I'm not sure it's fair to bundle these genres together like this, but it would have been a very short section otherwise.

Jens' favoruite Sports, Racing, Fighting & Puzzle games of all time

• Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge (Amiga) - The sequel may have been the one that became famous, but this is the first car-game I got hooked on (and the sequel was too forgiving for my taste). I fought long and hard to beat the game but I never managed to win the final race, no matter how close I got (but one day I will).
  
• Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (Amiga) - Another title that was perfectly balanced for my taste and I still remember the sense of accomplishment when I beat the game at its hardest mode. An Xbox Live Arcade version was recently released, but seems to have received a cold reception.
  

Runner-ups

• Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (PS2) - A close to perfect game, but I'll never forgive how it made the challenges more and more boring until it was too much work to enjoy it.
  
• Pinball Dreams (Amiga) - The legendary first game by swedish Digital Illusions/DICE. It may have made me skip school, but it also inspired me to become a games-developer.
  
• Tekken 3 (PS) - Probably my first true Playstation experience, and the adrenaline kick it gave me every lunch-break for a year is a found memory.
  
• SSX 3 (Xbox) - While the original SSX was probably the most memorial experience, the technical excellence of SSX 3 made me choose that one and also put it high up on my list of perfect games.
  
• The Incredible Machine (PC) - It was a fight against time trying to complete each level at my school's computer-room. The prize of winning was to walk over to my friend and mock his progress until he also completed it and the race could start again.
  
• Lemmings (Amiga) - Another close to perfect game that became an instant classic with a type of game-play you had never seen before.
  
• Tetris (PC and other) - While I never considered this to be an exceptional game, I've spent far too much time on this not to include it in this list.
  

I think it was because I had very few geeky friends while growing up that I never got into the whole pen-and-paper RPG thing. Instead, I marveled at the worlds created inside the computer. Even today, one of the things I look forward to most with games is exploring a new character-development system in a strange new world, hoping that I won't see the limits to it anytime soon (most recently expreienced in Oblivion). Again, it's very hard to classify games in this genre, mostly because almost all games I like contains RPG elements (whatever that may be), but here goes:

Role playing games
Fallout 1 & 2 (PC)
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA)
Pool of Radiance (C64)
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (C64)

Runner-ups
Deus Ex (PC)
Diablo (PC)
Ultima V (Amiga)
Ultima VII (PC)
Planescape Torment (PC)
Pokémon Gold (GBA)

As you might have figured out from part 1, this list covers the games that made the most impact on me, and therefore it's almost only older games here. I'm one of those people that believe that the games today are better and smarter in almost every apsect, but that doesn't mean that they will move you in the same way they did when you were new to games. One of the genres that have had a hard time the last couple of years is adventure games, so I've been a bit generous and included some modern games that pehaps should have been categorized as action games.

Jens' favourite adventure games of all time
Out of this world/Another World (Amiga)
Day of the Tentacle (PC)
ICO (PS2)
Dune (Amiga)
The Secret of Monkey Island (Amiga)

Runner-ups
Grim Fandango (PC)
Infocom text-adventures (Amiga)
It Came from the Desert (Amiga)
Knight Orc (C64)
Loom (Amiga)
Maniac Mansion (Amiga)
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
Riven (PC)

Each year around this time we start to see all these lists of best this and that. In that spirit I'm going to publish my own list. Having played more games than most, I recently compiled a list of my favourite games of all times. This list ended up having about 20 favourite games (with even more runner-ups) that I didn't want to grade further. Separated into multiple genres, I will post that list during the next few days. But as they say in Las Vegas: A little less conversation, a little more action, please.

Jens' favourite action games of all time

• Bubble Bobble (C64) - A true classic that needs little further presentation. A cooperative platform-game that begs replaying. It's still one of the few games that I would call perfect and without flaws. Nintendo created a few sequels and spin-offs, but they may have changed too much and never recaptured the original. Recent updates are Bubble Bobble Revolution for the DS and Bubble Bobble Evolution for the PSP, both receiving disasterous reviews (< 50%).
  
• Paradroid (C64) - To be able to take over every enemy in the game still makes this top-down shooter very unique. This simple game-mechanics is very underused with only a few games like Messiash trying to further build on it. The robot and space-ship setting used in Paradroid with the simplistic graphics makes this game a very special memory (so much that I wrote up a game-concept of the game called Paradroid World, hoping to aquire the license but never got a response of the current holders). Remakes of the game exist in the form of SDL Paradroid and FreeDroid.
  
• Syndicate (Amiga) - The violence and drugs theme that you see in a lot of games noadays may owe some credit to this game. Game-mechanics-wise it took the best from god-sims and blended that with strategic and role-playing-elements. Sadly, trying the game today may be a challenge because of it's cumbersome interface and graphics.
  
• Turrican II: The Final Fight (Amiga) - It's possible that this game destroyed any chance of me getting excited about a platform action game again. It was easily the most beautiful game of it's time and with music to match. I later heard that Chris Hülsbeck who created the music wrote also wrote the music-player that utilized 5 channels, a noteworthy feat on the 4-hardware channel Amiga and therefore made it into My Idols list. I recently threw away all my Amiga discs (most of them had been corrupted) and the Turrican II discs were the only ones I kept.
  

Runner ups

• Cannon Fodder (Amiga)
  
• Elite (C64)
  
• Escape from Colditz (Amiga)
  
• Frontier (Amiga)
  
• Grand Theft Auto 3 - San Andreas (PS2)
  
• Metroid Prime (GameCube)
  
• Prince of Persia (C64)
  
• Resident Evil 4 (GameCube)
  
• Wizball (C64)
  

One of the hardest things to create in games is the interactive stories. It's probably because that's something that is very new for us. Before computers, to only stories you could call interactive or branching were the role-playing game-books such as Lone Wolf (which I remember foundly from my childhood). And even those stories are not much older than half a century. Even so, I wish interactive storytelling had evolved as so many other areas related to computers and computer games like graphics technology and AI has.

There are some interesting things going on the subject, though. From the time back when Infocom introduced Zork to the world people have continued the fine tradition of interactive fiction. Every year people try to outperform each other in the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition by creating a short text-adventures where telling a compelling story in an interactive format is key. It's well worth to check out.

The game-industry in it-self hasn't produced that much new the last couple of years. One of the more interesting was of course Indigo Prophecy which as one of the best attempts of a true adventure-game in a long time. Still, there wasn't that much innovation in terms of story-telling and the same must go for the game I myself worked on, The Darkness, where the steps on interactive story-telling we did take are evolutionary and where the story should be immersive rather than have true choices.

One of the bigger problems in my opinion is the lack of techniques that can be used to talk to non-player characters. Having dialogues as catalysts for story-telling is crucial for most movies and books, but they are so very hard to do believable in an interactive media. Very few games today offer anything more interesting other than multiple dialogue-choices, substituting any real interactivity with a set of predefined questions. To me, that's a step backward from back even from 1966 when ELIZA was created. An exception is of course Façade, an experimental game where you converse with an arguing couple. It combines an advanced AI with a text-input system and it's an noteworthy accomplishment, but still failes to convince in my opinion.

For some time I've been experimenting with a new way to have conversations with non-player characters. The idea is to allow the player to pick up and carry conversation-topics between characters in the game. If a non-player character mentions something new, the player can pickup that topic and carry it to another character to ask him about it. By limiting the number of topics the player can carry, you force the player to decide which topics are worth keeping, instead of just asking about everything as you do in many games. This creates some interesting possibilities where information almost becomes an item that can be used for puzzles and trade.

While it's not as ambitions a system as to one used in Façade it's instead very simple and user-friendly (once you get the hang of it). It doesn't hide that it's a restricted system but I believe that that isn't necessary to make dialogues an interesting catalysts for interactive storytelling. I've released the prototype I made using this system for PC and today I also finished the PSP version of the game. Check it out here.

Having a great idea for a game is valuable. That goes without saying, but exactly how valuable is such an idea? I've become rather cynical on the subject after working a while in the games-industry. If 50 people work on one game for over two years, how many good ideas are thought up? And how many of those are needed for the next game? Even if you don't have a team of 50 people or don't plan to work on one project for that long, there is a good chance that you'll come up with a bunch of ideas that could become great games; Ideas that never will be realized.

Cosmonaut is such an idea. I came up with it one sleepless night thinking about how I would like to be able to watch the stars from my bed. I realized that it would never be a good fit for Starbreeze, the game-developer I work for. Nor would it be something I could realize myself, since it was too content-intensive. Still, I found the thought fascinating and couldn't get it out of my mind. There was something special about the lonely cosmonaut staring out of the window in his stranded shuttle and I had to at least make something out of it. The solution was to write a brief high concept about it. It's not very likely that I will ever make this game, but I can always look at the sky at night and dream.

You can find the high concept at www.collectingsmiles.com/cosmonaut

The Swedish game-magazine Level had a nice article about the relationship between art and games in their July 2007 issue. This article contained an interview with me about the game Rorschach, where I collaborated with Ida Rödén to make a small art-game. This game has been shown in a number of more "traditional" art-forums, for example at Umeå Konsthögskola and the M.A.D.E. festival. Art and games has always had a slightly weird relasionship and as usual opinions drift apart. Personally, I see interactivity as the key word and Rorschach tries to explore the interactivity for conversations; something that games in general have been pretty unsuccessful in.

Rorschach is now available for download and can be found at http://www.collectingsmiles.com/rorschach

I just saw the first batch of reviews on Halo 3. That's amazing. I never though they would score that great. On top of that Bioshock turned out to be incredibly as well. It's a good time to be a gamer. While waiting to get my hands on Halo, I wanted to talk a bit about a game that's close to my heart:

Pokémon. Yes, you heard me right, the Gotta catch'em all one. Every time I talk to someone about this game I get the same thing.
- Pokémon? Are you serious? Isn't that a children's game?
Well, maybe, but it's still one of the finest RPG ever created. Not many people around me have tried this game but the few I've managed to convince to try it out have never been disappointed, so I don't think I'm wrong here. So why is it that so few people try it out? Well, I shouldn't really say few people, with 10 million or so children (or Japanese people) get their regular fix with this game. But why so few adult gamers? Pokémon always score well on reviews with the latest one scoring 85%. This score should at least get people curious to try it out, but still I don't see it. It's definitely not a problem with marketing, since I don't know of anyone who doesn't know what Pokémon is. Still, no luck. So, what is it? Are we really so uptight and rigid that we don't give something great a chance just because it's a bit childish? Or am I just missing something?

I managed to get hold of a game for the DS called Etrian Odyssey that I feel the need to rave a little about. I'm still not really sure that it's a good game, but if you are like me and have grown up with computer role-playing games this game will definitely do the trick for you.

This game is mean in so many ways. It's has a narcissistic save-system. It's extremely hard and unforgiving. Early choices you do in the game have a huge effect on your chance of survival later on. Of course there is a kicker in there as well; you have to draw your own maps. Remember the last time you had to do that? I must have been 10-15 years ago. Ah, I had books and books of that sweet checkered paper. Well, of course the NDS helps you with the map-drawing things, and you do that on the lower screen, but it still captures that nostalgic feeling of exploration that is so hard to find in modern games. I also love seeing new creative ways (with a focus on creativity) to use the touch-screen.

If you never played those games back in the days. You probably should stay away from this game. But if you did, there is a good chance you'll get hooked. I was.

Oh sweet mud. I had the pleasure of attending the Roskilde Festival and watch a few bands like BJÖRK-INFLAMES-ROKYERICKSON-BEASTIEBOYS-DIZZEERAS
CAL-CSS-QUEENSOFTHESTONEAGE-MUSTASCH-BONDEDEROLE-
FLAMINGLIPS-CULTOFLUNA.

But since this is a gaming-blog I will not bore you with that. Instead I'd like smoothly move the topic over to licensed music in games. In The Darkness we did a pretty cool thing. We crammed the disc full with video content that ran on the in-game TVs that were scattered all over the game. We had a couple of different channels with movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and a bunch of episodes of Flash Gordon. These were all public domain, so we could basically do what we wanted with them, but one of the channels in the game was reserved for modern Swedish metal-music. I think we have about 26 music videos in there performed by small Swedish metal bands like Closer, Defleshed, El Caco, F.K.Ü, Acid House Kings, man.machine.industry etc. It was a great way for us to get some extra spice into the game as well as for the artists to promote their music. Then, we ran into the legal nightmare. Most of these artists the were interested in having their songs in the game where registered with STIM as well as some other organization which I don't remember the name of. Because of that, we couldn't just have the artists' permission to put the songs in the game, but STIM demanded huge amounts of money of us to have them in there. This is perhaps understandable since they are there to make sure the artists don't get screwed and they tried to apply their standing rules probably created for TV and movies but they had little interest to work around them. Still, after some dreadful legal mumbo-jumbo and some tremendous work by our super-hero lawyer, they finally got the picture and everyone was happy.

This made me realize how young the games industry is in many ways. We want to grow up and be able to use all the resources all other media use, but the structure just isn't there yet. We also tried to have a famous song running during the end credits but the number we were given to just use the lyrics where ridiculous, probably because they used the same payment scheme as the end-credits of a Hollywood movie. We found a good alternative to that as well, but it can be extremely hard run your head into the wall like that over and over again and I hope that this is something that will become easier as the industry grow even bigger.