Have You Played... Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Physics-based comedy games are ten a penny these days but there's nothing to compare with Psi-Ops, which is utterly hilarious purely by virtue of the fact that it's not a comedy game. You can drag people around and throw them into bizarrely exposed machine-works using the power of your mind but this is serious business.

The level design was dull, the enemies were about as smart as a sack of potatoes, and the plot was a load of old bollocks, but, damn, I love Psi-Ops. It occupies a booth in my mind that only Dark Messiah is allowed to visit. They're both games that use ragdoll physics and environmental kills to elevate themselves.

Psi-Ops is one of those glorious games in which individual enemies took on personalities not by virtue of any lines of dialogue or unique animations, but simply because they had memorable deaths. Every time I met one guy, who was hiding behind a pane of glass, I chortled right before I plucked him up with my mind-fingers and smashed him straight through the glass.

I called him Max Payne.