Squirrels.

(To this day I think Secret of Mana is the best JRPG, and one of the best games EVAR).

I'd have to agree; Secret of Mana was great. On the other hand I'm biased, since that game was directly responsible for me meeting my fiancee. SoM's sequel was also great (and beautiful); shame about the rapid downward trend of the rest of the Mana series.

I never got round to playing Demon's Souls - despite it sounding precisely like my cup of tea - so the fact it's got a sequel (and better, that it's coming out in Europe within a sensible timeframe) is great. Consider me sold, and then shortly afterward, dead.

I can't remember the last genuinely funny game I played - outside of most of Double Fine's catalogue, at least - but the most genuine mirth has resulted from long train journeys and multiplayer DS New Super Mario Bros with my fiancee.

Laughter. Giggling. Cursing. Irritating the hell out of our fellow passengers, no doubt. Most people seem to have overlooked this mode, but it's well worth a play, particularly since it's single-cart play.

I'm genuinely interested in Guild Wars 2. Might be a side-effect of not playing an MMO since Ultima Online, but what the devs have been saying about it makes it sound like it resolves some of the problems I've had with recent MMOs.

Of course, they could be lying, just excellent marketers or insanely ambitious without the skills to follow through, but I live in hope!

Hi everyone,

I'm Rob, an Englishman living in Wales. I'm a writer, database programmer and one half of the Generation Minus One webcomic. I've been meaning to join the TIG forums for ages, but never got round to it until this weekend, when my fiancee downloaded Game Maker and handed me her laptop for the weekend (I do more than enough coding at a desk during the week).

Two days of fiddling with sprites and mysterious error messages later, I think I might just stick with it and see what I can come up with

For my gaming history, my parents had an Amstrad CPC 464 when I was two, and apparently I started playing games pretty early. I loved that machine, and spent many hours painstakingly copying pokes and BASIC code from magazines (the idea of magazines giving six-eight pages to lines of code seems very odd indeed these days), then usually fiddling around with the programs to see what I could do with them. Everyone I knew was convinced I'd be a programmer when I grew up.

By my teens, I'd given up. After a couple of abortive attempts at making The Greatest Game Ever(TM), I decided programming wasn't for me, and instead I was going to be a marine biologist. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. Which is why I'm now gainfully employed as a programmer with a marine biology degree, living with my american gamer fiancee, making webcomics and writing novels about a homicidal french chef in my spare time.

I've got a pretty eclectic taste in games. Favourites would probably have to include Shadow of the Colossus, Metroid Prime, Secret of Mana, Gitaroo Man, Okami, but I also have a special place in my heart for certain games with unusual mechanics: Way of the Samurai's swordfighting, Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter's impending doom clock ticking away whenever you use an ability. Recently I've been playing more Minecraft and Desktop Dungeons than is healthy, along with ilomilo, Mass Effect 2 and Metroid Prime 3 (which, i should add, I genuinely dislike; it misses the point on so many levels).

Hope to see you all arond the boards!

Rob