Mr Biffo

This month our columnist is championing games he loved that everyone else seems to have forgotten about

If you try to picture the history of videogames as a big, physical, pile, at the top you’ve got Tetris, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto V, a bit below those are your Tomb Raider titles, your Mario games, Pokemon, Skyrim, the Call Of Duty series… then all the way near the bottom there’s a whole foundation of other games, buried and unloved.

Just as there are some a bit further up (I’m looking at you, Rise Of The Robots) which don’t deserve their place, there are many games, right at the bottom of the sales pile and hidden in the shadows, which really did deserve better.

I’ve been having a bit of a trawl through those shadows recently, looking up old games that I’ve forgotten I’d forgotten. Most of the time these games didn’t sell too well, but they weren’t quite bad enough to be remembered as terrible games either. We’ve all heard of the Atari 2600 version of ET, but what of the games which are neither here nor there? Well, more often than not they’ve been overshadowed by bigger, noisier, releases.

I’m not even talking about well-regarded, but low-selling games (though invariably, many of them were poor-sellers), but ones which were dismissed with a shrug by most reviewers, and consigned to the bottom drawer of gaming’s memory banks.

I mean, let’s take Time Commando as an example. Time what?! Yeah, Time Commando. It was a PC and Playstation title, published in Europe by Electronic Arts, developed by Adeline – the studio behind the similarly forgotten Little Big Adventure. Still not ringing any bells? It had a great little plot – your character ended up trapped in VR combat simulations drawn from different eras of history – and, for the time, some remarkable prerendered backdrops. Yeah, it was clunky as heck, but it was interesting, it was trying to do something different (perhaps too different), and yet all those ideas, all that effort, has been forgotten.

What about Urban Chaos – another game I loved, way ahead of its time, beating GTA to the punch by being set in a massive, free-roaming, 3D city? A dev team would’ve slaved over it for months, possibly years, but whoever mentions it now? It was considered fine… but nothing special. And yet, I had some great experiences with it.

More recently, what about Epic Mickey? It was a major release on the Wii, didn’t really sell great (though just about well enough to generate a sequel), but you rarely hear it mentioned as one of the best games for that system. Alright, it might not have been – but it was packed with great ideas, and deserving of a better fate than for history to simply ignore it.

I find it sad when you consider that there’s not a videogames developer in the world who wants their games to slip through the gaps of everyone’s recollection. So I say this; go for a good old trawl through your own memories. Pick out one unloved game today and tell everyone you know about it. It’s long overdue that mediocrity had its moment in the spotlight.

Yeah, Time Commando was clunky as heck, but it was interesting