The games industry has seen its fair share of the unusual. Today’s market is a relatively homogenised one, with the FPS military shooter ruling the roost, but still there are titles that slip through the net and break the mould, giving us something we haven’t seen before; games such as Mirror’s Edge.

During my last article on the rise of the humble demo in the gaming world, I happened across a memory of a game that not many have played, and even less have heard of. A game that is so rare, and has such a cult following, that original copies of it sell for around £60 or more on eBay. This title is of course, the incredible Tombi!, which is known as Tomba! in the US and Me! Tomba in Japan (in possibly one of the most unnecessary renaming during localisation I have seen).

You probably haven’t heard of Opoona, a very Japanese RPG released exclusively for the Wii. There is a very good reason for this. The brains behind this game decided that it would be a good idea to release this engrossing adventure on the same day as Super Mario Galaxy, possibly the most highly anticipated Wii game ever. Consequently, Opoona was plunged into darkness, and sat sulkily in the shadow of the pudgy plumber’s galactic adventure.

With the recent news that Sony has ceased production of the PlayStation 2 worldwide, the death knell has been sounded for this most successful of consoles. Many of today’s gamers started out with the PS2 as their first console, but whether it was your first experience of console gaming or just one step in your journey, the PS2 was unquestionably great. Over 10,000 titles were released for the PS2 worldwide, but with production now ceased, there’s a real danger of this back catalogue of games being completely lost to time. While the PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 games, only the first run of 60GB PlayStation 3 consoles in the UK are backwards compatible with PS2 games. What this means is, unless you have a PS2 or a rare PS3, you’d better snap up one of the last few PS2 consoles available if you want to play some of the best games of the last decade.

I can’t help but find it strange sometimes that certain franchises excel in their genre and others fall by the wayside. One of my favourite cases in question is Resident Evil and the survival horror genre. Capcom’s first instalment of the great franchise we know and love was everything that a good horror game should be. It was gory, tense and full of moments to make your heart jump into your throat. Albeit the first title hasn’t aged very well graphically (although it has received an incredible remake since it’s initial release), but it still stands as a benchmark of it’s genre.