Top Games List - Burnout Legends

I thought I better get going on the first game nn my list before I completely forgot about it and wrote about something else.

I was a bit of a late comer to the whole Burnout party. I never played the first three games on PS2 which is strange because Ridge Racer 4 is one of my favourite racing games and I'm a huge fan of the arcade style. I picked up Burnout Legends on the PSP fairly early after it came out as during that time there was a distinct lack of great games on the PSP. I played it to death and I truly believe that it's one of the contributing factors in me only getting a 2:2 at university. This was also during the period where I was travelling to Brighton, London or Milton Keynes to see Jordan every week so it helped me through a lot of long train and coach journeys.

My only gripe with the game was the rather horrendous load times. When you were playing crash mode and had to restart the level every 30 seconds or so the 15 second load times really got in the way.

Once Christmas is over and I have some free cash I'll definitely be picking up Burnout Paradise on the 360.

Favourite games

Today at work I was listening to the Final Fantasy VII Advent Children soundtrack. Advent Children is a CGI movie sequel to Final Fantasy VII - one of the most loved video games ever made. This got me thinking about FFVII and then about all of the other games that I have loved over the years which gave me the idea of doing a top 10. After thinking about what would make my top 10 I ended up with a mental list of about 15 or 20 and could not for the life of me decide what would make the list and what wouldn't.

So I decided it would be more fun to write a series of posts over the next few weeks in which I would name one game on the list and describe why it's there. The list will be in alphabetical order (or in no order at all) so as not to show any favouritism.

I must stress that this is just my own oppinion and I will inevitably leave off many amazing games due to me not playing them or just thinking they aren't very good. Over the years I have owned a fair few consoles and a pretty decent gaming PC so the list will cover most formats. For your information, this is what I've owned...

ZX Spectrum, NES, Master System, Mega Drive, MegaCD, 32X, SNES, Sega Saturn, N64, Playstation, Playstation 2, Game Boy, DS, PSP, Pocketstation (ahem) and XBox 360.

I have only recently acquired the XBox 360 so don't expect to see many new games on the list and I haven't really played the N64 since Jordan told me she had one a couple of years ago.

I hope you all enjoy my trip down memory lane and please give your oppinions on my choices!

Death of HD-DVD

I haven't posted for a while but I promise I have been thinking about it. I'm sure there'll be a few posts in a short space of time.

I saw this today. Apparently Toshiba have stopped production of their high definition disk format. I have always been a big supporter of Blu Ray (this may be due to my rather fan boy-ish relationship with Sony), so this news couldn't have come fast enough. I have been keeping an eye on this format war since day one and I always thought the situation was a real problem. No one had any idea which format was going to win and all that has happened is we have a few million people with a rather expensive upscaling DVD player... oh well, hopefully this will lead to the low cost brands such as Goodmans and Alba making a series of cheap (but a bit crap) players like we have seen with LCD TVs and the format can really start to displace DVD.

Now I just need to see the PS3 dropping below £200 and I'll be happy to pick up a Blu Ray player...

Illness

I'm ill for the second day today. I was good though and went to see the doctor. He thinks it's just a virus that has been going round, which is a relief as I thought my sore throat might have been the start of yet another bout of tonsillitis. I usually get tonsillitis about two of three times a year and it completely debilitates me for a week.

Other than that, on Sunday I picked up a digital camera - mainly for use on our holiday this summer. It's a Sony Cybershot DSC-W55. I haven't had a chance to really test it out as I haven't left the house much because of illness and rain. The pictures I've taken in the flat look quite nice - a lot better than the slightly under performing camera on my Sony Erikson K800i (3.2 Megapixel).

I also picked up a 4GB Memory Stick from Amazon. It was £20 new from a Marketplace seller - not a bad deal I think considering I paid £60 for a 1GB stick just over two years ago.