The Mini Rough Guide to Videogaming (Edition 2) (Miniguides S.)

INTRODUCTION

Just a decade ago, a guide to videogaming would have been inconceivable. Back then, gaming was a relatively small and exclusive club whose members were overwhelmingly male and mainly adolescent. Now, however, videogaming has emerged from the teenage bedroom to join the TV and VCR in millions of living rooms, and its audience is expanding at such a rate that the games industry is often able to present itself as a bigger economic sector than the movies. But, as you’ll know if you’ve ever set foot in a games store, buying a game isn’t at all like buying a movie, where chances are you know which actors or directors you like – you’d need to be thoroughly immersed in gaming history and culture to be able to choose a game by its designer, who generally doesn’t even get a credit on the box. What’s more, with a flurry of hyped games released on a monthly basis, if you’re a typical gamer who buys a handful of new titles each year, it’s hit and miss as to whether you’ll get value for money. While for those who are new to gaming, it can be a daunting task even to choose a console, especially since much of the specialist media restricts itself to covering a single platform, while denigrating the others.

In fact, all the games platforms – from established machines such as PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and the PC (and Mac) to newcomers Xbox and GameCube, and increasingly marginalized ones such as the Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 – are worthwhile in their own right, and they all have quality games to play on them. This is where the Rough Guide to Videogaming comes in: an informed, independent handbook, it picks out the best releases across all formats and genres, and identifies the platforms that suit your gaming tastes and budget. With the industry in constant flux, this book isn’t influenced by shortlived hype, concentrating instead on the tried and tested platforms. Each platform gets its own section starting on p.1, including a summary of its past and future. Technical jargon has been kept to a minimum, though we’ve provided a handy glossary (p.512) for useful and/or unavoidable terms.

As for the games themselves, which make up the bulk of this guide, we’re not forced – as many magazines are – to concentrate on the latest releases, good or otherwise, but take a broader outlook to bring you those that have justified their initial hype. These are organized according to genre rather than platform, so that you can easily identify other titles you might enjoy, and each is accompanied by hints, tips and addresses of useful websites. There are no bad reviews in these pages; every game we’ve included is a personal recommendation, though that’s not to say you’ll always agree with our opinions. If a game’s not here, we either didn’t rate it (for reasons of mediocrity or worse, to being too similar to other titles), or the full game wasn’t released in time for this edition. Unfinished versions, as used by many magazines for preview purposes, often mask more than they reveal about a title’s true quality: all the games we’ve tested are the products you’ll find in the shops.

Kate Berens and Geoff Howard are avid gaming enthusiasts. Products of the videogaming generation, Kate and Geoff have been glued to their screens since the age of the Atari.