Due to a lot of nasty problems I have been without an Internet connection for two weeks. I went through a lot of cold turkey I can tell you!!! This was a disaster and so I sat down and wondered what I could do. I considered going outside but that thought was quickly dismissed. Then I thought maybe I could do more University work but again I dismissed that idea. So then I decided to bring out my old consoles and play on those instead. So out came my SNES, N64 and my PSX along with my GBA (How I ever manage to do any work is a mystery) As I played I made a few discoveries I'd like to share.

1) Nintendo is without a shadow of a doubt the best games developer bar none. I played on Mario All Stars and found myself wondering how a game so old can be so damn playable, in fact I would go as far as to say that I prefer Mario World to Mario 64.

2) I have never played Resident Evil before and since it's headed to the Cube I thought I would pick up RE2 second hand on the cheap. The truth is that after 15 minutes of getting slaughtered by the damn Zombies and not getting all that far my fist was close to going through the screen. However more extensive play revealed that it is a very enjoyable game (be it hard). I am really looking forward to finding out the whole Story. My only real complaint is that I'm not sure that they can justify releasing RE2 full price if it really is just a direct port. The Graphics are ok in a Playstation kind of way but it will really look bad on the cube especially after releasing the redone RE1.

3) I also wanted to see what all the fuss was about Metal Gear Solid and all I'm going to say about this game is that if my fist nearly went through the screen playing RE then my Playstation almost went out the window playing this. I can see why fans of this Genre might like this but I really hated it. Trust me its really no great loss not having this game. Dues Ex on the PC is far better than this.

4) Final Fantasy 6 on the SNES was really a fantastic RPG, and Chrono Trigger is perhaps my favourite game of all time. Indeed as a huge RPG fan I miss the SNES days a lot. Secret of Mana, Zelda and Mario RPG were all fantastic and Illusion of Time was not half bad either. To be fair the Playstation had a number of good RPG's and Square was quite prolific with the amount of games it made for the PSX on the old quiet. So my point I am going to make (you know I have to make it once every week) is that Nintendo need Square for the Cube.

5) The N64 was one of the best consoles to ever be released in terms of quality games.

Mario 64
Zelda OOT
Zelda MM
Banjo Ka
Banjo To
Lylat Wars
Pilot Wings
Donkey Kong 64
Paper Mario
Conker's Bad Fur Day
Golden Eye
Perfect Dark
Blast Corps
Jet Force Gemini
Diddy Kong Racing
1080
Excitebike
Mario Kart 64
WWF No Mercy

You see what I'm talking about!!

A quick look at the news around the web has shown a rather poor Xbox launch in Japan which is good but then I see that Microsoft are giving golden handshakes to Nintendo Employees which is very bad. Still at least we will get a bigger version of Luigi (They must read my column). By the way Resident Evil has got a June 1st European release date (a week after SSB:M) and Eternal Darkness is coming out in Europe before Japan.

Gary Samaden