Nope, we’re not talking Westerns here for once. Anyone from the UK will probably be familiar with GAME and their fantastic 3 for £10 / 2 for £15 / 2 for £25 deals on PC games. Any offer that allows you to get Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon, Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2, and another title for £10 is nothing to complain about. Of course, the problem is that third title. I think it’s become something of given that you will end up with two classic games, and one that gets exiled to a shelf or drawer, and only retrieved in moments of sheer masochistic curiosity after enough time has passed that you’ve forgotten exactly why you only ever played it twice.

My latest encounter with GAME was in the hunt for another copy of Diablo II. After clearing out the games I left at my Dad’s when moving to uni, I discovered that I still owned the Lord of Destruction expansion pack, but due to a rather convoluted chain of events, the original game was nowhere to be found. Needless to say, this had to be rectified.

After hunting unsuccessfully for a second-hand copy in Cex, I resorted to picking one up in GAME. However, it happened to be in the 2 for £15 range. £10 for one game or £15 for two – tough decision. Eventually, I walked away with Diablo II and Genesis Rising.

After installing Diablo and the expansion pack on my long-suffering laptop, I remembered why I loved this game so much. By the standards of modern RPG’s it’s incredibly simple and ugly as hell (quite literally once you reach the fourth act), but there’s something intensely satisfying about watching your druid send a ball of molten magma rolling through a rank of skeletons straight out of a Harryhausen film. Rather worryingly, I was also heard to declare my love for Blizzard after I found that the latest official patch allows the game to run without any CD. In front of my girlfriend.

Today, I decided to try Genesis Rising. Where do I start? Well, the back of the case sounded interesting, and that’s about where the good points end. It’s an amazingly beautiful game – that is, for what visuals it has. Apparently the designers took space a little too literally, meaning most maps are basically empty. Then there’s the fact you have to micro-manage each ship’s weapon systems. Most weapons will not fire unless you specifically tell them to. Your ‘fleet’ is capped at about 12 ships. The universe has been pretty much directly lifted from Warhammer 40K. Then there’s the fact that in a right-click RTS interface, for some inexplicable reason, the right mouse button moves the cursor every time you click, so you have no fricken’ idea where any of your units are going to end up.

Hmm... First Journal in two months, and it turns into a game review. Oh well, I felt I had to share the pain with someone.