Resident Evil is cinematic in the most literal sense. The fixed camera angles from which you view the some-action-but-mostly-puzzle-solving are carefully composed to show only what you need to see, to direct your attention precisely where it needs to go. Those static cameras make what could have easily been a nauseating amount of grunting along walls for hot spots in a conventional first- or third-person game feel as natural and soothing as scanning your mouse cursor over the pre-rendered stills in Myst.

In other senses, Resident Evil isn’t cinematic at all. Though it’s only about two hours long (if you play it right), no part of your character’s experience is edited out. The entire game takes place in one single, coherent location, and every second of your traversal through that location is entirely under your control – in fact, it’s kind of the entire point!

I’ve heard the gameplay in Resident Evil described as resource management-based, and while that’s true, it also tells you virtually nothing. A dogfight simulator, for example, is all about resource management, pilots balancing thrust and gravity to preserve potential energy while simultaneously spending that energy to maintain an advantageous position or optimal maneuvering speed. So it’s probably a good idea for us to take a minute and nail down exactly what kind of game Resident Evil is.

In Resident Evil, you the player are trapped in a spooky old mansion with a variety of ghouls and other monsters. Standing between you and escape is a series of very basic lock and key puzzles. The mansion is segmented into a ridiculously (but not unrealistically) large number of self-contained rooms and hallways, all connected to one another by brief first-person door-opening animations. The player can pass through doors, while the slow, predictable monsters can not (if they could, the whole game would essentially become a very pretty version of Pac-Man (I would like to play that Pac-Man)).

The “adventure” part of this action-adventure game involves exploring the mansion to find key items to open previously encountered lock puzzles, then figuring out the most efficient route by which to backtrack through already charted territory without exposing yourself to any more danger than necessary. Actually traversing dangerous rooms is where the “action” component comes in, requiring you to either evade and outmaneuver the monsters, or fight them using a very limited amount of ammunition – either way, failure will deplete your equally precious healing supplies.

The traversal puzzles gradually become more complex as more interconnected rooms are unlocked and faster, scarier enemies are introduced. However, it’s not until subsequent playthroughs that the final element of resource management shows up, and that’s when the whole design clicks into place. Resident Evil is a timed game; there’s no hard limit that I’m aware of, but a game clock is displayed on the final score screen (spoiler?), and the player is assigned a letter grade largely based on it. Surprise! It looked like The 7th Guest, but it was really Crazy Taxi the whole time.

Finding faster solutions to the traversal puzzles – and there are ALWAYS faster solutions – becomes the core of replayability, though all the various unlockable alternate game modes certainly spice things up (one of them makes the enemies invisible; by the time you get around to it, you’ll probably already be so well-versed in where they are and how they move that it’s not even particularly challenging). And I haven’t even talked about the most important alternate game mode, the choice of player character at the start, which determines not only how many hit points and inventory spaces and stuff you start with, but also how some puzzles are solved and which NPCs you encounter and basically the entire course of the story line.

Resident Evil is one of those games you sit down to write one paragraph about and end up writing eight. Every element of it sounds dangerously sub-optimal on its own (fixed cameras! backtracking! inventory juggling! attrition-based combat! zombies!). It’s only when you fit those parts together like the pieces of an ancient mask that you realize how brilliantly they all complement one another, activating the elevator to the locked off part of your brain that’s still capable of experiencing childish delight at a video game.

Resident Evil HD was released in 2015 for PC, PS3, PS4, X360, and XO.

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Dream Cast

The 1980s introduced me to many radical things (including Rubik’s Cubes, Showbiz Pizza, and the Thompson Twins), but perhaps the most radical was extreme sports. Yes, technically skateboarding predates the Awesome 80s, but we’re talking about Christian Hosoi pulling McTwists off of half pipes here, not hippies surfing down sidewalks on pieces of wood with metal wheels nailed to them. Right around the time my interest in breakdancing began to wane I discovered Thrashin’ and Rad and quickly traded my Converse in for a pair of Vision Street Wear. No longer was it cool to build little ramps and ride around in the dirt — suddenly it was all about adding pegs to your bike and, if you had crappy brakes like I did, toe endos.

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How would I define the magic of an ATC sim? Well, it’s the one simulator which can nearly perfectly recreate the actual experience it is trying to simulate. Being a controller involves sitting in a room, staring at a bunch of blips on the screen, and making them move around. So does playing an ATC sim. I would imagine a perfect ATC sim would make it impossible to tell if you were actually doing it or not, other than the screams of doomed passengers as they plummet to the ground in a fiery ball. More than that, though, the magic is that it’s kind of like slow-motion, three-dimensional Asteroids. And who wouldn’t want to play that?

Now, let’s take a look at the contenders.

Endless ATC

For a free Android app (and a $3 PC game), this gets so much right that many of the other “more sophisticated” (and expensive) sims get wrong that it’s kind of embarrassing to the other sims. It is definitely a “game”, as planes just keep coming, more and more, until you can’t handle it, and the more planes you can handle, the higher your score. That’s it. You can “cap” your score to keep traffic from increasing, but by that time you’ve probably had enough anyway. It’s terrible easy to use, perfectly suited for a tablet/phone, and just does the whole “line ’em up like a string of pearls” stress-fest about as cleanly and well as possible. If I was going to introduce someone to the genre, I would definitely, without question, tell them to start here. The PC version is slightly superior, but they’re both just fine. Score: 8

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I have become… unhealthily obsessed with this movie ever since it came out on Netflix Instant. Many many movies both mainstream and indie have come out in recent years seeking to capitalize on my childhood. From Transformers, to Moonbeam City, to Kung Fury. But while they may have captured the fashions or the little details, none of them have captured the heart, save for Turbo Kid. Some movies remind me of childhood, Turbo Kid carries me back into my childhood on the hooves of a Lisa Frank unicorn.

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Child of Light let me fulfill my lifelong dream of having luxurious flowing hair and the cutest little fairy wings to flutter around a magical storybook land. And when you fly around, your beautiful silken locks swirl and twirl about and make me feel so pretty inside ^__________^. But in a vicious rib-kick to fantasy wish fulfillment, they didn’t add in a hairbrush or a giggle button so I could fly around spreading girlish cheer far and wide >:(

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I can’t help but think the Rebellion must be running out of recruits. Every Rodian, Sullustan, Twi’lek and Ishi Tib must have already been drafted before they got to me. As I repeatedly crash one X-Wing Fighter after another into the sides of Beggar’s Canyon while trying to figure out how to fly this goddamn thing, surely the recruitment officer who failed to check my references and handed me the keys to this multi-million dollar spaceship has been fired.

I’m not a huge fan of modern console games, but I am a huge fan of Star Wars. I bought a Nintendo 64 to play Star Wars: Episode I Racer and a GameCube for Rogue Squadron. I’ve had blisters on my thumb from attacking AT-ATs on the Atari 2600’s The Empire Strikes Back, spent hours assembling virtual bricks in Lego Star Wars on the PlayStation, and waved my arms around like an idiot while playing The Force Unleashed on the Nintendo Wii. Based on my previous efforts to assist the rebellion you might think word would have spread about my lack of skills and those in charge of recruiting capable soldiers would quit handing me loaded weapons, but no.

For what it’s worth, a PlayStation 4 with a second controller and a copy of Star Wars: Battlefront will set you back $518. After stopping by GameStop after work and receiving a snarky lecture about not pre-ordering the game, we walked next door to Walmart and bought everything right off the shelf. Walmart does a lot of things wrong, but that whole part about stocking their shelves with things people want to buy, they do pretty well. May GameStop and their pre-ordering system burn forever in the lowest levels of Mustafar.

I play these games, I think, because I want to be in Star Wars. As a kid, watching those films on the big screen, I imagined it was me flying a snow speeder and bringing down those giant walkers, or engaging imperial stormtroopers in a furious blaster battle. And while the original two Star Wars Battlefront games did a good job of bringing this experience home, Star Wars: Battlefront for the PS4, Xbox One and PC perfected it. As you run through worlds you’ve grown up watching on the big screen while firing lasers at your opponents, you’ll know this is as close you’ll ever get to being a part of those epic battles that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Because the recommended specs for the PC version of Battlefront are so high (Electronic Arts recommends 16GB of RAM and a 4GB video card, among other demands) I opted to go the console route. As I watched my son wiggle around our entertainment center connecting HDMI cables, I remembered why I’d had him.

The other thing he’s good for, apparently, is kicking imperial ass and taking names. After dying repeatedly, I handed him the controller and watched him go. He’s more of an online multiplayer than I am, and soon he was running around Hoth, Tatooine, and Endor shooting everything in sight.

I don’t know that screenshots do the game justice. I was afraid that the game wouldn’t look as good as the screen captures I had seen floating around prior to its release, but in reality, it looks better. With each generation of games I wonder “How can things get any better?” and this is no exception. At times I wish my enemy would stop shooting at me long enough to let me study the rocks and dirt that make up the landscape.

This game is so detailed and so big that I feel like it may take me many months to see it all. Like a meal with many courses I plan on slowly working my way through each one, taking the time to taste, smell and appreciate them before moving on to the next. Along with the game, I’ll be buying an online pass for $50 and (I’m sure) paying for downloadable content later, and Dice has done such a good job with this game that I honestly don’t care. Whatever it costs, I’ll pay it.

Line up another X-Wing for me, Red Squadron. I’m comin’ in hot.

BREAST ACTION GAME OF THE REAR! EXPLOSIVE HAND-TO-GLAND COMBAT! THIS ERECTION SEASON BAYONETTA 2 PUTS THE TITS BACK IN CONSTITUTION!

Short summary: Gameplay-wise, there aren’t any substantial changes from the first, so if you didn’t like the first you won’t like this either. If you liked the first, you’d probably like this.

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Satellite Reign is one of the most beautiful games I’ve played since Trine 2. Shadowrun has a better plot, but its watercolor backgrounds failed to make an impression, Invisible Inc. has better stealth gameplay, but its cyberpunk vision is so dull it might as well be taking place in the same universe as the movie “Her,” Satellite Reign is the first modern cyberpunk game I’ve played that gets the look and feel right. We really have reached an age where artistic vision trumps engine power in terms of a graphical triumph. I just cleared the Downtown area and gained access to the Industrial sector. My biggest fear was the game would blow its graphical load in the downtown, then industrial would be boring and repetitive. They did not and it is not.

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Once upon a time, respected movie critic Roger Ebert said that video games would never be art because their narrative didn’t explore the human condition. Video game critics wished above all else to one day be as respected as Ebert, so they took his statement as a personal rejection and made it their life’s mission to prove him wrong. They could have simply corrected Ebert by telling him that judging video games by their narrative is like comparing the card game “Bridge” to “Go Fish” based on the quality of the artwork on the cards. Sadly, the game critics instead went out in search of video games that explored the human condition with narrative!

Apparently the best they could find was a game called Passage. In it, you control an ugly pixelated dude and move him to the right until he dies. The only noteworthy thing about the game is how terrible it is in every respect. But the game’s website said it was inspired by colon cancer, and that was enough for the game critics. They showered Passage with universal undeserved praise.

Notoriety is money in the indie scene, so like mushrooms on a cow pat, amateurish, ugly, joyless games with a message began popping up everywhere to inevitable accolades from insecure game critics. I myself was mislead into paying money for Papers, Please, foolishly thinking that if EVERYONE was loving this game, including supposed curmudgeon Yahtzee, that it might actually be way more fun than it looks (Spoiler: it isn’t!) Thanks to gamergate, we now live in a brave new world where questioning why art games get preferential treatment by game critics is equivalent to gang-raping a woman in a porta-potty, so pretentious art house gaming is here to stay.

But fear not! There are still indie developers who make games that eschew narrative exploration of the human condition for gameplay that’s actually fun, and I’ve compiled a list of 50 of ‘em! Enjoy!

One Finger Death Punch

50. One Finger Death Punch

A cheap 2-button game of stick figure kung fu fighting with epic music and destructible scenery that’s way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

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Author’s note: After seeing what a wet blanket most of Hotline Miami 2 is I figured I’d dump this here and see what everyone thought about it. I wrote it awhile ago when it seemed like the whole #GamerGate thing was going to turn into some expressly anti-violence desensitization thing. — Worm

The first violent game I remember seeing would probably be Rampage. Now I know this isn’t a traditionally violent game but it’s where it began. After all you could pick up people and eat them whole, that’s pretty violent. Certainly Mario smashing Goombas wasn’t some grand gesture of peace but this is the first time I remember killing people, innocent people, and it was fun. I wasn’t really defending myself in Rampage, actually I found that the most fun was fighting against the helpless civilians rather than the military units that actually could drain my health and cause me to lose a life. Most of the fun in Rampage was killing helpless women and men, plucking them out of their apartments and eating them whole.

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