The Ten Best Gaming Moves... Ever!

Six: Star Power

As featured in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series

Otherwise known as the “Get out of an impossibly widdly guitar solo for free” card, Star Power is a difficult move to define to anyone unfamiliar with the games. Essentially, you build up Star Power by completing designated combinations of notes during a song. Once you’ve built up enough Star Power, you can activate it by raising the neck of the guitar to the heavens and invoking the spirit of Status Quo. This acts as a score multiplier, so you get twice as many points for every note you hit. It sounds minor in theory, but it transforms the game in practice.

Star Power is a great move for two reasons. The first is that it’s just plain cool. The very act of raising the guitar to unleash your Star Power adds a welcome element of dynamism to a game that otherwise just requires you to stand there with a plastic ukulele. It makes the physical act of playing much more fun, which is a necessity in such a tactile game.


The second reason is that Star Power introduces a tactical element to the game, pushing your technique beyond just hitting the right notes. Without Star Power, you’ll fail to complete a song if there’s a guitar solo that you just can’t complete. It’s far harder to fail when you’re playing with Star Power, so it enables players to complete songs that would otherwise stump them.

What’s more, it can also be used by more accomplished players who want to chase the highest scores. You just need to get to a complicated chunk of the song that you can nail, having built up a x4 score multiplier, raise your guitar and rake in the points as the multiplier doubles to 8x. It’s very rare that a single move, and such a conceptually simple one, can have such a huge effect on a game.

Five: Bullet Time

As featured in Max Payne

It may seem unlikely that the first game to make a big deal out of slowing down time would still be the game that does it best, but the steadily ageing Max Payne is just that game. Taking its cue from The Matrix, bullet time transformed Max Payne from a half-decent third person shooter into a work of art in which the player is both the artist and the subject. Not only could you kill the baddies and complete the game, but you could do it all in slow motion, carefully placing every shot while your enemies harmlessly whizzed past you, making the game a masterpiece of carnage.


What makes the bullet time feature in Max Payne more impressive than, say, the system employed by F.E.A.R. or Need For Speed: Most Wanted, is that it added some acrobatic moves to the mix, rather than just letting you play the game as usual, but in slow motion. Rather than simply shooting in slow-mo, Max could also dive through doorways, over bars and around corners. The video game was at last able to match the choreographed bloodbaths of action movies.

Turning simple room clearances into epic action showpieces, bullet time also made Max Payne a lot of fun to replay. Suddenly, replaying the game became less about improving your score, and more about wanting to see it all again from a different angle, perhaps taking down the bad guys in a different order, or with a different weapon.