And note that Vampire: Bloodlines is now, with a little luck, a bug-free heavenly romp through the most emotionally engaging and best-written RPG I’ve ever played. It’s not quite Fallout overall, but when you first see true fear on a character’s face as they plead with you for mercy, you might remember the Talking Heads, and realise with renewed clarity that the same people made this. Fallout crossed with Deus Ex, with Vampires. In Los Angeles. In First Person.

If you want an RPG.. Get this =)

And smack Red Faction: Guerilla on that list for 2009 – Bizarrely poorly received, for a game with a ground-breaking (except that’s the only thing that doesn’t break) destructive physics, a variety and precision of AI I can compare to Halo and nothing else, fantastically entertaining sandbox gameplay and an original sense of vulnerability; You are one man, with perhaps a few armed civilians hiding behind a truck giving you cover fire – and you’re trying to liberate a planet from a corporate-government professional army. Speed, surprise, strategy and sheer explosive force are the only way to do this on the ‘real’ difficulty modes.

And if you get it on the PC and can deal with the horrendous GFWL and some graphical/audio bugs (most of which can be dealt with), you’ll have my realism/high difficulty mod waiting for you, to make the game as cruel as it should have been. If it hadn’t been necessary for it to be remotely playable for the average Xbox gamer.

I totally agree with the games on the list that I’ve played. Gitaroo man was excellent and definetly deserves more praise, I totally regret selling my copy. F-Zero GX was ridiculously hard but ridiculously fun and I’m glad I still have a copy. Excite Truck and The Club were also very fun games.

To be fair, after 5 years of the Unofficial Patch (now up to version 6.7), most of the bugs have been ironed out. The game still decends into unsatisfactory fighting by the end, but it’s still probably the best FPS RPG I’ve played.

P.