Michel Ancel (the creator of Rayman) and his team produced a video gaming classic in 2003 with Ubisoft‘s Beyond Good & Evil.
It is a pseudo sci-fi fantasy, third-person action/adventure where you control a young woman called Jade, with a pig sidekick called Pey’j, and who is battling against the sinister “DomZ”.
Grandia was initially released in 1997 on the Sega Saturn in Japan, and then later in 1999 on the Sony PlayStation.
Only the later PlayStation version received an official English translation (although the Sega Saturn version does have a fan translation, using the same text as the PlayStation version, but was not available in English until the patch was released in March 2019).
A strange game, and Ubisoft‘s first ever video game release; the Amstrad original coming out in 1986 and this conversion in 1990.
Zombi is a clear appropriation [ie. lift] of George A. Romero‘s classic 1979 zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, although I don’t think Ubisoft actually bought an official license for it. They just changed all the names of the characters…
Far Cry 2 first came out in 2008 and is a first-person shoot ’em up set in a war-torn, fictitious African country. It was developed by Ubisoft Montreal.
The game mixes open world exploration with brutal violence, best-in-class combat, and also showcases many exciting action game concepts – such as great vehicle use and a large arsenal of weapons to choose from.
Developed by High Moon Studios, Darkwatch is a First-Person Shooter/survival horror game that crosses the American “Wild West” with ghosts, zombies and werewolves and that kind of material.
When it was first released, back in 2005, is was quite impressive for the time. In this day and age Darkwatch looks and plays very simply, but is not entirely without its redeeming features.
I’ve chosen Rayman on the Atari Jaguar to show first because it was the very first version of Rayman ever released, on any video game system. And it was seen as something of a ‘killer app’ on the Jaguar.
Far Cry is one of the greatest first-person shooters ever made. Sure: it looks a little simplistic now, but at the time of release (2004) it was a revelation.
