Today’s Five of the Best is…
Bikes! That is, bicycles without a motor. Push bikes, although no one actually calls them that do they? There’s a serenity to pedalling around on a bike that you don’t get on a rumbling motorbike. You can hear the world around you and you can see it too, providing you’re not plummeting down the side of a mountain. There’s a romance to biking as well. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to be those boys in ET, cycling away from the cops while jumping off grassy ramps on their BMXs. So here’s to bicycles and here are five of the best.
Okay so you can’t really ride Yakuza’s bikes, but you can go one better and lamp someone with them. One of the joys of Yakuza’s combat is grabbing street furniture and whirling it around as you fight off a mob of thugs, and I think the bike is the best of all of them – it’s overstated, over-the-top and feels simply brilliant when you connect a bulky frame with a bad man’s face.
I’m tempted to say that Lonely Mountain understands bikes better than any other game I’ve encountered. Despite this being a biking game, the bikes aren’t the star – rather it’s what they allow for that matters.
This is a game about getting to the heart of nature, following the track until there’s nobody else around for miles. Your bike is your means of getting here, but it’s also your reason for being here in the first place – and it’s a companion, too, skidding over skree and serenading you with the gentle, irresistible ticking of the chain.