The Top 5 best downloadable games on PSN and XBLA.

Ever looked at the online store of your favourite games console but not known where to start, hopefully this list of 5 games will be a good starting point for you but remember this is merely my opinion and there is an abundance of fantastic games available online nowadays.


5) Braid: Metacritic Average 93

Braid, released on Xbox Live and Playstation Network is a puzzle platformer with an emphasis on time manipulation. It takes many cues from classic platformers of old including stomping on 'enemies' like in Super Mario Bros. The game involves increasingly challenging puzzles that are solved by rewinding time to change aspects of the landscape to make things easy to reach like pullies or platforms. It is a game that should be seen to be believed and the ending twist is a real shocker.

4) Monkey Island 2 LeChucks Revenge Special Edition: Metacritic Average 87

Monkey Island follows the continuing adventures of Guybrush Threepwood and his pirate activities around the tri-island area in the carribean. This is a remake of the original LeChucks revenge released in the early 90's and features voice acting and greatly improved graphics. The point and click adventure genre may seem outdated nowadays but the humour and writing is as fresh today as it was upon its first release all those years ago and Guybrush is probably the most endearing gaming protagonist ever created.

3) Bejeweled 2 Metacritic average 74

I don't think much needs sayin about Bejeweled 2 suffice to say its Metacritic average does not reflect its popularity. Bejeweled for those who don't know is a puzzle game that involves matching 3 colours. Sound simple, well yeah thats because it is and thats ultimately its biggest charm. Bejeweled can be played by anyone, its simple intuitive fun that everyone whether hardcore gamer or casual toe dipper should have played.

2) Joe Danger: Metacritic Average 86

Joe Danger is a motorbike stunt game that is weirdly enough a cross between ExciteBike on NES and Sonic The Hedgehog. Its simple gameplay and quirky charm are what make it such a fantastic example of downloadable gaming. It controls wonderfully and is just enough of a challenge to be enjoyable without being frustrating.

1) Grand Theft Auto 4-The Ballad Of Gay Tony: Metacritic Average 89

While almost everyone enjoyed GTA 4 one of the few criticisms aimed at the game was that it lacked the fun factor of previous titles, particularly San Andreas. This was rectified in the second downloadable episode for the game 'The Ballad Of Gay Tony' which follows the story of Luiz Lopez, the right hand man of the afformentioned 'Gay Tony' the nightclub king of Liberty City, that is until debt collectors and other unsavoury characters come knocking on Tonys door. This is where Lopez comes in using ever more lavish ways to keep the wolves from the door, including invading a luxury yacht and gunning down the owners and his henchmen from a helicopter to skydiving, base jumping, car chasing and dancing (yes dancing!!!). It really is a nice change from the dark and melancholic story in GTA 4 and remains the best thing you can download from the 2 major consoles online stores.

The BEST game on every platform i've owned!! Part 3 PS3

Ok as much as I love retro gaming it is not my intention to create a retro blog therefore I am jumping forward to the current gen to give you my favourite game on Sony's PlayStation 3 console.I will be returning to the consoles of old but felt an overwhelming urge to wax lyrical about my favourite PS3 experience so far which has been with the truly epic Fallout 3 from Bethesda.

Fallout 3 is (fairly obviously) a sequel to the original two Fallout games previously released on the PC. The story starts with the birth of your character and quickly flashes forward through the more important parts of your childhood taking in first steps, your 10th birthday party and your G.O.A.T exam all of which are ways of disguising character creation and stat building. All of this is taking place in Vault 101, an underground vault built to protect american citizens in the wake of a nuclear war. The main story begins when your father escapes the vault and you leave the vault to find him and find out why, and its from the first moment you step out into the vast open wasteland of post apocalyptic Washington D.C that it hits you how bloody big this game is going to be.
I won't go into great plot details but suffice to say this game is HUGE. If you don't have much to spend on gaming and need something to sink some time into, Fallout 3 is it. The main quest is not particularly lengthy, probably around 9 hours if you were to burn straight through it. But that would defeat the point, Fallout 3 is much more than the sum of its parts, aside from the main quest there are an abundance of side quests to do that will take you all over the map. Theres also so much looting to be done and weapons to construct and locations to find that you could literally only play this game for a year and still find new things to do and see.
The original game has been extended by DLC packs that extend the life of the game even more, each adding new storylines. If you were to download any I would recommend The Pitt, Broken Steel and Point Lookout but if you don't yet own a copy of Fallout 3 I suggest picking up the game of the year edition which includes all available downloadable content on the disc.
In summary Fallout 3 is in my opinion one of if not the best game I have played this generation. It far surpasses anything i have played in previous years and is still superior (but only just) to its sequel Fallout: New Vegas. If you have a PS3 (or 360) and haven't played this yet and an RPG with almost endless questing sounds like fun, I urge you to give it a try.

The BEST game on every platform i've owned!! Part 2 Atari ST

In the grand computer war of the late 80's/early 90's there were two competitors that fought a fierce battle. Commodore with their Amiga and Atari with the ST. Now i will be the first to admit that despite owning an ST i secretly longed for an Amiga but the ST was not without its charm and was home to loads of great games a lot of which were Amiga ports and vice versa.

The game i have picked as my favourite for the ST is Carrier Command.

THRILLING yeah!!!!


For those who have not heard of this game it was a sort of flight sim crossed with a real time strategy game using 3d vector graphics to create an (at the time) realistic game world. The game started on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean and at your disposal you had aircraft (MANTA's) and seacraft (WALRUS) and the basic idea was to take over the islands in the game world although there was an action mode that took care of the island takeovers for you and let you fly into action (hence action mode!!) without worrying too much about strategy. The game was critically acclaimed, receiving 90% plus reviews and a sequel is in the works for release on ps3/360 although the website is very vague so i wouldn't hold your breath.
The main reason i have chosen this as the finest the ST had to offer is simply the time i invested in this game. It was in a way a precursor to the open world genre we all love so much now. I also used to play this as a pure flight sim pretending the aircraft were charter planes and i was taking passengers to exotic islands, albeit islands that shot charter planes down on sight (sad i know!!!). All in all Carrier Command is a fantastic example of old school gaming that pushed things forward to give us the gaming landscape we enjoy today.

The BEST game on every platform i've owned!! Part 1 ZX Spectrum +3

So i will point out before i start that this will only include platforms i have owned. There aren't many missing but full disclosure i have never owned a Sega Saturn or Dreamcast so please don't ask why i haven't included them.

Ok lets start at the beginning.

ZX Spectrum +3:
For those too young or too american to remember or know what the hell a Spectrum was, it was a home computer that ran games from a tape deck that took weeks to load and thats pretty much all you could say about them. That is until the super awesome +3 model came out boasting a 'floppy' disc drive and 128kb of RAM. As a 7 year old this basically meant nothing but numbers were impressive in the playground so it was important to know these stats to get one up on the commodore c64 kids. The games were by todays standards bad beyond belief but back then one could only dream of arcade perfect ports in the home so we made do.

The ultimate Spectrum game for me was Head Over Heels, published by Ocean Software and developed by John Ritman who also worked on Batman (not Arkham Asylum but the almost as good spectrum movie tie in from the 80's).
The game itself made almost no sense to me whatsoever as a child and probably still doesn't today but the hours i put into that game would certainly match the time put into Fallout 3 or Oblivion today. The basic premise was that the player controlled two seperate characters each with different abilities one could jump higher and one could run faster. It was viewed from an isometric perspective and was basically a puzzle solving game that involved getting from one side of the room to the other. The inclusion of a robot that looked like Prince Charles in a Dalek costume is what made this game a life long classic.

Intro to this exciting new blog!!

Thank you for stopping by and checking out my new and exciting blog about videogames (like there aren't enough of those already!!). With this blog i could make promises about how i'm going to be wildly different to every other one out there, but i don't want that to come back and bite me on the ass 2 weeks down the line so i will just say i 'hope' to be different, to offer a personal view on the wonderful world of videogames and to be interesting in a medium that can and does stagnate at the best of times.
My main focus is to offer gaming insight to people like me, that is to say people who don't have 12 hours a day to game, who have full time jobs and kids and other things that come before videogames but still hold as much reverance for them as they did when they were 10 years old. I want to reach out to you out there who doesn't just use there ps3 and 360 to pwn noobs on Call Of Duty but might express an interest in playing a game that might have been off there radar....sound like you?? then come on in, if not come in anyway your all welcome.
There will be features, and they will be whatever idea pops into my head so expect some lists a la High Fidelity with hopefully just enough personal twist to seperate them from the rest. I am fully aware a blog can live or die by its visitors so any feedback would be great and if you like please tell a friend or 10. Anyway thanks for looking.
Ben Salway 'The Casually Hardcore Gamer'