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Back in March it was announced that Ninja Theory had been dropped by Sony (or vice versa) after the £25mil game failed to “wow” cretinous PS3 owners and sales of the game failed to “wow” Sony shareholders.

It came as no surprise though, and had I not have signed a Non Disclosure Act with the company until the game had been released, I could’ve told you this 18 months ago. You see I interviewed with Ninja Theory back in January ‘07 and after being definitively bored by there technical wankery of the PS3, I turned down the chance to work on Heavenly Sword in favour of eating my own fist more money at my previous employer.

* I can see you wondering whats brought me to talk about this today, so it was this post on UK:R about Games 100 best games of all time.

Anyway, I knew they weren’t for me within the first 5 minutes of the interview, when they questioned the “favourite games” section of my CV. My choice of Shenmue was almost mockingly scoffed at, like I knew nothing about gaming and had picked some 2 week old title like GTAIV…

In fact, fuck them… looking back they were mocking it, the cunts!

Unsurprisingly the interview progressed to them talking about Heavenly Sword and what type of game it was. My comment of “so its a bit like Golden Axe then with only the female character to select from?” didn’t go down particularly well but ironically, I was completely right… it is a fucking hack ‘n slash after all. Nothing more, nothing less… it just looks “pretty” and cost £24.9mil more than it’s 1989 arcade father.

I also came out the interview feeling slightly violated after they jotted down my ideas furiously like I was the fucking Dali Lama of Video Game Design. I’ve not played HS so I can’t comment if any of my input translated to the game but whatever. I’m sure something from that free labour brain storming session we had got brought up elsewhere.

Anyway, back to what I wanted to discuss and that was the Top 100 Greatest Games of all time, not according to Game or the children they had participate (seriously, the winners idea of the best game being Killzone induced coffee being spat on my monitor in a definite WTF moment). I just want to make a few points for future lists so they get a little bit closer to the mark:

• Anything in a Greatest X list has to be more than three years old. In video gaming I’ll let this slip to 12 months at a push, but titles that fall into this category had better be fucking amazing.
• Just because Sega don’t have a current gen console, doesn’t mean you can forget about their games. This also counts for Lucas Arts (they did more than Monkey Island) in the software platform.
• Arcade games count so stop leaving them out
• If the list doesn’t have Castlevania Symphony of the Night on it, it instantly fails

Call of Duty 4 is good, but above Zelda Ocarina of Time… you’re having a laugh aren’t you?!