Doom 3

The Facehuggers from the Alien films are the archetypal enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. If these scuttling, jumping-at-your-face enemies had never been invented, video games would probably have 100% less scuttling enemies launching themselves in the general direction of your face area. Thankfully, not all the gaming imitations of these baby xenomorphs insert an embryo-laying proboscis down a protagonist's throat. Which just seems intrusive and not very hygienic. And a bit like unsavoury alien sex.

Here's a list consisting of seven enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. (But deliberately not including Facehuggers because they were made in movie land. Not game land).

Doom 3 then. Too dark. Too claustrophobic. Too many corridors. Not enough carnage. Closet monsters, closet, monsters, closet monsters. And that torch-or-gun mechanic is cheap as hell. That’s the accepted wisdom of much of the internet these days. But you know what? Much of the internet is full of crap. Yes, Doom 3 has some flaws. Yes, it’s very different from the Dooms of old. But taken on its own terms, it’s also a blistering, nerve-pounding, brutally affecting thrill-ride, one that got under my skin like few other games before it, and had the scare-power to turn my very own home into a nightmarish domain of half-seen horrors, ambiguous noises, and thick, black shadows that absolutely, resolutely did want to kill me as soon as the sun went down. But you know, in a good way.

So follow me, if you will, through the mists of time, and let me recount to you just why Doom 3 is so special.

It’s all Valve’s fault. I blame Valve for all of it. 

It was five-thirty. I was just about to leave the office when a friend’s Facebook status reminded me that the Steam sale was on, but was due to end that day. That update was to be the casually-thrown cigarette butt that hit the touchpaper that sent the whole firework factory up.

I was planning on saving money this month, and I hadn’t touched my aging PC for serious gaming since I finished Episode 2 in late 2007. But within a couple of hours, the resulting chain of events had made me an obsessed PC gamer again. It was a messy and frenzied experience, and one which I didn’t come through entirely unscathed, but it was one that desperately needed to happen. Here’s how it all went down.

Worrying news yesterday. The producer of the so-much-fun-they-could-be-herpes Resident Evil movies said that he'd love the games and films to converge at some point. Two problems with that. The films bare barely any resemblance to the games, and also, they are dire.

But it got us thinking. What if certain franchises started taking inspiration from the cinematic clunkers they inspired? And that got us scared. So we worked out our fears through Photoshop.

Perhaps better than any other creative medium, videogames have managed to recreate entire ecosystems of imaginary creatures and presented them in an observable context. Books and movies may offer detailed glimpses of anatomy and behavior, but only in videogames does the observer interact with organisms and experience behaviors first hand.

From its inception, the idea behind Week of Geek has been “as niche as possible.” To some, an article about videogame music is obscure enough, but as an ardent fan of all things VGM, I wanted to truly geek out and talk about game music that references other game music.

Sunsets, love, war, babies, baby war… There’s just no telling when and where exactly musical inspiration will strike. Well, with the exception of this here article. Using GamesRadar’s collective knowledge of games and music, we managed to scrape together numerous instances of game soundtracks that were, let’s just says, all too familiar for an expose decades in the making.

The secrets of their success in their own words.