Looking back, it’s probably because I wasn’t up to speed with the whole plot. Apart from the fact that I was controlling some fella who was in a groovy techno suit that turned him into a double hard bastard, I had no idea what was going on.

So it was of great delight to me, that EA decided to bring the first Crysis game to XBLA marketplace.

Now, I know there will be a few PC purists out there, condemning this port and claiming that it won’t stand up to the PC version, but frankly I couldn’t care less. I’m not a PC gamer – I’m not going to fork out a load of cash just so I can play a game that came out several years ago. And if I want to play games, I’ve got my trusty Xbox 360.

It is due to this PC ignorance of mine that I have no basis of comparison for Crysis and that is probably for the best. As I can just sit there and enjoy the game for what it is.

I’m not worried how it looks, plays, feels etc compared to the earlier version. I just want to sit back, immerse myself in the world and toss chickens at Korean soldiers.

As far as the plot goes, you control a soldier known simply as Nomad. Sent into North Korea to extract some hostages, it soon becomes pretty clear that there is more at work than the Koreans.

Equipped with a “nanosuit” that features all sorts of wonderful gadgets, it’s an interesting mechanic that sets the game apart from most other first person shooters.

Enabling Nomad to become invisible, super strong and fast, it offers the gamer multiple options on how they may wish to complete their missions. You can go all stealth with the cloak mode or if you wish to go in all guns ablazing, you can take everyone out with “maximum strength” – pretty handy when you’re in a tight sport and surrounded by a bunch of Korean soldiers armed with shotguns.

Aside from the various functions of the nanosuit, you will find yourself equipped with a variety of weapons – all of which are very satisfying to use and each one complimenting the style of gameplay you may wish to adopt.

For a game that is four years old, it still looks quite remarkable. There are a few signs that highlight the games age (or if you’re a PC purist, the weaknesses of the Xbox 360). The odd bit of tearing and a few bugs, but generally the visuals are pretty solid.

The audio also adds an extra dimension to the game, with the unique sounds of the Nanosuit adding a certain sci-fi charm to the world. You can never hear the robotic words of “maximum strength on” enough in my opinion.

Sadly, the game does have a few short comings – namely the lack of multiplayer. But for £15.00, this isn’t really something to be grumbled at. The campaign itself offers enough gameplay to keep the average player entertained for quite a while and at that price, I’d sincerely recommend it.

All in all, Crysis still is an amazing game and as far as I’m concerned, this port stands up well against Crysis 2.

Maximum gameplay on.

Verdict: 9 out of 10

The good
Visually strong
Good price
Flows nicely

The bad
No multiplayer

Even though I’m a Deus Ex fanboy, even after I turned off that part of my brain and saw Deus Ex: Human Revolution as just a game – not the long-awaited sequel to my favourite game of all time – it still deserves this really, really high score.

This game is brilliant. It’s 20 hours of well-scripted, intense play, shot through with plenty of open-world gameplay, little nods to the fanbase and a wonderful re-playbility that made me want to restart the game as soon as I finished it.

It’s everything a sequel to Deus Ex should be.

Let’s start with the story: set in 2027, 25 years before the original Deus Ex, Human Revolution charts the globetrotting adventures of Adam Jenson, a security chief for a major corporation. It is a world filled with chaos and corruption as humanity stands on the fulcrum of evolution, and it’s all thanks to one thing – augmentation.

By replacing parts of your body, through injury or choice, a new genus of humans are emerging – augmented men and women who can jump higher, see further (and sometimes produce a chaingun from their arm).

With the world in a state of flux, and corporations and individuals alike seeking to exploit the brewing chaos, the player finds himself unceremoniously shoved into the midst of the action, chasing down leads from Canada to China to America, hunting in the shadows for the group who (early on) take away everything that matters to you in one fell swoop.

Finding himself augmented by fate, instead of choice, Adam has to hunt through the dark spaces of the world to discover the truth behind the chaos – and it’s up to the player as to how you do it.

While Adam has a whole suite of augmentations built into his cyborg body, the early game finds the player facing a wide choice as to how you customise the unlucky agent.

Do you give him the ability to fall from any height and not get hurt? Do you install dermal armour so you can take fire better? Do you implant a social analysing system in your eyes, allowing you to influence conversations your way? The choice is yours.

Upgrading Adam to your heart’s content is no easy thing. ‘Praxis’ points are unlocked through exploration, finishing objectives, moving the story forwards or kills – or you can buy them (at a very hefty 5,000 credits a chip). You quickly find yourself being forced to seriously consider how you use your points.

Naturally, me being the stealthy, silenced pistol-type player, I chose the stealth enhancement pack, and the ‘glass shield’ cloaking system –heavy on the batteries, but ideal for staying unnoticed.

Deciding how to tackle what’s put in front of you is the core aspect of HR, and every objective you’re tasked with can be solved in any number of ways.

Take, for example, getting into a nightclub on the Chinese island of Hengsha – a city built on top of a city.

You could chat up the bouncer and buy your way in, shoot the bouncer and blast your way in, distract the bouncer by causing an explosion nearby and sidle in – or , as I did, overhear a conversation about a guy who found an air vent round the back that leads to the gent’s loos.

It all depends on your style of play. I favoured the softly-softly approach, non-lethally incapacitating enemies for an XP boost, hacking doors and security cameras, turning roving robots and fixed turrets against the enemy and generally vanishing at the first sign of a fight.

Of course, if cornered, the weapon upgrade system would allow me to turn a revolver into an armour-piercing, explosive handcannon of death – provided I’d found or bought the weapon add-ons.

This freedom is exactly what Deus Ex is all about, and it is plain to see that the developers’ focus on the core tenets of gameplay – social, combat, hacking and stealth – allow for any number of approaches to a given situation.

The environments the game takes you to – ranging from the dirty streets of Detroit to the sterile laboratories of big corporations – allow this freedom a focus that keep you playing, and rewards exploration. Hacking computers and doors, reading stolen emails and books, rifling through filing cabinets – it all turns up loot – as well as adding more and more insight into the world of HR, and the men and women behind the events of the game.

While the story, which is brilliantly written – and wonderfully morally grey – can be followed by someone out to just shoot things, reading the information lying around, watching the Picus newsfeed and listening to conversations helps to flesh out the experience, and makes it all the more intense at the finale.

While some Deus Ex purists were annoyed by HR’s addition of a cover system – similar to Gears of War – and a regenerative health system (which you will need… trust me), I found them to be a worthy addition to the game, making combat all the more fun, as you roll from cover to cover, blind-firing and ducking bullets.

Though the gunplay is pretty solid, the close combat is a little bit of a bugbear. Unlike the previous game, taking down an opponent is less about hitting them on the back of the neck with a club, and all about the animation.

Every time you take someone out close up – be it lethally, with the blades built into Adam’s arms, or non-lethally – the game plays an animation. Granted, these are cool, but the fact that this is the only way to take someone out hand-to-hand – and that it takes one of your batteries to do it – got on my wick somewhat, especially as only one of the batteries ever recharges all the way – the rest you need to top up with special energy bars, which are often few and far between.

While this forces you to play conservatively, using your head rather than your fists, it does annoy you somewhat – especially given how eagle-eyed and clever the bad guys are this time around.

Aside from this minor bugbear, the game’s presentation is excellent. Set in a post-modern, renaissance world of big coats and long dresses, the game is shot in a film-noir style, but with a yellow/orange tint to the environments, giving everything a slightly washed-out hue.

While not as sharp as some of the new-release games out there, HR more than manages to present its world in clear, exciting designs.

The score is also excellent, mixing orchestral strings with techno beats perfectly, and underscores the dramatic moments with the kind of music that sticks in your mind for days afterwards.

In a word, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is excellent, and I mean really excellent. Despite the couple of minor bugbears that niggled me somewhat, I found this long-awaited prequel to be a fantastic return to the tortured world of Deus Ex’s murky shenanigans, as well as a damn good game in its own right. From the start, the game immerses you in the gritty action and endless grey morals of a world on the fulcrum of change, and tasks the player with figuring out what’s right, and what’s wrong. In the words of Adam Jensen: “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”

Score: 9/10

Good Stuff:
Excellent plot, 20+ hours of play
Brilliantly realised moral and multiple-choice career path
Plenty to see and do, loads of side missions

Not so good stuff:
Animations for close combat get old
Long load times

Like many others out there, I’m quite fond of digging out an old classic to see how it has aged.  I was over the moon when Lucasarts announced that they were re-releasing The Secret of Monkey Island and despite Dragons Lair being a game that is pretty much one long quick time event, I have bought the game on several formats over the past few years.

It’s important to remember games from your childhood, in the same way it is important to listen to some classic songs you liked as a teenager. Hearing those songs can take you back to how you felt when you first heard them.

And in the same way, playing Another World on the iPad I was instantly transported back 1991 as it brought back memories of when I first played the game on my old Atari ST.

Taking control Professor Lester Knight Chaykin, the stories protagonist who does an experiment and finds himself transported to a strange and hazardous world, the game is essentially a platform action adventure.

At the time, the graphics and cinematic animation during the cutscenes were somewhat innovative and the game was seen as a benchmark both in terms of gameplay and visual presentation.

In this day and age, the game looks somewhat quaint.  However, bizarrely the minimalistic approach of the game means it has actually dated quite well and it retains a surprising amount of charm.

Needless to say, the touch screen controls don’t do the original game justice.  However, with a bit of perseverance you can slowly get the hang of it.

Overall, I’d recommend this to any retroheads out there who are looking for a slice of gaming history.  First timers might find themselves a little lost on first impressions, but this faithful adaptation should do fans of the original proud.

Verdict: 7 out of 10

This sentence greets you every time you turn on Infamous 2, counting down to the time when your hero, ‘electric man’ Cole McGrath, needs to face and defeat the monster he is fated to tackle.

“Not difficult”, you may think, at first – Cole is still the badass superhero of the first Infamous, and powered up to the hilt.

That is until the Beast arrives early, destroys Empire City (which gamers fought so hard to defend in the first game), strips Cole of the majority of his powers and sends him crawling to southern coastal city New Marais, to rebuild his strength, discover new powers and generally do good (or evil, if you’re so inclined.)

Likes its predecessor, Infamous 2 is a sandbox-style adventure game with some brilliant combat, ramped-up powers, comic book-style cutscenes and endless fun. In this aspect then, it would be fair to say that the game doesn’t really mess with the formula set down by Infamous, correct?

Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean the game is at all ‘bad’. Not by a long shot.

Like the first game, the majority of Infamous 2 features Cole free-running, power-line riding and electrifying his way around New Marais, which is modelled on New Orleans, complete with flooded, run-down, abandoned city blocks (bit close to the bone there, guys!), and an interesting selection of red-neck militia types who hate anyone who doesn’t conform.

Before long all hell breaks loose, and Cole finds himself fending off the militia, monsters of varying sizes – from exploding zombies to huge, eight-legged horrors – and the occasional supersoldier.

Unfortunately, however, there is very little explanation of where the monsters came from, once they break into the game, making Cole and co look a bit silly as the city disintegrates around them.

(Honestly! Right after fending off a pack of slavering monsters, Cole has an introspective moment about one of the women in his life – and doesn’t think “where the bloody hell did they come from?!” It’s weird.)

From then on, the game pretty much follows the formula set down by the previous game.

An interesting variety of missions await you, be it demolishing a house full of bad guys, racing from transformer to transformer to down a comms network, or throwing supplies off an offshore barge.

Add to this the exploration aspect, as you crawl over the city looking for blast shards to boost your battery-like body, and a selection of new powers to unlock and level up, and there’s plenty to enjoy about Infamous 2, even if it is mostly combat-oriented.

Thankfully, then, it’s a good thing that the combat is still great fun, allowing you to zip around, hurling lightning from your fingertips, summoning ionic storms of blistering energy, picking up and throwing cars across the street and generally floating around like some kind of crazed messiah on thrusters of energy.

Added to this is an enhanced close combat system, using a massive tuning fork called the ‘Amp’ as its weapon. Using this two-pronged death-dealing nightmare, Cole can smack ten bells out of anything that comes near to him, finishing off with a few cool finishers to boot.

All the powers can be upgraded through usage and completing certain activities and before long, your powers are varied and great fun to use, and skating along on a power cable while hurling exploding lightning grenades becomes second nature.

That said, Cole is not immortal, and the monsters and militia alike can bring him to a sticky end, fast – rocket launchers are especially guilty of this.

This difficulty, while often irritating (militia rocket troopers will happily shoot when you’re a metre away…) makes you use your powers wisely, and is all the more fulfilling for it.

Being close to death exposes another fantastic addition to Infamous 2 – a clever, creepy score.

While your screen greys out, the discordant hum of off-key violins pulls on your guts, making you want to run for the nearest health-restoring lamp post.

Aside from this, the game’s score includes a wide selection of banjo-strumming beats when you’re out in the bijou, saxophone solos as you clamber up a skyscraper and a decent selection of soulful rock as you dispatch your enemies (or innocents).

The game’s moral system also makes a return this time around, but seems far more polarised. The endless grey of Infamous’ world has been shunned in favour of clear ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ choices, and it’s pretty obvious which is which.

While this comes in useful if you’re trying to unlock some of the dark-side powers, for example, it makes the moral choices that little bit more laughable.

Graphically, Infamous 2 looks great. New Marais is a fantastically varied city to explore, ranging from red-light districts (with cheeky nods to other games: ‘Coming soon: ‘Assassin’s Need’’) to the bijou, packed city streets, run-down tenement blocks, and acres of slums.

The animation is smooth, for the most part, and the enemy AI is as good as you’d expect (the swamp monsters just charge you, for example), though the camera does have a habit of fritzing out now and then – when you use one of the fancy melee finishers, it will often zip around to give you the best angle on the action – and ruin your grasp on the battle at the same time. It’s a double-edged sword.

Cole is also a bit of a spider-monkey, and will often grab onto the nearest climbable object, no matter if you were aiming for something else entirely. This is only a minor irritation, and it doesn’t take long to get used to his style of movement.

Overall, Infamous 2 is not particularly trend-setting. Building on its predecessor, the title delivers another slice of superhero action, with some fantastic set-piece battles, a suite of cool powers and a decent plot to tie it all together. Though it doesn’t add a lot to the series, if you enjoyed the first game you’re bound to enjoy the second, and if you’re new to the series, come play one of the best superpower sims around.

Score: 8/10

Good Stuff:
Great gameplay
Varied selection of powers
Comic book stylings are always cool in cutscenes

Not so good stuff:
Occasionally naff camera
Plotholes are an irritation
More of the same action
Cole’s voice actor has changed