of the game's effort to build a credible living city. Nonetheless, the game still displays the developer's effort for biting humour, with it's cast of pervert scientists and vengeful Hari Krishnas. 

Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto II are available for download (completely free) directly from RockStar Games, here: http://9.bb/235785/rockstargames

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Diablo

• Release Date: 1997
• Platform: Various
• Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
• Genre: Action/Role-Playing

If it's an online quiz you're working with, clicking on things is quite boring and monotonic. However, if it's Diablo, the simple game mechanic turns into something magical. Enemies explode in bursts of blood or collapse into piles of bone, heroes race across the screen to the indicated spot to await your command.Everything you click on in Diablo rewards you in some form or another.

The game isn't just a good looking isometric dungeon crawler, it is THE best dungeon crawler. A simple - almost brainless trek through caverns and catacombs filled with vile creatures, not to mention all the loot. Blizzard spent a lot of time working on the generation of the game's spaces, making items, enemies, and geography be different every single time you load up the game. The game that results from this is a game that keeps on giving.

By todays standard, Diablo's classes, characters, and piles of rewards are actually rather shallow and inferior, but the game still radiates a wonderful fascination each time you return to it's caverns. It's so simple anyone could  learn the basics, and so rich and vibrant that even the pros will find themselves coming back for more.

The game has spawned countless clones, and to this very day, the skeleton smashing formula has not changed.

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Spy Hunter

• Release Date: 1983
• Platform: Arcade
• Developer: Midway
• Genre: Action

With its smart weapons, awesome cars, Spy Hunter was viewed as a very stylish game back in the arcades on the early 1980s. It was a title that playing into any boy's fantasies- secret agents, nasty weaponry, and a driving lincese. Make no mistake though, it was the action packed gameplay that kept people coming back for more again, again, and again.

In Spy Hunter, you play as a secret agent with a car that shoots bullets from the front grill, and you are tasked with the simple task of mowing down countless amounts of enemies on an endless, linear highway. From stretch cars with side-machine-guns, to buses with spiked wheels, and even the occasional helicopter,  Spy Hunter had a unique and incredible selection of foes to destroy. Even upgrading your ride was cool; driving into the back of passing vans to upgrade your car with smoke-screens and oil slicks every now and again.

All of this was pretty slick, but Spy Hunter's most epic moments comes when the game's incomplete bridges force you to take your ride off-road, where it transforms itself into a boat, and taking the road based battles to the sea.

Fit to the obsessions of the 1980s, having a mixture of espionages and cars, Spy Hunter is a delightful memory for everyone who played it.

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Donkey Kong

• Release Date: 1981
• Platform: Arcade
• Developer: Nintendo
• Genre: Platformer

Donkey Kong was truely a game-changer (no pun intended)  when it was first released back in 1981. It's elaborate cartoon graphics set it apart from the industry standard of a scene filled with aliens and space rocks. It came at a time where the "great" protagonist was merely a yellow circle who seemed to suffer from a chronic drug addiction.The game had decent animation when other games had blips that just moved around the screen.

It also introduced two characters who would go on to dominate the gaming realm for years to come. As welll as Donkey Kong, we were introduced to a carpenter named Jumpman. After a name change and a career transition, Jumpman would go on to become one of the most iconic characters in gaming to date - Mario the plumber.

All of the mechanics that made the Mario games so successful, originated from this title. Leaping from platform to platform whilst dodging obstacles, on an endless quest to save his woman.

Donkey Kong launched Nintendo into the God-tier of game development. The company's president Hiroshi Yamauchi made the right decision in tasking the young employee Shigeru Miyamoto to crack into the US gaming market. It still a fun game to play today!

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